22h ago

AI computers aren’t selling because users don’t care

pivot-to-ai.com

video version

159 comments

Maybe I'm just getting old, but I honestly can't think of any practical use case for AI in my day-to-day routine.
ML algorithms are just fancy statistics machines, and to that end, I can see plenty of research and industry applications where large datasets need to be assessed (weather, medicine, ...) with human oversight.
But for me in my day to day?
I don't need a statistics bot making decisions for me at work, because if it was that easy I wouldn't be getting paid to do it.
I don't need a giant calculator telling me when to eat or sleep or what game to play.
I don't need a Roomba with a graphics card automatically replying to my text messages.
Handing over my entire life's data just so a ML algorithm might be able to tell me what that one website I visited 3 years ago that sold kangaroo testicles was isn't a filing system. There's nothing I care about losing enough to go the effort of setting up copilot, but not enough to just, you know, bookmark it, or save it with a clear enough file name.
Long rant, but really, what does copilot actually do for me?
- How about real-time subtitles on movies in any language you want that are always synced?
  VLC is working on that with the use of LLMs
- Our boss all but ordered us to have IT set this shit up on our PCs. So far I've been stalling, but I don't know how long I can keep doing it.
  
  Set it up. People have to find out by themselves.
  
  Tell your boss you talked to legal and they caution that all copilot data is potentially discoverable.
- same here, i mostly dont even use it on the phone. my bro is into it thought, thinking ai generate dpicture is good.
  
  It's a fun party trick for like a second, but at no point today did I need a picture of a goat in a sweater smoking three cigarettes while playing tic-tac-toe with a llama dressed as the Dalai Lama.
  
  It's great if you want to do a kids party invitation or something like that
  
  That wasn't that hard to do in the first place, and certainly isn't worth the drinking water to cool whatever computer made that calculation for you.
- The only feature that actually seems useful for on-device AI is voice to text that doesn't need an Internet connection.
  
  As someone who hates orally dictating my thoughts, that's a no from me dawg, but I can kinda understand the appeal (though I'll note offline TTS has been around for like a decade pre-AI)
- I use it to speed up my work.
  For example, I can give it a database schema and ask it for what I need to achieve and most of the time it will throw out a pretty good approximation or even get it right on the first go, depending on complexity and how well I phrase the request. I could write these myself, of course, but not in 2 seconds.
  Same with text formatting, for example. I regularly need to format long strings in specific ways, adding brackets and changing upper/lower capitalization. It does it in a second, and really well.
  Then there's just convenience things. At what date and time will something end if it starts in two weeks and takes 400h to do? There's tools for that, or I could figure it out myself, but I mean the AI is just there and does it in a sec...
  
  it’s really embarrassing when the promptfans come here to brag about how they’re using the technology that’s burning the earth and it’s just basic editor shit they never learned. and then you watch these fuckers “work” and it’s miserably slow cause they’re prompting the piece of shit model in English, waiting for the cloud service to burn enough methane to generate a response, correcting the output and re-prompting, all to do the same task that’s just a fucking key combo.
  Same with text formatting, for example. I regularly need to format long strings in specific ways, adding brackets and changing upper/lower capitalization. It does it in a second, and really well.
  how in fuck do you work with strings and have this shit not be muscle memory or an editor macro? oh yeah, by giving the fuck up.
  
  adding brackets and changing upper/lower capitalization
  I have used a system wide service in macOS for that for decades by now.
  
  presumably everyone who has to work with you spits in your coffee/tea, too?
- Apparently it's useful for extraction of information out of a text to a format you specify. A Friend is using it to extract transactions out of 500 year old texts. However to get rid of hallucinations the temperature reds to be 0. So the only way is to self host.
  
  Setting the temperature to 0 doesn't get rid of hallucinations.
  It might slightly increase accuracy, but it's still going to go wrong.
  
  Well, LLMs are capable (but hallucinant) and cost an absolute fuckton of energy. There have been purpose trained efficient ML models that we've used for years. Document Understanding and Computer Vision are great, just don't use a LLM for them.

159 comments