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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

#171

Post by tourmalinetaco »

hobs wrote: post #124
nunez wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chatbots were HUGE in the late 2010s!

And they hugely sucked, and basically were a sign you were dealing with either a fly by night company or a corporation so faceless and shitty you'd never willingly do business with them. It was literally replacing a hierarchical link tree and that almost always was easier to use.

Or you were told this one chatbot was “haunted” by a creepypasta character and was amazed that it would actually reference that story (not knowing it was just a silly program trained on its interactions, leading to a feedback loop).

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

#172

Post by KineticLensman »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #141
KineticLensman wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tech was very different then. The first commercial steam Engine appeared in 1712 - big static thing thing that could pump water out of mines. It took about about 100 years until 1804 to get to a steam engine small but powerful enough to pull a train. Mines and factories were pretty much the only users for decades and there were very few people who had a steam engine for the sake of it

How was tech different then? We've been working on AI for 70 years now, seems comparable.

We’ve been working on digital computers for 70 years and AI is just one part of that. Computers are everywhere and suddenly AI is being crammed into every product, it seems. In the first 90 years of steam, steam engines did not suddenly appear everywhere. Outside of factories and mines, they essentially did not exist. No one had a steam engine in their home. Innovation happened very slowly, no equivalent of Moore’s law, no continuous year on year improvements to the basic tech

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

#173

Post by Fricken »

ewoodrich wrote: post #111
Fricken wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 servi…

I feel like I'm being too obvious but maybe try using it for something it's good at.

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

#174

Post by latexr »

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…

> with citations I can verify.

And do you? Every time someone tried to show me examples of “how amazing ChatGPT is at reasoning”, the answers had glaring mistakes. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad how it shows people turning off their critical thinking when using LLMs, to the point they won’t even verify answers when trying to make a point.

Here’s a small recent example of failure: I asked the “state of the art” ChatGPT model which Monty Python members have been knighted (it wasn’t a trick question, I really wanted to know). It answered Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam, and that they had been knighted for X, Y, and Z (I don’t recall the exact reasons). Then I verified the answer on the BBC, Wikipedia, and a few others, and determined only Michael Palin has been knighted, and those weren’t even the reasons.

Just for kicks, I then said I didn’t think Michael Palin had been knighted. It promptly apologised, told me I was right, and that only Terry Gilliam had been knighted. Worse than useless.

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

#175

Post by paretoer »

honestjohn wrote: post #131
necroforest wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think so, people have been wanting a general chatbot for a long time. It's useful for plenty of things, just not useful when embedded in random places.

I kind of remember the Turing Test was a big deal for some 70+ years.

We should have known that once we pass the Turing Test it would almost instantly become as passe as Deep Blue beating Kasparov on the road to general intelligence.

I am taking a break from my LLM subscriptions right now for the first time to gain some perspective and all I miss it for is as a code assistant. I would also miss it for learning another human language. It seems unsurprising that large language models use cases are with automated language. What is really surprising is how very limited the use cases for automated language seems to be.

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

#176

Post by kamaal »

8organicbits wrote: post #62
FpUser wrote: post #41

ChatGPT is very useful for me to the point that I pay subscription fee. To me it IS the product.

I haven't found a use for it. What do you use it for?

Everything!

Its like talking to a intelligent person about a topic you want to learn, but they know it good enough to teach you if you keep asking questions.

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

#177

Post by _heimdall »

turkey99 wrote: post #150
lagniappe wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Git is by the literal definition a blockchain.

Seems a bit of a stretch. Git is not linear, and there’s no consensus mechanisms

git is linear, if multiple users have a different main branch history you have a problem.

Pull requests in github is actually very similar conceptually to a consensus mechanism used in crypto currencies. Everyone has an identical copy of the main branch with an identical history of every commit in order, a PR is saying "I think this commit goes next" and, if you use code reviews, the PR approval is consensus.

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

#178

Post by r-zip »

the_sleaze_ wrote: post #116
danielodievich wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They are NOT as unaware of things as we are. That’s like someone seeing a software developer googling stuff and saying “see, they don’t know much more than me”.

An expert refreshing their knowledge on Google is not the same as a layman learning it for the first time. At all.

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

#179

Post by _heimdall »

lagniappe wrote: post #140
sham1 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Git's also not a blockchain at least in the way commonly meant by the term. But yeah, it'd be a pretty bad bank account (and an even worse way of doing money transfers.)

Git is by the literal definition a blockchain.

No idea why this got down voted.

git is very much a blockchain

- sequential list of changes to a data source (commits)

- single, shared history of changes (main branch)

- users creating potential next change(s) to be added to the history (side branches and forks)

- consensus mechanism for new change blocks (merge requests and code reviews or approvals)

What's missing?

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

#180

Post by tim333 »

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…

A python company is too specialized but software companies are a thing, Maybe AI will be another tool for software companies.
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