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To me it’s 65% useful. As it can run in the background doing “chores” while I sleep.
AI hasn't done anything we couldn't already do. It's just doing it faster and with more mistakes.
You forgot CHEAPER (at least now, burning VC money), which is a major motivating factor.
AI is capable of performing a lot of grunt work reliably. Still must be reviewed. But a big productivity gain over doing everything yourself.
Computers do admittedly claim the Apollo program pretty early in, so I'll definitely concede that one - just curious if other revolutions have really lived up to that bar. As someone who grew up on modems, I struggle to view the modern world as really having a "killer app" that really couldn't have been done in the 90s
My phone can search my photos with text based on what's represented in the photo. That wasn't a thing for computers from 1950 through about 2012, and now it's just normal. Google Lens will tell you what a plant is, Merlin app will identify birds from birdsong.
In 2000 we had Dragon Naturally Speaking and Kurzweil VoicePad, now we have voice recognition and machine transcription that works usefully well. 'Now' being sometime after 2012.
I don't remember what we had for human language translation, but since transformers and LLMs and GP-GPU, we have Google Translate and a lot of competitors, such that usefully good translation is everywhere - in the right click menu in FireFox, for example. Google translate will take a photo with foreign text in it, translate the text, overlay it on the photo.
Useful programming language porting, it's gone from basically impossible or unusable, to very usable.
Text synthesis, my employer has an AI generated newsletter. It's not something I want, but it's also not something you could do at all ten years ago.
Script synthesis, it's now easy to one-shot a few lines of script or command line to do something, faster than opening the ffmpeg man pages or whatever. "that didn't work, here's the error: <>" "the codec is not supported in this mode, try --work-please" and
Image synthesis. My local daily newspaper has at least one full page AI image, that's not something you could do at all ten years ago.
Camera drones, now they can clock onto your face, fly while following you and keeping the you in shot, and respond to gestures for things like landing.
> "By now we should have seen some major new invention"
There's no law of the Universe which says this, "you should see a new invention k years after the invention of a transformer architecture". Solar electricity generation was first noticed in 1839, first commercialised in 1954, and it's only just (give or take a few years) become a significant percentage of world power generation (6% in 2022) and the cheapest form of electricity.
"AI" was considered a hundred years ago with 'Robots' and Turing Tests, wasn't usefully progressed until computers in say the 1950's with LISP and chess, the 1970s with Prolog, but had a huge shift around 2012 with GP-GPU and powerful enough video cards to crunch large amounts of data and with the internet providing large amounts of data, then again with transformer architectures and LLMs, and then with tensor flow and TPU/NPU dedicated accelerators.
Do you expect the world will look the same in 2036? 2046? That all this investment in AI datacenters will just stop and go away? That all the dedicated cores in mobile devices will fall unused? That Waze and Tesla Full Self Driving will just stop where they are even if processing power 10x's? That Amazon will stop rolling out warehouse robots because humans are better? That drones and robo-mowers, robo vacuums, Alexas and OK Google's are going to be no different? That nobody will train anything else, connect up any other inputs or outputs, try any new uses, or make use of any changing costs?
The vacuum is a great example of an actual invention. Making it "autonomous" just isn't that impressive.
Well said. This is exactly was I was alluding to. Moving goal posts and making things practical that they didn't even notice (or weren't aware of at the time).
And those productivity gains are moot if AI costs (including externalities) increase commensurately.
However thinking of the long arc is important to, even though it has no consequence for you right now. AI is a force multiplayer and scarily dangerous in the wrong hands. We can already see by these discussions how uncertain things are.
Just food for thought.
You have to spell this out a lot more if you want to have credibility.
I’m not seeing anything in discussed here that seems scary.
Moving into the future slightly: they're already getting decent at video games, and if they can win at Counterstrike they can probably also win at real-life Drone Warfare.
I'd say the risks are mostly still hypothetical, though. There's a ton of reading out there if you take that idea seriously, but I don't blame you if you dismiss it as being a bit too "Science Fiction"
That you don’t see anything scary that’s your prerogative of course.
So a kind of Star Wars game?
Slightly off topic, but this reminds me of the night family in Rick and Morty.
Its hard to even have a discussion because someone else needs to give you enough content like ask you first why do you even think that.
So how do you define AI? LLMs? GenAI stuff?
What is 95%? Does it mean that these 5% are unable to disrupt industries or does it mean for you that these 5% will change the world as we know it but stil 95% of other AI stuff is useless?
I personally think that AI/AGI progress is faster than i expected it, I think its very useful already today, I also think we still need to build a lot of obvious stuff (like proper AI Agentic Platforms), more hardware, cheaper hardware etc. but the way quite clear, but some peple might think the current state is the AGI future people talk about it but I think we will only see this in 4/5-15 years and then it will have disrupted a lot.
This is a ridiculous take.
FWIW, I am NOT a bot. (beep-boop)