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Even Apple cannot explain why we need AI in our lives

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Re: Even Apple cannot explain why we need AI in our lives

#61

Post by moffkalast »

shiandow wrote: post #24
thepasswordis wrote: post #13

It certainly feels like the AI bubble is popping. Code completion is a great use, some writing tools are nice, I love chatGPT for information lookup (while knowing that it hallucinates), ChatGPT/whatever is great for generating icons and some images, and it’s much better at writing in corpo than I am. But…Nvidia as the most valuable company in the world? $1B valuations for freshly minted companies? Radical changes to…

The easiest prediction you can make is that it's going to have an impact in unexpected ways. It will be some time until we get to grips with all the implications of computers grokking language. Then again sci-fi has had computers understanding speech for ages as if it's the most natural thing in the world.

I for one am definitely looking forward to having some proper droids around. Once multimodality and edge accelerators are sorted anyway.

Re: Even Apple cannot explain why we need AI in our lives

#62

Post by swatcoder »

tmpz22 wrote: post #19
thepasswordis wrote: post #13

It certainly feels like the AI bubble is popping. Code completion is a great use, some writing tools are nice, I love chatGPT for information lookup (while knowing that it hallucinates), ChatGPT/whatever is great for generating icons and some images, and it’s much better at writing in corpo than I am. But…Nvidia as the most valuable company in the world? $1B valuations for freshly minted companies? Radical changes to…

If it is a pop how can Big Tech walk it back? Am I overreacting here or have companies like Google and Microsoft pimped out their reputations in an irreversible fashion?

None of the big players have staked reputation on AI yet at all, which is telling in its own way. They've invested in it and explored products and demonstrated their R&D commitment but they haven't made it their new brand identity or anything.

The most vulnerable Big Tech organization are the ones like OpenAI and Anthropic that are swollen with investment specifically for AI but need to find a business or growth plan that can sustain that investment, plus the smaller and startup companies that have bet the farm on AI before it matured. But these same companies are the ones that have the potential to win big if there's another key breakthrough on either capabilities or product insight.

Re: Even Apple cannot explain why we need AI in our lives

#63

Post by AlexandrB »

thepasswordis wrote: post #13

It certainly feels like the AI bubble is popping. Code completion is a great use, some writing tools are nice, I love chatGPT for information lookup (while knowing that it hallucinates), ChatGPT/whatever is great for generating icons and some images, and it’s much better at writing in corpo than I am. But…Nvidia as the most valuable company in the world? $1B valuations for freshly minted companies? Radical changes to…

We're certainly a long way from last summer's AI hype where CEOs of AI companies were going in front of congress to explain how their AI is going to take over the world and needed to be tightly regulated.

Re: Even Apple cannot explain why we need AI in our lives

#64

Post by cogman10 »

j16sdiz wrote: post #50
cogman10 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did big tech walk back crypto, ML, Web 2.0? They really don't need to walk back anything. If the features are too expensive to support and ultimately unused, then they'll just quietly kill them off. Otherwise, it'll just be another feature in the feature lists. Not something that really buys anything but also not something making them a lot of money.

Funny you put crypto on the same list with ML. (and I guess you meant Web 3.0, not 2.0)

Nah, web 2.0 was a super hype back in the late 90s early 00s. Everyone was all about advertising their adoption and development of web 2.0. Web 3.0 was never really a thing, beyond some crypto enthusiasts nobody cared.

As for crypto, I probably should have said blockchain instead. There was one point recently where everything was block chained.

Re: Even Apple cannot explain why we need AI in our lives

#65

Post by nlawalker »

Not in its current state, when it doesn't do anything on its own and you have to ask it a question to interact with it.

Once it becomes capable enough to act as an agent and starts asking you questions (unprompted by you) to confirm its actions, it'll slowly become a requirement to participate in society and remain productive enough to be taken seriously, like smartphones are today.

Re: Even Apple cannot explain why we need AI in our lives

#66

Post by sqeaky »

GJim wrote: post #34
thepasswordis wrote: post #13

It certainly feels like the AI bubble is popping. Code completion is a great use, some writing tools are nice, I love chatGPT for information lookup (while knowing that it hallucinates), ChatGPT/whatever is great for generating icons and some images, and it’s much better at writing in corpo than I am. But…Nvidia as the most valuable company in the world? $1B valuations for freshly minted companies? Radical changes to…

> I love chatGPT for information lookup (while knowing that it hallucinates) Hallucinates? I'd use the term 'bullshits' when it doesn't know the right answer. This makes it a dangerous thing to trust.

It absolutely can't be trusted, but it can focus searches for relevant information. I started researching network monitoring solutions and chatgpt provided suggestions for me to look at and provided terms that I use to find pages in documentation that were relevant to me. I saw real solutions that would work that my initial web searches missed. I got to relevant documentation much faster with a fair expectation of what I would find.

It is a greatat summarizing but poor at understanding. It is great at concepts but crap at precision. And every actionable "fact" coming from it needs to be vetted.

Re: Even Apple cannot explain why we need AI in our lives

#68

Post by crazygringo »

thepasswordis wrote: post #13

It certainly feels like the AI bubble is popping. Code completion is a great use, some writing tools are nice, I love chatGPT for information lookup (while knowing that it hallucinates), ChatGPT/whatever is great for generating icons and some images, and it’s much better at writing in corpo than I am. But…Nvidia as the most valuable company in the world? $1B valuations for freshly minted companies? Radical changes to…

> It certainly feels like the AI bubble is popping.

Objectively, no it doesn't. Even if you think it's a bubble, then the bubble is just growing. There are zero signs of anything popping yet. Company valuations are only increasing.

> Nvidia as the most valuable company in the world?

It makes sense when you look at the financials. It's like back in 1800's when railroads were the new thing, and imagine there were only one company that knew how to make locomotives, while everything else had multiple suppliers. It would have been the most valuable company as well.

Nvidia is in an extremely enviable situation where they're simply the only company that makes a product that is in extreme demand. And for various reasons, no other companies appear to be able to make and deliver a substitute -- not yet and seemingly not in the near future.

So they're able to produce an extreme level of profit, which shows no signs of stopping anytime soon, and their market valuation reflects that accurately.

Remember, high market valuation isn't a reflection of expected future revenue or sales -- it's a reflection of expected future profit. And Nvidia is raking in crazy profits because nobody else is effectively competing with them.

Re: Even Apple cannot explain why we need AI in our lives

#69

Post by gjm11 »

cogman10 wrote: post #27
tmpz22 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it is a pop how can Big Tech walk it back? Am I overreacting here or have companies like Google and Microsoft pimped out their reputations in an irreversible fashion?

How did big tech walk back crypto, ML, Web 2.0? They really don't need to walk back anything. If the features are too expensive to support and ultimately unused, then they'll just quietly kill them off. Otherwise, it'll just be another feature in the feature lists. Not something that really buys anything but also not something making them a lot of money.

I don't think I understand your first sentence.

Big tech wasn't invested in crypto in the way it is in AI. For a few days Meta pretended they were going to launch a cryptocurrency, but that's kinda it. Whereas in this case all the biggest tech players are making a lot of noise about how AI is The Future and investing a tremendous amount of resources into trying to make their AI be The Future.

Big tech investment into machine learning didn't need walking back because machine learning morphed smoothly into AI.

Big tech investment into "Web 2.0" didn't need walking back because "Web 2.0", to whatever extent it was a definite specific thing, was a huge success and now we just call it the web. (If you meant "Web 3.0", that didn't need walking back for the same reason as crypto didn't: it was never a very big thing for very big tech.)

So I'm not seeing how any of those things was like AI today. If it turns out that present-day AI is a bubble and it bursts, it will not be like crypto or "Web 3.0" for the big tech companies because those were only ever fads that the big tech companies didn't particularly tie themselves to. It won't be like machine learning because it will be the same bubble, just later on. And it won't be like "Web 2.0" because that wasn't a bubble and didn't burst.

Re: Even Apple cannot explain why we need AI in our lives

#70

Post by ein0p »

We the HN readers do not need it, but for 90% of the rest of the world's population the interaction model with computers today for tasks more complex than Instagram is akin to casting magical spells, and it's been like that for decades. Imagine they could just tell the computer what to do in a completely natural, possibly even broken English, and it'd do it. That's the longer term promise of AI, and that's where it'll inevitably go.
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