"Everyday AI" hasn't even been built yet tbh. Where is my assistant that notices my flight has been delayed and reschedules my appointments and lets my contacts know?
Seems to me the problems are (1) the "assistants" aren't anywhere near good enough to be trusted to make the right decisions, and (2) a trustworthy assistant isn't compatible with the adtech business model, so it's unlikely facebook or google would produce such a thing.
The CEO would trust the personal assistant to do this if they have a deep trust in the assistance competence. They would also need to know the assistant has a deep enough understanding of the their preferences to not do something they don't like. AI can mirror that.
More importantly though there will be consequences if the human assistant makes a big mistake and books the wrong flight. They would have to take responsibility for the mistake.
The LLM is always just going to write in text it is sorry if it makes a mistake. That is never going to be good enough for anything of consequence. The LLM would practically have to be omniscient in a way that is not going to be possible in a world filled with uncertainty.
So much of human activity is built around the network of trust that another human takes the blame if something goes wrong. So much activity involves coin flips and that someone takes the blame when the coin lands on heads but we bet on tails.
Yes, why wouldn’t I? I could also give them parameters like “if I’m more than 20 minutes late please re-schedule this” or “if my flight is delayed please let everyone know it’s delayed”
Why wouldn’t I do that? Presumably the person hired is competent to make determinations within parameters specified.
I could also let them know when it’s inappropriate to do this. Again, they should be competent enough to discern the differences between when it is and isn’t appropriate.
This could honestly be done by an algorithm if you give it the correct inputs and outputs and it could be fed updates, the only real limit is the fact that some of this isn’t exposed via an API either in a timely fashion or at all
That years of training is what we are missing. I don't think modern AIs can be trained in the way the assistants of old could be, at least not yet.
Being able to collate the requisite inputs from outside sources is the real problem. If you can’t do that reliably it’s simply hard to build an algorithm around it. Flights for example would require your calendar program to reliably pull data from an API regarding the flight information that is current and effectively real time. That’s the actual hard part, and this expands across services.
For all the advances we have made with computers and smartphones in particular they suck at meaningfully exposing a way to collate data sources and create actions around them reliably
Having one running locally helps but it's still necessarily storing information that you might not want to have stored where someone could potentially retrieve it, either via some sort of exploit or by forcibly compelling you to give it up.
Today, this is nearly available, nearly. Probably only something Google/apple can realistically offer. Apple “intelligence” has started to read your notifications and rewrite them for you, so it shouldn’t be a big leap to listen for a United App notification and decide it’s urgent enough take action. Should be “trivial” for Google to do as well, and they could even run it server side to help without a phone present.
It's still pretty terrible though
AI is anything automated it seems, and now they’re being subcategorized into niches as to what they do, e.g. “Agentic AI”, “LLM backed AI systems” etc.
If it’s not real intelligence then it isn’t really AI, and I wish the world at large would call it out.
LLM, Machine Learning, Neural Networks etc are all great but none of them have true spontaneous intelligence or learning ability.
Please, someone point out how any of these systems have organic spontaneous learning ability for a subject it was not pre-data seeded on. This is a generally accepted measure of higher level sentience as far as I’m aware
Hence the predicated “artificial”, and hence the downvotes you are currently receiving.
Your message is largely, if not entirely, a strawman.
There has been considerable success in programming computers to draw inferences, for example, but not actual reasoning. You can mimic some forms of reasoning but you can’t take one ML set - like recognizing photos with mountains, then expect it to correctly identify a similar geographical element - a hill. It can’t do that. It may correctly identify that it’s not a mountain but that isn’t the same thing as actually learning it’s similar to a mountain but not the same, which would be a rudimentary definition of a hill that an intelligent entity could conceivably use if it knew what a mountain was but not a hill.
Machine Learning was always a more honest place to have This discourse. I am indeed pushing back on the idea that we should be calling ChatGPT or anything like it intelligence.
It’s Machine Learning, clever algorithms, Large language Models, among other things, that are trained on ways to mimic certain aspects of intelligence, but it does not actually possess any real intelligence. Look at the LLM hallucination problem for example. It can’t be self corrected because it’s not an intelligent system.
Moving the goal post on what AI means (and pushing AGI as some new goalpost) is disingenuous, and relatively recent.
I’d care not if it wasn’t for the fact there is so much misinformation around capabilities and the future of AI, that it’s already negatively crept into policy making for example.
2. How does it know which contacts to contact? Does that acquaintance you talked to for some professional reason need to know your flight got rescheduled? What about that travel agency you talked to last night to confirm the flight?
If they had an app then an AI assistant should be able to tie things together. Where things seem to be going is apps provide an intent-based API wrapper plus UI widgets to interact with it. That way assistants can operate them too.