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AI tools I wish existed

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Re: AI tools I wish existed

#71

Post by Oras »

lancebeet wrote: post #67

This is really striking, isn't it? We've all certainly seen demos of things on this list or very similar things, and there are startups that have spent years and billions of dollars attempting to exploit existing LLMs to develop useful products. Yet most of the products don't seem to exist. The ones that you see in everyday life never seem to work nearly as well as the demos suggest. So what's going on here? Do the p…

It is too expensive to reach the right audience. I remember talking to agencies about ads for a fintech app, and all of them said the same thing:

You need to burn around 20k a month on ads for 3 months, so we can learn what works, then the CAC will start decreasing, and you can get more targeted users.

Once you turn ads off, there is no awareness, no new users, and people will not be aware of the product's existence.

Re: AI tools I wish existed

#72

Post by swiftcoder »

agnishom wrote: post #63

> a chat app grounded by nutrition databases. Just minimize the cognitive effort it takes me to log a meal. I think this is a great idea for an user interface. While inputting information, the user would have to enter some jumbled thoughts, the precise rows and columns would be handled by the AI

Google tried this years ago, by having you input a photo of your meal, and the ML algorithm guesses the calorie count and macros.

Of course, it didn't actually work - nobody, human nor machine, can guess the calorie counts of a hamburger from a photo.

Re: AI tools I wish existed

#75

Post by monch1962 »

> A Sony Walkman-style device that you can give to children so they can ask questions to an LLM. It should be voice-first, and focused on explaining things. There shouldn’t be a single screen on the device. Offline-first would be a plus.

Not a 100% fit, but https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005009196849357.html is pretty close. It's not offline, and it's slightly larger than a ping pong ball.

My grandkids (5 and 3) spent about 2 minutes learning how to use it, then bombarded it with "tell me a story about a unicorn named Bob", "can dogs be friends with monkeys?" and so on. In every case it gave a reasonable answer within a few seconds.

I'll be amazed if these things don't wind up embedded inside toys by Xmas. When they do, I'll be in the queue to buy one

Re: AI tools I wish existed

#76

Post by nl »

mhl47 wrote: post #48

Currently trying to build #6. Just for private use. My hope is that by throwing a bunch of highly personalized information in a VLM it will provide reasonably first estimates. (E.g. if you see a bowl lentils I will probably have rice below etc.). And then iterate on the main ingredients -> fetch the macros of main ingredients from a DB. If its within 20% that would be enough for me. I have tried some off-the-shelfe s…

I looked at this field a while back and I'd caution that estimates are dramatically off because high and low calorie foods are often identical visually.

Think of a diet soda vs a sugared one - it can be 10 vs 1000 calories easily. Almost all diet options are designed to look like the non-diet options.

Re: AI tools I wish existed

#77

Post by FinnKuhn »

Gigachad wrote: post #45
onion2k wrote: post #14

A recommendation engine that looks at my browsing history, sees what blog posts or articles I spent the most time on, then searches the web every night for things I should be reading that I’m not. This kind of exists in the form of ChatGPT Pulse. It uses your ChatGPT history rather than your browser history, but that's probably just as good a source for people interested in using it (e.g. people who use ChatGPT enoug…

It's also essentially every social media platform with an algorithm selected feed.

A lot of social media platforms only recommend recently uploaded content or at least heavily favor it.

The idea sounds to me more like a feed for independent blogs/articles though, which is what an RSS reader once was supposed to be. Have we come full circle?

Re: AI tools I wish existed

#78

Post by VSerge »

On the topic of "24. A Sony Walkman-style device that you can give to children so they can ask questions to an LLM...", I would strongly caution against this:

- short of AGI, what a child will hear are explanations given with authority, which would probably be correct a very high percentage of the time (maybe even close to or above 99%), BUT the few incorrect answers and subtles misconceptions finding their way in there will be catastrophic for the learning journey because they will be believed blindly by the child.

- even if you had a perfect answering LLM who never makes a mistake, what's the end result? No need to talk to others to find out about something, ie reduced opportunities to learn about cooperating with others

- as a parent, one wishes sometimes for a moment of rest, but imagine that your kid just finds out there's another entity to ask questions from that will have ready answers all the time, instead of you saying sometimes that you don't know, and looking for an answer together. How many bonding moments will be lost? How cut off would your kid become from you? What value system would permeate through the answers?

A key assumption here for any parent equipping their child with such a system is that it would be aligned with their own worldview and value system. For parents on HN, this probably means a fairly science-mediated understanding of the world. But you can bet that in other places, this assistant would very convincingly deliver whatever cultural, political, or religious propaganda their environment requires. This would make for frighteningly powerful brainwashing tools.

Re: AI tools I wish existed

#79

Post by ponector »

VSerge wrote: post #78

On the topic of "24. A Sony Walkman-style device that you can give to children so they can ask questions to an LLM...", I would strongly caution against this: - short of AGI, what a child will hear are explanations given with authority, which would probably be correct a very high percentage of the time (maybe even close to or above 99%), BUT the few incorrect answers and subtles misconceptions finding their way in th…

>> child will hear are explanations given with authority, which would probably be correct a very high percentage of the time (maybe even close to or above 99%), BUT the few incorrect answers and subtles misconceptions finding their way in there will be catastrophic for the learning journey because they will be believed blindly by the child.

Much better results than asking a real teacher at school, though.

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