But what's it for? I can tell what an electric car is for, can you tell me what "generative AI" is for? A car can transport goods and people, really good non-deterministic typeahead is just.. well, I don't know what I'd use it for, do you?
EDIT: what I really mean is what makes people think this is a commercially viable thing to spend time and money on? Like, say one of these companies hits some magic jackpot and discovers "AGI".. then what? Is that worth money, somehow?
Does a computer understanding me make it better? I find that attempts the computer makes to understand me, "delight" me, etc. just end up pissing me off. It's a tool. All I ever want a tool to do is be completely invisible and become an extension of my body, which enables me to get a task done. Computer software which does anything other than exactly what I tell it to fails at this, because it instantly breaks my connection to the task I'm trying to do and refocuses my attention on the software itself.
I wouldn't dream of trying to use a Siri, it sounds absolutely maddening. All I expect is that when I press a key on the keyboard the character I commanded with my key press shows up on the screen before I can blink, and does so exactly once.
That's great, and I don't begrudge you, but most people want to be able to tell their computer what to do and not need to understand the discrete steps it took to get there.
Taking a completely different type of example, image editing. Let's say you ask your computer to remove a blemish in a photo. A professional could remove it, maybe better even, without AI. They know the tools to use, the keys to press, and effect change. Regular people don't give a crap about that, they want to circle the item (or otherwise identify it) and click "remove." When the computer removes the selected item they're happy, and generative AI is working on THAT type of solution.
It's not here yet, so yes you're right that Siri IS maddening to use.
> Regular people don't give a crap about that, they want to circle the item (or otherwise identify it) and click "remove." When the computer removes the selected item they're happy, and generative AI is working on THAT type of solution.
This feels dangerously close to a lack of empathy for the user. I understand that's not your intention, in fact the opposite. But in order to accept the notion that users actually want an intelligent employee instead of a tool I have to believe that everyone truly wants to be a manager instead of an individual contributor. I don't believe it.
Take a simpler case, hammering in a nail. What I want from my hammer is for it to disappear and become an extension of my arm. I just want to hammer in the nail. I don't want to negotiate with the hammer about how it's going to strike the nail, all I want is to hit the nail. There's no amount of "clever" the hammer can be which will help. Cleverness can only hurt my user experience.
In your example, what recourse does the user have if the AI didn't do the job the way they wanted? Removing something from an image implies (probably? or maybe not?) that the void is "backfilled" somehow. What if they're not happy with the backfill job? Do they have to argue with the tool about it? Will the tool take their feedback well or will it become a fight?
I think, generally, giving users tools that scale like hammers is the way to go. A hammer in the hands of a skilled carpenter, blacksmith, or cobbler with 30yr experience is no different than the same hammer in the hands of a 2yo child learning to drive their first nail. But that hammer's utility will scale with that child's skill for their entire lifetime. There's no "beginner" vs "advanced" distinction. What makes us (as computer hammer builders) believe that we can distinguish between "beginner" or "advanced" computer hammers? Or "regular" vs "special" users?
EDIT: or maybe we're not building hammers, instead we're building dishwashers. Dishwasher users aren't supposed to be skilled beyond loading and unloading the dishwasher, and hitting the start button. Do "regular users" really want an appliance, or do they want a tool?
EDIT: another way to phrase it -- are computers "bicycles for the mind" or are they just a bus?
That's very true, I dislike how Apple, etc. don't uncover the manual controls for things. So when the smart tools stop working it gets frustrating because there's no manual way to continue.
I love watching my friends and family use Siri. Maybe 20% of the time it does what they want first try. 40% of the time they end up unlocking the phone and tapping the screen.
Sounds infuriating to me. (To be clear, I don't have any always-(maybe)-on mics in my life, I doubt Hey Google or Bard or whatever is much better.)
But none of those things are Generative AI, which is a big part of WHY they're infuriating to use.
I use Siri to add stuff to my grocery list and set timers. That's it. It's useful when I'm in the kitchen to just say what needs to go on this list instead of remembering to write it down later.
The day when Siri or Google or whatever can make the corrections I mentioned in my higher post will improve it vastly.
Even if all it did was improve Siri’s capability to understand requests and add the ability to ask clarifying questions with no other functional improvements, it’d make Siri vastly more useful.
This, but it is really exciting because for the first time, you can just tell your computer what to do. Not just a given set of tasks, but e.g. "go to my gym and book a slot with my personal trainer"; "contact Shauna and set up a meeting to talk about X, then book me tickets to get there".
Think about how much monkey-work we all do with our smartphones. We might look back in 10 years and laugh at the idea that we had to press buttons all the time.
I had this 15 years ago when my blackberry had a keyboard on it. It had buttons, and when you press them it makes the character you commanded go onto the screen. If they'd just put buttons on the phone instead of trying to draw a fake one on the screen you wouldn't need a statistical model to make the keyboard work
I can type significantly faster with GBoard, swipe or not, than I could on any physical phone keyboard ever. Blackberries, the G1, Droid OG. No way I'd ever take those over GBoard.
But iOS users don't really know what they're missing from GBoard, so.
I haven't owned an iPhone since the iPhone 4, I lean really heavily on autocorrect on my Pixel (is that using Gboard?). It's just an infuriating experience to me compared to physical buttons. I probably hit the backspace key at least three times as often and often when I try to type a backspace instead it comes out as an "l", "m", ".", or enter.
Most of the time I just wish I could plug my full sized keyboard into the phone, that would fix it completely most of the time (except, obviously, when I'm not near my desk).
An ideal compromise would be physical buttons on the device for when it's necessary and the ability to easily use my workstation's external keyboard (dock + switch maybe?) the rest of the time.
EDIT: Now that I think of it.. let me plug in a mouse too and give me a real OS (maybe in a container like you get on a Chromebook) and i can just replace my workstation with the docked phone. But then I would buy only half as many computers and wouldn't need all that GPU compute to train a bunch of statistical models so I guess that doesn't work for the computer companies.
I knew halfway through your comment that I was going to end up agreeing with where you were going. We're so close to having a decent Android tablet, with maybe a new Firefox for tablets, with USB-C DP out. 90% of the time I also would rather just be on a better device.
I'm sad there isn't more built around Android's AVF. I thought for sure, by now, we were going to have "Linux on Android" ala Crostini.
You can indeed just plug in your full size keyboard into your phone! You may need a USB A to C adapter, but your phone will happily support an external keyboard
> But what's it for? I can tell what an electric car is for, can you tell me what "generative AI" is for? A car can transport goods and people, really good non-deterministic typeahead is just.. well, I don't know what I'd use it for, do you?
It doesn't even seem to matter anymore. The tail is fully wagging the dog. Wall Street doesn't really care what companies are doing with AI, how they are using it, or whether their use of AI is going to actually drive earnings. They just care that they are using it. If a company says "We're doing AI blah blah blah" that's enough: investors are happy and stock price goes up.
I think you're right, it'll be interesting to see whether the next AI winter brings a market crash with it. It would be one thing if it seemed like there was some commercial application beyond "neat nerd toy" but so far there just isn't that I'm aware of? That smells a lot like tulip bulbs.
If AGI is defined as a AI that can replace most humans at most tasks, it would be worth money if it's cheaper than paying humans. So instead of a Marvel film costing 100 million to make, if an AGI can do it for 30 million it's worth tens of millions of dollars. Of course society might eventually collapse from mass unemployment, but corporate owners would live like kings until that finally happens.
There are two possibilities- one is what the PC largely did. Nobody really lost their jobs even though one accountant can do the work of 40 that just had calculators. We can just do “more” now.
On the other hand there’s what the washing machine, mechanized farm equipment, etc. did. A slow shift in how many people are required to do a job. There were no absolute jobs lost, just a shift in the economy.
This comment is really odd to see on HN. It’s like if a group of computer enthusiasts (in person) had a guy saying “I don’t understand what the big deal is with this so-called internet.”
The Internet was (is) a totally transformative technology which has changed how people work, play, shop, and interact worldwide. Your claim is that generative AI will do this? How? I recall a few months ago the Web 3.0 people saying a similar thing. Is it different this time?
That's a really myopic observation. They're very very different. ChatGPT Pro helps me learn new concepts in new languages much much faster than I did in the past.
Who would that put out of business? Does that replace anyone's job function? It sounds like you're describing something like "really good search for Wikipedia" which to be clear I think is great, but who's gonna be replaced by that in their workplace?
EDIT: actually, I overcommitted a little bit with "really good Wikipedia search". I can rely on Wikipedia search to not invent stuff from whole cloth and try to pass it off as results.
Do you understand the concept of individual productivity? If you have 5 people working for you, and a new technology makes each 25% more productive, you can fire one of them.
The idea here is that it won't stop at 25%. Even if you were to accept this premise, maybe you're just thinking about chat gpt 3.5 or 4. But it really doesn't take a lot more imagination to think about what version 7 or 30 might do.
The same goes for the image/video generation models. Smaller production studios might forgo several artist hires and just generate the stuff they need. Large ones will have an enormous pool of unemployed creatives and won't have to pay them much at all.
Has anyone been made measurably more productive with this stuff? Is even 25% achievable? I'm a software engineer, and I spend less than 25% of my time typing out code. So even if copilot could write every single line of code for me it could not improve my productivity by 25%. In order to make me 25% more productive it would also have to somehow speed up everything else I do at work as well. Has this been demonstrated?
Auto-completing function bodies with stack overflow content is cool! I'm not trying to say this technology isn't doing anything. It's clearly doing something "cool". But that doesn't necessarily actually make anyone more productive. That seems like an extraordinary claim (at least based on my own small experience working with it), so I'd expect to see some extraordinary evidence.
Yes, I wrote a small app in kotlin to scratch an itch. Chat gpt 3.5 gave me code that in the past would have taken me weeks to figure out from the mountain of verbiage in Google docs for the ever changing APIs. Normally googling for this stuff just leads to loads of things that don't work and I have to figure out why. With chat gpt I just pasted whatever error and it gave me the right answer the second or third time. I now have my (private) app that does what I need. Without gpt it would have taken me several weeks (real time, it's a hobby).
I've seen new colleagues use co-pilot at work and it definitely increases the amount of stuff they can now figure out for themselves within a given time.
EDIT: what I really mean is what makes people think this is a commercially viable thing to spend time and money on? Like, say one of these companies hits some magic jackpot and discovers "AGI".. then what? Is that worth money, somehow?