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Comment by fy20

1 day ago

Those are all techbical limitations that will be solved with time. In 5 years I would be surprised if we do NOT have an AI as smart as today's frontier models, that runs completely locally, and has a real time voice interface.

I'm not a Treky but I think Star Trek has the right interface here. For basic operations you just use voice and tell it your intent or what you need to know "Computer, what's the fastest route for me to get home?". "Madison is fastest right now, it's 3 minutes faster than Lake, it traffic is building up".

This isn't just whatever Waze gives you, it knows about your constraints and preferences. So you need to program that somehow. Imagine taking it one step further "Computer, what's the fastest route to pickup my daughter and get home?" or even it just responding to the first prompt "Take Roosevelt, and today you need to pickup your daughter from volleyball".

In Star Trek they often do this when they create "simulations". They tell the computer constraints and then it refines it. No writing programs, but effectively that's what you are doing but with the natural language voice interface.

"Computer let's create a simulation to figure out the fastest way for me to get home. I want to take a route along the expressway and know whether to get off at Roosevelt, Madison, or Lake. I need to pickup my daughter when she has volleyball." You don't need to repeat the whole instruction each time, and behind the scenes it is probably turning it into some deterministic code, so next time you trigger that program it's not going to hallucinate some nonsense.

16 comments

fy20

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torginus  12 hours ago

Afair Star Trek AI is more like 'Ok Google', and generally doesn't really seem like very agentic, more like a computer with a voice interface, able to execute simple commands and answer simple questions.

  • xg15  4 hours ago

    I think Star Trek is interesting in that "AI" was explored so often by so many different writers that you have the entire spectrum of agency or sophistication levels by now - the ship's computer at one end, then the Holodeck characters, Data and eventually the Borg at the other end...

xg15  17 hours ago

And yet, even on Star Trek we can see people typing things into screens or onto pads. The helmsman doesn't fly the ship by talking to the computer.

My point is that text-based interfaces - and voice is just a convenience around text - are not the best interfaces for a lot of tasks.

vinyl7  18 hours ago

We live in a "capitalist" society. Moats will be built, regulations will be enacted to ensure the American Corporation controls the market segment. No one has been able to unseat Amazon, no one has been able to unseat Google, no one has been able to unseat Microsoft, no one has been able to seat Twitter, Facebook, etc. The modern market is segments that are controlled by a single entity. There will be no local models.

skydhash  21 hours ago

> "Computer let's create a simulation to figure out the fastest way for me to get home. I want to take a route along the expressway and know whether to get off at Roosevelt, Madison, or Lake. I need to pickup my daughter when she has volleyball."

Imagine saying that to a random dude with a map and that should give you a good idea on how many info you're leaving out. You can say that the AI will infere those but that seems to be the common fallacy of AI enjoyers: They're always assuming the AI will magically find out the missing information from their prompt somehow.

I have Organic Maps installed on my phone and within a few minutes (faster than my car warming up) I can set a multi stop route (you can bookmark places). Training a random user to use such apps is also equally fast. The same happens with various pro tools: once trained, a user can be very fast with them.

  • Xirdus  19 hours ago

    > I have Organic Maps installed on my phone and within a few minutes (faster than my car warming up) I can set a multi stop route (you can bookmark places).

    Wow that's slow. I can do the same in Google Maps in seconds. Can you tell me what I'm missing? I'm definitely missing something.