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> - Have a real time video conversation with an AI which can see what you see, translate between languages, read text, recognize objects, and interact with the real world.

Maybe it's me having an extremely low imagination, but that stuff existed for a while in the shape of google lens and the various vision flavor of LLMs, and I must have used them.... 3 times in years, and not once did I think "Gosh I wish I could just ask a question aloud while walking in the street about this building and wait for the answer". It's either important enough that I want to see the wikipedia page straight from google maps and read the whole lot or not.

> an AI which can read text, recognize objects, and interact with the real world.

I can already do that pretty well with my eyeballs, and I don't need to worry about hallucinations, privacy, bad phone signal or my bad english accent. I get that is certainly an amazing tools for people with vision impairments, but that is not the market Meta/OpenAI are aiming for and forcefully trying to shove it into.

So yes, mayyybe if I am in a foreign country I could see a use but I usually want to get _away_ from technology on vacation. So I really don't see the point, but it seems that they believe I am the target audience?

> I can already do that pretty well with my eyeballs, and I don't need to worry about hallucinations

I see. Perhaps your eyeballs missed the part where I said I'm blind?

The entire purpose of my comment was to push back against this idea that AI is stuck in 2022. It's weird and nonsensical and seems disingenuous, especially when I say "here are things I can do now that I couldn't do before" and the general response is "but I don't need to do those things!"

You describe new ways of feeding information into the model and new ways model presents outputs. Nothing radically changed in how model transforms inputs into outputs.

I think they did miss that, but to be fair you probably should have opened with that. It’s great that AI is enabling new use cases for blind/partially-sighted people! It’s encouraging to hear your perspective. At the same time, I’m sure you can imagine that the “killer app” for a blind person might seem less useful to a fully-sighted person. Imo there are still useful aspects, and you raise good examples, but the “second pair of eyes” aspect in particular is low-value for me.

I don't think they missed it. They addressed it in:

>>> I get that is certainly an amazing tools for people with vision impairments, but that is not the market Meta/OpenAI are aiming for and forcefully trying to shove it into.

Oh you’re absolutely correct! My mistake

That is an amazing use of the technology, and for sure something that should result in a pretty successful company - but not enough to bet the entire VC ecosystem on.

I think anyone saying AI has no use is being willfully ignorant, but like every hype cycle before it since mobile (the last big paradigm shift), IMO it's going to result in a few useful applications and not the paradigm shift promised.

Let's be calm. It is true that the technology has improved and certainly has new and improving uses. But we started out talking about business.

I think a charitable reading of this thread is simply: AI as a large technology leap is still developing a business case that can pay for all the hype. Not to mention it's operating cost.

So what’s…

been the impact of OpenAI and meta glasses / headsets on the blind community at large?

Based on your statements it seems that the real value of AI is increasing the participation rate of visually impaired people in the global workforce.

If Elon or Sam can convince governments and insurance companies to pay for AI-powered glasses as a healthcare necessity maybe there’s a pathway forward for AI and VC class after all.

…maybe that’s the real game plan for Marc Andreesen, Kanye, Elon and the others.

They’re not really Nazi’s just early adopters choosing the “innovative freedom” promised by Emperor Palpatine and the Sith over the slow march of the Senators of the Republic.

Sorry, I’ve been watching too much Andor.

Yes, you are right, I missed it at first. I read it as another message from AI evangelists that overpromise every aspects of AI.

After I finished writing the message I realized that you were blind but I was too enraged to do the right thing and scrape the message. When I came back to my senses the anti-procastination had kicked in and I couldn't edit it.

I am sorry losing my temper, and I am very happy that this tech is able to be useful to you, and I think that it is a fantastic use case.

Now I need to get off the internet, it just brings the worst in me.

Am I mistaken in thinking that much of what you're describing would be considered computer vision, and that computer vision was already largely capable of these things in 2019 and before? I vividly remember a live demonstration of an on-device AR-and-object-recognition program at the 2014 Facebook developer conference.

> Ask to play with a pear [sic] of the Meta glasses.

Ironically, this typo is very likely a result of AI dictation making a mistake. There are a lot of common misspellings in English, like "their" and "there", but I've never seen a human confuse "pair" and "pear".

So yeah, there are cool demos you can do that you couldn't five years ago. But whether any of those cool demos actually translate into something useful in day-to-day life where the benefits outweigh the costs and risks is far from clear.

Actually dictation would be more-likely to get this right! This was my typical human failure. Vastly more attributable to me reading with speech rather than Braille.

OK, well, I stand corrected. Still, a dictation transcription failure was plausible.

One thing that’s fascinating to me is that these straight out of sci-fi things are novelties or demos, and don’t seem all that popular. Most people just aren’t interested.

It’s the “boring” stuff that’s interesting: automating drudgery work, a better way to research, etc.

I’ve been predicting for years that glasses — whether AR or VR — are and will remain niche. I don’t think most people want them.

> Most people just aren’t interested.

Which makes sense, really. Buying an expensive pair of glasses so that I can point at an object and say “what is that” is a cool parlour trick but I can imagine very few scenarios where I’ve wished I had that functionality.

Realtime translation… absolutely a feature I’d use. For a week a year, max. IMO the killer, everyday application just isn’t there yet. I’m still not sure what it would be.

And those are also all things that a smartphone can do (often a little worse, admittedly). Which you'll have with you anyway because of all the things it does much better than glasses can and likely ever could.

These statements were true of the Internet too. Until it wasn't. It'll be a slow burn and then one day you turn around and notice it's everywhere.

Even post dotcom bust there was still this generally shared understanding that you probably shouldn't meet people you met on the Internet and you shouldn't get in strangers cars. Today we use the Internet for the purpose of summoning strangers to us for the purpose of getting in their cars, and it's completely banal to do so.

These shifts take time and in the early-adopter stage the applications look half-baked, or solutions looking for a problem. That's because most of them are. The few that aren't will accrete over time until there's a solid base.

That was not my experience. I was meeting web chat friends IRL in 1995 and none of us were the least bit afraid. IRC and the web were everything SnapChat is today and not considered any stranger than AOL IM from 5 years before that which were hardly different from the BBSes that came before the subscription services.

So, lots of people were meeting online in 1995. 5 years later couples who met on the internet were all over the place. When I moved to Silicon Valley in 2000, "I met my wife online" was hardly even a conversation starter. (I did meet my wife at The State of Insanity web chat boards in 1995.)

Also, from 1998-2008, the world invested precisely what it's now invested in the last decade of LLM AIs and was already adding over a trillion dollars annually to the global economy. AI, with that same spending over about the same amount of time, is still an economic black hole and no one has any answers that would satisfy anyone other than VC about how it's all going to pay for itself.

The internet, and particularly email, IM and the web, were going strong in the 90s and by the mid-2000s were absolutely dominant. This re-writing of history to suggest that AI deserves more runway to burn more hundreds of billions on things that will have no staying power like the trillion dollars in internet build out between '98-'08.

These things don't take time. The whole broadband internet took about a decade and about as much money as AI has gotten in this latest bubble. At least when the dot com bubble burst, we had infrastructure with staying power and real societal value, unlike AI which will leave us with next to nothing when its bubble pops.

This is what I keep coming back to. If this is actually supercharging e.g. software developers, why aren't we absolutely awash in better software?

Because most software doesn’t need to be good, but just hit the “kind of does the job well enough” line. It improves velocity for this usecase.

OK, but if this 12Xes devs why isn't there 12 times the crappy software there was 5 years ago? I'm not seeing a massive increase in the amount of available software. Shouldn't there be dozens of new word processors? Hundreds of new MIDI sequencers? Thousands of text editors?

If this is actually making software easier to make where is the software?

It assumes there is a need for that software. It's not because I can ship the nth clone of flappy bird in minutes that I will?

I mean, people released a billion clones of flappy bird before AI so I don't see why they would stop? The dominant mobile game genre seems to be "line up three of the same thing and get a prize which will make you want to buy a better prize in our online store"; I don't see a flood of new entrants to this space.

Do LLMs just not work for mobile development? What about native? Why is the only thing I'm actually seeing produced increasingly byzantine tooling for AI itself?

From your "even post dotcom bust..." I wonder if you are too young to know the time before that? It wasn't always that way. In my college days before the dotcom boom really took off, people could meet in real life after first contact on USENET, which I'd say was the social media of the time.

You are referencing a later period where regular folks were piling onto the internet and giving each other advice. And maybe that advice was geared towards novices and/or children, coming from other novices, and steeped in a lot of urban legend fears of the unknown. Even the academic types started to embrace these ideas, lending credence to the idea that their magical garden was now turning into hunting grounds.

But, imagine yourself in the early 90s, mapping your way (on paper, of course) to a trailer home in Silicon Valley or a secluded dirt road in the Santa Cruz mountains. You've never been there before, and your goal is to meet people you've never only seen as text on a screen. You assume they are real people but, technically, it could be all sock puppets.

I did those things! It wasn't a horror movie. Instead it lead to light socializing and drinking.

> These statements were true of the Internet too. Until it wasn't. It'll be a slow burn and then one day you turn around and notice it's everywhere.

Maybe. What I remember is that the niche parts of the Internet remained niche. Everybody seemed excited about email, kids were excited about instant messaging, etc, and fundamentally that never changed; people have continued to use the Internet for communication. And the dotcom boom was a massive, stupid frenzy fueled by investors who had no idea what they were doing or what they were buying, and just wanted to make sure they didn't miss the next Microsoft, but the bubble was grounded in the accurate prediction that the web would become an essential part of business and an enormous money maker.

Does all of this sound right? Please correct me if I'm wrong. I find myself in the unexpected, uncomfortable position of wildly contradicting and undermining what I thought I understood: that people are terrible at predicting the future of technology.

Broadly speaking, in the 80s and 90s, the outlines of the future of technology was obvious and unmistakable: computers would become faster and more connected; that they'd take over or supplement a widening range of tasks and parts of our lives.

But it also can be hard to remember the way you understood the world in the past, or the way things were, because your understanding of the present overwrites it. Remember when VR was going to be huge? Remember when 3d chat was going to be the next big thing? Remember when TV was going to be hugely important in the classroom? Remember when social media was going to make our lives better?

People are making predictions regarding AI (or "AI") -- that it will do Everything Everywhere Very Soon, that it will lead to a 10x increase in worker output -- that strike me as absolutely, obviously wrong, even risible.

> I find myself in the unexpected, uncomfortable position of wildly contradicting and undermining what I thought I understood: that people are terrible at predicting the future of technology.

By and large, I think you're still right. But by the late '90s and early 2000s, the internet wasn't "the future of technology". It was already the present of technology.

Anyone paying attention could already see by 1994 or 1995 that the Internet was a) a big deal, and b) growing massively. The key at that point was not figuring out that the technology was going to be huge; it was figuring out which companies using that technology would be huge—ie, predicting with more granularity the future of the technology that was the World Wide Web.

And investors failed at that. Hard. That's what caused the dot-com bust.

People were resistant to cell phones, too. To computers, to the Internet, to online articles and news replacing newspapers and TV programs.

Thid I'd why it sucks that glass was shot down when that technology will soar in a few decades.

People need to be more forward looking and open to change imo. It affects society in very negative ways. Imagine if people had planned for social media when it was first becoming a thing. We'd have safety nets, and an actual fucking plan.

For a long time I held a sentiment similar to the parent comment, and then my brother sat me down, took out his phone, put chatGPT into conversation mode, and chatted with it for about five minutes. That was the second time I was truly amazed by chatGPT (after my first conversation, where I got it to tell me a fair bit about how Postgres works). Its ability to hold a natural, context-aware conversation has gotten really amazing.

I somehow agree with the op, that I don’t think I’m much closer to hiring chatGPT for a real job in 2025 than I was in 2022, but also you that there has been meaningful progress. And in particular, products that are transformative for disabled people are usually big improvements to the status quo for abled people too (oxo good grips being the classic example—transformative for people with arthritis, and generally just better for everybody else)

ChatGPT and its kin is already being hired massively as first-line customer support. Voice synthesis and recognition is really good now, too, so it's both online chat bots and phone support bots.

Does it satisfy customer support requests at a much higher rate than previous generations?

Every time I’ve encountered an AI first-line support agent I still find myself looking for the quickest escalation path to a real human just like before.

> after my first conversation, where I got it to tell me a fair bit about how Postgres works

See, I always start with conversations about things I already know about, and they bullshit me enough that I'm wary of Gell-Mann Amnesia when asking them about things I don't know about. They output a lot of things that seem plausible but the way they blend fact and fiction with no regard for the truth keeps me extremely distrusting of them.

That is to say: after your conversation, did you ask for citations and go read the primary sources? Because if you did not, the model likely mislead you about Postgres in subtle ways.

I use it instead of Google searching now but even I double and triple check the hell out of it. It just bullshits the fuck out of semi complex or unique questions.

Like "can a ps2 game use the ps1 hardware" it gave a noncommital, hallucinated answer. Then when asked to list sources it "searched the Internet" where all the links were from searches like "reddit ps2" etc.

And we had these toys with higher latency in 22 with gpt3. The better tooling and integration hides the extremely slowed down pace of innovation in base models all while throwing mountains of compute at it.

The comment quotes the article as stating that (so-called "tech") "[v]enture capital is moribund except for AI. AI is moribund except OpenAI."

How does this personal anecdote relate to the observation that (so-called "tech") "[v]enture capital is moribund except for AI. AI is moribund except OpenAI."

Is venture capital involved with the Meta Ray-Ban glasses that we are advised to try for free.

> - Have a real time video conversation with an AI which can see what you see, translate between languages, read text, recognize objects, and interact with the real world.

This certainly provides benefit to those with limited vision, which is great. But that is a very small segment of consumers. Besides those, how many other people do you know who are actually _using these glasses_ in the real world?

Google Glass came out 10 years ago.

The Facebook glasses aren't as relevant as the LLMs doing many thinking tasks that people get paid to do. A lot of it is as a productivity multiplier, and I'm not saying it's all doom and gloom, but it's transformative.

But why should anyone in the general public get excited about a productivity multiplier? If history is any indication (and it appears to be repeating itself with worrying frequency), then all of that benefit will be hoarded by the upper crusts of society while labor is further marginalized. At this point, even as a technology enthusiast and longtime evangelist, I find myself sympathizing with the luddites.

If it's a productivity multiplier, where is the output of that productivity? Is there a bunch of new software I can download? A bunch of books I can read? What's all this alleged new productivity actually producing besides Ghibli memes?

Hasn’t Google lens been doing that for almost a decade now?

Like how Google Translate has been translating between languages for a decade+ now...?

There's been a stepwise jump in the capabilities of AI that's changed "products" from mostly fun to actually useful

Are you implying that google translate was not useful to anyone prior to chat gpt3?