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.
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
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???
AI toasters are a Bad Idea
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.
As I mentioned in another post, about the same topic:
Slapping the words “artificial intelligence” onto your product makes you look like those shady used cars salesmen: in the best hypothesis it’s misleading, in the worst it’s actually true but poorly done.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I get AI has its uses but I don’t need my mouse to have any thing AI related (looking at you Logitech).
The less technologically literate shout “AI is theft!”
Conspiracy theorists whisper of “government surveils” and “brain hacking chips”…
As a result, those who don’t understand new technology become fearful of it.
In itself, “AI” is a total buzzword.
Hi, I’m annoying and want to be helpful. Am I helpful? If I repeat the same options again when you’ve told me I’m not helpful, will that be helpful? I won’t remember this conversation once it’s ended.
Hi, which option have you told me you already don’t want would you like?
Sorry, I didn’t quite catch that, please rage again.
Meanwhile, I just had Cluade turn a few obscure academic papers into a slide deck on the subject, along with presentation notes and interactive graphs, using like 5 prompts and 15 min.
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.
For the love of god, defund MBAs.
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)
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.
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.
I’ll second this experience. Pricing aside (and even then, because of their new recycling policy, I was able to replace an old galaxy nearly the size of a tablet with a new flip-- that has VERY surprisingly become my favorite phone I’ve ever owned-- for like a hundred bucks), I’ve never had complaints about my Samsung phone and wearables that weren’t general to all smartphones. And the easy integrations between my watch, phone, and earbuds, all Samsung, is really great.
