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AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products

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Re: AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products

#111

Post by ewoodrich »

Fricken wrote: post #96
preordained wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I think the problem is you haven’t shifted your mindset to using AI correctly yet" There is an indictment of AI "products" if I ever heard one

How come this spoon won't hold my soup? Don't tell me I'm holding it wrong!

I mean if my dentist adds a Helpful Super GenAI Infused Chatbot that can't book appointments or answer any questions about their services no amount of "you're holding it wrong" insistence about LLMs in general will actually make it useful to me.

The point is ChatGPT's wild success doesn't automatically mean consumers want and possibly will never want a chatbot as their primary interface for your specific app or service.

Re: AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products

#112

Post by diatone »

BobbyJo wrote: post #31
rustypotato wrote: post #26

> But when developers put AI in consumer products, people expect it to behave like software, which means that it needs to work deterministically. If your AI travel agent books vacations to the correct destination only 90% of the time, it won’t be successful. This is the fundamental problem that prevents generative AI from becoming a "foundational building block" for most products. Even with rigorous safety measures i…

I've made this statement a bunch in other mediums: The reason AI software is always "AI software" and not just a useful product is because AI is fallible. The reason we can build such deep and complex software system is because each layer can assume the one below it will "just work". If it only worked 99% of the time, we'd all still be interfacing with assembly, because we'd have to be aware of the mistakes that were…

The irony here is that there are many domains using statistical methods, that bound the complexity and failure modes of statistical methods successfully. A lot of people struggle with statistics but in domains where the glove fits I think AI will slot in all across the stack really nicely.

Re: AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products

#113

Post by diatone »

jjmarr wrote: post #82
loa_in_ wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But software works only 99% of the time. For some definition of work: 99% of days it's run, 99% of clicks, 99% of CPU time in given component, 99% of versions released and linked into some business' production binary, 99% of github tags, 99% of commits, 99% of software that that one guy says is battle-tested

If twenty components work 99% of the time, then they only have an 0.99^20 = 82% chance of working as a collective. If your 5.1 GHz (billion instructions per second) CPU had a 0.00000001% chance of failing at a given instruction, you'd have a 40% chance of a crash every second. If a flight had a 1% chance of killing everyone aboard 10 million people/day * 1% = 100,000 people would die every day from a plane.

Gamblers fallacy

Re: AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products

#114

Post by yoyohello13 »

dyauspitr wrote: post #88
dragontamer wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my local car dealerships is using an chat system of some kind (probably an LLM?). It's awful and a complete waste of time. I'm not sure if LLMs are getting good use yet / general chatbots are good or ready for business use.

Who cares. I literally use ChatGPT 30 times a day. It answers incredibly complex queries along with citations I can verify. Isn’t “this not good enough yet” line getting old? There nothing else that can estimate the number of cinder blocks I need to use for a project and account for the volume of concrete required for it (while taking into consideration the actual available volume available in a cinder block and sett…

Did you do the cinder block project? Was its estimate close? From everything I’ve seen LLMs are not that great at math.

Re: AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products

#115

Post by _heimdall »

javiramos wrote: post #86
cooperx wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its the same as all the "we are a blockchain company" startups that popped up looking for a problem to solve with their tech rather than the right way round. However, a lot of those got a bunch of investment or made some decent money in the short term. Very few are still around. We will see the same pattern here.

I had already forgotten about the blockchain

git still works pretty well, I just wouldn't try to use it as a bank account.

Re: AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products

#116

Post by the_sleaze_ »

danielodievich wrote: post #91
cm2012 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It gives amazing medical advice and answers, way better than webmd or frankly even most primary care physicians ive seen.

Terrifying. You must like living dangerously.

I am lucky enough to have several family members who are MDs and am close to a few more.

They google crap all the time. They're as unaware of things as we are.

The tests they have access to are much better than anything we can get our hands on though.

Re: AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products

#117

Post by nunez »

necroforest wrote: post #49
ryandrake wrote: post #34

Companies keep going at it the wrong way. Instead of saying "We have AI, let's find products we can make out of AI!" they should be saying, "What products do people want, let's use whatever tools we have (including maybe AI) to make them." The idea that a company is an AI company should be as ridiculous as a company being a Python company. "We are Python-first, have Python experts, and all of our products are made wi…

I don't entirely disagree with you, but "what products do people want" is overly conservative. Pre-ChatGPT, very few people wanted a (more or less) general purpose chatbot.

Chatbots were HUGE in the late 2010s!

Re: AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products

#118

Post by dyauspitr »

preordained wrote: post #92
dyauspitr wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares. I literally use ChatGPT 30 times a day. It answers incredibly complex queries along with citations I can verify. Isn’t “this not good enough yet” line getting old? There nothing else that can estimate the number of cinder blocks I need to use for a project and account for the volume of concrete required for it (while taking into consideration the actual available volume available in a cinder block and sett…

"I think the problem is you haven’t shifted your mindset to using AI correctly yet" There is an indictment of AI "products" if I ever heard one

That’s a glib, low effort dismissal but it makes sense if you consider it.

It’s like people that kept going to the library even with Google around. You’re not playing to the strengths of AI and relying on whatever suboptimal previous method you used to find the answers. It does really, really well with very specific queries with a lot of looks ups and dependencies that nothing else can really answer without a lot of work on your end.

Re: AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products

#119

Post by dyauspitr »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #114
dyauspitr wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares. I literally use ChatGPT 30 times a day. It answers incredibly complex queries along with citations I can verify. Isn’t “this not good enough yet” line getting old? There nothing else that can estimate the number of cinder blocks I need to use for a project and account for the volume of concrete required for it (while taking into consideration the actual available volume available in a cinder block and sett…

Did you do the cinder block project? Was its estimate close? From everything I’ve seen LLMs are not that great at math.

Yes, I finished the footings for the barn. I had to get two extra bags on an estimate of 68 bags. Not bad in my opinion considering the wastage from mixing, spilling etc. Also I would have had to do a bunch of tedious math that I didn’t have to.

I had about 5-10 cinder blocks left over, not bad for an order of ~150

Re: AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products

#120

Post by dyauspitr »

goatlover wrote: post #95
dyauspitr wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares. I literally use ChatGPT 30 times a day. It answers incredibly complex queries along with citations I can verify. Isn’t “this not good enough yet” line getting old? There nothing else that can estimate the number of cinder blocks I need to use for a project and account for the volume of concrete required for it (while taking into consideration the actual available volume available in a cinder block and sett…

It works for me, therefore it should work for everyone?

It’s pretty much the vein of the comment of the GP I’m responding to.
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