Why Big Tech's bet on AI assistants is so risky
Why Big Tech's bet on AI assistants is so risky
Tech companies have not solved some of the persistent problems with AI language models.
This whole thing is basically a nonstory when you realize how much money is in tech. Meta changed their name and sank billions on an idea that everyone thought was stupid from the beginning, and they're still fine.
Putting a billion into the flavor-of-the-month that has like 10% chance to be the next big thing is a no-brainer when you're printing multiple billions in profit doing nothing, and have a lot more cash on hand.
The real story, is how wealth inequality and monopolies have essentially allowed the rich to waste tons of money chasing more wealth while having almost no incentive to provide value to society. Who gives a fuck about hallucination and prompt injection? It's all trivial details that VCs are giving away billions to eventually solve.
41Well put with that relevant user name for the Dem who cemented wealth inequality with Nafta that Reagan had worked so hard to get the ball rolling on.
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Amazon is losing money on basic voice assistant, but maybe if they make it more expensive , it will become profitable ?
19I mean, that’s a little like asking, “How many swift kicks to my nuts before it makes me a billionaire?”
Because it’s one of those cost evaluation situations where they thought it was a shot in the dark at first, but by now it’s clearly a loss. So, the whole thing feels a little like, The Producer’s, something isn’t smelling right for any outsiders.
10Alexa is trash and its entire implementation is trash. I’ve tried it with a smart home and it’s a nightmare.
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Me looking up the exact order of commands I have to give the machine to get connected to a real first level support employee.
17Me, an "AI written" regurgitated article on a content mill website uncaringly misleading you about the best way to get connected to a purple banana fridge.
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Because people like me genuinely don’t want this crap?
17Like never? Even as it gets better?
5For me, that depends on a whole lot of things. Who owns it? Who pays for its operation? How much and what access does it need? What verifiable privacy protections are there? How transparent are its processes?
I’m just generally suspicious of companies whose products are ultimately meant to be integral to our daily lives. These kinds of tools will undoubtedly need access to a huge chunk of our personal and professional data to work effectively. I’d rather not interact with the world through the lens of someone’s corporate vision. With the right protections? Sure, I could see some cool and creative use cases. But that unfortunately brings me back to my general skepticism.
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Gonna just buck the trend and say that this AI push has me excited for the future. It's easy to be a nay-sayer, but I genuinely believe the leaps made in AI in just the last year are amazing.
The author clearly doesn't like AI, and completely mischaracterizes Mistral AI for things their models could say, but doesn't consider at all why unaligned models are useful in developing your own.
The author likes to highlight that sometimes an AI will make things up, a phenomenon known as hallucinating. Hallucinations could also be called "creativity" in certain contexts. This isn't always a fault, especially when creativity is the intended purpose.
The author pointed out how it's possible to prompt engineer out sensitive data, and how there's a lack of privacy... which isn't a problem with the tech, but rather tech companies.
The technology used behind the scenes with ChatGPT isn't exclusively for text generation. I'm seeing it appear in speech to text / text to speech applications. It's showing up in image and video editing. It's showing up in ... well ... images/movies of an adult nature.
You're probably already consuming AI generated content without even realizing it.
9Hmm, an unfinished technology has an exploit no one building it expected. Heh, welcome to the Internet.
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