Comment by AlienRobot
1 year ago
>iPhone fundamentally redefined what a cellphone and a portable computer could be, as did the iPad, creating entirely new consumer and business use cases almost immediately. >So, what exactly has generative AI actually done? Where are the products? No, really, where are they? What's the product you use every day, or week, that uses generative AI, that truly changes your life? If generative AI disappeared tomorrow — assuming you are not somebody who actively builds using it — would your life materially change?
I think ChatGPT and similar generative AI did fundamentally redefine what software could be. Everyone rushed to implement generative AI into every software. Even MS Paint has AI now. Before this, the idea that you would have it was unthinkable.
If it doesn't make any money, that's a separate issue.
>If generative AI disappeared tomorrow — assuming you are not somebody who actively builds using it — would your life materially change?
To put it in another way, you could live without the ability to drag and drop, but that doesn't mean it hasn't redefined user interfaces.
My concern is when you've implemented it and rely on it and then the company providing the service pulls a "Google" and deprecates the project. I haven't seen that mentioned in any of the comments.
This is the same issue that would happen with any closed source software, and why the push for fully open source or at least "semi" open source models (which provide the weights but not the training data). If you are critically dependent on software that can just disappear for reasons out of your control, you're beholden to its developers.
On the flip side I feel that this is the big problem with monetizing AI. AI is already bad enough in that its output is practically always untrusted output, so any customer-facing application of AI requires a second AI to make sure the first AI didn't output anything improper to consumers or even children (because parents are okay with an app that just tells their children randomly generated text, apparently).
It would be a little better if you had control over the model. But without a intellectual property rights over the model, what is the AI company even selling? A GUI? So anyone can just copy and paste the model, skip all the training costs, and just sell a react frontend for the model trained for billions of dollars?
It feels like you can't make money from training the AI in a way that makes sense for customers, but you can make money from selling the AI that someone else trained by selling access to it for non-technical users.