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AI is a technology not a product

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Re: AI is a technology not a product

#181

Post by buu700 »

daemin wrote: post #172
buu700 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be more inclined to believe that an abundance of robotaxis will use predictive algorithms to preemptively show up wherever they're likely to be needed, allowing a UX where users can hail them like traditional taxis without an app. Maybe not in four years, but maybe in a decade or two. That feels both more credible and more desirable than the magic panopticon predicted in the quote, and doesn't really depend on an…

Or you know, maybe have public transport that's available so you can easily get it to where you need to go. Having a city's worth of automated cars driving around all the time sounds like a hellscape.

I'd feel safer with streets populated by fleets of mature autonomous vehicles than the current status quo, even (or especially) when traveling by foot and train (which I do often). Public transit is great, but cars also exist for good reasons.

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#182

Post by overfeed »

flashman wrote: post #147

Apple is smart to avoid betting the farm on generative AI based on large language models, which is really what we mean by 'AI' here. It costs a lot to create and to run, nobody is willing to pay enough to cover those costs, and when that financial reality hits, it's going to take the knees out from under some major corporations. Maybe Apple will buy Nvidia. That would be a useful vertical integration.

> Apple is smart to avoid betting the farm on generative AI based on large language models

Let's all pretend there was an intentional coherent strategy, and not because Apple's lagged its peers due to its secretive corporate DNA, internal silos, and restrictive publishing policies actively repelling AI talent at a critical time.

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#183

Post by sincerely »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #169
MrDarcy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replace search for one.

Search is great when you know what you're looking for. I want a "how do I?" function alongside search that will explain their product to me. Especially since so many SaaS products have absolutely terrible UX - it looks lovely, but you cannot discover anything, and you cannot intuit how to do something. Menus auto-hide, scroll bars don't work so you don't realise there's another half of the page you're looking at, but…

>I think I'm at 1 success out of 15 attempts for Gemini to explain how to do something in Google Sheets/Docs, though, so I'm not hopeful that anyone can actually implement this.

People love to talk about this as one of the helpful features of AI (knowledge extraction from documents/summarizing), but I'm really not convinced. The last generation of models seem to have 70-90% accuracy on tasks like this, which is way below what i'd consider a reliable tool

e.g. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/digital-health/articles...

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11197181/

I don't know if there are any benchmarks for this sort of task, maybe the new ones are improved but I also doubt that people are using GPT5.5 pro ultrathink for these tasks anyways

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#184

Post by daemin »

buu700 wrote: post #181
daemin wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you know, maybe have public transport that's available so you can easily get it to where you need to go. Having a city's worth of automated cars driving around all the time sounds like a hellscape.

I'd feel safer with streets populated by fleets of mature autonomous vehicles than the current status quo, even (or especially) when traveling by foot and train (which I do often). Public transit is great, but cars also exist for good reasons.

The streets would be far safer with far fewer cars on the road. Having automated fleets just increases the number of cars on the roads making the streets less safe. This is due to each fleet needing enough capacity on the road at any time to handle the demand and response times expected.

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#185

Post by lxgr »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #102
lxgr wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [...] broadcast that they're so important and busy that they can't take the 5 seconds [...] It takes a lot more than 5 seconds to make an informed decision these days. Apps and websites are throwing abusive fine print and dark patterns at users left and right. I'd be absolutely thrilled to e.g. not have to interact with the Uber app and all its dark patterns if there were somebody or something I could trust to comp…

> It takes a lot more than 5 seconds to make an informed decision these days. Apps and websites are throwing abusive fine print and dark patterns at users left and right. I just opened the Uber app. The first thing that pops up is a search bar that says "Where to?". I entered a destination address. Next thing it showed was a map with a path to my destination and nearby cars, and buttons where I can choose my type of…

The dark patterns and generally options not presented in the app are exactly where I would expect a competent assistant to shine.

Are local taxi services cheaper and known to be more reliable? Am I missing an obvious public transit option? Is Uber pulling something creative with dynamic pricing again?

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#186

Post by lxgr »

mold_aid wrote: post #93
lxgr wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know how to set up a static HTML site in about 15 minutes. Building a website to host there usually takes me the better part of a weekend, and usually ends up looking absolutely terrible.

I think this really gets at it: people are so terrified of not knowing what to do, of not knowing whether their solution is "good," that they'll pay a monthly fee for a machine to tell them it's ok, ironically bypassing human judgment in the end. Drudgery or judgery, those are the two task contexts in which AI products* excel. * It's lovely to have the opportunity to disagree with both Gruber and the "the whole thing…

I’m not terrified of learning how to design a good website, I would simply not take up a design-heavy project, as I don’t enjoy it at all.

I do like certain other aspects of projects like that, which is why it’s great to have LLMs to collaborate with on it.

> they'll pay a monthly fee for a machine to tell them it's ok

Why would I outsource that decision to an LLM? I can look at the result myself and decide if I like it.

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#187

Post by tomaskafka »

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…

Yep. I am pleased to say that after over a decade of development and high tens of billions USD in costs, Siri can finally play Knights of Cydonia in Youtube Music at a first try. "That Queen song from Sonic hedgehog movie" will probably need another 20-50 billion $ and I am happy to let Ternus spend it.

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#189

Post by mastermage »

hresvelgr wrote: post #5

This is a similar argument to "Dropbox is a feature, not a product" and it definitely rings true in this instance too. I remember the litany of applications that only supported sync through Dropbox. It had no ecosystem, it's saving grace was that no one yet was operating a service similar at that scale. All the major AI companies are trying to manufacture their own ecosystems to become less disposable. They'll get aw…

and alot of software still has only dropbox sync support. As every Cloud Storage Provider facing Consumers just implements their own propriatary bullshit protocoll so there is always only 3 supported Cloud Storages and usualy they are Icloud, Dropbox, Google Drive.

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#190

Post by mastermage »

lxgr wrote: post #185
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It takes a lot more than 5 seconds to make an informed decision these days. Apps and websites are throwing abusive fine print and dark patterns at users left and right. I just opened the Uber app. The first thing that pops up is a search bar that says "Where to?". I entered a destination address. Next thing it showed was a map with a path to my destination and nearby cars, and buttons where I can choose my type of…

The dark patterns and generally options not presented in the app are exactly where I would expect a competent assistant to shine. Are local taxi services cheaper and known to be more reliable? Am I missing an obvious public transit option? Is Uber pulling something creative with dynamic pricing again?

How do you think that AI Assistants would be not subject to Dark Patterns when they are literally Pattern Matching machines? Trained on General Human output and behavior.
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