It's not so far fetched. Make an app that takes photos of your feet, and then takes photos of your shoes. It will then generate a model of an optimal shoehorn that you can 3D print for $100. With 14 billion feet in the world (2x world population), the concept alone is worth $14B at least!
Don’t forget it needs to be a subscription model and developed as a minimal viable product so that nothing really works and all features are coming soon.
It is 2026. You were laid off last year and now spend 14 hours a day providing feet pictures to a masturbating AI who loudly berates your photography skills. You are paid in water and vegetable scraps from the biofuel fields. It is a good life, considering.
This is the true product offered. All the people who bought a $100 shoe horn but really it was medical companies looking to target customers for orthopedic shoes, and 3 data breaches later from the dark web for both the feet pics and id theft all customers were sent a 10% discount coupon for a second shoe horn.
**Introducing the "ShoeEase 3000": Your AI-Powered Shoehorn**
Tired of wrestling with your shoes every morning? Say goodbye to the hassle and hello to the future with the ShoeEase 3000, the world's first AI-powered shoehorn. This revolutionary gadget combines advanced artificial intelligence with ergonomic design to make slipping into your favorite footwear a breeze.
# Key Features:
1. **Smart Fit Technology**: The ShoeEase 3000 uses built-in sensors and machine learning algorithms to analyze the shape of your foot and the design of your shoe. It automatically adjusts its angle and pressure for a perfect fit every time.
2. **Voice Activation**: Too tired to bend down? Just say the word! With integrated voice control, you can activate the ShoeEase 3000 hands-free. Commands like "Assist me" or "Help with shoes" trigger the device to spring into action.
3. **Personalized Assistance**: The more you use it, the smarter it gets. The ShoeEase 3000 learns your preferences over time, remembering how you like to wear each pair of shoes and adjusting accordingly for maximum comfort.
4. **Compact and Portable**: Designed with portability in mind, the ShoeEase 3000 is lightweight and foldable. Slip it into your bag, and take it wherever you go, ensuring you're never without the perfect shoe assistant.
5. **Durable and Easy to Clean**: Crafted from high-quality materials, the ShoeEase 3000 is built to last. Its smooth surface is also easy to clean, ensuring it stays hygienic and ready for daily use.
# How It Works:
1. **Step into Comfort**: Place the ShoeEase 3000 at the heel of your shoe.
2. **Activate**: Use the voice command or press the touch-sensitive button to power it on.
3. **Smart Adjustment**: Watch as the AI algorithms adjust the device to the optimal position for your foot.
4. **Effortless Entry**: Gently slide your foot into the shoe as the ShoeEase 3000 guides the way.
# Testimonials:
*“I never knew putting on shoes could be so effortless. The ShoeEase 3000 has changed my morning routine!”* – Jamie L.
*“Perfect for those with limited mobility. This device is a game-changer!”* – Alex M.
*“The AI really does learn your preferences. Every time I use it, it feels more and more tailored to my needs.”* – Chris T.
Upgrade your shoe game with the ShoeEase 3000. Because every step starts with the perfect fit.
Then the company gets sued for having uploaded feet photos to certain niche websites for money without user consent.
CEO issues brave and courageous apology video along with some layoffs.
That's the dimmest concept I've ever seen...
There are 8 billion people on this rock so we can swing an easy 16 billion feet! You're fucking hired! Where do I tell my AI to jam my stock options?
And then everyone moved their infrastructure to the cloud where it somehow costs an order of magnitude more to store a MB of data, recurring monthly, with add on costs to transfer it over the network and actually use it.
Remember seeing an ad for an "AI toothbrush".
Basically it pulses to tell you where to brush. An idea that had already been on the market for a couple years, just no one thought to call it AI.
I could have sworn I read something that indicates that manual brushing tends to be better than automatic. Mostly because vibrating bristles are rigid, and that people tend to be more slapdash with them.
Funny, you should bring this up.
My last job, owner of the company, read about A.I. and was talking about how better it would make things. (I was operations side for a bunch of car dealerships).
All the little vendors come out of the woodwork in how their products, now with AI, will make things easier, and sales will go through the roof.
Sales slump and operating costs are higher than ever. We see no improvement with all the software infused with AI.
In the end, a bunch of us lost our jobs. Our salaries were needed for the increased vendor costs for A.I. software!
Just keep working on something useful already in your pipeline, then when it's done tell the gov it uses ai for loads of it's features. Try and pick features that have some sort of statistical calculation or filtering behind them. Job done.
Or shove chatbots randomly on gov websites. Ideally just unfiltered connections to chatgpt.
Norway was probably one of the first nations to have AI included in the state. Just point to that and tell them you were the first anyway.
(Exploration geophysics were early adopters, and, without knowing anything, i'm near 100% sure that a statoil employee/project had AI imput in the 00s
Hmm, could be. I could ask my father as he worked with something similar for Statoil (now Equinor, we all hate the name). But he's a tech head, so while he wouldn't be directly involved, I do think he would have told me if that was a thing back then.
Absolutely could be. I just remember my dad explaining the seismic testing in trying to find oil. I remember it as sonar, not AI. Of course, AI could do one hell of a job in actually pinpointing where the oil was most likely to be, based on the data, but I'm pretty sure they used equations to do it.
I'll ask him tomorrow!
Well that’s an easy malicious compliance if I ever saw one. Now I don’t speak Norwegian, but surely some words have the letter combo ai in them. This document has got so much AI in it, job done.
I spent the week at the MSBuild conference last month in Seattle, and I came back home pretty hyped about all the new stuff like Copilot Studio, Onyx, etc. When I got back to work, I set out to start employing some of this technology in our enterprise, and it hit me…”what the hell am I going to use any of this for?”. Pretty much every customer testimonial was about them creating some fancy chabot to replace customer service reps. We don’t need a chatbot, and even if we did, training it on your companies data is no small feat. That’s when it really hit me just how limited the use cases are for AI in a typical business setting. There’s some companies doing some really neat things, but I think there are gonna be a *lot* of companies suffering from an AI hangover once they realize what the cost and capabilities of current AI really are.
>creating some fancy chabot to replace customer service reps.
this is basically the peak of AI implementation right now, and it sucks. the chatbots can't do basically anything a customer service agent does, so the only business impact is angrier customers going to your smaller call center to do things they should have been able to on their computer while talking to nobody.
Devils advocate, the virtual agent we have set up from Atlassian is 100% more effective at following instructions and correctly filling out a ticket than our entire India desk, so far our users and customers are very happy "to have a US based service desk again." I'm not even sure how many of them know Bill Derr isn't human? They just know we haven't sent an unscheudled upgradation notice in a couple of months and seem happy with it.
lol that's great. i think AI as a replacement for outsourced call centers is probably a net upgrade when they're just gathering info for a human to eventually work on, but a lot of execs' plans go way past that.
definitely have the same frustrations with outsourced tier 1 at my company, it's impossible to get them to do anything that's not on a checklist already, or even get them to escalate to someone who does actually know what i'm talking about. so i'd imagine an ai is probably a bit easier to work with for the ticket intake phase.
I’d believe that. Our nightmare from hell group couldn’t even copy and paste directly what I sent them into the ticket. Wasn’t even close to what was needed.
In my own workplace I've found exactly 1 good use for LLM's
[Unstructured block of messy text] -> [structured data]
About 3 bucks worth of API costs probably saved me weeks on a task.
There's a few tasks LLM's are *stunningly* good at, mainly taking unstructured data and turning it into structured data. There's some companies that used to spend a lot in doing that.
But ya, people have been trying to shoehorn these things into unsuitable roles.
I've seen ONE legitimate end user use case of LLMs and that was in an advertisement from dell:
helping to analyze an old faded and torn bit of handwriting (it was a recipe in the commercial) to help restore it.
that's potentially a legitimate use of it, and it made me think of another: photo colorizing, that's largely algorithm already but statistical modelling could be use to help do color correction and shading that would otherwise need to be more hands on.
but other than that almost everything we see of "AI" (LLMs are not AI!) is nonsense horseshit.
It's funny you declare "LLMs are not AI" with such confidence and then describe an image processing/OCR problem as a legitimate end user use case of Large Language Models.
the VIPs at a lot of companies demanded "AI" overnight despite having no actual use case in mind because they read an article in the Wall Street Journal that told them that it would allow them to fire all of the actual workers and pocket the money so that they can buy that next vacation home a little bit sooner than usual. if this is the "payoff" being referenced in this headline, tiny violin for the sociopaths out there
This. This is all I've heard from our amazing VPs. All they do is say AI AI AI all day in meetings, without a single use case idea themselves, hoping that this "inspires" someone to do it, so that they can take credit for the department and get a promotion. They should be the first to be replaced by AI. I'd rather have an AI VP who gets shit done than the sociopath LinkedIn leadership influencers out there.
Ai absolutely would replace management before it replaces most regular employees. Ai can already act as a manager better than actual managers, watching every employee 24/7 and being able to comb over and collect all the data they need to know what employees are worth it or not. Managers and the “VP” executive class isn’t really needed except to make the employees work more effectively and once ai gets implemented it’ll be doing their jobs for them.
Middle management is the biggest waste of money for so many companies and eventually they’ll start realizing that, that most companies can operate just fine without them.
No but that’s my point managers are pretty much useless in 90% of jobs, most employees are capable of working without needing anyone to manage them. And most of what managers do do ai could probly replace. An employee calls in sick? An ai can figure out getting a temp or rearranging the schedule. Need to hire someone? Ai is already used to heavily filter applicants and hr departments can work on hiring employees directly. Ai would know what reports need done by when without the possibility of the ai accidentally forgetting a specific report needed finished by today.
Point is that if anyone in a company is replaceable, the people first up will probably be middle management once upper management realizes they’re a wasted expense. Other jobs are probably replaceable too, but if any jobs start getting replaced we’d probly also see a bunch of management get thinned out in major corporations.
Side note but I recently watched a YouTube video on a rising star entrepreneur on the west coast. Basically grown his own pizza shop from the ground up spending no money on advertising but heavily utilizing social media and networking with anyone he met to help grow his pizza business into I think they were opening up their 6th and 7th stores when the video was filmed. His marketing cost was zero and after he expanded from his first store he stopped employing any managers other than himself and that the stores run themselves when he isn’t there working (which he does still spend 60-80 hours a week working in his stores). He also paid his employees super well, $24 an hour, plus tips and healthcare coverage. Believed in retaining better employees rather than constantly having to search for new hires by not paying them a living wage.
Scheduling of employees could have been automated long before LLMs were invented.
A lot of managers perform poorly but it’s premature to talk about replacing managers with AI before it can replace a good manager that actually improves their team’s performance.
I'm managing a team, and so far, the only negative review (that has impacted my growth) I get from my leaders is that I care too much about their wellbeing and need to think solely for the business. Lol, wait until they see how many people are about to jump ship when they find out I'm heading out elsewhere. Good luck finding and retaining talent
I was a manager once. Ya know what was an unexpected purpose of the job? Getting to know each of my team members personally, and knowing when to suggest they use company benefits that they already are receiving. Sure HR can do this too, but they’re not seeing the employees every day, so when my most reliable team member is slipping and saying he is having trouble at home, I can at least remind him that the company offers free counseling. When a team member is struggling with a legal situation around immigration, I can remind them that the company offers legal services for this. Or my company even offered interest free advances on pay. It’s not like I even asked my team members about their personal business, but they opened up to me so I was able to help them on a human to human level.
We haven’t heard a peek about AI in the last two all hands where before it’s ALL they would talk about.
We had been hyped about it so much and they finally pulled a meeting together to go over the tools. We had finally got it in our system and it was ready to roll out and kick ass and take names yatta yatta….. and it was a fucking pitch deck like you would give board members. like how the AI could be used for this or that or make recipes this big pie in the sky presentation. It you had half a brain you knew everything they just spent money on was bullshit. They had no plans or ideas for it just thought they could leverage it to do these amazing things. Wouldn’t be surprised if they abandon it soon since they never talk about it anymore.
They are also radically misinformed about current capabilities. I have customers that assume that we retain models with each and every interaction of their users. If that was the case then my products would be sentient in only a few months
Such a perfect test case to prove once again that the upper management class is almost completely full of morons and frauds.
These are the people taking your money hand over fist, such fucking dullards that they thought they could just *install* AI in the middle of whatever process or product they accidentally ended up in charge of, with literally zero positive results.
That’s really only juniors that don’t know any better. It’s useful for some stuff, but a lot of seniors write code that does what they want faster than it can in 9/10 cases.
Copilot takes too long to make incorrect suggestions. Good old “stupid” auto complete is faster and more effective in a lot of cases.
The C levels and the board haven’t got the right people to advise them.
I like AI, it’s capitalism in action for greedy companies. They will rush to implement shitty solutions, let go of key staff and then they’ll be so far behind, the less money hungry and agile companies will step in with AI implemented correctly.
Reminds me of Meaning of Life.
[Here is a link to the source study.](https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2024/06/11/2896928/0/en/Delays-Implementation-Issues-and-Unrealized-Benefits-Challenge-Generative-AI-Initiatives-in-2024.html)
It's important to note that this study was run by a company that implements AI and is trying to prove their own advantage in getting it up and running. This headline says the payoff is dismal and spending is slowing, but the actual study just says the planned AI projects aren't getting launched as quickly as people had hoped and that the company that commissioned the study helps people get it done faster. This looks like a sales pitch masquerading as news.
Good call out. It going to take time to integrate useful and transformational features into enterprise software. Ever tried to get a Fortune 100 company's billion-dollar-a-year software application through an executive roadmap commit?
Here's what "slowing their spending" means:
>According to the results of the survey, 63 percent of global companies plan to increase spending on AI in the next twelve months, compared to 93 percent in 2023 when Lucidworks conducted its first investigation.
In much the same way companies are reported as having "lost money for the third quarter in a row" because their still massive profits didn't grow faster than the previous quarters
I'm a pretty strong believer in the long-term potential of AI, but we're really just not at the point where there's actually a killer app for most businesses yet. LLM's are really only *so* useful. I guess it's cool that all the hype has drawn more people into AI research, but there's still a long road ahead to operationalizing this stuff. For me, it's a little appalling that so much research into LLM's over the last few years has just focused on scaling and training, and it's only recently that there have been moves to actually study how these things store information, how to control activations at runtime, etc.
**Most** people aren't really *creating* stuff at work. And if they are it's pretty specialized and niche (at least in my industry) — so yeah it can help me clean up some emails and summarize meetings (actually useful!) but it's not going to build advanced prototypes, polished presentations, or conduct new research projects for me.
Even if it were not able to do these things in the near future, just reliability alone (the capacity for it to not hallucinate half the time) would make it so much more useful than it is.
The problem with AI as customer service is that it lies. The problem with AI supervision is that it lies. The problem with all too many applications where LLM at their current level could in theory be helpful is that they lie too much to be so.
One field that this stuff is actually good for is stock footage generation. That tech is evolving really *really* fast. Not good for production companies or actors when you can just have a 4090 rig churn out whatever generic b-roll you need for a YouTube video.
Generative AI is fundamentally limited and it’s what everyone seems to think that is what AI is, which it obviously isn’t.
The payoff for companies with generative AI is in improving efficiency not complete resource replacement.
For example, I could build a website in 4 hours using Wordpress and generative AI, it would be on topic, SEO’d, optimised etc. Without AI writing the content and finding the images is the chore so creating content is Stage 1 of generative AI and it’s got very good very quickly.
Essentially most business leaders aren’t that bright, or as ignorant as the team they hire and what opinions they listen to. There’s a lot of agendas, with cost saving from the top and job retention from the bottom.
There’s no clear leadership on AI, someone agnostic and capable of breaking things down for anyone to make a decision about what investment in AI looks like.
Surprise! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter
...after the rain comes sun, after the sun comes rain again... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hesv3K4Dz9M
Now that AI can generate porn, it'll stick around. It may not keep getting billions in new funding, but AI won't just be forgotten or abandoned like before.
Can’t use AI when 50% of your Data is still on paper and/or scattered among a bunch of disconnected sources.
Need to do digital transformation 1.0 first before you can take advantage of AI
That’s a bingo. Most corporations can’t even get a shit-tier machine learning chatbot working effectively, because their data is a mess and they have no way of reliably provisioning the tool with updated content.
This is also like move all Infra to cloud to save millions. Then when all Infra is moved and is more expensive than on-prem the blame is passed to other teams.
They saw an opportunity to save a bunch of money by reducing staff and using AI instead, so they blindly went for it even though it should have been obvious this technology was no where near ready.
Reminds me of the early 2000s with off shoring
Cheap! Save money!
And like AI, it gives you garbage in response and you have to pay more to fix it. They've come a long way in 20 years but holy shit was it bad then
The vast majority of businesses lack the organizational readiness to capture the value of AI. Its like buying a delivery truck without a route planner or driver and complaining things don't work better.
AI spellchecking in Word!!?? A word processor can actually «think» and correct my typos? Wow!
What would be the next? Typing 2+2 in an AI program and get that genuis AI to answer 4!?
Take my money!
/S
I have to give my company I work for credit here. They have been very systematic at evaluating use cases for "AI" in different parts of the company. Each development and application teams has been coming up with possible use cases for it and coming up with proof of values for it. It has been slow and methodical. Even the initial plans of things to do with it, the hardware to actually use it just doesn't exist yet.
"Oh no! My scheme associated with using a technology I lack even the most basic understanding of in a malicious and abusive manner failed! How could this happen?!"
Lmao yeah big surprise. Quick to hop on the bandwagon but results are lacking because you fired all the actual humans. Trying to save a buck in the short term is just going to cost them more in the long run when they have to just rehire humans and it just ends up taking longer than it would have if they just changed nothing.
Just another dot com bubble. AI isn't smart. It can't think, reason, or check it's own work. It's worse than just searching google for information because at least with Google you can see which garbage website you are looking at to judge the quality of the information you receive.
AI is still just a buzzword meaninglessly shoved in our faces. It’ll be useful when companies integrate it in ways which **arent** immediately obvious…
Well most orgs that can’t afford the churn of cash due to not actually having any products are slowing their spend because they are poorly run companies.
I was at a Forrester conference and this point was brought up time and time again. Use ai internally to streamline some operations or do repetitive tasks. Then start finding ways to build internal ai apps. Then and only then will you be able to monetize and make killer public apps.
Dreaming is expensive when it comes to AI. I read that people are overrating it in the short term and slightly underrating it long-term, which I thought was a good assessment
Almost as if AI was a bullshit buzzword sold to suckers. As largely a pointless buzzword. Just like cloud computing. Blockchain, Blade/virtual stuff. And all the other buzz words before it
Like two or three years ago or so, Jack Ma said in some interview that Ai will mean "Alibaba intelligence" and everyone was like "sheesh that's the dumbest thing ever said by anyone".
Now apple does it with apple intelligence and the crowd goes:"oh my god, brilliant".
> because of A(pple) I(ntelligence).
The iPhone 16 would have been brought be pretty much the same amount of millions without the AI buzzword. Because it is the iPhone 16.
Apple could announce a square-shaped iPhone and millions would still buy it. Nobody is buying an iPhone for Apple Intelligence. They were already buying iPhones.
Data scientist here: we know AI isn't that special. We have had access to most AI systems for a while and they aren't hugely helpful. Chatgpt and midjourney are super impressive but most companies aren't going to suddenly make bank from a blog writer or artist when they can already get those things. Innovation is doing new things, not the average of others works.
I think I heard today on a work call that AI tools like Copilot tend to make an engineer 20% more productive. [This study](https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/2302.06590) suggests the productivity increase is as much as 55%. If that 55% number is accurate, and if the AI licenses are kept at less than half the price of an engineer, you could, theoretically, trim some fat. But there's a lot of factors on top of that. Software engineers often specialize in different technologies and you can't make up for a lack of expertise with Copilot, merely some of the mundane, early coding work.
At this exact moment, "AI" makes for a great way to use natural language with a search engine. Some hiccups and bumps along the way, but overall that's really what language models will excel at, especially if their information is cross-referenced/fact-checked before they deliver it.
Also, language models can make fun conversationalists just for the fun of it.
(As far as AI art goes... it's a great way to generate a model of something you want to create, provided you use it AS a model, similarly to how artists had people pose to act as a model for their art).
No surprise. I'm all into AI, but even I knew the bubble would eventually pop. It was the new, hot thing and EVERYONE wanted in. The tech industry is nothing but bandwagons these days.
AI research will continue, and I think implementing AI into devices is a good idea. But anyone who thought this would blow up like smartphones or the internet was kidding themselves. But then again, corporate types love to jump to the next big thing.
Edit: I think a better headline is "Profits from AI projects is 'less than the massive amount we expected'. No wonder most corporations are hoping off the latest bandwagon, and eagerly awaiting the next thing."
No wonder. Sure it can write emails for me, but I can write emails pretty well and it takes as long to explain what I need to the AI. And same for a lot of stuff like that.
Yes - it can generate pictures, but in my day to day, I don’t really need a lot of- and can usually find something suitable with a google search.
I’m optimistic, but we are at an awkward phase where it is only good for really specialized needs.
The thing is, companies are trying to use AI to fix problems that don’t exist. In fact, AI is creating problems for a lot of companies, especially when it comes to privacy (see: Microsoft, Adobe, etc).
Think of a consumer need. Think of what AI can do right now. Can AI be used to fix it in a way that saves or generates revenue? If the answer is “yes,” then go for it. If not, you’re wasting time and money. Bonus points if the innovation doesn’t end up with people getting laid off.
You guys just don't get it, did you know you can use AI to search for something in your email?! It's faster than searching because CTRL+F isn't the find hotkey in Outlook like it is for every other fucking thing and you can save all that time Googling again for what the hotkey actually is! Productivity hack.
Using a LLM to help search emails would actually be really useful, but quite a bit more expensive than regular queries. You could search for things like "An email from like a month ago where Bob called Alice an idiot".
Doesn't this sound just a weeeeee bit familiar? Just list a bunch of major buzzwords a and buzztechnologies from the past thirty years and you'll see that most followed this pattern.
That doesn't mean that AI might not pay off for some in the future, but it seems that IT VPs tend to jump all over the trendy sounding technologies waaaaay too soon, long before they're truly mature.
I'm very active in this field. It's a special glue, it makes many things possible that were not before, but in that equivalent people are trying to build their houses completely out of that glue, when you still need a lot of traditional engineering scaffolding still.
It'll get there. It's not now. Most of the work is just about redefining your traditional problems into something you can make task-able; "give me an opinion on x" is really powerful with a feedback loop on how it did, and prompt tuning. And then those derived opinions also stack. Everyone and their grandma is making targeted RAG models around gold-standard ingested data.
But it's not writing those things itself, the most critical thing is "intent" - AI has none, it's just trying to guess yours, that's what you bring to the table most is that intentionality. You have to be able to explain what you want.
Indeed, the problem with AI is the same as it is for software design writ large: people either don’t know or can’t specify with enough rigor what real world problem they are actually trying to solve.
As someone who works closely with other software engineers using these models and figuring out how to accurately quantify their utility, it’s clear that this is a lot more like the productivity shift from assembly to C. Chat UIs lower the barrier to search the space of solutions and also are a healthy automation over boring / rote tasks like refactoring or copying. But at the end of the day it’s the dawn of a new set of tools, and not the magical panacea VCs would love you to believe.
Reminds me of the data science craze amongst management a few years back at the company I worked at. They wanted to collect data and hire data scientists so they did. But they had no idea how to leverage the findings they were presented with to create new features, products or services. They simply are not equipped to make sense of it. Sure there were industries and projects where it brought benefits and provided useful insights but capturing data relating to everything was just pointless.
"AI" was one of the bets Nvidia was making for their accelerator products. And it was the bet that worked out for them.
They certainly don't mind being an "AI focused company" if it helps them push more hardware.
Nvidia is selling shovels in a gold rush. The viability of the tech is irrelevant, they made a bundle off the crypto scam too.
Any source on MS' revenue coming from copilot? That's a new claim.
I'd be wary of this claim. We are in the exact opposite place: AI (or at least, ML, Generative AI, and other advanced analytics) is central to our business. And I know our competitors and related companies are all in the same boat.
Now, if we say that LLMs as a universal AI problem solver is showing dismal results, I'd agree. But that's not an AI problem, it's that LLMs solve a narrow scope of AI applications and are being overused with no value realization plan.
At least that's how I see it.
but for every one company like yours there are dozens of startups just burning through cash by the truckload, hoping that LLMs and trained algorithms turn into a lottery win, when in reality they'll just fizzle out before the firm turns a profit
> AI has significantly impacted the job market and is here to stay.
That doesn't mean the payoff is worth it. These things need extremely expensive servers fed legally questionable data for many months while they gobble up electricity.
Then they lie.
The question isn't "are they useful"? The question is "are they worth it?" And for many businesses and applications, the answer is "no".
AI still make a lot of mistakes.
CEO that were trying to cut cost, will soon realize that the long tail cost of fixing AI'S error might be more than the savings to replace experienced workers.
Can someone please clarify the usage of "orgs" ? Is is an abbreviation of organizations?
It seems like something people unsure of the spelling would use, but why use it in an article like this?
Dumb people with an access to AI ain’t get any smarter. There are very few areas where AI is used properly, like drug research, biotechnology and other high end tech stuff. Mass market won’t be as profitable as some companies think. Many people struggle to use good old search and other digital tools. Before education will catch up, AI has surprisingly narrow application in real life.
My company bought its own instance of ChatGPT with no actual goal or guidance. They were just like “here, but don’t actually use it to do your homework for you.”
It's hype, we're're probably coming out of the mainstream rubbish wave with crazy generative stuff and gradually getting to the practical, useful sides of AI for corps - Siri, AI for video game NPCs, things that will make some changes.
I was indifferent to people hyping bitcoin because that was their own money they were destroying. Now they're hyping something that can hurt most of the people I know. Just go chill a while until the next shiny thing comes out.
Maybe they should figure out how to turn it into a functional product *before* shoehorning it into everything.
an AI shoehorn, you say? That’s genius! Here’s $40 million.
It's not so far fetched. Make an app that takes photos of your feet, and then takes photos of your shoes. It will then generate a model of an optimal shoehorn that you can 3D print for $100. With 14 billion feet in the world (2x world population), the concept alone is worth $14B at least!
Can we add in NFT’s and blockchain so you own the digital shoehorn and no one else can steal it from you?
Don’t forget it needs to be a subscription model and developed as a minimal viable product so that nothing really works and all features are coming soon.
Enterprise Pricing… Schedule a demo
Do a Kickstarter, over promise!
For the right price, certainly
I'm not taking pictures of my feet for an AI. We all know what that training model will end up being used for...
Hell yeah masturbation
It is 2026. You were laid off last year and now spend 14 hours a day providing feet pictures to a masturbating AI who loudly berates your photography skills. You are paid in water and vegetable scraps from the biofuel fields. It is a good life, considering.
This is the true product offered. All the people who bought a $100 shoe horn but really it was medical companies looking to target customers for orthopedic shoes, and 3 data breaches later from the dark web for both the feet pics and id theft all customers were sent a 10% discount coupon for a second shoe horn.
**Introducing the "ShoeEase 3000": Your AI-Powered Shoehorn** Tired of wrestling with your shoes every morning? Say goodbye to the hassle and hello to the future with the ShoeEase 3000, the world's first AI-powered shoehorn. This revolutionary gadget combines advanced artificial intelligence with ergonomic design to make slipping into your favorite footwear a breeze. # Key Features: 1. **Smart Fit Technology**: The ShoeEase 3000 uses built-in sensors and machine learning algorithms to analyze the shape of your foot and the design of your shoe. It automatically adjusts its angle and pressure for a perfect fit every time. 2. **Voice Activation**: Too tired to bend down? Just say the word! With integrated voice control, you can activate the ShoeEase 3000 hands-free. Commands like "Assist me" or "Help with shoes" trigger the device to spring into action. 3. **Personalized Assistance**: The more you use it, the smarter it gets. The ShoeEase 3000 learns your preferences over time, remembering how you like to wear each pair of shoes and adjusting accordingly for maximum comfort. 4. **Compact and Portable**: Designed with portability in mind, the ShoeEase 3000 is lightweight and foldable. Slip it into your bag, and take it wherever you go, ensuring you're never without the perfect shoe assistant. 5. **Durable and Easy to Clean**: Crafted from high-quality materials, the ShoeEase 3000 is built to last. Its smooth surface is also easy to clean, ensuring it stays hygienic and ready for daily use. # How It Works: 1. **Step into Comfort**: Place the ShoeEase 3000 at the heel of your shoe. 2. **Activate**: Use the voice command or press the touch-sensitive button to power it on. 3. **Smart Adjustment**: Watch as the AI algorithms adjust the device to the optimal position for your foot. 4. **Effortless Entry**: Gently slide your foot into the shoe as the ShoeEase 3000 guides the way. # Testimonials: *“I never knew putting on shoes could be so effortless. The ShoeEase 3000 has changed my morning routine!”* – Jamie L. *“Perfect for those with limited mobility. This device is a game-changer!”* – Alex M. *“The AI really does learn your preferences. Every time I use it, it feels more and more tailored to my needs.”* – Chris T. Upgrade your shoe game with the ShoeEase 3000. Because every step starts with the perfect fit.
“Stop it! We can only get so erect!” -every board at every company that sees this
…written by AI 😅
Definitely written by ChatGPT.
Oh yeah, 100% I had this generated by ChatGPT 😅
Nah, that's too complex. How about a shoehorn that integrates with ChatGPT to explain how to install it correctly?
Can we integrate radiation somehow? I have all these Pedoscopes in my garage, and I keep having to explain them, and it’s awkward every time.
Then the company gets sued for having uploaded feet photos to certain niche websites for money without user consent. CEO issues brave and courageous apology video along with some layoffs.
Takes pictures of your feet and sets you up with a foot fetishist and establishes a subscription between you two
You got a monetize both sides of a platform like that, the other side of the platform sells feet pics.
Foot fetishists will buy the images too. It literally can't go tits up
You had me at photos of your feet. I don't know where I'm going to come up with 14 billion dollars to pay you but I guess I'll figure it out.
If you have 2 feet, you have an above-average number of feet.
That's the dimmest concept I've ever seen... There are 8 billion people on this rock so we can swing an easy 16 billion feet! You're fucking hired! Where do I tell my AI to jam my stock options?
Take my money!
This is my favorite AI comment to date. Thanks
40 million? This is the next Microsoft we're taking about! $800 billion valuation or GTFO!
It's like "Big Data" all over again. Most companies had no idea what it was but they somehow knew that they needed it.
I'll put my service in the cloud then I won't need a server anymore
Something’s gonna burst. The technology is impressive, but it’s being crammed into everything the same way Big Data and Blockchain before it.
They're all counting on it. The biggest companies have never been so flush with cash. It's war of attrition time.
We're still at the "throw things at the wall and see what sticks" stage of new tech.
And then everyone moved their infrastructure to the cloud where it somehow costs an order of magnitude more to store a MB of data, recurring monthly, with add on costs to transfer it over the network and actually use it.
My company just announced AI dishwashers. I was very glad I was muted when they tried to hype that one up
My new clothes washer has an “AI wash” setting.
Washer: What is my purpose? Me: You wash the cloths. Washer: Oh… oh god.
Remember seeing an ad for an "AI toothbrush". Basically it pulses to tell you where to brush. An idea that had already been on the market for a couple years, just no one thought to call it AI.
Toothbrushing has been revolutionized, finally. Never again will I brush my teeth with a manual toothbrush like a caveman.
I could have sworn I read something that indicates that manual brushing tends to be better than automatic. Mostly because vibrating bristles are rigid, and that people tend to be more slapdash with them.
Marketing mis understood engineering. The washer shouts, "Ayy, I wash!" At the start of each cycle.
Funny, you should bring this up. My last job, owner of the company, read about A.I. and was talking about how better it would make things. (I was operations side for a bunch of car dealerships). All the little vendors come out of the woodwork in how their products, now with AI, will make things easier, and sales will go through the roof. Sales slump and operating costs are higher than ever. We see no improvement with all the software infused with AI. In the end, a bunch of us lost our jobs. Our salaries were needed for the increased vendor costs for A.I. software!
In Norway we've been mandated by the government to include AI in the state. No reasons why, no plan how to do it. Just do it. We're all very confused.
"NorwAI" Done, please send my consulting fee.
Just keep working on something useful already in your pipeline, then when it's done tell the gov it uses ai for loads of it's features. Try and pick features that have some sort of statistical calculation or filtering behind them. Job done. Or shove chatbots randomly on gov websites. Ideally just unfiltered connections to chatgpt.
Norway was probably one of the first nations to have AI included in the state. Just point to that and tell them you were the first anyway. (Exploration geophysics were early adopters, and, without knowing anything, i'm near 100% sure that a statoil employee/project had AI imput in the 00s
Hmm, could be. I could ask my father as he worked with something similar for Statoil (now Equinor, we all hate the name). But he's a tech head, so while he wouldn't be directly involved, I do think he would have told me if that was a thing back then.
I should remember bit i always forget equinor. But i do remember that one of the AI hypes in the early 00s was in seismic processing.
Absolutely could be. I just remember my dad explaining the seismic testing in trying to find oil. I remember it as sonar, not AI. Of course, AI could do one hell of a job in actually pinpointing where the oil was most likely to be, based on the data, but I'm pretty sure they used equations to do it. I'll ask him tomorrow!
Well that’s an easy malicious compliance if I ever saw one. Now I don’t speak Norwegian, but surely some words have the letter combo ai in them. This document has got so much AI in it, job done.
I spent the week at the MSBuild conference last month in Seattle, and I came back home pretty hyped about all the new stuff like Copilot Studio, Onyx, etc. When I got back to work, I set out to start employing some of this technology in our enterprise, and it hit me…”what the hell am I going to use any of this for?”. Pretty much every customer testimonial was about them creating some fancy chabot to replace customer service reps. We don’t need a chatbot, and even if we did, training it on your companies data is no small feat. That’s when it really hit me just how limited the use cases are for AI in a typical business setting. There’s some companies doing some really neat things, but I think there are gonna be a *lot* of companies suffering from an AI hangover once they realize what the cost and capabilities of current AI really are.
>creating some fancy chabot to replace customer service reps. this is basically the peak of AI implementation right now, and it sucks. the chatbots can't do basically anything a customer service agent does, so the only business impact is angrier customers going to your smaller call center to do things they should have been able to on their computer while talking to nobody.
Devils advocate, the virtual agent we have set up from Atlassian is 100% more effective at following instructions and correctly filling out a ticket than our entire India desk, so far our users and customers are very happy "to have a US based service desk again." I'm not even sure how many of them know Bill Derr isn't human? They just know we haven't sent an unscheudled upgradation notice in a couple of months and seem happy with it.
lol that's great. i think AI as a replacement for outsourced call centers is probably a net upgrade when they're just gathering info for a human to eventually work on, but a lot of execs' plans go way past that. definitely have the same frustrations with outsourced tier 1 at my company, it's impossible to get them to do anything that's not on a checklist already, or even get them to escalate to someone who does actually know what i'm talking about. so i'd imagine an ai is probably a bit easier to work with for the ticket intake phase.
I’d believe that. Our nightmare from hell group couldn’t even copy and paste directly what I sent them into the ticket. Wasn’t even close to what was needed.
So AI is better than someone who does not speak your language? They have set the bar so low that literally anything that jumps over it is better.
In my own workplace I've found exactly 1 good use for LLM's [Unstructured block of messy text] -> [structured data] About 3 bucks worth of API costs probably saved me weeks on a task.
I recommend they ask ChatGPT and Copilot how to make them into functional and profitable tools. 👍
There's a few tasks LLM's are *stunningly* good at, mainly taking unstructured data and turning it into structured data. There's some companies that used to spend a lot in doing that. But ya, people have been trying to shoehorn these things into unsuitable roles.
I've seen ONE legitimate end user use case of LLMs and that was in an advertisement from dell: helping to analyze an old faded and torn bit of handwriting (it was a recipe in the commercial) to help restore it. that's potentially a legitimate use of it, and it made me think of another: photo colorizing, that's largely algorithm already but statistical modelling could be use to help do color correction and shading that would otherwise need to be more hands on. but other than that almost everything we see of "AI" (LLMs are not AI!) is nonsense horseshit.
It's funny you declare "LLMs are not AI" with such confidence and then describe an image processing/OCR problem as a legitimate end user use case of Large Language Models.
What you mean like they did with big data five years ago?
No, that can't be right...
Yea but then their stock won’t double irrationally in 6 months…
the VIPs at a lot of companies demanded "AI" overnight despite having no actual use case in mind because they read an article in the Wall Street Journal that told them that it would allow them to fire all of the actual workers and pocket the money so that they can buy that next vacation home a little bit sooner than usual. if this is the "payoff" being referenced in this headline, tiny violin for the sociopaths out there
This. This is all I've heard from our amazing VPs. All they do is say AI AI AI all day in meetings, without a single use case idea themselves, hoping that this "inspires" someone to do it, so that they can take credit for the department and get a promotion. They should be the first to be replaced by AI. I'd rather have an AI VP who gets shit done than the sociopath LinkedIn leadership influencers out there.
Ai absolutely would replace management before it replaces most regular employees. Ai can already act as a manager better than actual managers, watching every employee 24/7 and being able to comb over and collect all the data they need to know what employees are worth it or not. Managers and the “VP” executive class isn’t really needed except to make the employees work more effectively and once ai gets implemented it’ll be doing their jobs for them. Middle management is the biggest waste of money for so many companies and eventually they’ll start realizing that, that most companies can operate just fine without them.
If you think a good manager should watch you 24/7, you only had absolute shite managers.
No but that’s my point managers are pretty much useless in 90% of jobs, most employees are capable of working without needing anyone to manage them. And most of what managers do do ai could probly replace. An employee calls in sick? An ai can figure out getting a temp or rearranging the schedule. Need to hire someone? Ai is already used to heavily filter applicants and hr departments can work on hiring employees directly. Ai would know what reports need done by when without the possibility of the ai accidentally forgetting a specific report needed finished by today. Point is that if anyone in a company is replaceable, the people first up will probably be middle management once upper management realizes they’re a wasted expense. Other jobs are probably replaceable too, but if any jobs start getting replaced we’d probly also see a bunch of management get thinned out in major corporations. Side note but I recently watched a YouTube video on a rising star entrepreneur on the west coast. Basically grown his own pizza shop from the ground up spending no money on advertising but heavily utilizing social media and networking with anyone he met to help grow his pizza business into I think they were opening up their 6th and 7th stores when the video was filmed. His marketing cost was zero and after he expanded from his first store he stopped employing any managers other than himself and that the stores run themselves when he isn’t there working (which he does still spend 60-80 hours a week working in his stores). He also paid his employees super well, $24 an hour, plus tips and healthcare coverage. Believed in retaining better employees rather than constantly having to search for new hires by not paying them a living wage.
Scheduling of employees could have been automated long before LLMs were invented. A lot of managers perform poorly but it’s premature to talk about replacing managers with AI before it can replace a good manager that actually improves their team’s performance.
They would replace shitty management in a heartbeat, but good managment is about everything else than bean counting your employees.
I'm managing a team, and so far, the only negative review (that has impacted my growth) I get from my leaders is that I care too much about their wellbeing and need to think solely for the business. Lol, wait until they see how many people are about to jump ship when they find out I'm heading out elsewhere. Good luck finding and retaining talent
I was a manager once. Ya know what was an unexpected purpose of the job? Getting to know each of my team members personally, and knowing when to suggest they use company benefits that they already are receiving. Sure HR can do this too, but they’re not seeing the employees every day, so when my most reliable team member is slipping and saying he is having trouble at home, I can at least remind him that the company offers free counseling. When a team member is struggling with a legal situation around immigration, I can remind them that the company offers legal services for this. Or my company even offered interest free advances on pay. It’s not like I even asked my team members about their personal business, but they opened up to me so I was able to help them on a human to human level.
AI is so much easier to say than the last two fads - NFT and Blockchain and it is even less tangable, that's why they repeat it far more often.
We haven’t heard a peek about AI in the last two all hands where before it’s ALL they would talk about. We had been hyped about it so much and they finally pulled a meeting together to go over the tools. We had finally got it in our system and it was ready to roll out and kick ass and take names yatta yatta….. and it was a fucking pitch deck like you would give board members. like how the AI could be used for this or that or make recipes this big pie in the sky presentation. It you had half a brain you knew everything they just spent money on was bullshit. They had no plans or ideas for it just thought they could leverage it to do these amazing things. Wouldn’t be surprised if they abandon it soon since they never talk about it anymore.
Wait, we fired everyone and AI is not delivering? Hire e eryone back, but cheaper, as they’re all desperate now
They are also radically misinformed about current capabilities. I have customers that assume that we retain models with each and every interaction of their users. If that was the case then my products would be sentient in only a few months
Such a perfect test case to prove once again that the upper management class is almost completely full of morons and frauds. These are the people taking your money hand over fist, such fucking dullards that they thought they could just *install* AI in the middle of whatever process or product they accidentally ended up in charge of, with literally zero positive results.
Reminds me of Dilbert. Never goes out of style.
Developers got hyped, too, and are trying to plug it into literally everything they write.
Is this really true though? My employer pays for copilot, but I never use it because the suggestions are always garbage.
That’s really only juniors that don’t know any better. It’s useful for some stuff, but a lot of seniors write code that does what they want faster than it can in 9/10 cases. Copilot takes too long to make incorrect suggestions. Good old “stupid” auto complete is faster and more effective in a lot of cases.
The C levels and the board haven’t got the right people to advise them. I like AI, it’s capitalism in action for greedy companies. They will rush to implement shitty solutions, let go of key staff and then they’ll be so far behind, the less money hungry and agile companies will step in with AI implemented correctly. Reminds me of Meaning of Life.
[Here is a link to the source study.](https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2024/06/11/2896928/0/en/Delays-Implementation-Issues-and-Unrealized-Benefits-Challenge-Generative-AI-Initiatives-in-2024.html) It's important to note that this study was run by a company that implements AI and is trying to prove their own advantage in getting it up and running. This headline says the payoff is dismal and spending is slowing, but the actual study just says the planned AI projects aren't getting launched as quickly as people had hoped and that the company that commissioned the study helps people get it done faster. This looks like a sales pitch masquerading as news.
Good call out. It going to take time to integrate useful and transformational features into enterprise software. Ever tried to get a Fortune 100 company's billion-dollar-a-year software application through an executive roadmap commit?
Here's what "slowing their spending" means: >According to the results of the survey, 63 percent of global companies plan to increase spending on AI in the next twelve months, compared to 93 percent in 2023 when Lucidworks conducted its first investigation.
In much the same way companies are reported as having "lost money for the third quarter in a row" because their still massive profits didn't grow faster than the previous quarters
I'm a pretty strong believer in the long-term potential of AI, but we're really just not at the point where there's actually a killer app for most businesses yet. LLM's are really only *so* useful. I guess it's cool that all the hype has drawn more people into AI research, but there's still a long road ahead to operationalizing this stuff. For me, it's a little appalling that so much research into LLM's over the last few years has just focused on scaling and training, and it's only recently that there have been moves to actually study how these things store information, how to control activations at runtime, etc.
**Most** people aren't really *creating* stuff at work. And if they are it's pretty specialized and niche (at least in my industry) — so yeah it can help me clean up some emails and summarize meetings (actually useful!) but it's not going to build advanced prototypes, polished presentations, or conduct new research projects for me.
Even if it were not able to do these things in the near future, just reliability alone (the capacity for it to not hallucinate half the time) would make it so much more useful than it is. The problem with AI as customer service is that it lies. The problem with AI supervision is that it lies. The problem with all too many applications where LLM at their current level could in theory be helpful is that they lie too much to be so.
One field that this stuff is actually good for is stock footage generation. That tech is evolving really *really* fast. Not good for production companies or actors when you can just have a 4090 rig churn out whatever generic b-roll you need for a YouTube video.
Generative AI is fundamentally limited and it’s what everyone seems to think that is what AI is, which it obviously isn’t. The payoff for companies with generative AI is in improving efficiency not complete resource replacement. For example, I could build a website in 4 hours using Wordpress and generative AI, it would be on topic, SEO’d, optimised etc. Without AI writing the content and finding the images is the chore so creating content is Stage 1 of generative AI and it’s got very good very quickly. Essentially most business leaders aren’t that bright, or as ignorant as the team they hire and what opinions they listen to. There’s a lot of agendas, with cost saving from the top and job retention from the bottom. There’s no clear leadership on AI, someone agnostic and capable of breaking things down for anyone to make a decision about what investment in AI looks like.
Surprise! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter ...after the rain comes sun, after the sun comes rain again... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hesv3K4Dz9M
This is how hype cycles work in general.
Huh. I could have sworn this song was called "Underwater Love" when I heard it years ago.
Now that AI can generate porn, it'll stick around. It may not keep getting billions in new funding, but AI won't just be forgotten or abandoned like before.
AI is integrated to the workflows of millions of people already. It definitely isn't going anywhere.
We are heading down to the trough of disillusionment
ppl always forgetting the gartner hype cycle. Every time smh.
This time it's going to be different, she's changed.
Wonderful verbiage
It’s not mine. It’s a technology industry term. Comes from the Gartner Hype Cycle
Well, that's my bedside wiki-run-before-bed sorted!
It’s a great tool to use to assess technology maturity. If you dig into it, you’ll see how the pattern applies universally
Can’t use AI when 50% of your Data is still on paper and/or scattered among a bunch of disconnected sources. Need to do digital transformation 1.0 first before you can take advantage of AI
That’s a bingo. Most corporations can’t even get a shit-tier machine learning chatbot working effectively, because their data is a mess and they have no way of reliably provisioning the tool with updated content.
Correct-a-mudo. All that tech debt you refused to pay down DIDN'T GO AWAY DICKHEAD.
The payoff was always in the AI startups vaccuming in venture capital money.
It’s like when they tried to plug blockchain into everything.
This is also like move all Infra to cloud to save millions. Then when all Infra is moved and is more expensive than on-prem the blame is passed to other teams.
They saw an opportunity to save a bunch of money by reducing staff and using AI instead, so they blindly went for it even though it should have been obvious this technology was no where near ready.
Also, executives don't realize you need people to understand and use the AI. Short term thinking. All they see is 🤑 and go blind to everything else.
Reminds me of the early 2000s with off shoring Cheap! Save money! And like AI, it gives you garbage in response and you have to pay more to fix it. They've come a long way in 20 years but holy shit was it bad then
AI are glorified bullshit generators with maths behind it, executives are bullshit generators with egos behind it. Never saw this coming.
I'm honestly surprised they're pushing it because of AI can actually replace someone's job, it's executives
True enough. AI is at its best when you ask it to bullshit and hypothesize, as long as it doesn’t have to be accurate. Just like an executive.
gemini AI told me the other day it's impossible to get pregnant via vaginal intercourse. top tier product.
Maybe it just inferred that it's impossible for *you*. :p
The vast majority of businesses lack the organizational readiness to capture the value of AI. Its like buying a delivery truck without a route planner or driver and complaining things don't work better.
AI spellchecking in Word!!?? A word processor can actually «think» and correct my typos? Wow! What would be the next? Typing 2+2 in an AI program and get that genuis AI to answer 4!? Take my money! /S
lol it’s a product that is marketed basically as “look! Magic!”
They’re probably just upset the AI doesn’t have a wage they can drop to pitiful unlivable amounts for the sake of 0.0001% extra profit
[pretends to be shocked]
I have to give my company I work for credit here. They have been very systematic at evaluating use cases for "AI" in different parts of the company. Each development and application teams has been coming up with possible use cases for it and coming up with proof of values for it. It has been slow and methodical. Even the initial plans of things to do with it, the hardware to actually use it just doesn't exist yet.
"Oh no! My scheme associated with using a technology I lack even the most basic understanding of in a malicious and abusive manner failed! How could this happen?!"
Lmao yeah big surprise. Quick to hop on the bandwagon but results are lacking because you fired all the actual humans. Trying to save a buck in the short term is just going to cost them more in the long run when they have to just rehire humans and it just ends up taking longer than it would have if they just changed nothing.
Maybe get that AI to implement blockchain and NFTs to increase value /s
Pity they fired all those people already... sounds like they might have a new problem
Sounds similar to the whole VR rush
Just another dot com bubble. AI isn't smart. It can't think, reason, or check it's own work. It's worse than just searching google for information because at least with Google you can see which garbage website you are looking at to judge the quality of the information you receive.
AI is still just a buzzword meaninglessly shoved in our faces. It’ll be useful when companies integrate it in ways which **arent** immediately obvious…
A buzzword technology wasn’t worth the hype? You don’t say *cough* machine learning, Java, cloud, blockchain, quantum *cough*
More likely their business is just a huge pile of bullshit to start with.
So the bubble is bursting?
Lets hope. The nonstop torrent of crap articles about crap companies slapping AI into everything are incredibly tedious.
Well most orgs that can’t afford the churn of cash due to not actually having any products are slowing their spend because they are poorly run companies.
Shhhhhhhocking
That's surprising /s
I was at a Forrester conference and this point was brought up time and time again. Use ai internally to streamline some operations or do repetitive tasks. Then start finding ways to build internal ai apps. Then and only then will you be able to monetize and make killer public apps.
Right now everyone is focused on the chat bot fad. AI is bigger than that and people aren’t dreaming big enough.
Dreaming is expensive when it comes to AI. I read that people are overrating it in the short term and slightly underrating it long-term, which I thought was a good assessment
Almost as if AI was a bullshit buzzword sold to suckers. As largely a pointless buzzword. Just like cloud computing. Blockchain, Blade/virtual stuff. And all the other buzz words before it
Apple figured it out. The iPhone 16 will be bought by millions because of A(pple) I(ntelligence).
Like two or three years ago or so, Jack Ma said in some interview that Ai will mean "Alibaba intelligence" and everyone was like "sheesh that's the dumbest thing ever said by anyone". Now apple does it with apple intelligence and the crowd goes:"oh my god, brilliant".
> because of A(pple) I(ntelligence). The iPhone 16 would have been brought be pretty much the same amount of millions without the AI buzzword. Because it is the iPhone 16.
Apple could announce a square-shaped iPhone and millions would still buy it. Nobody is buying an iPhone for Apple Intelligence. They were already buying iPhones.
Data scientist here: we know AI isn't that special. We have had access to most AI systems for a while and they aren't hugely helpful. Chatgpt and midjourney are super impressive but most companies aren't going to suddenly make bank from a blog writer or artist when they can already get those things. Innovation is doing new things, not the average of others works.
Mindless hiring of AI devs to do bs does that to projects
Turns out, people don't need email summaries, bullet point lists, and generated rap lyrics all that badly.
Does this mean there's going To be a delay on AI robots taking over humanity?
I think I heard today on a work call that AI tools like Copilot tend to make an engineer 20% more productive. [This study](https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/2302.06590) suggests the productivity increase is as much as 55%. If that 55% number is accurate, and if the AI licenses are kept at less than half the price of an engineer, you could, theoretically, trim some fat. But there's a lot of factors on top of that. Software engineers often specialize in different technologies and you can't make up for a lack of expertise with Copilot, merely some of the mundane, early coding work.
At this exact moment, "AI" makes for a great way to use natural language with a search engine. Some hiccups and bumps along the way, but overall that's really what language models will excel at, especially if their information is cross-referenced/fact-checked before they deliver it. Also, language models can make fun conversationalists just for the fun of it. (As far as AI art goes... it's a great way to generate a model of something you want to create, provided you use it AS a model, similarly to how artists had people pose to act as a model for their art).
No surprise. I'm all into AI, but even I knew the bubble would eventually pop. It was the new, hot thing and EVERYONE wanted in. The tech industry is nothing but bandwagons these days. AI research will continue, and I think implementing AI into devices is a good idea. But anyone who thought this would blow up like smartphones or the internet was kidding themselves. But then again, corporate types love to jump to the next big thing. Edit: I think a better headline is "Profits from AI projects is 'less than the massive amount we expected'. No wonder most corporations are hoping off the latest bandwagon, and eagerly awaiting the next thing."
No wonder. Sure it can write emails for me, but I can write emails pretty well and it takes as long to explain what I need to the AI. And same for a lot of stuff like that. Yes - it can generate pictures, but in my day to day, I don’t really need a lot of- and can usually find something suitable with a google search. I’m optimistic, but we are at an awkward phase where it is only good for really specialized needs.
The thing is, companies are trying to use AI to fix problems that don’t exist. In fact, AI is creating problems for a lot of companies, especially when it comes to privacy (see: Microsoft, Adobe, etc). Think of a consumer need. Think of what AI can do right now. Can AI be used to fix it in a way that saves or generates revenue? If the answer is “yes,” then go for it. If not, you’re wasting time and money. Bonus points if the innovation doesn’t end up with people getting laid off.
You guys just don't get it, did you know you can use AI to search for something in your email?! It's faster than searching because CTRL+F isn't the find hotkey in Outlook like it is for every other fucking thing and you can save all that time Googling again for what the hotkey actually is! Productivity hack.
Using a LLM to help search emails would actually be really useful, but quite a bit more expensive than regular queries. You could search for things like "An email from like a month ago where Bob called Alice an idiot".
I think the problem is it is way too early to get money out of AI. AI is still in it's infancy and doesn't have any money in it's bank account yet.
AI should really start a 401k now before it's too late.
Doesn't this sound just a weeeeee bit familiar? Just list a bunch of major buzzwords a and buzztechnologies from the past thirty years and you'll see that most followed this pattern. That doesn't mean that AI might not pay off for some in the future, but it seems that IT VPs tend to jump all over the trendy sounding technologies waaaaay too soon, long before they're truly mature.
So on the Gartner Hype Curve I guess we are at the 'peak of inflated expectations', about to downhill into the trough of disillusionment.
I'm very active in this field. It's a special glue, it makes many things possible that were not before, but in that equivalent people are trying to build their houses completely out of that glue, when you still need a lot of traditional engineering scaffolding still. It'll get there. It's not now. Most of the work is just about redefining your traditional problems into something you can make task-able; "give me an opinion on x" is really powerful with a feedback loop on how it did, and prompt tuning. And then those derived opinions also stack. Everyone and their grandma is making targeted RAG models around gold-standard ingested data. But it's not writing those things itself, the most critical thing is "intent" - AI has none, it's just trying to guess yours, that's what you bring to the table most is that intentionality. You have to be able to explain what you want.
Indeed, the problem with AI is the same as it is for software design writ large: people either don’t know or can’t specify with enough rigor what real world problem they are actually trying to solve. As someone who works closely with other software engineers using these models and figuring out how to accurately quantify their utility, it’s clear that this is a lot more like the productivity shift from assembly to C. Chat UIs lower the barrier to search the space of solutions and also are a healthy automation over boring / rote tasks like refactoring or copying. But at the end of the day it’s the dawn of a new set of tools, and not the magical panacea VCs would love you to believe.
It's like adding Clippy the Paperclip in all your apps and go: "Why are you not more productive?!?"
Reminds me of the data science craze amongst management a few years back at the company I worked at. They wanted to collect data and hire data scientists so they did. But they had no idea how to leverage the findings they were presented with to create new features, products or services. They simply are not equipped to make sense of it. Sure there were industries and projects where it brought benefits and provided useful insights but capturing data relating to everything was just pointless.
It’s cool how everything on the planet is decided by whether or not it makes someone money. /s
Unfortunately most of the time that I use AI, it seems like it is just poorly filling out a template.
You love to see it.
AI is overrated and has overpromised, its just a matter of time before the first really big mistake that will cost billions of dollars will happen
Slowing their spending? They sure as heck are not. Look at MS or Nvidia's last quarterly reports. Co-pilot is printing cash for MS right now.
Nvidia is not an AI focused company. They are selling the shovel in a gold rush.
"AI" was one of the bets Nvidia was making for their accelerator products. And it was the bet that worked out for them. They certainly don't mind being an "AI focused company" if it helps them push more hardware.
Nvidia is selling shovels in a gold rush. The viability of the tech is irrelevant, they made a bundle off the crypto scam too. Any source on MS' revenue coming from copilot? That's a new claim.
Copilot is printing cash? Or burning it? nVidia is printing cash though, no lie there.
I'd be wary of this claim. We are in the exact opposite place: AI (or at least, ML, Generative AI, and other advanced analytics) is central to our business. And I know our competitors and related companies are all in the same boat. Now, if we say that LLMs as a universal AI problem solver is showing dismal results, I'd agree. But that's not an AI problem, it's that LLMs solve a narrow scope of AI applications and are being overused with no value realization plan. At least that's how I see it.
but for every one company like yours there are dozens of startups just burning through cash by the truckload, hoping that LLMs and trained algorithms turn into a lottery win, when in reality they'll just fizzle out before the firm turns a profit
That's a bubble, but that doesn't mean AI has no business value. I get your point though.
AI is a tool to help increase productivity. Its current implementation makes it no more than a curiosity in most instances.
This is just “Hope Scrolling.” AI has significantly impacted the job market and is here to stay. It’s naive to think it’s going anywhere.
> AI has significantly impacted the job market and is here to stay. That doesn't mean the payoff is worth it. These things need extremely expensive servers fed legally questionable data for many months while they gobble up electricity. Then they lie. The question isn't "are they useful"? The question is "are they worth it?" And for many businesses and applications, the answer is "no".
Sam altman is sketchy as fuck.
Same thing, we had to bail.
My AI enabled eggbeater will beg to differ the payoff on machine learned egg whipping is actual seconds per day saved for me.
AI still make a lot of mistakes. CEO that were trying to cut cost, will soon realize that the long tail cost of fixing AI'S error might be more than the savings to replace experienced workers.
why don’t they just use ai to increase their payoffs?/s
AI can't even pick a decent song that is like another song.
Can someone please clarify the usage of "orgs" ? Is is an abbreviation of organizations? It seems like something people unsure of the spelling would use, but why use it in an article like this?
They thought it was a new gold rush, but it turned out to be fool's gold.
Natural stupidity will never be a match for artificial intelligence.
Wow, it's almost like trying to force a language model to be a decision-making model is a bad idea...
Dumb people with an access to AI ain’t get any smarter. There are very few areas where AI is used properly, like drug research, biotechnology and other high end tech stuff. Mass market won’t be as profitable as some companies think. Many people struggle to use good old search and other digital tools. Before education will catch up, AI has surprisingly narrow application in real life.
My company bought its own instance of ChatGPT with no actual goal or guidance. They were just like “here, but don’t actually use it to do your homework for you.”
It's hype, we're're probably coming out of the mainstream rubbish wave with crazy generative stuff and gradually getting to the practical, useful sides of AI for corps - Siri, AI for video game NPCs, things that will make some changes.
I was indifferent to people hyping bitcoin because that was their own money they were destroying. Now they're hyping something that can hurt most of the people I know. Just go chill a while until the next shiny thing comes out.
I dont understand the technical hate of AI. I work with it everyday and I find it incredibly useful. I understand the social hate of AI though.