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Three kinds of AI products work

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Re: Three kinds of AI products work

#111

Post by pixl97 »

mzajc wrote: post #57
pixl97 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Skeptics always like to toss in 'if ever' as some form of enlightenment they they are aware of some fundamental limitation of the universe only they are privy to.

Of the universe, perhaps, but humans certainly are a limiting factor here. Assuming we get this technology someday, why would one buy your software when the mere description of its functionality allows one to recreate it effortlessly?

>humans certainly are a limiting factor here.

Completely disagree. Intelligence is self reinforcing. The smarter we get as humans the more likely we'll create sources of intelligence.

Re: Three kinds of AI products work

#112

Post by cpill »

ohyoutravel wrote: post #47
torlok wrote: post #8

So the only AI products that work is a chat bot you can talk to, or a chat bot that can perform tasks for you. Next thing you'll tell me is that the only businesses that work are ones where you can ask somebody to do something for you in exchange for money.

Realistically there are only four types of businesses writ large: tourism, food service, railroads, and sales. People building AI-based products should focus on those verticals.

Games? One of the biggest industries, I mean verticals, in the world?

Re: Three kinds of AI products work

#114

Post by ohyoutravel »

cpill wrote: post #112
ohyoutravel wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Realistically there are only four types of businesses writ large: tourism, food service, railroads, and sales. People building AI-based products should focus on those verticals.

Games? One of the biggest industries, I mean verticals, in the world?

It’s a little counterintuitive, but games is under railroads.

Re: Three kinds of AI products work

#115

Post by falseprofit »

pixl97 wrote: post #110
falseprofit wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s say there are three options: {soon, later, not at all}. Ruling out only one to arrive at {later, not at all} implies less knowledge than ruling out two and asserting {later}. Awareness of a fundamental limitation would eliminate possibilities to just {not at all}, and the phrasing would be “never”, rather than “not soon, if ever”.

But we know that the fundamental limitation of intelligence does not exist, nature has already created that with animal and eventually human intelligence via random walk. So 'AI will never exist' is lazy magical thinking. That intelligence can be self reinforcing is a good reason why AI will exist much sooner than later.

I actually agree with your premise of ruling out “not at all”. I was just responding to your characterization of “if ever”.

I’m not quite as certain as you are, though. Just because a technology is possible does not mean it is inevitable.

Re: Three kinds of AI products work

#116

Post by whoisthemachine »

wongarsu wrote: post #6

This seems to be biased heavily towards products that look like an LLM. And yes, only a small number of those work. But that's because if your product is a thing I chat with, it immediately is in competition with ChatGPT/Claude/Grok/etc, leading to everything the article expressed. But those are hardly the only use cases for LLMs, let alone AI (whatever people nowadays mean by AI) To name some of the obvious counter-…

In the author's defense, LLM's are typically what is associated with AI these days.

Re: Three kinds of AI products work

#117

Post by sota_pop »

I could be aging myself, but what about the back-office software that’s been driving business operations for at least two decades that utilize SVMs and other techniques unrelated to the transformer architecture or even deep learning??

I have always felt chat bots, although the most accessible, are the worst application of AI. Why would any business WANT to put layers of abstraction (sic ai chatbots) in between them and people who are potentially interested in paying them money?

The famous book series got it right: “Automate the boring stuff” best use-cases for AI are embedded deeply within operational tasks, abstracted away completely, and used in applications where limiting scope/context of information makes traditional software methods overly cumbersome or intractable.

Re: Three kinds of AI products work

#118

Post by koliber »

gregates wrote: post #106
koliber wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on how much time I have, and how important the task is. I've been surprised and I've been disappointed. One particular time I was wrestling with a CI/CD issue. I could not for the life of me figure it out. The logs were cryptic and there was a lot of them. In desperation I pasted the 10 or so pages of raw logs into ChatGPT and asked it to see if it can spot the problem. It have me three potential things to…

I really don't see how it can save you time if you have to summarize the same source for yourself every time in order to learn whether the AI did a good job in this particular case.

There is a difference between creating a summary and double-checking if a summary is correct. It's kind of like coding something, or doing a code review. It does save me time, but that might have to do with how I think and what I enjoy doing. Everyone is different.

Re: Three kinds of AI products work

#119

Post by rckt »

Kiro wrote: post #103
rckt wrote: post #100

> The third real AI product is the coding agent. People have been talking about this for years, but it was only really in 2025 that the technology behind coding agents became feasible No, they didn’t. > LLMs are particularly good at tasks like “skim through ten pages of search results” or “keyword search this giant dataset for any information on a particular topic”. No. They are not. Amazing article without any suppo…

I don't think any of those statements are controversial. Do you mind elaborating?

There's nothing to elaborate actually. The state of the AI currently does not allow to use seriously. If we mean "then spend N amount of time reviewing and trying to make a better output", then yes, I can agree that AI is usable. But the time wasted on the reviews can be simply put into doing the task yourself. And it will be faster and less frustrating.

Re: Three kinds of AI products work

#120

Post by Kiro »

rckt wrote: post #119
Kiro wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think any of those statements are controversial. Do you mind elaborating?

There's nothing to elaborate actually. The state of the AI currently does not allow to use seriously. If we mean "then spend N amount of time reviewing and trying to make a better output", then yes, I can agree that AI is usable. But the time wasted on the reviews can be simply put into doing the task yourself. And it will be faster and less frustrating.

You not being able to use it successfully is no basis for such a conclusion. One verified observation is stronger than infinite lack of observation.
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