Hacker News Reader

Comment by windexh8er | Hacker News Reader

In most implementations of generative AI, as of today, the use case is as a feature. People don't buy features, they buy products. If your company is built solely on this hot button you better be sure you either have some IP backing it up, are building and own it (models), or are the best mouse trap for your target market. Because, I'm watching an entire industry segment all show up with slight iterations of the exact same thing and those things are not great. They're unreliable and mostly mediocre.

View on HN

"Thank god <insert every service> added an AI chatbot to their site! It makes it much faster and easier to use!" - things no living soul has ever said

Actually, compared to the non-AI chatbots they are incredibly good.

Compared to being tortured to death, merely being waterboarded is incredibly good.

Considering that the only purpose of chat-bots is to bullshit customers and filter out as much as they can before redirecting to the human support, then yeah - LLM chat-bots are good. Just not good for the the customers. I recently had to call my telco and they had a temerity to demand that I have(!) to speak to the fucking bot. And then bot declared it doesn't understand me and hang up the call. I have no idea if that bot was neural network powered, but the only improvements LLM bot may have achieved is to keep me in the hamster loop longer and delay transfering to the support even more.

Yes. But those feature companies are not IPO’d and listed on the exchanges. That is the key distinction with the markets this time. Most public companies in this space are actually growing their bottom lines. I’m not talking about just Nvidia here. You can see this effect in the entire food-chain. Everyone is benefitting.

I have inside knowledge (that I'm not trading on) of multiple publicly listed companies with "every feature is AI powered or it doesn't ship" policies that are being applied to their entire product or major parts of their product. Those policies come from execs who are primarily informed by science fiction and FOMO, not by an understanding of the available tools.

AI is great when it's the right tool. But the rate at which features are shipping at these companies is plummeting because so many features would be cheaper, easier, and better without AI. It feels like self-gaslighting on a scale that I haven't seen since the dot com days. And I see engineers and their managers struggling to maintain their sanity as they try to improve their products within the constraints of these policies.

So… where is the money coming from? Where is the value added?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com