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Three kinds of AI products work

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Re: Three kinds of AI products work

#61

Post by input_sh »

levocardia wrote: post #40

Very obviously missing the mundane agentic work. I think the following things are basically already solved, and are just waiting for the right harness: - Call this government service center, wait on hold for 45 minutes, then when they finally answer, tell them to reactivate my insurance marketplace account that got wrongly deleted. - Find a good dentist within 2mi from my house, call them to make sure they take my in…

Basically already solved = you've never used it for any of those purposes and have no idea if or how well would they work?

Re: Three kinds of AI products work

#62

Post by Mikhail_Edoshin »

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

Old Apple Newton had a feature, I don't remember how they called it, but on any screen you could write "please", and then describe what to do, e. g. using one of their examples: "please fax this to Bob". And it worked. Internally it was a rather simple keyword match plus access to data, such as the system address book. New applications could register their own names for actions and relevant dictionaries.

Re: Three kinds of AI products work

#64

Post by koliber »

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.

I hate what LLM spit out and would never accept the whole output verbatim.

I love how they occasionally come up with a turn of phrase, a thought path, or surprising perspective. I work with them iteratively to brainstorm, transform, and crate compose content that I incorporate into my own work.

Regarding spotting AI-generate content, I was once accused of posting AI-generated content where I bona-fide typed every single letter myself without as much as glancing at an LLM. People's confidence in spotting AI content will vary and err on fake-positives and fake-negatives too. My kids now think all CG movies are AI generated, even the ones that pre-date image and video gen. They're pretty sure it's AI though.

Re: Three kinds of AI products work

#65

Post by kken »

Well, considering that the long term idea is to have AGI, general intelligence, it seems that the goal as also to only have a single product in the end.

There may be different ways to access it, but the product is always the same.

Re: Three kinds of AI products work

#66

Post by lelandbatey »

ohyoutravel wrote: post #47
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.

Really only two kinds:

- Energy generation and

- Expending energy to convince the folks generating energy to give you money for activating their neurons (food service, entertainment, tourism, transportation, sales).

Any other fun ways to compartmentalize an economy?

Re: Three kinds of AI products work

#67

Post by dbreunig »

themanmaran wrote: post #55
wongarsu wrote: post #6

This seems to be biased heavily towards products that look like an LLM. And yes, only a small number of those work. But that's because if your product is a thing I chat with, it immediately is in competition with ChatGPT/Claude/Grok/etc, leading to everything the article expressed. But those are hardly the only use cases for LLMs, let alone AI (whatever people nowadays mean by AI) To name some of the obvious counter-…

Perhaps I'm biased since we're in a document heavy industry, but I think the original post misses a lot of the non-tech company use cases. An insane percentage of human time is spent copy pasting things from documents.

Agree. I bucket things into three piles:

1. Batch/Pipeline: Processing a ton of things, with no oversight. Document parsing, content moderation, etc.

2. AI Features: An app calls out to an AI-powered function. Grammarly might pass out a document for a summary, a CMS might want to generate tags for a post, etc.

3. Agents: AI manages the control flow.

So much of discussion online is heavily focused towards agents so that skews the macro view, but these patterns are pretty distinct.

Re: Three kinds of AI products work

#68

Post by tehjoker »

ohyoutravel wrote: post #47
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.

Not shown: any activity involved in production, science, or healthcare just off the top of my head

Re: Three kinds of AI products work

#69

Post by gregates »

koliber wrote: post #60
notatoad wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> summarization can you point me to a useful example of this? i see websites including ai-generated summaries all the time, but i've yet to see one that is actually useful and it seems like the product being sold here is simply "ai", not the summary itself - that is, companies and product managers are under pressure to implement some sort of AI, and sticking summaries in places is a way for them to fill that requirem…

I sometimes get contracts, NDAs, or terms and conditions which normally I would automatically accept because they are low stakes and I don't have time to read them. At best I would skim them. Now I pass them through an LLM and ask them to point out interesting, unconventional, or surprising things, and to summarize the document in a few bullet points. They're quite good at this, and I am can use what I discover later…

Do you go through the haystack yourself first, find the needle, and then use that to validate your hypothesis that the AI is good at accomplishing that task (because it usually finds the same needle)? If not, how do you know they're good at the task?

My own experience using LLMs is that we frequently disagree about which points are crucial and which can be omitted from a summary.

Re: Three kinds of AI products work

#70

Post by irq-1 »

levocardia wrote: post #40

Very obviously missing the mundane agentic work. I think the following things are basically already solved, and are just waiting for the right harness: - Call this government service center, wait on hold for 45 minutes, then when they finally answer, tell them to reactivate my insurance marketplace account that got wrongly deleted. - Find a good dentist within 2mi from my house, call them to make sure they take my in…

> - Find a good dentist within 2mi from my house, call them to make sure they take my insurance, and book an appointment sometime in the next two weeks no earlier than 11am

The web caused dentists to make websites, but they don't post their appointment calendar; they don't have to.

Will AI looking for appointments cause businesses to post live, structured data (like calendars)? The complexity of scheduling and multiple calendars is perfect for an AI solution. What other AI uses and interactive systems will come soon?

- Accounting: generate balance sheets, audit in real-time, and have human accountants double check it (rather than doing)

- Correspondence: create and send notifications of all sorts, and consume them

- Purchase selection: shifting the lack of knowledge about products in the customers favor

- Forms: doing taxes or applying for a visa

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