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Three kinds of AI products work

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Re: Three kinds of AI products work

#41

Post by adastra22 »

ZeroConcerns wrote: post #24

Well, the elephant in the room here is that the generic AI product that is being promised, i.e. "you get into your car in the morning, and on your drive to the office dictate your requirements for one of the apps that is going to guarantee your retirement, in order to find it completely done , rolled out to all the app stores and making money already once you arrive" isn't happening anytime soon, if ever, yet everyon…

Agentic tools is already delivering an increase in productivity equivalent to many FTEs. I say this as someone in the position of having to hire coders and needing far fewer than we otherwise would have.

Re: Three kinds of AI products work

#42

Post by gordonhart »

hobs wrote: post #31
owenpalmer wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. What other type of business is there?

That is the joke.

The best kind of businesses are the ones I don’t have to ask; they’ve already built a better product than what I would have asked for. That’s kinda the point the OP is making about chat vs a [good] dedicated interface.

Re: Three kinds of AI products work

#43

Post by vorticalbox »

ZeroConcerns wrote: post #24

Well, the elephant in the room here is that the generic AI product that is being promised, i.e. "you get into your car in the morning, and on your drive to the office dictate your requirements for one of the apps that is going to guarantee your retirement, in order to find it completely done , rolled out to all the app stores and making money already once you arrive" isn't happening anytime soon, if ever, yet everyon…

I use mongo at work and LLM helped me find index issues.

Feeding it the explain, query and current indexes it can quickly tell what it was doing and why it was slow.

I saved a bunch time as I didn’t have to read large amounts of json from explain to see what is going on.

Re: Three kinds of AI products work

#44

Post by Dilettante_ »

renewiltord wrote: post #16

The classic problem that online commenters face is that they only know products that are on Hacker News and Reddit. And I get why. Not being plugged into anything the only way to get information is social media so you only know social media. E.g. https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en/press-releases/2025/septem... B2B AI company, 2 years in sold for hundreds of millions, not an agent, chatbot, or completion. Do you know i…

  Additive’s GenAI-native platform streamlines the repetitive, time-consuming task of ingesting and parsing pass-through entity documents
From TFA:

  There’s another kind of agent that isn’t about coding: the research agent. 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”.

Re: Three kinds of AI products work

#45

Post by chrisweekly »

websap wrote: post #35

> Users simply do not want to type out “hey, can you increase the font size for me” when they could simply hit “ctrl-plus” or click a single button3. I would def challenge this. “Turn off private relay”, “send this photo to X”, “Add a pit stop at a coffee shop along the way” are all voice commands I would love to use

Yes, this! esp the last one. Finding coffee shop / restaurant options ALONG THE WAY seems like it should've been solved years ago. Scenario: while driving, "want to eat in about an hour, must have vegetarian options, don't add more than 10m extra drive time" and get a shortlist to pick from.

Re: Three kinds of AI products work

#46

Post by PopAlongKid »

renewiltord wrote: post #16

The classic problem that online commenters face is that they only know products that are on Hacker News and Reddit. And I get why. Not being plugged into anything the only way to get information is social media so you only know social media. E.g. https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en/press-releases/2025/septem... B2B AI company, 2 years in sold for hundreds of millions, not an agent, chatbot, or completion. Do you know i…

>The company’s [Additive] technology automates complex tasks such as extracting footnotes from K-1s, K-3s, and related forms, so every staff member can become a reviewer and complete work that used to take weeks in a matter of hours.

Any tax professional who takes weeks to enter footnote info from a K-1 form into their professional tax prep software is probably just as bad at other job-related tasks and either needs more training or to find another job.

Re: Three kinds of AI products work

#47

Post by ohyoutravel »

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.

Re: Three kinds of AI products work

#48

Post by ansgri »

madeofpalk wrote: post #36
ZeroConcerns wrote: post #24

Well, the elephant in the room here is that the generic AI product that is being promised, i.e. "you get into your car in the morning, and on your drive to the office dictate your requirements for one of the apps that is going to guarantee your retirement, in order to find it completely done , rolled out to all the app stores and making money already once you arrive" isn't happening anytime soon, if ever, yet everyon…

The other part to this is that LLMs as a technology definitely has some value as a foundation to build features/products on other than chat bots. But unclear to be whether that value can sustain current valuations. Is a better de-noisier algorithm in Adobe Lightroom worth $500 billion?

A bit off-topic, but denoise in LR is like 3 years behind the purpose-built products like Topaz, so a bad example. They've added any ML-based denoise to it when, like a year ago?

Re: Three kinds of AI products work

#49

Post by ZeroConcerns »

adastra22 wrote: post #41
ZeroConcerns wrote: post #24

Well, the elephant in the room here is that the generic AI product that is being promised, i.e. "you get into your car in the morning, and on your drive to the office dictate your requirements for one of the apps that is going to guarantee your retirement, in order to find it completely done , rolled out to all the app stores and making money already once you arrive" isn't happening anytime soon, if ever, yet everyon…

Agentic tools is already delivering an increase in productivity equivalent to many FTEs. I say this as someone in the position of having to hire coders and needing far fewer than we otherwise would have.

Well, yeah, as they say on Wikipedia: {{Citation Needed}}

Can AI-as-it-currently-is save FTEs? Sure: but, again, there's a template for that: {{How Many}} -- 1% of your org chart? 10%? In my case it's around 0.5% right now.

Or, to reframe it a bit: can AI pay Sam A's salary? Sure! His stock options? Doubtful. His future plans? Heck nah!

Re: Three kinds of AI products work

#50

Post by carsoon »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #18
koliber wrote: post #15

A few more seem to work as well, because I've used them and found them valuable - human language translation - summarization - basic content generation - spoken language transcription

> basic content generation Dunno, man, I can spot ai-generated content a mile away, it tends to be incredibly useless so once I spot it, I’ll run in the opposite direction.

You spot bad ai content. Since there is no button that will tell you if something was Ai generated you never know if what you read was/wasn't.
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