Comment by alfalfasprout
3 days ago
I'm not sure if this post is ragebait or not but I'll bite...
If anything, HN is in general very much on the LLM hype train. The contrarian takes tend to be from more experienced folks working on difficult problems that very much see the fundamental flaws in how we're talking about AI.
> Many will argue that it's all fake, that it's all artificial hype to prop of VC evaluations, etc. They literally will see the billions in revenue as not real
That's not what people are saying. They're noting that revenue is meaningless in the absence of looking at cost. And it's true, investor money is propping up extremely costly ventures in AI. These services operate at a substantial loss. The only way they can hope to survive is through promising future pricing power by promising they can one day (the proverbial next week) replace human labor.
> same with all the real people upskilled via LLM's in ways that are entirely unique to the utility of AI.
Again, no one really denies that LLMs can be useful in learning.
This all feels like a strawman-- it's important to approach these topics with nuance.
I was talking to a friend today about where AI would actually be useful in my personal life, but it would require much higher reliability.
This is very basic stuff, not rewriting a codebase, creating a video game from text prompt or generating imagery.
Simply - I would like to be able to verbally prompt my phone something like "make sure the lights and AC are set to I will be comfortable when I get home, follow up with that plumber if they haven't gotten back to us, place my usual grocery order plus add some berries plus anything my wife put on our shared grocery list, and schedule a haircut for the end of next week some time after 5pm".
Basically 15-30min of daily stupid personal time sucks that can all be accomplished via smartphone.
Given the promise of IoT, smart home, LLMs, voice assistants, etc.. this should be possible.
This would require it having access to my calendar, location, ability to navigate apps on my phone, read/send email/text, and spend money. Given the current state of the tools, even if there is a 0.1% chance it changes my contact card photo to Hitler, replies to an email from my boss with an insult, purchases $100,000 in bananas, or sets the thermostats to 99F.. then I couldn't imagine giving an LLM access to all those things.
Are we 3 months, 5 years, or never away from that being achievable? These feel like the kind of things previous voice assistants promised 10 years ago.