Technology

For coding it's also useful for doing the menial grunt work that's easy but just takes time.

You're not going to replace a senior dev with it, of course, but it's a great tool.

My previous employer was using AI for intelligent document processing, and the results were absolutely amazing. They did sink a few million dollars into getting the LLM fine tuned properly, though.

I think the best way I've heard it put is "if we absolutely have to burn down a forest, I want warp drive out of it. Not a crappy python app"

I was just talking about this with someone the other day. While it’s truly remarkable what AI can do, its margin for error is just too big for most if not all of the use cases companies want to use it for.

For example, I use the Hoarder app which is a site bookmarking program, and when I save any given site, it feeds the text into a local Ollama model which summarizes it, conjures up some tags, and applies the tags to it. This is useful for me, and if it generates a few extra tags that aren’t useful, it doesn’t really disrupt my workflow at all. So this is a net benefit for me, but this use case will not be earning these corps any amount of profit.

On the other end, you have Googles Gemini that now gives you an AI generated answer to your queries. The point of this is to aggregate data from several sources within the search results and return it to you, saving you the time of having to look through several search results yourself. And like 90% of the time it actually does a great job. The problem with this is the goal, which is to save you from having to check individual sources, and its reliability rate. If I google 100 things and Gemini correctly answers 99 of those things accurate abut completely hallucinates the 100th, then that means that all 100 times I have to check its sources and verify that what it said was correct. Which means I’m now back to just… you know… looking through the search results one by one like I would have anyway without the AI.

So while AI is far from useless, it can’t now and never will be able to be relied on for anything important, and that’s where the money to be made is.

Tech is basically trying to push up the stocks one hype idea after another. Social media bubble about to burst? AI! AI about to burst? Quantum! I'm sure that when people will start realizing quantum computing is another smokescreen, a new moronic idea will start to gain steam from all those LinkedIn "luminaries"

I'm convinced the devs actually time traveled back from like 2035

My theory is it's only a matter of time until the firing sprees generate enough backlog of actual work that isn't being realised by the minor productivity gains from AI until the investors start asking hard questions.

Maybe this is the start of the bubble bursting.

Well sure, but you're forgetting that the federal government has pulled the rug out from under health research and therefore had made it so there is no economic value in biochemistry.

Yeah tbh, AI has been an insane helpful tool in my analysis and writing. Never would I have been able to do thoroughly investigate appropriate statisticall tests on my own. After following the sources and double checking ofcourse, but still, super helpful.

Thanks. So the underlying architecture that powers LLMs has application in things besides language generation like protein folding and DNA sequencing.

I think AI is generating negative value ... the huge power usage is akin to speculative blockchain currencies. Barring some biochemistry and other very, very specialized uses it hasn't given anything other than, as you've said, plain-language search (with bonus hallucination bullshit, yay!) ... snake oil, indeed.

For me personally, it's because it's been so aggressively shoved in my face in every context. I never asked for it, and I can't escape it. It actively gets in my way at work (github copilot) and has already re-enabled itself at least once. I'd be much happier to just let it exist if it would do the same for me.

Because there’s already been multiple AI bubbles (eg, ELIZA - I had a lot of conversations with FREUD running on an Apple IIe). It’s also been falsely presented as basically “AGI.”

AI models trained to help doctors recognize cancer cells - great, awesome.

AI models used as the default research tool for every subject - very very very bad. It’s also so forced - and because it’s forced, I routinely see that it has generated absolute, misleading, horseshit in response to my research queries. But your average Joe will take that on faith, your high schooler will grow up thinking that Columbus discovered Colombia or something.

I just can't see AI tools like ChatGPT ever being profitable. It's a neat little thing that has flaws but generally works well, but I'm just putzing around in the free version. There's no dollar amount that could be ascribed to the service that it provides that I would be willing to pay, and I think OpenAI has their sights set way too high with the talk of $200/month subscriptions for their top of the line product.