Comment by jrflo
1 day ago
I don't think 99% of people have any application for AI as it is today short of personal assistants. But, if we can have recursively improving systems for that 1% of people that are responsible for scientific and technological innovations, that's going to be transformative for everyone.
I'll assert that 99% of people don't have any application for personal assistants, outside of work (perhaps). Most of us aren't so buried in personal obligations that the value of a half-assed "assistant" (which might violate our privacy) is worth the tradeoff in complexity or security.
The pitches for Dots, Grok Bot, etc., have been spectacularly uncompelling for me as a civilian. I don't need or want a bot to book my flights or read my inbox. I'm not so busy that these things have a value high enough to be worth the effort.
As a worker or an entrepreneur...maybe. Depends on the task, and how many other people were flinging slop at me on a daily basis. I could see the value of a calendar bot, or an expense reporting bot or a bullshit paperwork bot or a slop-return (slop jai alai?) bot, but there's no way in the world I'd give a bot access to the information necessary to, say, do my personal taxes.
Well, you can't run a personal AI assistant with 640k of memory.
i'd argue any parent, especially of a young child, could use 20 personal assistants lol. So that's just false. There's SO many appointments to keep track of in baby's first year of life, and that's if you have a healthy baby.
And once they start school there's an endless amount of deadlines and "reminders". A personal assistant that can automatically keep your reminders + calendar up to date based on your inbox would be very nice.
It gets even more fun if you have an aging parent at the same time as you have young kids. Then you get double the appointments to scheduled, coordinate and keep track of.
So when you say people don't need a personal assistant, i feel like you're living on a different planet. I suppose when i was single things were more "simple". Your mileage may vary of course...
> I'd argue any parent, especially of a young child, could use 20 personal assistants lol. So that's just false. There's SO many appointments to keep track of in baby's first year of life, and that's if you have a healthy baby.
I understand the need. I have a calendar. I put appointments in it. It provides alerts. What value does having a lossy/inaccurate/fragile robot in the middle give me? Data entry?
Now look...if I were in a position of power with literally everyone in my life, and I could somehow justify the social cost of requiring that they interact with a robot to negotiate demands on my time (the actual hard part), then maybe there would be additional value. Some people can do this! I'm sure one must deal with Mark Zuckerberg's PA to schedule his time [1]. It is very nice indeed when you are the kind of person who can defer your supplicants to a representative who manages the hoi polloi for you. If you can delegate these irritations to a robot, well, so much the better, I suppose.
If I tried this, as not-Mark-Zuckerberg, I would be what normal people refer to as "an asshole". I would also like to see you try this with your child's teacher, or the PTA, or doctor, or...
The response you will receive, an alarmingly high percentage of the time, will rhyme with "buck off". This stuff reminds me a lot of how valley folks keep trying to push spy glasses on the proles (silly normies never understand the genius of that technology, either...)
> And once they start school there's an endless amount of deadlines and "reminders". A personal assistant that can automatically keep your reminders + calendar up to date based on your inbox would be very nice.
Let me introduce you to...Gmail, from like, ten years ago. It looks for appointments in my mail and put them in my calendar. Somewhat to the point, it is often wrong, requiring more work to correct than it would to just enter the data myself.
[1] Somehow I doubt his wife is in this group.
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What countless appoinemts with a baby? It is genuine question I have kids and the regular checkups were not all that difficult to track.
And with school, this is issue if your kid struggles a lot, maybe. But otherwise they track that stuff through school portal or notes.
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I have been kind of disappointed by AI science-wise. I was anticipating more advancement. Experiments do take time, so I suppose they could be pending.
AI really struggles with "collision with reality". Computers suck at modeling the real world in a detailed enough way to make scientific progress, aside from small niches like drug discovery where you have a very well scoped problem. If any part of the try something -> test it -> look at the results loop requires hitting the real world, AI is going to struggle.
On the other hand, the areas where it doesn't need to hit the real world, progress is absolutely flying. I would not be surprised if AI is superhuman in math and physics in a year, considering we went from homework helper to IMO Gold to Millennium problem solving in a couple years time. I think we'll start to see more meaningful scientific progress in maybe 2-3 years when scientists have access to an oracle that can formulate theories and direct real-world research better than a human can.
I agree and I think the question is then, how much economically valuable work exists in a closed world? My hunch is less than people think. Finance can't rely on LLMs because its adversarial we can't all be listening to the same oracle and evidence of LLMs being any good at trading are nil. And then lawyers, as per usual, will simply regulate their job security into existence. Of course, AI feels amazing to Silicon Valley / Big Tech, software is the product. And often its software you sell to other people making software. But outside of that? Useful but lots of landmines.
People have to come to grips with the possibility that a technology can be extremely impressive but be a bust in utility. I'm not saying that's what AI is, I'm saying that nobody actually knows.