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AI is a technology not a product

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Re: AI is a technology not a product

#91

Post by ebbi »

For those that care, Gruber (author of this blog), said the following about news about the Genocide in Palestine:

Quote tweeting a NYTimes post detailing war crimes "As Israeli forces entered Gaza on Friday to fight Hamas, phone and internet service was severed for 34 hours. Most people in Gaza had no way to reach the outside world..."

Gruber wrote "F*k around and find out."

Quote tweeting a post by the UN Human Rights account about Israel's flooding of tunnels with saltwater could have severe adverse human rights impacts,

Gruber wrote "One side is pumping salt water into the tunnels. The other side has put innocent civilian women and children hostages in the tunnels. Also: "salt water" has a space when used as a noun"

Quote tweeting a post by a StopAntisemitism page that posted about 'pro-Palesinian agitators showed up to secreteary of Defence Lloyd Austin's home..."

Gruber wrote "These people are surely a lot of fun at parties"

Gruber is a big fan of collective punishment, it seems. But at least he's very specific about the use of grammar.

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#93

Post by mold_aid »

lxgr wrote: post #73
amazingamazing wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see how a llm solves this. It’s not like a llm hosts the website. Sites like squarespace and Wordpress let you modify your site without ever seeing code. They have graphical editors that you can stay in if you wish. I agree llms help, though if you use a product .

I know how to set up a static HTML site in about 15 minutes. Building a website to host there usually takes me the better part of a weekend, and usually ends up looking absolutely terrible.

I think this really gets at it: people are so terrified of not knowing what to do, of not knowing whether their solution is "good," that they'll pay a monthly fee for a machine to tell them it's ok, ironically bypassing human judgment in the end. Drudgery or judgery, those are the two task contexts in which AI products* excel.

* It's lovely to have the opportunity to disagree with both Gruber and the "the whole thing smacks of politics" HN commentariat, pulled daily between "it's just a tool, like a hammer, which also kills people, stay with me here" and "AI puts an expert in your pocket; soon, the expert will live in your eyes"

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#94

Post by buu700 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #58

Agree with this article, and I almost threw up in my mouth when I read this quote from Stephen Levy: > By the end of this decade, it’s unlikely that people will swipe on their phones to tap on Uber or Lyft. They will just tell their always-on AI agent to get them home. Or that agent will have already figured out where they need to go, and the car will be waiting without the friction of a request. “There’s an app for…

I'd be more inclined to believe that an abundance of robotaxis will use predictive algorithms to preemptively show up wherever they're likely to be needed, allowing a UX where users can hail them like traditional taxis without an app. Maybe not in four years, but maybe in a decade or two.

That feels both more credible and more desirable than the magic panopticon predicted in the quote, and doesn't really depend on any major technological leaps beyond continued maturation and scaling of Waymo/alternatives.

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#95

Post by wpm »

coffeefirst wrote: post #11

Agreed. The ideal implementation of AI for Apple is probably to finally make Siri work. This isn’t necessary fancy, just let me set some calendar events without knowing the magic words or tell it to open Overcast and play the new Gastropod episode. Better yet, for power users, let me set up reusable shortcuts using natural language. The most important part of this is it doesn’t necessarily feel like AI. The user does…

Shortcuts already lets you set up custom workflows you can trigger by voice.

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#96

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

dpark wrote: post #69
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #58

Agree with this article, and I almost threw up in my mouth when I read this quote from Stephen Levy: > By the end of this decade, it’s unlikely that people will swipe on their phones to tap on Uber or Lyft. They will just tell their always-on AI agent to get them home. Or that agent will have already figured out where they need to go, and the car will be waiting without the friction of a request. “There’s an app for…

> Who TF are these people who think this kind of future is desirable? Some of this is weird techno delusion. Some of it is because the people describing it do a poor job of explaining how it might work. If a couple decades ago someone told you that you’d have an always listening device in your pocket to answer your questions from all the world’s information, it would have sounded dumb, and with the always-listening d…

> and with the always-listening device, rather dystopian. But that’s what you have assuming you have any modern smart phone.

That feels a little bit of muddling the waters. At least on Android with which I'm familiar, (a) you can turn off the "OK Google" detection in settings so that it's not always listening (and I'm not sure what the setup is now but originally I had to opt it to OK Google detection) and (b) the path for OK Google detection runs on a lower power, on device chip that only has capacity to store like the last few seconds of ambient noise to look for the assistant key phrase.

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#97

Post by yogthos »

I've always looked at it as a platform to build stuff on top of as well. I expect that we'll be treating this tech the same way we treat stuff like Linux today. It'll become common open infrastructure that will be used to build products. Incidentally, this is exactly what Chinese companies seem to be banking on, hence why they don't worry about releasing their models in the open. They understand that getting more people using their models is the key part right now.

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#98

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

buu700 wrote: post #94
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #58

Agree with this article, and I almost threw up in my mouth when I read this quote from Stephen Levy: > By the end of this decade, it’s unlikely that people will swipe on their phones to tap on Uber or Lyft. They will just tell their always-on AI agent to get them home. Or that agent will have already figured out where they need to go, and the car will be waiting without the friction of a request. “There’s an app for…

I'd be more inclined to believe that an abundance of robotaxis will use predictive algorithms to preemptively show up wherever they're likely to be needed, allowing a UX where users can hail them like traditional taxis without an app. Maybe not in four years, but maybe in a decade or two. That feels both more credible and more desirable than the magic panopticon predicted in the quote, and doesn't really depend on an…

I agree with what you've written about robotaxis, and Uber/Lyft already put a ton of data analysis into ensuring they have capacity where it's needed. But I don't think apps are going anywhere anytime soon, or in decades for that matter, primarily because there are economic forces in play that make them desirable for the network owners.

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#99

Post by buu700 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #98
buu700 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be more inclined to believe that an abundance of robotaxis will use predictive algorithms to preemptively show up wherever they're likely to be needed, allowing a UX where users can hail them like traditional taxis without an app. Maybe not in four years, but maybe in a decade or two. That feels both more credible and more desirable than the magic panopticon predicted in the quote, and doesn't really depend on an…

I agree with what you've written about robotaxis, and Uber/Lyft already put a ton of data analysis into ensuring they have capacity where it's needed. But I don't think apps are going anywhere anytime soon, or in decades for that matter, primarily because there are economic forces in play that make them desirable for the network owners.

Just to clarify, I'm not suggesting that the apps will or should ever go away, but rather that with sufficient volume both ways could become plausible options. If an available Waymo happens to be sitting there waiting for a passenger, I don't see why it shouldn't let me just tap my credit card on the handle or something and tell it where to drop me off. Of course, summoning one or tapping my phone would ideally work too.

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#100

Post by themafia »

> Only a fool would argue that Apple can stand on the sidelines and ignore AI.

Yet you've only offered examples of what they _shouldn't_ do with "AI." You've offered no clear ideas on what they should do, only intimated that Apple, by pure osmotic magic, would be better at it than others if they made similar investments.

There's something about language models that causes smart people to wantonly turn their brains off.

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