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AI is a technology not a product

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Re: AI is a technology not a product

#121

Post by bigstrat2003 »

amazingamazing wrote: post #10

GPT 3.5 is nearly 4 years old. What’s a non coding use case that’s enabled with LLMs that materially improves the average person’s life? For the sake of conversation let’s say the average person is some random person in middle America. To me there are cool things but nothing so great where if LLMs were deleted I’d cry about it. To contrast mRNA vaccines, gene therapy and crispr seem more impactful in reality, just to…

LLMs aren't even useful for coding, the one thing they are supposedly great for. It's a technology without any real use cases yet.

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#122

Post by amelius »

paulhebert wrote: post #118
amelius wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "You have to work backwards from the customer experience." Ok. Let's try that with some basic needs. And I'm totally serious. Let's go. I am abroad, walking in a city. I look for a book store. I get my Apple phone, open maps, OK, that works. Now I have to go to the bathroom. Hmm, is there an app for that? How do I convert this phone into a nice and clean toilet? Stupid question you say? I'm the user, remember, and…

I’m not sure what you’re getting at here. You want iPhones to be able to differentiate and find clean bathrooms on the fly?

No I want iPhones to solve real problems users have rather than pretend my entire life happens inside a 7" screen.

"You have to work backwards from the customer experience."

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#123

Post by shepherdjerred »

amazingamazing wrote: post #19
miguel_rdp wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Access to a rational, imperfect yet functional expert in lots of everyday subjects: personal finance, making decisions and plans, relationships, taboo questions, the first steps of a medical/law opinion, general problem solving and breakdown.. Even considering that it’s sometimes wrong or hallucinating, it’s doing an important job by beginning to eliminate gate keeping, be it centered on cost or access.

Im unconvinced. How do you trade this for misinformation and scams that will be coming on unprecedented scale? In any case isn’t it the case that the value there is human expertise and search? At least with gpt 5 using it without search will almost certainly give you wrong information in a variety of topics so the value seems to be in search which is old tech

Are you asking for a use case or the net benefit? Because it sure sounds like you're moving the goalpost.

Considering that ChatGPT has 900 million users I suspect the average person finds value in the technology.

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#124

Post by wilg »

the_af wrote: post #103
wilg wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

"Better how"? If you're going to dismiss a comment, you better address the points they are making, like: > I was reading article recently that said that a majority of people interviewed did not want to use AI agents simply because they didn't have much stuff in their life worth automating. Or more to the point, a lot of people actually enjoy making grocery lists, planning trips, picking out gifts for friends, etc. Th…

Better how?! It's obvious how doing less work to figure out your transportation is a better user experience. And again, that's just a trivial example. If people like making grocery lists, that's fine, but I bet there's other things they might consider drudgery that could be automated.

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#125

Post by ebbi »

selectively wrote: post #113
ebbi wrote: post #91

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 Righ…

Gruber is a monstrous person. He's also written many different pieces that are more or less content-free anti-Korean racist screeds. The world would be much better if he'd retire and never speak in public again.

I totally agree! Also his writings on China. He's used quite strong language when discussing China, and at the time I thought this is just his brutal opinions, but when his own country does things, he's a lot more forgiving.

Looking back, it just reads as sinophobic.

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#126

Post by pie_flavor »

By 2021, we'll have completely abandoned light switches. We'll just use an app on our phones to turn off the light in the bedroom, or perhaps request out loud for Alexa to do so. The future is the Internet of Things.

I think this article is too soft a criticism by half. The iPhone defining the mobile era was not an artefact of the Apple logo being on it. Every bit of Apple's relentless productization went into what features the phone actually had and how they were integrated. This guy, in 2006, would have been telling Apple 'just release a feature phone like BlackBerry does, so you can define the era of feature phones like you did MP3 players'.

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#127

Post by arshia0098 »

Agreed.

The more invisible AI inference becomes in systems, the more they start feeling more practical.

I personally find it more engaging to have an agent visualize things for me using matplotlib.

The problem is that too many startups are trying to do to OpenAI and Anthropic, what merchants do with commodities in the market.

Seems more driven by profit in mind than by actual value creation.

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#128

Post by lmm »

easton wrote: post #89
manoDev wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just the experience any executive with a secretary or personal assistant is used to having. If AI allows more people to have such a premium experience, that's a use of technology that makes a lot more sense than all the "AI will take over your job" scaremongering.

Are people in the habit of asking their admin to order a pizza or a Uber? There’s more complex things (the floor I think is booking a flight that doesn’t conflict with activities I have to do), but by time you summon your assistant you could’ve had the car on its way.

> Are people in the habit of asking their admin to order a pizza or a Uber?

They're in the habit of their admin telling them the Uber has arrived to take them to their 3 o'clock yes.

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#129

Post by lurking_swe »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #63

...in the same way that people used to just accept bulky laptops with terrible batteries, I think people today have become inured to just how annoying it is to get your phone in and out of your pocket. This is why phones get dropped at broken constantly. Phones suck, and I don't think they are the final form factor. The final final form factor is probably a pair of glasses (or an implant), but I still think that's pr…

your argument assumes that “fully integrated and in-my-face” == best form factor.

Maybe for certain tasks or certain people. But in general i disagree with that take. The fact that i can stow away my phone into my pocket, not creep out bystanders (they know my camera isn’t recording them, etc), and forget about my phone for a while is a FEATURE.

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#130

Post by janalsncm »

m3kw9 wrote: post #83
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…

They keep banging on Siri hoping for a different outcome is insanity by definition. Voice is actually not a very good UI for most things, it isn't very private, it's prone to mistakenly think I'm talking to it, and is bad for dense info/info organization. Siri should only be activated very very deliberatly, not "Hey siri", and don't make it act like jarvis because you will not in the near future with the smarts it ne…

> Voice is actually not a very good UI for most things

Agreed. But it is a good UI for some things, and which things is probably situation and user specific. Many people’s frustration with Siri is that many of the things it should be good at based on their decision to try, Siri cannot do.

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