Comment by bolobo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bolobo | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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