What problem is AI going to solve? This question is being carefully avoided for some reason, and many seem to believe that AI is like air or water, which is good by itself.
Fraud detection and prevention
Personalization and recommendation systems
Autonomous vehicles
Spam filters
Smart navigation systems
Inventory management
System control in industrial processes
Increasing crop yields in agriculture
All sorts of use cases in finance
Diagnosis in healthcare
Image and sound intelligent upscaling
etc etc etc
These are all real use cases of AI which are in place already.
Those are all real applications now. For example you might not think some autonomous vehicles are very good but they do exist and are in production.
If you want companies that have already chosen to apply AI to their work, consider Google, Facebook, and Tesla.
Superintelligence can solve all the things we’re struggling to solve. All human diseases, Earth being destroyed, fundamental questions about the universe, etc., etc. etc., etc. Worth pursuing?
I had a good example recently and I'll quote it again:
People seriously using the "Please write an expression for me which adds 2 and 2" prompt in order to get the "2+2" expression they need – advocating that they got it with magical efficiency
In a sense, we kind of already are already, since out internet feed is (for most apps with recommendation algorithms) just spoonfed to us, rather than the product of our own search.
To be honest, I wish the progress will stop and that AGI won't happen. That possibility scares me.
Object recognition is AI. A decade ago we were piss poor at Object recog, today labeling AI is at human level. Being able to recognize your environment is the first step in navigating it effectively.
Engineering is about applying the science to real world problems.
We’re mostly in the science phase right now.
It seems to me that you used to have to work for years to create a product and prove it’s worth in the market place and only then could you convince some wealthy person to back you to make it into a product and eventually a valuable company because the commercial viability was so glaringly obvious. Thomas Edison, Chester Carlson, etc.
But now it seems that has been turned on its head. Assemble a group of brilliant people, back them with a giant company with a highly respected CEO, and wait for success and product market fit to inevitably arrive.
I hate to sound like a downer but it just seems very odd for so many people to talk about how transformative a company is without much evidence that the products are really being used at scale. And the way opportunists like Benioff have piled on to enhance the perceived value of their own products with their own spins feels off. In fact many have openly discussed that Nvidia’s future growth relies on GPT finding product market fit at scale or they will end up with massive supply overhang which would actually cause costs of AI research to plummet, opening the door for many others to work on it. So many are already seemingly aware that commercial viability is still TBD.
I believe all this is likely a product of a period of a string of successful products starting with the iPhone, then Amazon’s transformation of shipping then AWS, etc. Whereas everyone used to be skeptical by nature, it seems now we’re in an age of extreme credulity. Everyone wants to believe in every new storyline.
And I want to be clear that I’m not suggesting that there aren’t some useful applications of GPT. But the value of products should be self evident and consumption of them should flow naturally from demand. This all just feels backwards to me. Success is assumed straight away and historically that tends to coincide with bubbles and precede a pretty nasty crash in sentiment. I’d love to be proven wrong.
like people used to be able to travel before cars as well, cars didn't solve a new problem and the world didn't have any demand for them too. but once they became available, regardless of whether someone knows it or not, the whole world needed cars. now the car builders control the demand because they can't instantly scale up the supply
AI is similar to that but people can scale it pretty quickly to the whole world, there are a number of efficiency problems being solved in the world using AI. a couple of years ago I had to research and read atleast 1 hour worth of content to find out the information that I needed, google was good but still it required 1 hour. now its hardly a couple of minutes with chatgpt in many cases.
efficiency problems usually don't manifest in demand, people adapt to the status quo
Today, though, I see companies like Tesla and OpenAI and cryptocurrencies gain gigantic enthusiastic followings without a whole lot of evidence of massive adoption and product/market fit. It’s pretty clear that underlying the enthusiasm is an economic interest in their success. That doesn’t alone negate the validity but without the adoption being self evident it’s very difficult to set aside my skepticism.
I remember walking down the magnificent mile in Chicago and going into an Apple Store for the first time and seeing and touching an early iPod nano. I knew right away that the device was an amazing leap forward. I of course didn’t predict the iPhone and Apple becoming today’s apple but I remember the “wow” factor that so many of these newer products lack. Again, I sincerely hope to be proven wrong here as I want better products!