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The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

theregister.com

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Re: The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

#121

Post by tim333 »

OtherShrezzing wrote: post #113
mh- wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking out the fact we're talking about "AI" for the moment.. doesn't it seem unusual to speculate that despite recent progress, it's just going to be.. flat from here out? (That's directed at El Reg, not you.) Hard to take the rest of it seriously with them taking a position like that. I can't think of a time that's been true for any technology in my career. Whether they were ones I found useful or not.

There was lots of progress in NFTs. Not much going on there these days.

NFTs were kind of a scam to sell you jpgs on the grounds that insider Bob had sold one to insider Harry for $20k and so you're getting a bargain buying one for $15k. It's a different thing really.

Re: The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

#123

Post by jmaestrooper »

mvdtnz wrote: post #118
jmaestrooper wrote: post #114

Very dumbed-down take on the subject. What's "AI"? ChatGPT and Google AlphaFold are both AI. I very much doubt speech and voice recognition and synthesis, as well as visual object recognition, are "as good as they will get" (however scary some of the practical applications might look like). Ditto specialized neural networks like aforementioned AlphaFold. General-purpose chatbots trained on randomly selected data from…

As you well know, even when you're pretending you don't, in this context when people say "AI" they mean LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude, not AlphaFold.

I very much disagree. Terms and definitions matter, and in this case what you mean by "AI" changes the answer. Again, general-purpose LLMs might be a dead end. Specialized neural networks are not. One might argue that even specialized LLMs (ie fine tuned for code generation) have ways to go, too.

I'm not sure about target audience of the TheRegister but here on HN we should be more precise in our discussion.

Re: The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

#124

Post by gspencley »

ElectronCharge wrote: post #104
SkyPuncher wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who worked in fast food in high school, I completely disagree with this. Order taking via drive through can be surprisingly hard. * Often lots of background noise * Sometimes multiple people try to order (often with one of those being way away from the mic) * People don't always know exactly what they want or what it's called. Sometimes things have a regional or local name that's not on the board. Right no…

Actually one of the fast food restaurants here takes automated spoken orders at the drive through. I've only used it once, but I was surprised that it worked flawlessly for me...

The thing about automated systems is that they typically cover the happy paths, and leave people who fall outside of those happy paths extremely frustrated.

Take automated phone menu systems, for example.

"If you are calling about X, press 1

If you are calling about Y, press 2

If you are calling about Z, press 3"

customers presses 0 because they are calling about none-of-the-above and wants to talk to a human

"I'm sorry. I don't recognize that menu option. To hear the options again, please press 9."

Oh just today, to give another example of how automation can seriously frustrate end users, I'm trying to get a Square POS account approved for my new business. Their automated verification system sent me a form requesting more information about my business because certain information "could not be verified." One of the questions on the form was asking me to explain a discrepancy between the legal business name I typed in when setting up the account and the business name as it appears on the articles of incorporation that I submitted. The discrepancy in question: white-space and capitalization. No human being would read the two strings as distinct or recognize any discrepancy. Only software does that.

Re: The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

#125

Post by fknorangesite »

p0w3n3d wrote: post #19
jqpabc123 wrote: post #2

One of the lowest level jobs in the market is taking orders at a fast food drive thru. If AI can't do this job, it probably can't do yours either. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c722gne7qngo Bottom line: AI has very poor grasp of reality --- because (surprise, surprise) it has zero real world experience.

There was this joke at some point of time: Expectations: AI will deliver food to you and your high-paid programmers colleagues Reality: You and your colleagues work at Mac because AI took your high-paid programmers jobs

Or, similarly:

> I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do laundry and dishes.

https://twitter.com/AuthorJMac/status/1773679197631701238?la...

Re: The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

#126

Post by [deleted] »

OtherShrezzing wrote: post #113
mh- wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking out the fact we're talking about "AI" for the moment.. doesn't it seem unusual to speculate that despite recent progress, it's just going to be.. flat from here out? (That's directed at El Reg, not you.) Hard to take the rest of it seriously with them taking a position like that. I can't think of a time that's been true for any technology in my career. Whether they were ones I found useful or not.

There was lots of progress in NFTs. Not much going on there these days.

[deleted]

Re: The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

#127

Post by JohnFen »

diggan wrote: post #96
ecshafer wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99% of orders are not made incorrectly, and you're being told to go faster and keep times low. Is this the 1 order of the hour that the person will come back and complain that its wrong? Is this person going to come back regardless and say it was wrong to get free food? Its unambiguous enough to not be worth the time.

Be a bit smooth about it: as you type in the order, verbally say out loud what you're entering with other words, then ask them to confirm. No lost time, potentially less people to deal with in the future, win-win.

It's been several lifetimes since I worked in a fast food place (not McDonald's), but at least then, this was how we were trained to do it. Reading the order back like that was required.

Re: The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

#128

Post by 1718627440 »

dylan604 wrote: post #9
danielbln wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed on both fronts, but it bears repeating two that both things can be true at the same time. More often than not people think when the AI bubble bursts, LLMs, diffusion models etc. will just vanish, and they will absolutely not vanish. This tech is here to stay, for good.

When the dot com bubble burst, the internet did not go away. Just the over inflated companies did. The underlying tech was not to blame, but the mismanaged VC funded nonsense that goes on inside hype machines. We lathered and rinsed, now we're repeating.

"The internet" was invented in the 70ths.

Re: The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

#129

Post by belZaah »

mh- wrote: post #77
JKCalhoun wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read on then — the author suggests a 4th camp that I believe you (and I as a matter of fact) can agree with. "I propose a fourth: AI is now as good as it's going to get, and that's neither as good nor as bad as its fans and haters think…" I suppose I disagree with "as good as it's going to get" … but for the time being (this decade?) this might be correct.

Taking out the fact we're talking about "AI" for the moment.. doesn't it seem unusual to speculate that despite recent progress, it's just going to be.. flat from here out? (That's directed at El Reg, not you.) Hard to take the rest of it seriously with them taking a position like that. I can't think of a time that's been true for any technology in my career. Whether they were ones I found useful or not.

But it has. Aircraft have long stopped getting faster or bigger or having a longer range. They get marginally more efficient, but not better for consumers. Cars are mostly the same. Audio codecs. Everything has a balancing loop somewhere. With AI there are several, eg. the better it is, the more content is made using AI, the worse AI is

Re: The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

#130

Post by mh- »

belZaah wrote: post #129
mh- wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking out the fact we're talking about "AI" for the moment.. doesn't it seem unusual to speculate that despite recent progress, it's just going to be.. flat from here out? (That's directed at El Reg, not you.) Hard to take the rest of it seriously with them taking a position like that. I can't think of a time that's been true for any technology in my career. Whether they were ones I found useful or not.

But it has. Aircraft have long stopped getting faster or bigger or having a longer range. They get marginally more efficient, but not better for consumers. Cars are mostly the same. Audio codecs. Everything has a balancing loop somewhere. With AI there are several, eg. the better it is, the more content is made using AI, the worse AI is

In no particular order:

Air travel (thanks to efficiencies) costs a fraction of what it used to, look up what % of people have traveled by air and compare that to previous decades.

Cars are safer than ever, per mile driven, for their occupants and substantially more comfortable. They're also more efficient, but we've consciously traded that for heavier cars for crash safety.

Lossless audio codecs are ubiquitous, and there are low-loss low-latency wireless audio codecs deployed to billions of devices.

Agree with the AI statement, though.

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