SaraTonin

Okay, so you can’t conceive of the idea of an email that it’s important that you don’t miss.

Let’s go with what Apple sold Apple Intelligence on, shall we? You say to Siri “what time do I need to pick my mother up from the airport?” and Siri coombs through your messages for the flight time, checks the time of arrival from the airline’s website, accesses maps to get journey time accounting for local traffic, and tells you when you need to leave.

With LLMs, absolutely none of those steps can be trusted. You have to check each one yourself. Because if they’re wrong, then the output is wrong. And it’s important that the output is right. And if you have to check the input of every step, then what do you save by having Siri do it in the first place? It’s actually taking you more time than it would have to do everything yourself.

AI assistants are being sold as saving you time and taking meaningless busywork away from you. In some applications, like writing easy, boring code, or crunching more data than a human could in a very short time frame, they are. But for the applications they’re being sold on for phones? Not without being reliable. Which they can’t be, because of their architecture.

I don’t know if heads are actually going to roll, but the guy who was in charge of the Vision Pro is now in charge of Siri.

If you’re on old reddit you don’t even see notifications for chat

There’s a guy in the news at the moment who has started a GoFundMe for a legal defence for his wife who has been deported. Says he doesn’t regret his vote for Trump.

The EV market is crashing. If you exclude Tesla from the figures, the EV market is up 13%.

It doesn’t seem like you’re really replying to what i wrote.

I’m sure both people who use Bing are furious

The fact that this is even a real headline should trouble everybody. I know the answer, but the question still is:” what kind of a state is the USA in where someone even feels the need to write this, rather than it being an assumed norm?”

Three points. Firstly, in the 1950s, CEOs earned around 20 times what the lowest-paid employee did (including things like bonuses, shares, etc). Now the average is around 400, but can be as high as 2,000.

Secondly, in the US in the 1950s the highest tax band was 91%. Today it’s 37%.

Both these things are perfectly sustainable. And all that’s working under the false premise that there aren’t numerous tax loopholes available to the rich but not the poor.

Thirdly, there’s a tonne of research into what best stimulates economies, but it’s often dismissed because it doesn’t favour the rich. If you give money to the poor, they will spend it in their local communities. Then that money gets spent again, and again, and again, getting taxed each time. IIRC, for every dollar given to someone poor the government itself gets something like a dollar fifty back. Because the money just keeps circulating.

Give money to the rich, though, and what happens? They hoard it, or they spend it abroad. It drains money from the country, either by taking it out of circulation, or by taking it out of the country entirely.

I’m not sure we’re disagreeing very much, really.

My main point WRT “kinda” is that there are a tonne of applications that 99% isn’t good enough for.

For example, one use that all the big players in the phone world seem to be pushing ATM is That of sorting your emails for you. If you rely on that and it classifies an important email as unimportant so you miss it, then that’s actually a useless feature. Either you have to check all your emails manually yourself, in which case it’s quicker to just do that in the first place and the AI offers no value, or you rely on it and end up missing something that it es important you didn’t miss.

And it doesn’t matter if it gets it wrong one time in a hundred, that one time is enough to completely negate all potential positives of the feature.

As you say, 100% isn’t really possible.

I think where it’s useful is for things like analysing medical data and helping coders who know what they’re doing with their work. In terms of search it’s also good at “what’s the name of that thing that’s kinda like this?”-type queries. Kind of the opposite of traditional search engines where you’re trying to find out information about a specific thing, where i think non-Google engines are still better.

I’m not saying they don’t have applications. But the idea of them being a one size fits all solution to everything is something being sold to VC investors and shareholders.

As you say - the issue is accuracy. And, as you also say - that’s not what these things do, and instead they make predictions about what comes next and present that confidently. Hallucinations aren’t errors, they’re what they were built to do.

If you want something which can set an alarm for you or find search results then something that responds to set inputs correctly 100% of the time is better than something more natural-seeming which is right 99%of the time.

Maybe along the line there will be a new approach, but what is currently branded as AI is never going to be what it’s being sold as.

Also, what’s the betting that they were very interested in “debates” before the negative consequences affected them directly?