Why most AI projects feel useless | Hacker News Reader

Why most AI projects feel useless

I don't know or if its just me but I believe that AI projects are just becoming wrappers one by one new tools pop up being similar but still get attention

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Coming at this from a design perspective, ultimately, I think it’s because we’re following and repeating the same patterns we see at larger companies or trendy startups that look interesting or useful, but when when the “end product” is repeated across domains, it’s either too broad of a solution to be useful within a specific context, or it’s too narrow to be applied to multiple contexts. AI (across the different ways we’ve defined it over time) really only enables 5 things, either individually or combined: perception, organization, inference, production, or action. If you use those enablements as starting points to ask questions about whether AI needs to be used at all in a particular context, and you can articulate WHY a system needs to sense something, and WHY it needs to act on what its sensed, then you can start to see where it can actually be useful in the context you’re building. Not everything needs to be a generator, or if it is, it doesn’t always need to be a chat interaction, etc.

I think attracting attention is enough to show that market demand does indeed exist, but most products' quality has failed to impress users, resulting in retention not going up, and ultimately the products end in failure. It is worth mentioning that we are not clear whether the poor product quality is because the underlying LLM is still not reliable enough, or because AI product design still needs some time to find innovations that belong to the AI era and meet market demand.

Most of these tools aren’t defensible because of AI, they’re defensible because of workflow capture. The model is the easy part now, the hard part is owning the context, the data, and the place where work actually happens.

That’s why a lot of them feel same kind on the surface. Same models, slightly different UI. But the ones that stick quietly wedge themselves into a real job and make it 5x faster or cheaper.

I see the same, and I am getting bored. I open application listing, like BetaList, ProductHunt and I see the same. A lot of people are trying to produce something, using AI, Loveble, Base 44 or any other 'no coding tool'. The hype is too big, all the complexities are hidden behind AI, and there is nothing that catches the eye.

Like the whole market is flooded with the same thing, just with different skin

You need to find niche ideas that didn't exist because of input/output tradeoffs which still requires some engineering chops to pull off even with AI.

Guess the answer is AI products are built using AI. Artificial creativity has overtaken natural. Feels synthetic

it's like everyone is launching their own interpretation to a problem/idea. persuading people is really hard, you know.

Honestly, it's because the barrier to entry is getting lower and lower. This is the same as what happened to newsletters back in the day and blogs before that. Used to be hard to get in so quality was higher but then it got so easy, that anyone could do it and the market got flooded with crap. Everyone is jumping on building with AI and launching new tools they built over the weekend, most likely they will get abandoned within a couple of months if not weeks.

Because a lot of them are built for the sole purpose of using AI for something, no matter whether that thing needs AI to begin with or (in many cases) needs to exist at all.

It's the issue most trending tech has, where the majority of people trying to make use of it are grifters desperate for a quick buck rather than those who have problems that actually need solving.

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