I think AI has mostly been about luring investors into pumping up share prices rather than offering something of genuine value to consumers.
Some people are gonna lose a lot of other people’s money over it.
Definitely. Many companies have implemented AI without thinking with 3 brain cells.
Great and useful implementation of AI exists, but it’s like 1/100 right now in products.
My old company before they laid me off laid off our entire HR and Comms teams in exchange for ChatGPT Enterprise.
“We can just have an AI chatbot for HR and pay inquiries and ask Dall-e to create icons and other content”.
A friend who still works there told me they’re hiring a bunch of “prompt engineers” to improve the quality of the AI outputs haha
That’s an even worse ‘use case’ than I could imagine.
HR should be one of the most protected fields against AI, because you actually need a human resource.
And “prompt engineer” is so stupid. The “job” is only necessary because the AI doesn’t understand what you want to do well enough. The only productive guy you could hire would be a programmer or something, that could actually tinker with the AI.
God that sounds like hell.
I’m sorry. Hope you find a better job, on the inevitable downswing of the hype, when someone realizes that a prompt can’t replace a person in customer service. Customers will invest more time, i.e., even wait in a purposely engineered holding music hell, to have a real person listen to them.
If my employer is anything to go by, much of it is just unimaginative businesspeople who are afraid of missing out on what everyone else is selling.
At work we were instructed to shove ChatGPT into our systems about a month after it became a thing. It makes no sense in our system and many of us advised management it was irresponsible since it’s giving people advice of very sensitive matters without any guarantee that advice is any good. But no matter, we had to shove it in there, with small print to cover our asses. I bet no one even uses it, but sales can tell customers the product is “AI-driven”.
Yes, I’m getting some serious dot-com bubble vibes from the whole AI thing. But the dot-com boom produced Amazon, and every company is basically going all-in in the hope they are the new Amazon while in the end most will end up like pets.com but it’s a risk they’re willing to take.
“You might lose all your money, but that is a risk I’m willing to take”
- visionairy AI techbro talking to investors
Investors pump money in a bunch of companies so the chances of at least one of them making it big and paying them back for all the failed investments is almost guaranteed. That’s what taking risks is all about.
If the whole sector turns out to be garbage it won’t matter which particular set of companies within it you invest in; you will get burned if you cash out after everyone else.
Sure, but it SEEMS, that some investors are relying on buzzword and hype, without research and ignoring the fundamentals of investing, i.e. besides the ever evolving claims of the CEO, is the company well managed? What is their cash flow and where is it going a year from now? Do the upper level managers have coke habits?
You’re right, but these fundamentals don’t really matter anymore, investors are buying hype and hoping to sell a bigger hype for more money later.
OpenAI will fail. StabilityAI will fail. CivitAI will prevail, mark my words.
A lot of it is follow the leader type bullshit. For companies in areas where AI is actually beneficial they have already been implementing it for years, quietly because it isn’t something new or exceptional. It is just the tool you use for solving certain problems.
Investors going to bubble though.
I tried to find the advert but I see this on YouTube a lot - an Adobe AI ad which depicts, without shame, AI writing out a newsletter/promo for a business owner’s new product (cookies or ice cream or something), showing the owner putting no effort into their personal product and a customer happily consuming because they were attracted by the thoughtless promo.
How are producers/consumers okay with everything being so mediocre??
How are producers/consumers okay with everything being so mediocre??
I’m not. My particular beef is with is with plastics and toxic materials and chemicals being ubiquitous in everything I buy. Systemic problem that I can do almost nothing about apart from make things myself out of raw materials.
How are producers/consumers okay with everything being so mediocre??
“You’re always trying to make everything just a little bit worse so that you can feel good about having a lot more of it. I love it. It’s so human!” - The Good Place
My doorbell camera manufacturer now advertises their products as using, “Local AI” meaning, they’re not relying on a cloud service to look at your video in order to detect humans/faces/etc. Honestly, it seems like a good (marketing) move.
Yeah, can make some products better but most of the products these days that use AI, it doesn’t actually need them. It’s annoying to use products that actively shovel AI when it doesn’t even need it.
Ya know what pfoduct MIGHT be better with AI?
Toasters. They have ONE JOB, and everybody agrees their toaster is crap. But you’re not going to buy another toaster, because that too will be crap.
How about a toaster, that accurately, and evenly toasts your bread, and then DOESN’T give you a heart attack at 5am when you’re still half asleep???
IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK???
This is the visionary we need. Take my venture capital millions on a magic carpet ride, time traveler!
Nah. We already have AI toasters, and they’re ambitious, but rubbish.
Adding AI is just serious overkill for a toaster, especially when it wouldn’t add anything meaningful, not compared to just designing the toaster better.
It only needs one string of conditions that it can understand: don’t catch on fire. Turn yourself off IF smoke.
Sweet, I’m the one who gets to link the obligatory Technology Connections toaster video!
Aw man, now I want this toaster.
I said the exact same thing months ago when I saw that video. I don’t even use a toaster.
LLMs: using statistics to generate reasonable-sounding wrong answers from bad data.
Often the answers are pretty good. But you never know if you got a good answer or a bad answer.
And the system doesn’t know either.
For me this is the major issue. A human is capable of saying “I don’t know”. LLMs don’t seem able to.
Accurate.
No matter what question you ask them, they have an answer. Even when you point out their answer was wrong, they just have a different answer. There’s no concept of not knowing the answer, because they don’t know anything in the first place.
The worst for me was a fairly simple programming question. The class it used didn’t exist.
“You are correct, that class was removed in OLD version. Try this updated code instead.”
Gave another made up class name.
Repeated with a newer version number.
It knows what answers smell like, and the same with excuses. Unfortunately there’s no way of knowing whether it’s actually bullshit until you take a whiff of it yourself.
So instead of Prompt Engineer, the more accurate term should be AI Taste Tester?
From what I’ve seen you’ll need an iron stomach.
They really aren’t. Go ask about something in your area of expertise. At first glance, everything will look correct and in order, but the more you read the more it turns out to be complete bullshit. It’s good at getting broad strokes but the details are very often wrong.
Now imagine someone that doesn’t have your expertise reading that answer. They won’t recognize those details are wrong until it’s too late.
That is about the experience I have. I asked it for factual information in the field I work at. It didn’t gave correct answers. Or, it gave working protocols which were strange and would not be successful.
With proper framework, decent assertions are possible.
- It must cite the source and provide the quote, not just a summary.
- An adversarial review must be conducted
If that is done, the work on the human is very low.
That said, it’s STILL imperfect, but this is leagues better than one shot question and answer
Except LLMs don’t store sources.
They don’t even store sentences.
It’s all a stack of massive N-dimensional probability spaces roughly encoding the probabilities of certain tokens (which are mostly but not always words) appearing after groups of tokens in a certain order.
And all of that to just figure out “what’s the most likely next token”, an output which is then added to the input and fed into it again to get the next word and so on, producing sentences one word at a time.
Now, if you feed it as input a long, very precise sentence taken from a unique piece, maybe you’re luck and it will output the correct next word, but if you already have all that you don’t really need an LLM to give you the rest.
Maybe the “framework” you seek - which is quite akin to a indexer with a natural language interface - can be made with AI, but it’s not something you can do with LLMs because their structure is entirely unsuited for it.
The proper framework does, with data store, indexing and access functions.
The cutting edge work is absolutely using LLMs in post-rag pipelines.
Consumer grade chat interfaces def do not do this.
Edit if you worry about topics like context window, sentence splitting or source extraction, you aren’t using a best in class framework any more.
Sounds familiar. Citation please
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Market shows that investors are actively turned on by products that use AI
Customers worry about what they can do with it, while investors and spectators and vendors worry about buzzwords. Customers determine demand.
Sadly what some of those customers want to do is to somehow improve their own business without thinking, and then they too care about buzzwords, that’s how the hype comes.
Market shows that the market buys into hype, not value.
Market shows that hype is a cycle and the AI hype is nearing its end.
How can you tell when the cycle is ending?
When one of two things happens:
- A new hype starts to replace it (can happen fast though!)
- The hype starts to specialize into subcategories of the hype (e.g. AI images, AI videos, AI text generation)
When “AI” hype dies down we are likely to see “AI” removed from various topics because enough people know and understand the hyped parent topic. It’ll just be “image generation”, “video generation”, “generated text”, etc.
There are different types of people in the market. The informed ones hate AI, and the uninformed love it. The informed ones tend to be the cornerstones of businesses, and the uninformed ones tend to be in charge.
So we have… All this. All this nonsense. All because of stupid managers.
It’s the new block chain or NFT hype, they think it’s magic.
But what if it actually is magic this time? Just this once!? And we miss the hype train?! (This is a sarcastic impression of real conversations I have had.)
No shit, because we all see that AI is just technospeak for “harvest all your info”.
Not to mention it’s usually dog shit out put
To be fair, I love my dog but he has the same output 🤷
But no one is investing billions into your dog’s shit, are they?
He’s open to investment 🤷
I refuse to use Facebook anymore, but my wife and others do. Apparently the search box is now a Meta AI box, and it pisses them every time. They want the original search back.
That’s another thing companies don’t seem to understand. A lot of them aren’t creating new products and services that use ai, but are removing the existing ones, that people use daily and enjoy, and forcing some ai alternative. Of course people are going to be pissed off!
Yes the cost is sending all of your data to the harvest, but what price can you put on having a virtual dumbass that is frequently wrong?
+ a monthly service fee
for the price of a cup of coffee
More like “instead of making something that gets the job done, expect pur unfinished product to complain and not do whatever it’s supposed to”. Or just plain false advertising.
Either way, not a good look and I’m glad it’s not just us lemmings who care.
They’ve overhyped the hell out of it and slapped those letters on everything including a lot of half baked ideas. Of course people are tired of it and beginning to associate ai with bad marketing.
This whole situation really does feel dotcommish. I suspect we will soon see an ai crash, then a decade or so later it will be ubiquitous but far less hyped.
Thing is, it already was ubiquitous before the AI “boom”. That’s why everything got an AI label added so quickly, because everything was already using machine learning! LLMs are new, but they’re just one form of AI and tbh they don’t do 90% of the stuff they’re marketed as and most things would be better off without them.
What did they even expect, calling something “AI” when it’s no more “AI” than a Perl script determining whether a picture contains more red color than green or vice versa.
Anything making some kind of determination via technical means, including MCs and control systems, has been called AI.
When people start using the abbreviation as if it were “the” AI, naturally first there’ll be a hype of clueless people, and then everybody will understand that this is no different from what was before. Just lots of data and computing power to make a show.
LLM based AI was a fun toy when it first broke. Everyone was curious and wanted to play with it, which made it seem super popular. Now that the novelty has worn off, most people are bored and unimpressed with it. The problem is that the tech bros invested so much money in it and they are unwilling to take the loss. They are trying to force it so that they can say they didn’t waste their money.
Honestly they’re still impressive and useful it’s just the hype train overload and trying to implement them in areas they either don’t fit or don’t work well enough yet.
Even in areas where they would fit it’s really annoying how some companies are trying to push it down our throats.
It’s always some obnoxious UI element, screaming at me their 3 example questions, and I always sigh and think, “I have to assume you can only answer these 3 particular questions, and why would I ask those questions, and when I ask UI questions I expect precise answers so would I want to use AI for that.”
I have no doubt that LLM’s have more uses than I can think of, but come on…
I’m happy for studies like this. People who are trying to smear their AI all over our faces need to calm, the f…k, down.
AI does a good job of generating character portraits for my TTRPG games. But, really, beyond that I haven’t found a good use for it.
One place where I found AI usefull is in generating search queries in JIRA. Not having to deal with their query language every time I have to change a search filter, but being able to just use the built in AI to query in natural language has already saved me like two or three minutes in total in the last two months.
…also TTRPH, TTRPI, TTRPJ, TTRPK, TTRPL, TTRPM, TTRPN, TTRPO, TTRPP, TTRPQ, TTRPR, TTRPS, TTRPT, TTRPU, TTRPV, TTRPW, TTRPX, TTRPY and TTRPZ games.
But beyond that, no good use, no siree.
PS: spoiler
that was WAY harder to type than I expected.
Many of us who are old enough saw it as an advanced version of ELIZA and used it with the same level of amusement until that amusement faded (pretty quick) because it got old.
If anything, they are less impressive because tricking people into thinking a computer is actually having a conversation with them has been around for a long time.
So you want to tell me they all spent billions and made huge data centres that suck more power than small country so we can all play with it, generate some cringy smut and then toss it away?
This is kinda insane if that’s how it will play out
Not the first time this has happened. Even recently. See NFTs. Venture capitalists hear “tech buzzword” and throw money at it because if they’re lucky, it’s the next Google. Or at least it gets an IPO and they can cash out.
Yeah but the scale is bigger and we could be doing something worthwhile with all these finite resources it makes me a bit dizzy
We could, but they don’t care about making the world a better place. They care about getting rich. And then if everything collapses, they can go to their private island or their doomsday vault or whatever and enjoy the apocalypse.
Are you like 80?
No, 47. Believe it or not, the first PCs came out when I was a young whippersnapper.
IBM 486 was my first PC as a kid. Throw in those floppys and game on DOS!
Mine was an Apple ][+.
(And yes, that’s how you write it properly. I’m a pedant.)
I would have it no other way. I am the same. 😂
I have 6.22 and Win3.11 running in a VM for fun.
Fuck yea man, Dr Sbaitso was the one for me. I loved that shit. It still fucks with people when I bust that out on Dosbox.
Doggdorzbaydzoh.
Oh OK cause the article you sent mentioned ELIZA being developed between 1964-67 so I had to ask.
For the love of god, defund MBAs.
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Take the hint, MBAs.
They don’t care. At the moment AI is cheap for them (because some other investor is paying for it). As long as they believe AI reduces their operating costs*, and as long as they’re convinced every other company will follow suit, it doesn’t matter if consumers like it less. Modern history is a long string of companies making things worse and selling them to us anyway because there’s no alternatives. Because every competitor is doing it, too, except the ones that are prohibitively expensive.
[*] Lol, it doesn’t do that either
I’ve learned to hate companies that replaced their support staff with AI. I don’t mind if it supplements easy stuff, that should take like 15 seconds, but when I have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get to the one lone bastard stuck running the support desk on their own, I start to wonder why I give them any money at all.
I love it when I have to trick those stupid ai chatbots to let me talk to a human customer service rep
I literally uninstalled and disabled every AI process and app in that latest galaxy AI update, which was the whole update btw. my reasons are:
1- privacy and data sharing.
2- the battery, cpu, ram of AI bloatware running in the background 247.
3- it was chaging and doing things which I didn’t want especially in the galary photo albums and camera AI modes.
I was considering a new Samsung phone - is that baked into it? (Assuming you’re talking Samsung anyway, based on the galaxy name)
To give you a second opinion from the other guy, I’ve had quite a few Samsungs in a row at this point. From Galaxy S2 to S23Ultra skipping years between every purchase.
They are effectively the premium vendor of Android, at least for western audiences. The midrange has some good ones, but other companies do well there too. At the high end, Samsung might lose out a bit to google on images of people, but the phones Samsung sell are well built, have a long support life, have lots of features that usually end up being imported to AOSP and/or Google’s own version of Android. The last few generations are the Apple of Android. The AI features they’ve added can be run on device if you want, and idk what the other guy is talking about, but the AI features aren’t that obnoxiously pushed on my device, the S23 Ultra. I have some things on, most things off. Then again, I’ve used HTC for a few years and iPhone for two weeks, so except for helping my dad with his Pixel 6a while that device lasted, I’ve not really tried other brands. The added customization on Samsung is kind of a problem for me, because I don’t feel like changing brands after being able to customize so much out of the box.
And I’ve never had issues connecting to a simple Windows computer, given that the phone has always been able to use the normal Plug-and-play driver that is there already. If you have a macbook like I do, it’s a bit cringe, but that’s a macbook issue moreso.
Samsung is a nightmare, don’t purchase their products.
For example: I used to have a Samsung phone. If I plugged it into the USB port on my computer Windows Explorer would not be able to see it to transfer files. My phone would tell me I need to download Samsung’s drivers to transfer files. I could only get them by downloading Samsung’s software. Once I installed the software Windows Explorer was able to see the device and transfer files. Once I uninstalled the software Windows Explorer couldn’t see the device again.
Anything Samsung can do in your region to insert themselves between you and what you are trying to do they will do.
Did it help with battery life? My S24U has not been getting the greatest battery life lately and I wonder if this is why.
I don’t know about the AI stuff specifically. Check your battery usage to see which process is doing that. but yes debloating in general makes your phone battery longer, and with the help of few more tricks also faster. There are thousands of no-root-required debloating tutorials online.
I can attest this is true for me. I was shopping for a new clothes washer, and was strongly considering an LG until I saw it had “AI wash”. I can see relevance for AI in some places, but washing clothes is NOT one of them. It gave me the feeling LG clothes washer division is full of shit.
Bought a SpeedQueen instead and been super happy with it. No AI bullshit anywhere in their product info.
Honestly, +1 for SpeedQueen. That’s the brand that every laundromat uses, because they’re basically the Crown Vic of washers; They’re uglier than sin, but they’ll run for literal decades with very little maintenance. They do exactly one thing, (clean your clothes), and they do that one thing very well. They’re the “somehow my grandma’s appliances still work 70 years later, while mine all break after three years" of washing machines.
SpeedQueen doesn’t have any of the modern bells or whistles… But that also means there’s nothing to break prematurely and turn the washer into the world’s largest paperweight. Samsung washers, for instance, have infamously shitty LCD panels, which are notorious for dying right after the warranty expires. And when it dies, the entire washer is dead until you replace basically the entire control interface. SpeedQueen doesn’t have this issue, because they don’t even have LCD panels; everything is just physical knobs and buttons. If something ever does break, it’s just a mechanical switch that you can swap out in 15 minutes with a YouTube tutorial.
FYI, all current Speed Queen models except the Classic Series dryer (DC5, not the washer) are electronically controlled. Even the ones with knobs. They are not mechanical and no longer use the oldschool sequencing drums.
The TR7/DR7 are at least still sold with a 7 year manufacturer’s warranty, though. This is specifically to assuage consumer fears about the electronic control panel.
Speed Queen for the win. I recently replaced a couple of trusty machines that had finally given up after decades of abuse. Went for speed queen, no regrets.
Speed Queen is great stuff. It will last just about forever. When it does break it is built so it can be repaired.
I was shopping for a new clothes washer, and was strongly considering an LG until I saw it had “AI wash”. I can see relevance for AI in some places, but washing clothes is NOT one of them.
I might be thinking the same. But I actually purchased an LG washer a couple months ago and finally got around to finding and reading the manual, and realized that I should have been doing “AI wash” instead of the “normal wash” that I always did.
The manual says that this is what “AI wash” actually is for:
“This cycle automatically adjusts wash and rinse patterns based on load size”.
In other news, AI bros convince CEOs and investors that polls saying people don’t like AI are out of touch with reality and those people actually want more AI, as proven by an AI that only outputs what those same AI bros want.
Just waiting for that to pop up in the news some time soon.
That’s literally the sales response to this. “People don’t really know what they want until we sell it to them”
It’s pretty fucking gross.
“If I asked people what they want, they would say, better AI”
MBA tech bro: “so … that means what they really want is the same shitty AI, right?”
My brother in the fediverse, ceos and investors are the AI bros
Also just listening and reading what people say. We don’t want fucking AI anything. We understand what it might do. We don’t want it.
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Give me a bunch of open AI models and a big GPU to play with and I’ll generate twenty gigabytes of weird anime fetish content.
This is the only true use of AI
You forgot to add “and post it to Lemmy”.
In your own words, tell me why you’re calling today.
My medication is in the wrong dosage.
You need to refill your medication is that right?
No, my medication is in the wrong dosage, it’s supposed to be tens and it came as 20s.
You need to change the pharmacy where you’re picking up your medication?
I need to speak to a human please.
I understand that you want to speak to an agent, is that right?
Yes.
Chorus, 5x. (Please give me your group number, or dial it in at the keypad. For this letter press that number for that letter press this number. No I’m driving, just connect me with an agent so I can verify over the phone)
I’m sorry, I can’t verify your identity please collect all your paperwork and try calling again. Click
Why ever would we be mad?
I went through a McDonald’s drive-thru the other day and had the most insane experience. For the context of this anecdote, I don’t do that often, so, what I experienced was just weird.
While not quite “AI,” the first thing that happened was an automated voice yells at me, “are you ordering using your mobile app today?”
There’s like three menu-speaker boxes, and due to where the car in front of me stopped, I’m like in between the last two. The other speaker begins to yell, “Are you ordering using your mobile app today?”
The person running drive-thru mumbles something about pull around. I do. Pass by the other menu “Are you ordering using your mobile app today?”
Dude walks out with a headset and starts taking orders from each car using a tablet.
I have no idea what is happening. I can’t even see a menu when the guy gets around to me. Turns the tablet around at me.
I realized that I was indeed ordering using the mobile app today.
To be fair, this is not new, unless you’re counting all answering machines as AI
Hardly. It used to be natural language dictation and decision tree. Now they’re trying to use LLM training to automatically pick up more edge cases and it’s pretty much b*******.
