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AI is a technology not a product

daringfireball.net

41–50 of 224 posts

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#41

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…

Translation. If the said random person is interesting in any media from non-english speaking countries. Anime, manhwa, cultivation web novels.

But you specified America, so I guess no.

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#42

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…

Translation. If the said random person is interesting in any media from non-english speaking countries. Anime, manhwa, cultivation web novels. But you specified America, so I guess no.

Translation existed before llms tho in hundreds of languages. Google translate came out in 2006

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#43
post #35

This is important to think through, does one have a product, tech, tool, or even just a feature. I given thing is not necessarily at the bottom of this stack, but also not always at the top.

Really depends on the company and who you're selling to. For a car company a tire is a feature, for other companies it's their product.

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Translation. If the said random person is interesting in any media from non-english speaking countries. Anime, manhwa, cultivation web novels. But you specified America, so I guess no.

Translation existed before llms tho in hundreds of languages. Google translate came out in 2006

And? Coding existed before LLMs too.

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#45

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

100% I would be happier to have a small model that can run locally capable of searching the web than a stand-alone frontier model

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#46
post #25

The answer as always in these situations is to zoom out. We are in the midst of a paradigm shift, and the perspective in the daring fireball post aligns exactly with this author’s perspective: https://rebecca-powell.com/posts/return-on-intelligence-01-e...

Really enjoyed that article, thanks for the link. I agree there can be a bubble and a genuine paradigm shift at the same time. We're going through our first wave of attempts, more or less wrong, but the general direction is right, that the future will never be the same.

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#47
post #12

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…

Absolutely agreed. It feels like tech companies forgot that they are supposed to add value to users. Theyve been shoving random AI usecases down their users throats with no regard for whether it works for the users flow or not. When theres so much value to be had from AI in normal products. Claude code is the best in this right now, probably because the engineers themselves are users. This isnt unprecedented, its wha…

> When theres so much value to be had from AI in normal products.

Please elaborate

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#48

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…

> 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.

Isn’t this the proverbial ”faster horse”? Ie let me do exactly what I can do now, in a very slightly different, possibly very slightly more convenient way?

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#49
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely agreed. It feels like tech companies forgot that they are supposed to add value to users. Theyve been shoving random AI usecases down their users throats with no regard for whether it works for the users flow or not. When theres so much value to be had from AI in normal products. Claude code is the best in this right now, probably because the engineers themselves are users. This isnt unprecedented, its wha…

> When theres so much value to be had from AI in normal products. Please elaborate

Replace search for one.

Re: AI is a technology not a product

#50
post #48

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…

> 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. Isn’t this the proverbial ”faster horse”? Ie let me do exactly what I can do now, in a very slightly different, possibly very slightly more convenient way?

The whole point of AI is that if something different happens, it's not you doing it.
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