Study shows that tacking the “AI” label on products may drive people away
cnn.com
cnn.com
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41126685
This makes sense if you ignore every single example of AI-based features popping up all over consumer-facing services
That being said, GP has made the implicit assumption that they can't market it to investors as AI and to consumers as something else, and if investor interest in AI doesn't ebb, then I expect they will find a way to do just that.
How would you pitch a feature with erratic behavior?
To your second question, I believe a popular adjective might be 'invigorating'.
As "creative", "diverse", and "enriching". ;)
"the AI browser".
So yes I do see it in marketing.
what’s the next big bubble?
I think everybody remember that all but a few addicts got quickly bored of second life in the mid 00's and it was not worth trying a second time.
That's harsh, dude! ;-)
Tablets: These should be revolutionary. In practice, they're not, and I'm trying to sort out why.
The biggest gripe is that there's no single use for which a tablet is a preferred option, other than as an e-book reader, and numerous others for which it is distinctly less-than-optimal, with smaller smart (or "dumb") phones being better for on-the-go comms, and full-featured laptops or notebooks being preferably for virtually all compute applications.
I'd made that case in a Diaspora* post a few years back: <https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/880e5c403edb013918e100...>.
The most detailed critique is in this comment to that thread, with a (sorry, poorly-rendering at most screen-widths) table:
<https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/880e5c403edb013918e100...>
I've used tablets for about a decade now (first an Android Samsung device, 3+ years on an Onyx BOOX e-ink ebook-reader, though it's really an Android tablet), and my assessment of them as less-than-serious compute devices remains, even with the addition of an external keyboard and Termux (a Linux-on-Android environment). There are simply too many compromises from the Android environment. And everything I've seen about iOS suggests that they would be worse as a general-compute device, despite some clear wins over Android/Google/Samsung elsewhere.
I'm not sure if tablets can break through or not. I'm leaning increasingly to a number of independent devices: tablet (for ebooks and podcasts), laptop (for real work), a small phone, preferably feature, possibly something like the Light Phone, independent image/video and audio capture (dedicated camera, point-and-shoot or DSLR, handheld audio recorder, see NYT's reviews: <https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/the-best-voice-re...> ... and note that reporters make heavy use of such equipment). At this point I'm not even sure I want a general-purpose phone of any sort given the heavy abuse of that channel (smishing / robocalls / fraud / harassment), though a wide-spread alternative doesn't seem to have emerged yet.
I hope EU will make this illegal if it isnt yet, they seem to be the only real power these days not giving a fuck about revenues of corporations in the first place when deciding stuff.
But I suppose you could view that as a neural network with a single neuron.
Maybe the real AI was the friends we made along the way.
-- https://soyacincau.com/2024/05/15/samsung-bespoke-ai-laundry...
If you can't defeat the people talking about the AI bubble, join them?
It's so Samsung. Back when Internet of Things was a thing, I went to an IoT meeting in SF where one of the speakers was from Samsung. They had a refrigerator with a tablet built into the door. The tablet and refrigerator shared nothing but power, and cost more than a comparable refrigerator and tablet separately. I asked the speaker why they built this, and was told that there's a fraction of the market that likes to show off their kitchens who will buy this stuff.
One problem... it only showed 3 shelves on the fridge side. You couldn't PTZ the camera around the entire fridge. No way to see the stuff stored in the door. No way to check the freezer, etc. Most reviewers concluded it was practically useless.
And if it can't identify the item, it can even ask the user to identify the item ("pasta I made last night") and how long they think it will last.
If it's made by a committee of idiots, it will just repeatedly say "Cannot identify item. Please name this item."... if it's actually good it will just have different beep tones for different states (Beep A: "All good", beep B: "Can't identify item", beep C: "Can't see expiration date", etc)
For corporations I’m sure they like whatever cash they squeeze out of whatever percent of people have this “get the most expensive offering” strategy but it seems likely the end goal is more about gradually normalizing more expensive offerings at all levels. After you get there, you can start removing useful things that justified cost originally (like headphone jacks) to push whatever else people now need (ear buds). Smart phones are the obvious example of this sort of thing, where major carriers will basically force customers to get use either the latest iPhone or android, and then act like your existing phone is a potato and you must be crazy to think that they could make it ring.
Not just a push to require smart phones but the latest ridiculously large one with features no one cares about, at a price point that it becomes a major investment for many households, and now needs a payment plan. whereas logic,progress and naive expectations of capitalism would suggest that such things would be getting cheaper, and represent a *smaller* chunk of your monthly wages.
Fix photos?
Oh walstreet cares about ai. What’s our ai plan. Internal team, we are buying a new AI dev product that’ll reduce headcount needs by 10%. Csuite sounds great!
Every ad break included ads for Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, and Salesforce Einstein.
We are in a full on AI product marketing cycle.
I mean, some of it may be about getting end-users to pay for AI-thingies, but running the ads can also be seen as investor-posturing even if if it doesn't say "buy our stock", and there may be a corporate goal of boosting the (free) usage-numbers in order to present that to investors, etc.
Likewise, everybody and their dog has ChatGPT installed and think of AI as this magical thing that's gonna change the world, so they are potential indirect customers.
I then tweak the example to suit my needs exactly.
But it takes away only a small amount of busy work. It's not as helpful as AI proponents make you believe.
It’s a fraction of a percent of the population that have used it.
The main purpose of Big Pharma's saturation advertising spend on TV networks is the buying of influence with those networks - not marketing, secondary or otherwise.
I say this with the utmost respect and concern for my friends, family, and neighbors:
This attitude is part of the reason why the rust belt exists - filled with towns and cities that are a shell of their former selves. Areas of constant economic hardship, endemic drug use, etc.
The two big factories in the town I went to high school in are closed. Needless to say things aren’t going well… Yelling at the TV didn’t do anything to prevent that and it’s not going to do anything to prevent the next wave of it.
It’s harsh, but an important lesson since the beginning of time:
Adapt or die.
Now, I'm not American and not an expert on the Rust Belt, but I'm pretty certain this is not the reason why the Rust Belt exists. Probably rather something to do with corporate greed and greedy politicians.
I agree. Problem is it didn't do anything when they were saying the exact same things that led to the closure or significant job loss of the manufacturing that was the core of these communities:
1) "Hah, my factory job is complicated. The Mexicans, Chinese, Japanese, etc will never figure it out." Racist/xenophobic but said at the time. Even more wrong.
2) Look at robotics. It also took some time for the technology to develop and many of these same people looked at early implementations and thought the exact same thing: "Oh those robots don't really work and they never will". Then their factory jobs became a fraction of the head count with a completely different skill set...
Throughout history this has played out over and over again.
> People have the power to vote with their wallets (and their actual votes), and they should do so.
Key word being /should/. Yet it has been proven time and time again that people regularly vote against their own best economic interests in the ballot box and with their wallets. The same people who laughed at and dismissed the Chinese are going to Wal-Mart everyday and buying goods from (you guessed it) - China. They're also voting for the same corporate-funded politicians.
For many of these people their best option now is working at the large Amazon warehouse down the road where they pick and pack goods largely from (you guessed it again) - China. But even then there just aren't that many of those jobs and as the horror stories reported in the media show they're routinely abused there.
> Now, I'm not American and not an expert on the Rust Belt, but I'm pretty certain this is not the reason why the Rust Belt exists.
Next time you're in the US visiting New York, California, Florida, etc come visit the rust belt in "flyover country" and see just how devastating the effects of this are. I see and live it (to some extent) everyday.
> Probably rather something to do with corporate greed and greedy politicians.
A huge factor and the ultimate root of the problem but back to voting, wallets, etc: in the real world this isn't going anywhere and from what I see it's just getting worse.
My concern comes from seeing the blight and literal deaths in MY community. My concern now is AI is coming for the white collar workforce as well.
Another old adage:
"Don't underestimate your enemy/competition".
The only way to prevent this is to reign in capitalism. Neoliberalism does not work.
> Yet it has been proven time and time again that people regularly vote against their own best economic interests in the ballot box and with their wallets.
Unfortunately, yes. People are strongly influenced by propaganda. Propaganda is often bankrolled by corporations. A good start with be curb lobbyism and make it more transparent.
Maybe. Or (maybe) yelling at the TV is a lot easier (and more visceral) than thinking "Hmm, this whole AI thing just might work out. Maybe I should treat the threat seriously this time just like my dad should have with the Chinese, robots, etc". As I said in my other reply it's generally not a good idea to outright dismiss what is even in the early stages a pretty clear potential threat to your livelihood.
> The markets can adapt also.
This can mean nearly anything and I'm not sure what you're trying to communicate in this context.
You could be out of a job with as little control of the whole situation as those rustbeltians you have such disregard for.
NAFTA and globalism killed the rustbelt. The refusal of auto plant Larry to learn Java didn’t.
When you ship off a persons job in mass this is what happens.
I'll admit I was a bit angry and offended when I first read this. Did you miss the part about how horribly this has affected my friends, family, and neighbors? I say this expressly out of concern and literal, actual love.
Where do you live?
> NAFTA and globalism killed the rustbelt.
As I said in my other reply the generation before this one also outright dismissed the ability for Mexico, China, etc to take their jobs. In any case it certainly wasn't prevented.
> The refusal of auto plant Larry to learn Java didn’t.
Again, as I said in my other reply what little manufacturing is left is a fraction of the jobs with a completely different skill set - CNC programming, etc. While you're off on Java because (frankly) you don't know what you're talking about it's pretty much exactly this.
I think OP referenced Java because it was the hot language of the 90s/early 2000s that people would harp on about studying.
Sort of like how people nowadays go to bootcamps to study JavaScript and Python
I’m not sure what your point is substituting one language for another - you can’t take a guy who’s painted cars his whole life and retool him to “cnc programming” even if the lathes didn’t git moved with the rest of production. The c suite did hit their stock goals tho so at least that is good!
If you’re telling a blue collar worker who’s been laid off “adapt or die” then you have contempt for those very love ones you claim to sympathize with.
This is the economic system you and others choose to support, by your rhetoric if nothing else. The purpose of a system is what it does &c &c
The Rust Belt exists (primarily) because the companies who owned all the big manufacturing in the late 20th century outsourced all of that labor to Asia.
If people who live there have a higher-than-average distrust of big corporate bullshit, it's an effect of being abandoned by them, not the cause of it.
You need to put AI to raise money or appeal to a broad swath of consumers, but educated consumers and enterprise buyers are increasingly rolling their eyes at it.
The “AI” label also indicates the solution is way over complicated and simpler ways to improve the product have been ignored. For instance, Confluence now has an “AI” chatbot. Search is still substantially worse than grep.
Not profits, just stock price. The evidence that anybody who isn't "selling shovels" has made any significant money yet with AI remains thin.
I can't remember if it was Google or Facebook, but in the last earnings season one of them claimed directly that AI has improved their advertising revenue, but the improvement was not terribly out of line from what these companies have been doing for a while (not like suddenly they popped out a revenue triple, it was not obviously out of line with their normal reporting), and I wouldn't be surprised they were doing exactly what I said in my first paragraph. I did not find their claim terribly compelling, even if it was completely true and not just a sop to the stock market. Nobody else is even claiming that AI has increased profits.
I'm sure there's some startups with some profits, maybe even very exciting amounts of profit for a startup, but nothing that would move the needle for established companies. In fact we seem to already be in the consolidation phase for the industry, the startups are starting to go under. If we use that as a timer for where we are in the hype cycle, this is underperforming compared to other bubbles; at this point in the dot com crash, while the sector was heavily overinvested it was also quite obvious to a calm observer not panicking about their portfolio that there was definitely a there there, it just wasn't ready to sustain that much investment. There is so far a lot less there there with AI.
This hype is going to prove disastrous for the entire technology, I fear. If it was treated as a more normal technology, it would improve, it would be experimented with, companies would learn how to use it, failures would be shaken out and successes doubled down on, and in 3-10 years it would be a healthy industry making reliable, good money with a bright future for growth. But the way the stock market went absolutely ape shit, now the bar is, in roughly 6-12 months if AI has not quintupled the profit margin of all of the already-largest companies on Earth, it is a failure, and so are those companies. We've got a lot of people now with all the incentives in the world to blatently lie about their progress because as soon as they are truthful they become personally bankrupt as their stock options tank. Not because of any particular aspect of AI, except that it wasn't a miracle "drop it into any process instantly see quintupled profits", and I'm not inclined to be too annoyed at any technology for failing to be that. And it could take AI down with it. Again. I'd expect the resulting "AI winter" to be relatively short this time because the technology really is becoming promising, but the medium-term prospects for the tech are probably a lot dimmer than they theoretically should be because of this disproportionate frenzy.
[1] https://thomasvilhena.com/2024/06/easy-wins-for-generative-a...
There's still a search for reviews, but I can't find one for Q&A or for both together.
What's the point of working your developers to the bone (as Amazon is famous for doing) if the result is going to be this bad?
I'd really rather have time invested in making the memory footprint smaller again.
Which is an incredibly misguided idea specifically in the context of a developer IDE... I mean I do understand the rationale and value for the job in other contexts. Not so much in this one though.
Very rare example though. As a matter of fact, I couldn't name another one right now.
It analyses the laundry type and size to inform itself on how much detergent to use, analyses the laundry during the wash to know when it is clean enough, monitors the moisture level in the clothes to know when the drying is finished.. it's as if a person is there micromanaging the washing machine.. how is that not an artificial agent?
What is your standard for intelligence?
My washing machine is already better at doing laundry than I am (even if I was in total control of a machine with identical capabilities), why is that not good enough for you?
"Oh sorry, your drum is a little light , consider putting more clothes in to save the environment"
I throw another towel in.
"Oh shucks, drum weight overload, consider removing some clothes from the wash"
The problem with the new ones is that they're too smart for their own good and instead of using their smarts to make my life easier (I don't know what can be easier than the old washing machines where you throw the was inside, with the detergent, turn the program knob and push start, and why we need smart ones) they instead use their smarts to be annoying and require more user input and more steps just to fucking wash clothes.
Worse, it’s changing a washing machine from a standalone device to an internet-connected computer which needs to regularly get software updates. That adds not just cost but increases the odds that something unrelated to the core functionality will break and make the machine unusable.
It also makes them much harder to setup and adds privacy concerns: the last Samsung washing machine I used had an amazingly clunky setup process which required a number of ToS prompts allowing them to resell your data and they insist that you need to grant their app all kinds of permissions on your phone (background location tracking, local network access, Bluetooth scanning, etc.) as part of that process. I am pretty confident that the machine will break before I would ever see a net time savings from not having to measure detergent manually relative to their setup process.
I would also be profoundly unsurprised if they get breached or abuse their data collection practices in some way which would be impossible with a regular standalone device. These features are not being added to satisfy user demand and the real customers don’t care about things like privacy or security unless it costs more than they’re making.
You can try to wow the customer with a bunch of words but it’s all fluff - and everyone is implementing AI now, and usually these “implementations” are ChatGPT with RAG on the docs or something else that everyone’s done before. What you end up getting is only slightly better than typing in chatgpt.com.
If you’ve managed to get something that solves a problem just explain what it does to solve that.
"People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill; they want to buy a quarter-inch hole." - Ted Levitt HBS
Not sure why everyone instantly assumes product teams are not aware of marketings basics. It is consumers driving how the products evolve, not the other way around.
Product teams are often wrong, and A/B tests can lead to inferior long term solutions.
As always, it's best to criticize the idea, not the people.
Nah, speaking for plenty of guys, I'd say we want the drill. Maybe with an impact hammer too, of we can afford it. :)
Ah, well, there you run into a problem. Generally consumer ‘AI’ is pointless, and is there only because the markets are (or at least were; there are some indications that this may be ending) fixated on AI.
Most blatant example I've seen is Logitech's AI mouse.
AI is the same thing. It's a means to an end. You need to be talking about what you deliver with it. Not about how you deliver it.
In the case of CNN that hosts this article, a lot of their content probably is at this point passing through some LLMs at this point. They don't have to advertise that of course. If they do their job right, you barely notice this. Arguably, they should be doing a lot more with AI than they are doing already. The news business is fiercely competitive. Margins are small, and they have to produce more content with fewer people. LLMs can help them do that.
Having an app is "fuck you, i don't want to install another app" these days...
My mother has total disdain for “social media users” yet spends six hours a day on Facebook. She doesn’t see it as social media. “It’s more of a virtual parlour”
So yeah. People don’t know what the hell they want or are talking about.
What's social media today anyway? I've been told the likes of whatsapp or discord are also social media. But they're just chat apps to me because you use them to chat with other people and they don't have automated systems that cram cat pictures down your throat.
Yes they do. It is your aunt who is crazy about cats. Nearly every family has one.
There seem to be some neo-cyberpunk LARPers taking interest in stuff like Usenet and IRC for kewl points. I wonder if these are also "social media".
Of course, it doesn't help that pretty much everyone has been saying "social media" for years when they almost always meant "social networking".
Wow. Has everything gone full circle again already? I thought we were all still complaining about the death of the web and the app-ocracy.
The "apps" i'm talking about are just the web site packed into a crap and resource hungry web view...
i guess with time developers will also get to make and train inhouse AI models if in future it gets more affordable
I agree with a lot of the siblings though: "AI" features themselves are so often seemingly just pushed on users, and it doesn't look like they were thought through, well implemented or tested.
My main annoyance with this these days is that absolutely every app and device seems to have decided they need to push an "assistant" on me. I personally hate the assistant UX, and I wish I didn't have to close so many banners for apps to leave me alone with that. I get that they're trying to show their investors that their "AI features" get "engagement", but it seems... desperate.
Even if they don't call it "AI", but just by the value it supposedly provides (e.g. "assistant"), it still annoys me quite a bit. I wonder how other consumers (especially non-technical people) feel about that part. TFA doesn't really seem to go into it.
This is true, but AI is new enough tech that it is reasonable to say "this thing wasn't possible to build three years ago, now it is possible to build, and we built it!". That is definitely a good pitch to investors, and in some cases, directly to customers.
That is not something you can say about mobile apps - like you said, it's not a distinguishing factor any more. But it is a factor for AI, in some situations.
And some companies are using it to deliver real value. Adobe has been killing it with AI features. I switched back to Lightroom and Photoshop specifically for the new automasking, generative AI fill and such.
The average person’s experience with “AI” is Siri telling them “I found this on the web” as a response to half of their questions. Or some streaming service suggesting a show they don’t want to watch. Or the Will Smith spaghetti meme.
People who understand LLMs are on average fairly excited about what is happening recently. But those who don’t know what LLM stands for are skeptical about why anything today is going to be better than the last 20 years of snake oil “AI”.
What passes for AI these days is a fun toy, sometimes a useful one, but it isn't anything I want to have to depend on.
But there's a lot more substance behind AI than NFTs. As much as the hype? Maybe not. More than 0 (NFTs had 0 substance)? Very much so.
I'm more hype-adverse than the next guy, but I've gotten value from AI (just plain old ChatGPT) recently as I've deep-dived into a new area. It's kinda like having a tutor in the room to whom I ask questions as they occur to me. My "tutor" isn't perfect, but neither are humans, Google, or the internet.
So I wouldn't categorize this as "no substance". There is a lot of substance here, even if it's not quite as much as the marketeers are selling.
But what really shocked me, was when people on the client side are asking suppliers if they're not working on anything AI-based, since everyone is doing it. But those people did always give me the vibe you're talking about: "they don't know what to do and are desperate".
I guess my point is that maybe, at least some of the time, marketers aren't that stupid.
Anyway, when you start asking what AI is doing there, you'll realize it's just a simple sensor reading and thresholding (which AI is all about)
I can't imagine a product with true AI - what is true AI? :)
It it's a "real AI" (and by that i mean ChatGPT) it means that not more than a year later it will need a subscription to work.
But, you're right. It's the best and clearest bet you can bet on. you can't lose:
Later it will need a subscription.
But also, "normal ML" is also a source for earnings and a reason to want higher prices (and subscription) by other means. There was a washing machine that automatically adjusted the volume of the washing agent added, depending on the types of clothes and grade if dirtyness. But, the washing agent was only available in capsules, which are higher in price. So, why one would want that? IDK.
But ok, as time go by, the technology will be updated.
But, then this year they came out with "Apple Intelligence", which people will just see as "AI". So, I guess they finally gave up on that.
With Apple Intelligence it can be whatever they want it to be. Could be ChatGPT, could be rule based. AI is now being linked to ChatGPT/conversational for many people
For the ones interested in the actual study instead the headline, this is the link for the original paper:
Paper page: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19368623.2024.2...
PDF: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/19368623.2024.2...
Ubiquitous design and UX is better than throwing around nebulous technical cant 99.999% of people don't understand and are partially terrified of taking their jobs. While automating the navigation of ambiguous requests and delivering more open results with less exhaustive and tedious coding is cool, these features delivered to users have to provide useful advantages to be essential or they're just going to come off as "me too" bandwagon jumping.
"Self-hosted", "open architecture", "cloud optional" are terms I like to see but only because I'm weirdo who tinkers with things sometimes but don't necessarily want to spend all of my time fixing or supporting fragile hacks.
My perspective: consumers have seen new tech emerge a thousand times and are favoring reliability instead of the flavor of the month new tech, especially when it was designed to sell instead, not to solve real problems.
This seems just like TVs, where more people long for dumber TVs with quality display - they are faster and more reliable than what the market of smart TVs is providing.
Then you have Google writing letters for your children or showing how their camera AI integrations can help you live a lie. Frankly I'm glad to see data showing consumers are turned off.
Oh! And then for the executives they have Matthew McConaughey and Idris Elba talking about data security and productivity.
It’s clearly working well for her.
- VMware - Azure - IBM etc
Now-a-days
- Get your employees co-pilot assisted Intel/Windows/etc to boost productivity
We’re currently doing a bunch of “AI at the Edge” projects, even though it’s hardly justified (“edge” in this case is just an on-prem datacenter), but you need to use buzzwords like these to convince executives.
And yet we’re told execs are smarter than the rest of us and deserve to make so much more than we do.
Someday I pray the executive class gets its comeuppance.
For existing companies with AI features: more useful but mostly LLM bolted on with the same use cases. They can improve the product if used right. But for me it’s mostly often just a gimmick.
The problem with LLMs: They mostly generate stuff they have seen and are bad as truly new stuff. They make mistakes You need to put time and energy in the review it.
For stuff that transforms data it’s useful. Like rewriting a piece of text.
It’s also useful for search queries on the corpus the LLM is trained on.
It’s good at pattern recognition and lastly: human like voice interfaces.
But for generating novel stuff: good luck reviewing it.
People who just blindly copy paste the output of an LLM: that’s quite dangerous and potentially plain wrong.
At least that’s my experience.
I'm an huge crypto enthusiast, but whenever I see the term "crypto" being used somewhere I just cringe.
Meanwhile another conference I am going to has several “machine learning” talks which could have been titled something more informative like “image analysis” or “regression modelling”.
* Nondeterministic * Untrustworthy * Uncertain * Marketing buzzword * Gimmick * Probably requires an external service or expensive hardware * Probably collecting my data
If other people generally have the same perception, I'm not surprised it would drive people away.
If that’s all you have in your sales pitch then you are failing.
By all means, please use "AI" everywhere.
Sell benefits not features.
To be fair, the providers don't know either. At the moment enough users are crazy enough to buy that as a feature. Let's see how long this will last.
My dad would struggle to tell you what the acronym AI would even stand for, but he's a pretty big spender on household technology like TVs, and audio gear.
Subconsciously, many of them do "know" - it means that if you're an insecure and kinda clueless trend-chaser, then the 'AI' product is the one to buy.
Haha. So they made a splash talking about AI. Well played.
Everytime that happens, I go back to that meme that got created after Google's IO when Sundar Pichai said "ai, ai, ai..." like 113 times.
This should represent a Cambrian Explosion of delightful innovation on par with anything that followed the emergence of the personal computer, or the web, or the smartphone. And there is in fact a ton of amazingly cool stuff happening under the tidal wave of shitty monetization and financialization.
But the robber barons and the hustlers and the opportunists have gone for the jugular on how quickly and completely this event can be politicized (the lobbying and laws and the speed and ruthlessness around them are an embarrassment), how quickly it can be “monetized” via LLM spam and pump-and-dump Mag7 cap manipulation, and how directly it can be converted into a minimum cost offshore customer servicing model-style aspirations where consumers get a broken chat bot instead of a person while simultaneously facing pressure, real or perceived, that their job is about to be replaced by some inferior “agent” that isn’t done.
Machine learning is an amazing technology that should be strictly delightful in the hands of people who live to build awesome things that make people happy and prosperous and safe. “AI” has come to mean LLM spam, Thiel/Altman-style TESCREAL fascist politics, a massive surge in ubiquitous digital surveillance (which somehow still had headroom), and the next turn of the crank on the enshitification of modern life courtesy of the Battery Club.
The socially useful and technically exciting future of AI is just waiting on the fall of the “AI” people. It’s so close.
This seems more relevant to physical consumer goods
I share the sentiment but I don’t think this is tech related.
* The AI Browser
* AI note taking app
* AI photo gallery
* AI habit tracker
* AI budget planner
* AI music player
* AI bank
* AI hike planner
* AI icon pack(wtf?!)
* AI launcher
* AI camera
* AI news
* AI PDF reader
* AI comics viewer
* AI Maps
* AI food delivery
* AI shopping experience
* AI calorie tracker
* AI video editor
* AI backup
* AI share
* AI Authenticator(??)
* AI partner
* AI RoboAdviser(?)
* AI Wallpapers
* AI package tracker(?!)
* AI health tracker
And plenty other things I am forgetting. Even things that already had AI before are now new AI. This is getting out of hand.
Seriously though, it seems AI is being marketed towards investors, and that wherever it was included in a product it will be just to say it's on the product roadmap. If you're long enough in the game like myself you get to recognize these hype bubbles (CORBA anyone?) that claim to be about to take over the world and then fizzle out.
I guess that is what Tech is nowadays.
So yes when I see 'AI' mentioned in products I shake my head before looking at details. Case in point: iOS 18.1 Beta. The Great Apple Intelligence. It does nothing. Just... you won't even notice it.
The irony… I cannot imagine a more hilariously negative way to reduce a title than to say someone is the Taco Bell professor.
Maybe good for late night drunks and stoners with nothing else still opened, but I know literally nobody who ever even mentioned eating there.
not a big fan of Pizza Hut, but believe me: there's much worse.
A massive commercial success, with tens of thousands of restaurants worldwide and hundreds of thousands of employees?
Folks I know end up in MCDs all the time when partying, not much else open around midnight, even kebabs close at 10-10:30pm where I live.
They're not trying to be the kind of posh place you'd go for an important business meeting, or with a date you wanted to impress. It's a bit more raucous - if your kids are a bit excitable they won't be spoiling the experience for the other diners.
The food quality is fine - it's not haute cuisine but it's easy to make pizza taste great because it's packed with great tasting melted cheese and pepperoni and tomato sauce.
If you don't know any people who go there it's probably because you don't know many people organising birthday parties for 13 year olds.
It's gross
(In other words, "Continuum" vibes. An underrated Canadian sci-fi show featuring "Corporate Congress" and a bunch of luxury brands of today turning into serious industrial/energy/medical players under 50 years from now.)
Disney's robotics are legit though, they do a lot of work and research in that area
I think it is a "you"-thing thinking others also devalue disney because "kid movies" or some other property. There is no joke because people respect them already. Now, the fast food folks? That is silly. Unless it is about production efficiency from McDonalds. Or marketing by coke.
Innovation and imagineering (cough, largely robotics) are synonymous with the image of disney.
Maybe it's' indeed a "me" problem, but I only vaguely know about "imagineering" thing via HN; it's not something I think I'd stumbled on otherwise. As far as I can tell, for most people I know, Disney is the kids programming producer that often makes stuff adults enjoy just as much, if not more, than kids, plus the company that took over Star Wars. A subset of them is also aware that the House of Mouse has a scary legal department.
> There is no joke because people respect them already. Now, the fast food folks? That is silly. Unless it is about production efficiency from McDonalds.
McDonald's must be a powerhouse in logistics and process engineering - and in case of the latter, it's not a big leap from making food to making drugs or advanced materials. I know a little bit about adjacent fields from the software side; the food processing plant and a chemical manufacturing plant use pretty much the same tools and processes.
Ex.
The Poulan/Weedeater Independence Bowl
Guaranteed Rate Field
Smoothie King Center
And my fav: Bargain Booze Stadium
The Barclay Card English Premier League comes to mind.
But nowadays only the weathered shadows on the facade remain where the letters "Shell" once were mounted.
Chevron is, as you know, an enormous fossil fuel corp. The simplest and best method of improving the environment would be simply to shut down their oil and gas operations. The irony is almost overwhelming.
As usual, nothing has been heard from the Greentech Hub since it was announced by the relevant minister almost a year ago. Which is fine, because the entire point of the thing was to have it announced by the relevant minister.
It's all very Yes Minister / Utopia, and we all see straight through it.
[0] https://startupnews.com.au/news/minister-dawson-announces-ne...
Yea, but that would just make some other player take their place. The game-theoretic choice seems to be to keep doing what they are doing, while allocating some of that dirty money towards research in green tech.
Real life is rarely binary.
The catastrophic levels of human deaths resulting from food shortages and supply chain disruption (and basically everything supporting civilization) would surely lower global CO2 emissions!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheaties
It's not a compliment. ;)
So a "Taco Bell professor" sounds like a similar kind of thing, except it's real.
They have been common for at least 1,000 years. Much much longer than that but "a millennium" is enough to get my point across.
Sometimes it seems as though half of the biomedical professorships in Europe are funded by Merck and Roche.
Every single philosopher at Plato's Academy and the Lyceum was "sponsored" by wealthy merchants and politicians, the corporations and billionaires of that era.
A classic example would be folks sponsored by the Medici’s or their numerous competitors.
Or, for example, the numerous (often controversial) concessions Michelangelo had to make for the church. Which frankly, come across a bit like the Simpsons poking fun at Fox all the time. Albeit, more classically artistic of course.
ASML Endowed Chair in Advanced Optical Technologies
Callaway Golf Chair in Structural Mechanics
Chugai Pharmaceutical Chair in Cancer
Ericsson Chair in Wireless Communications Access Techniques
Qualcomm Endowed Chair in Embedded Microsystems
Etc, etc.
Credit Suisse Asset Management (Schweiz) AG-Professur für Distributed Ledger Technology/Fintech
Cambridge had a BP Professor of Chemistry until 2019 when BP stopped paying.
Their price list is online: https://www.philanthropy.cam.ac.uk/give-to-cambridge/endowin...
Are three examples sufficient? Taco Bell is a more ethical and apt supporter of higher education than BP, Credit Suisse, or Roche, lol.
Novo Nordisk is not part of the state of Denmark.
Most, but not all, noble and titled aristocracy had a landowner in the family, young aristocrats with older siblings would rarely inherit the land titles.
On the flip, relatively few of the landowners were part of the nobility. Many of the grand landowners were, of course, but certainly once the merchant class started earning serious coin and commissioning all the best gardens on large estate they purchased from poor nobles, well, that relationship started to fall away.
Consider: the 1954 coup in Guatemala, the Coca-Cola death squads, Nestle's reliance on slave labor for cocoa (through a scheme of indirection that is common among other companies), etc.
There's plenty of thuggery in the dealings of megacorps, and plenty of pretension in the sponsorship of a professorship by such a corporation
I'm not sure if it's worse than 'AI distinguished professor' though.
Also Taco Bell Distinguished Professor at.. WSU. yup that tracks
Reminds me of the scene from the movie Idiocracy where the main character's lawyer said he went to Costco Law School[1] and that he was lucky since his dad pulled some strings to get him in.
Jokes aside, one does not get to pick their academic sponsors or reject funding, and no offence intended to the guy's obvious expertise.
It reminds me of the 100 Thieves Totino's Fortnite training room.
You see, a calm, factual, truthful and informed conversation of different technologies actual maturity, merrits and risks is in nobody's interest. /s
- reliability
- relAIbility
> McKinsey research estimates that gen AI could add to the economy between $2.6 trillion and $4.4 trillion annually while increasing the impact of all artificial intelligence by 15 to 40 percent.
When McKinsey releases a report, all product managers will present it in the next marketing slide and the ad budget will follow. If it fails to materialize, it's never their fault of course. The leader in market research is to blame.
Google has no business advertising Gemini on TV. Like who is the target really? But an enterprise not embracing AI after the biggest Market Research firm says it's the future? I'm putting my money on Long Island Ice Tea AI next.
[0]: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-tel...
That's about the same number McKinsey used for "the metaverse" a few years back.
Oh, they absolutely will. Like, they did _last_ time; in the early noughties the term ‘AI’ was poison and everything AI-adjacent got called ML. I suspect we’re already there again with consumers, though ‘AI’ may still work for investors for another year or so.
https://www.politico.eu/article/ursula-von-der-leyen-biograp...
I have never heard of a sound advice originating from McKinsey that improved a company. It is hot air and promoted by the powerful who are in the right circles.