I saw people complaining the companies are yet to find the next big thing with AI, but I am already seeing countless offer good solutions for almost every field imaginable. What is this thing the tech industry is waiting for and what are all these current products if not what they had in mind?
I am not great with understanding the business point of view of this situation and I have been out from the news for a long time, so I would really appreciate if someone could ELI5.
Here’s a secret. It’s not true AI. All the hype is marketing shit.
Large language models like GPT, llama, and Gemini don’t create anything new. They just regurgitate existing data.
You can see this when chat bots keep giving the same 2 pieces incorrect information. They have no concept of they are wrong.
Until a llm can understand why it is wrong we won’t have true AI.
That’s not a secret. The industry constantly talks about the difference between LLMs and AGI.
Until a product goes through marketing and they slap that ‘Using AI’ into the blurb when it doesn’t.
LLMs are AI. They are not AGI. AGI is a particular subset of AI, that does not preclude non-general AI from being AI.
People keep talking about how it just regurgitates information, and says incorrect things sometimes, and hallucinates or misinterprets things, as if humans do not also do those things. Most people just regurgitate information they found online, true or false. People frequently hallucinate things they think are true and stubbornly refuse to change when called out. Many people cannot understand when and why they’re wrong.
I have different weights for my two dumbbells and I asked ChatGPT 4.0 how to divide the weights evenly on all 4 sides of the 2 dumbbells. It told me to use 4 half-pound weighs instead of my 2 pound weighs constantly, and finally after like 15 minutes, it admitted that, with my sets of weights, it’s impossible to divide them evenly…
You used an LLM for one of the things it is specifically not good at. Dismissing its overall value on that basis is like complaining that your snowmobile is bad at making its way up and down your basement stairs, and so it is therefore useless.
Large language models like GPT, llama, and Gemini don’t create anything new
That’s because it is a stupid use case. Why should we expect AI models to be creative, when that is explicitly not what they are for?
They are creative, though:
They put things that are “near” each-other into juxtaposition, and sometimes the insights are astonishing.
The AI’s don’t understand anything, though: they’re like bacteria-instinct: total autopilot.
The real problem is that we humans aren’t able to default to understanding such non-understanding apparent-someones.
We’ve created a “hack” of our entire mental-system, and it is the money-profit-rules-the-world group which controls its evolution.
This is called “Darwin Award territory”, at the species-scale.
No matter:
The Great Filter, which is what happens when a world-species hasn’t grown-up, but gains adult-level technology ( nukes, entire-country-destroying-militaries, biotech, neurotoxins, immense industrial toxic wastelands like the former USSR, accountability-denial-mechanisms in all corporate “persons”, etc… )
you have a toddler with a loaded gun, & killing can happen.
“there’s no such thing as a dangerous gun: only a dangerous man”, as the book “Starship Troopers” pushed…
Toddlers with guns KILL people in the US.
AI’s our “gun”, & narcissistic-sociopathy’s our “toddler commanding the ship” nature.
Maybe we should rename Earth to “The Titanic”, for honesty’s sake…
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It is true AI, it’s just not AGI. Artificial General Intelligence is the sort of thing you see on Star Trek. AI is a much broader term and it encompasses large language models, as well as even simpler things like pathfinding algorithms or OCR. The term “AI” has been in use for this kind of thing since 1956, it’s not some sudden new marketing buzzword that’s being misapplied. Indeed, it’s the people who are insisting that LLMs are not AI that are attempting to redefine a word that’s already been in use for a very long time.
You can see this when chat bots keep giving the same 2 pieces incorrect information. They have no concept of they are wrong.
Reminds me of the classic quote from Charles Babbage:
“On two occasions I have been asked, – “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” … I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question”
How is the chatbot supposed to know that the information it’s been given is wrong?
If you were talking with a human and they thought something was true that wasn’t actually true, do you not count them as an intelligence any more?
Recently I saw AI transcribe a YT video. It was genuinely helpful.
A buddy told me he used AI to mostly author a PowerShell script for something or other automation at his work the other day. Sounded like it was reasonably complex and all he had to do was sanity-check the code and touch it up to make sure it worked correctly. I’ve barely dabbled in that area, but I was reasonably impressed with the small tasks I threw at it.
AI seems to be for coders what the PC was for Designers.
We used to have a guy for type, a guy for colours, a copywriter, an art director, and a graphic designer. Now it’s all one guy whose responsible for everything start to finish.
Are you writing a term paper or business plan and looking for ideas? Lol cuz that’s how you get ideas. Data mining for business ideas – an AI function, actually…
AI is seeing a lot of uses. At my job were using it for Change Control and Requirements Analysis. Legal Discovery was already a thing for LLM models but this threatens to make contracts simpler to digest. My graduate advisor mentioned how she’s using it to grade papers.
These aren’t the same use cases as the average person, and may not be using the same products, platforms, or models.
