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AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products

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Re: AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products

#81

Post by wruza »

chasd00 wrote: post #55
slidehero wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

structured outputs help, paired with regular old systems design I think you can get pretty far. it really depends what you're building though. >If your AI travel agent books vacations to the correct destination only 90% of the time that would be using the wrong tool for the job. an AI travel agent would be very useful for making suggestions, either for destinations or giving a list of suggested flights, hotels etc, a…

> that would be using the wrong tool for the job. an AI travel agent would be very useful for making suggestions But that’s a recommendation engine and we have that already all over the place.

We have lists with shallowly gamed results all over the place, which work in owners/bots favor, not yours. You can’t expect something not running on your device (or on a gpu rented from a third party) to work in your interest.

Re: AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products

#82

Post by jjmarr »

loa_in_ wrote: post #35
BobbyJo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've made this statement a bunch in other mediums: The reason AI software is always "AI software" and not just a useful product is because AI is fallible. The reason we can build such deep and complex software system is because each layer can assume the one below it will "just work". If it only worked 99% of the time, we'd all still be interfacing with assembly, because we'd have to be aware of the mistakes that were…

But software works only 99% of the time. For some definition of work: 99% of days it's run, 99% of clicks, 99% of CPU time in given component, 99% of versions released and linked into some business' production binary, 99% of github tags, 99% of commits, 99% of software that that one guy says is battle-tested

If twenty components work 99% of the time, then they only have an 0.99^20 = 82% chance of working as a collective.

If your 5.1 GHz (billion instructions per second) CPU had a 0.00000001% chance of failing at a given instruction, you'd have a 40% chance of a crash every second.

If a flight had a 1% chance of killing everyone aboard 10 million people/day * 1% = 100,000 people would die every day from a plane.

Re: AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products

#83

Post by t-writescode »

8organicbits wrote: post #62
FpUser wrote: post #41

ChatGPT is very useful for me to the point that I pay subscription fee. To me it IS the product.

I haven't found a use for it. What do you use it for?

I find it to be orders of magnitude more helpful at getting me started on the research journey when I don't know how to formulate the question of what I'm researching.

I find it useful for:

  * throwing ideas at a wall and rubber-ducking my emotional state and feelings.
  * creating silly, meme images in strange circumstances, sometimes.
  * answering simple "what's the name of that movie / song / whatever" questions
Is it always right? Absolutely not. Is it a good starting point? Yes.

Think of it like the school and the early days of Wikipedia. "Can I use Wikipedia as a source? No. But you can use it to find primary sources and use those in your research paper!"

Re: AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products

#85

Post by DylanDmitri »

ryandrake wrote: post #34

Companies keep going at it the wrong way. Instead of saying "We have AI, let's find products we can make out of AI!" they should be saying, "What products do people want, let's use whatever tools we have (including maybe AI) to make them." The idea that a company is an AI company should be as ridiculous as a company being a Python company. "We are Python-first, have Python experts, and all of our products are made wi…

I’m seeing a lot of meh products that take like 4 units of effort to integrate. I think multiple LLMs, deeply integrated into a cohesive product with 100+ effort units, that can be great. An AI that’s familiar with the use of every settings menu on windows would be awesome

Re: AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products

#86

Post by javiramos »

cooperx wrote: post #65
ryandrake wrote: post #34

Companies keep going at it the wrong way. Instead of saying "We have AI, let's find products we can make out of AI!" they should be saying, "What products do people want, let's use whatever tools we have (including maybe AI) to make them." The idea that a company is an AI company should be as ridiculous as a company being a Python company. "We are Python-first, have Python experts, and all of our products are made wi…

Its the same as all the "we are a blockchain company" startups that popped up looking for a problem to solve with their tech rather than the right way round. However, a lot of those got a bunch of investment or made some decent money in the short term. Very few are still around. We will see the same pattern here.

I had already forgotten about the blockchain

Re: AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products

#87

Post by lancesells »

dragontamer wrote: post #66
necroforest wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't entirely disagree with you, but "what products do people want" is overly conservative. Pre-ChatGPT, very few people wanted a (more or less) general purpose chatbot.

One of my local car dealerships is using an chat system of some kind (probably an LLM?). It's awful and a complete waste of time. I'm not sure if LLMs are getting good use yet / general chatbots are good or ready for business use.

But this is like companies forcing self-checkout at retail. Companies get to cheap out on their customer support by paying a monthly fee instead of paying a person to do it. It doesn't matter if it's worse for you, as every business is getting sold on using this technology.

You misery and wasted time is their improved stock price and bonus package.

Re: AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products

#88

Post by dyauspitr »

dragontamer wrote: post #66
necroforest wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't entirely disagree with you, but "what products do people want" is overly conservative. Pre-ChatGPT, very few people wanted a (more or less) general purpose chatbot.

One of my local car dealerships is using an chat system of some kind (probably an LLM?). It's awful and a complete waste of time. I'm not sure if LLMs are getting good use yet / general chatbots are good or ready for business use.

Who cares. I literally use ChatGPT 30 times a day. It answers incredibly complex queries along with citations I can verify. Isn’t “this not good enough yet” line getting old? There nothing else that can estimate the number of cinder blocks I need to use for a project and account for the volume of concrete required for it (while taking into consideration the actual available volume available in a cinder block and settling) with a few quick sentences I speak to it. I can think of literally thousands of things I have asked that would have taken hours of googling that I can get an answer for in minutes.

I think the problem is you haven’t shifted your mindset to using AI correctly yet.

Edit: More everyday examples from just the last 3 days

- Use carbide bits to drill into rocks. Googling “best bits for drilling rocks” doesn’t bring up anything obvious about carbide but it was the main thing chatGPT suggested.

- gave it dimensions for a barn I’m building and asked it how many gallons of paint I would need of a particular type. I could probably work that out myself but it’s a bunch of lookups (what’s the total sq footage, how many sq ft per gallon, what type of paint stands up to a lot of scuffing etc.)

- coarse threaded inserts for softwood when I asked it for threaded insert recommendations. I would have probably ended up not caring and fine threaded slips right out of pine.

- lookup ingredients in a face cream and list out any harms (with citations) for any of them.

- speeds and feeds for acrylic cutting for my particular CNC. Don’t use a downcut bit because it might cause a fire, something I didn’t consider.

- an explanation of relevant NEMA outlets. Something that’s very hard to figure out if you’re just dropped into it via googling.

Re: AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products

#89

Post by cm2012 »

8organicbits wrote: post #62
FpUser wrote: post #41

ChatGPT is very useful for me to the point that I pay subscription fee. To me it IS the product.

I haven't found a use for it. What do you use it for?

It gives amazing medical advice and answers, way better than webmd or frankly even most primary care physicians ive seen.

Re: AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products

#90

Post by AdieuToLogic »

necroforest wrote: post #49
ryandrake wrote: post #34

Companies keep going at it the wrong way. Instead of saying "We have AI, let's find products we can make out of AI!" they should be saying, "What products do people want, let's use whatever tools we have (including maybe AI) to make them." The idea that a company is an AI company should be as ridiculous as a company being a Python company. "We are Python-first, have Python experts, and all of our products are made wi…

I don't entirely disagree with you, but "what products do people want" is overly conservative. Pre-ChatGPT, very few people wanted a (more or less) general purpose chatbot.

> Pre-ChatGPT, very few people wanted a (more or less) general purpose chatbot.

And post-ChatGPT, very few people want to have to deal with "a (more or less) general purpose chatbot."

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