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Just today I used the AI service on the amazon product page to get more information about a specific product, basically RAG on the reviews. So maybe your analysis is outdated?
The amazon store chatbot is mongst the worst implementations I've seen. The old UI which displayed the customer questions and allowed searching them was infinitely better.
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> The best AI applications are beneath the surface to empower users Not this time, tho. ChatGPT is the iphone moment for "AI" for the masses. And it was surprising and unexpected both for the experts / practitioners and said masses. Working with LLMs pre gpt3.5 was a mess, hackish and "in the background" but way way worse experience overall. Chatgpt made it happen just like the proverbial "you had me at scroll and pi…
I’ll spend an anti-hype token :) ChatGPT wasn’t the iphone moment, because the iphone wasn’t quickly forgotten. Outside of software, most adult professionals in my network had a play with chatgpt and have long since abandoned their accounts. They can’t use chatbots for work (maybe data is sensitive, or their ‘knowledge work’ isn’t the kind that produces text output). Our native language is too poorly supported for li…
> The first cars were expensive, unreliable, and slow
We can say the same about the AI features being added to every SaaS product right now. Productization will take a while, but people will figure out where LLMs add value soon enough.
For the most part, winning startups look like new categories rather than those beating an incumbent. Very different than SaaS winners.
Great read! I wonder if there is something noteworthy about Studebacker - yes, they were the only carriage maker out of 4000 to start making cars, and therefore the CEO "knew better" than the other ones. But then again, Studebacker was the single largest carriage maker and a military contractor for the Union - in other words they were big and "wealthy" enough to consider the "painful transformation" as the article pu…
Agreed. The autombile was two innovations, not one. If Ford had created a carriage assembly line in an alternate history without automobiles, how many carriage makers would he have put out of business? The United States certainly couldn't have supported 4000 carriage assembly lines. Most of those carriage makers did not have the capacity or volume to finance and support an assembly line.
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I’ll spend an anti-hype token :) ChatGPT wasn’t the iphone moment, because the iphone wasn’t quickly forgotten. Outside of software, most adult professionals in my network had a play with chatgpt and have long since abandoned their accounts. They can’t use chatbots for work (maybe data is sensitive, or their ‘knowledge work’ isn’t the kind that produces text output). Our native language is too poorly supported for li…
It’s tough because every CEO and VC is hyperventilating about LLMs as a paradigm shift for humanity when in reality they are useful but also so are gene editing and solid state batteries and mrna vaccines. It’s just that software innovations are much more attractive to certain groups with money.
I guess there's a quiet majority thing going on where the vast majority of businesses are just not integrating chatbots because their business is not generating text.
Let us see how this will age. The current generation of AI models will turn out to be essentially a dead end. I have no doubt that AI will eventually fundamentally change a lot of things, but it will not be large language models [1]. And I think there is no path of gradual improvement, we still need some fundamental new ideas. Integration with external tools will help but not overcome fundamental limitations. Once th…
> The current generation of AI models will turn out to be essentially a dead end. It seems a matter of perspective to me whether you call it "dead end" or "stepping stone". To give some pause before dismissing the current state of the art prematurely: I would already consider LLM based current systems more "intelligent" than a housecat. And a pets intelligence is enough to have ethical implications, so we arguably re…
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Something can be much better than before but still be a dead end. Literally a dead end road can take you closer but never get you there.
But dead end to what? All progress eventually plateaus somewhere? It's clearly insanely useful in practice. And do you think there will be any future AGI whose development is not helped by current LLM technology? Even if the architecture is completely different the ability of LLMs to understand humans data automatically is unparalleled.
I like Steve's content, but the ending misses the mark. With the carriage / car situation, individual transportation is their core business, and most companies are not in the field of Artificial Intelligence. I say this as someone who has worked for 7 years implementing AI research for production, from automated hardware testing to accessibility for nonverbals: I don't think founders need to obsess even more than the…
> With the carriage / car situation, individual transportation is their core business, and most companies are not in the field of Artificial Intelligence. Agreed. The analogy breaks down because the car disrupted a single vertical but AI is a horizontal, general-purpose technology. I think this also explains why we're seeing "forced" adoption everywhere (e.g., the ubiquitous chatbot) -- as a result of: 1. Massive dos…
Let us see how this will age. The current generation of AI models will turn out to be essentially a dead end. I have no doubt that AI will eventually fundamentally change a lot of things, but it will not be large language models [1]. And I think there is no path of gradual improvement, we still need some fundamental new ideas. Integration with external tools will help but not overcome fundamental limitations. Once th…
This is a surprising take. I think what's available today can improve productivity by 20% across the board. That seems massive. Only a very small % of the population is leveraging AI in any meaningful way. But I think today's tools are sufficient for them to do so if they wanted to start and will only get better (even if the LLMs don't, which they will).
I like Steve's content, but the ending misses the mark. With the carriage / car situation, individual transportation is their core business, and most companies are not in the field of Artificial Intelligence. I say this as someone who has worked for 7 years implementing AI research for production, from automated hardware testing to accessibility for nonverbals: I don't think founders need to obsess even more than the…