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Comment by sensanaty | Hacker News Reader

Despite access to """"""AGI""""""" all the marketing teams at these companies can only dream up 2 things, buying plane tickets and online shopping autonomously. Sometimes they're feeling extra spicy and throw in sorting emails or something along those lines.

I suspect it's because it's tailored towards VCs and other similar rich ghouls as a replacement for their overworked and underpaid secretaries

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I feel like there are so many cloistered people at these companies that they are left scratching their heads about what normies even want. Like, they literally can't fathom basic stuff that isn't just highly consumer-oriented. I dunno, like applying for government services, paying your gas/elec bill without being confused af, keeping the dr up to date with your dad's illness, or how to get your newborn to sleep at 2am.

I will happily shout AGI from the rooftops the day I can turn on voice mode in ChatGPT and have the model calm down my toddler for a tantrum, or keep him from opening all the bananas instead of eating one.

People in this thread arguing about AGI relating to Einstein problems and physics. Yeah no. When AI can handle toddlers then we're getting somewhere.

Helping your child navigate the world is the only remaining thing that makes you human.

And you can already ask models to help you become better at it.

It's like a (subset of a) generation of parents having youtube raise their kids. But it's probably an improvement over that!

It's actually a really interesting question to reckon with - can an AI help raise a child and is that good or bad? I suspect there are ways you can use the current frontier that elevate the child's experience, especially when it comes to education and creative play. On the flipside using one of these models to automate storytelling to your 3 year old is probably a bad idea... The tricky bit is where to draw the line? Is using an LLM to collaboratively build a story alongside the parent and the child bad? I don't know, I suspect not, but that is not a simple question to answer.

I haven't watched, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raised_by_Wolves_(American_TV_... seems to be exactly about this.

It all comes down to whether you see time and attention spent with your kids as a nuisance or the best time you can ever have in your lifetime (I am team B).

And as every child psychologist says, "attention is all you need" :).

Well there is an upper bound of how much time you have available to spend with your child and how you spend that time. You could use an LLM when you can't be there (I suspect this is a bad idea), or you can use it collaboratively with your child (I suspect this is a good idea). I see it as similar to using a phone; your child on wikipedia is a different thing to your child on tiktok.

Tablets are obsolete. The new generation of kids is going to be raised by a new generation of technology.

I feel like we read different blog posts. The announcement shows Astra filling out a tax form, looking for a kindergarten and apartment hunting. These are ordinary everyday tasks for normal people. It also shows lots of non-consumer stuff like financial modeling, genetic sequencing analysis and coding.

This is the funniest part of it all for me.

Ok we have AGI, so where are the _things_?!

We have neither AGI nor _things_ I'm afraid. I wouldn't even know what to do with a semi-autonomous automation tool for my daily tasks, I don't really have anything that I'd like to automate.

(like, how often do you look for a doctor or day care? The demos automate occasional and one-off tasks. That said, it automating tasks like circuitboard design and CAD modeling is impressive and will / may have a much higher impact on those respective industries (if it works), just like LLM assisted coding did)

Don’t forget making podcasts and telling you what to bake with your kids

Many VCs also dislike these examples, I believe. I'm doubtful this is what they're being pitched.

As for public releases: I wonder if it's because these examples are easy to relate to. Many websites are just a long tail of industry or use-case specific stuff. What's valuable to me probably means nothing to you. This is unlikely to resonate with people-wit-large (and LLMs are marketed broadly) or requires the reader to think (and marketing that requires thinking is bad these days).

Second, it's arguably a good litmus test. If it still can't do the worn out examples of plane tickets and shopping, which would be a good assumption since we've been demo'd these use-cases for 2 years at this point, then ...

They’re ridiculously facile use cases for what agentic AI can already do.

I don’t trust an agent with full executive power - yet - but I am essentially using GPT as my PA. Right now I’ve got it managing a construction project with recalcitrant contractors, an international move and visa tied to a property purchase, a short term holiday rental business, and basically just popping up in my life going “the situation is this, you need to do X/I suggest you send Y to Z, the email is prepped in your drafts”. I am of course also using it for software development, and have had it resolve every digital chore in my home life.

I guess it doesn’t make for a quick elevator pitch, but I’m finding it has reduced my cognitive overhead on a whole raft of fuckery that would otherwise have me shouting at inanimate objects.

Anyway, today I have to take the cat to the vet, email a bank, go and discuss ceiling systems, and review a proposed shopping list for a maintenance visit to a holiday rental. Can’t wait for the bleeding robots to get here.

Also travel plans. For some reason these marketing guys love to post pictures of places to visit on a board and share them with their friends list. Then a friend makes a comment about a picture on the board like "Cool, I can't wait to be there <emoji>". I've always assumed that's a cultural thing.

The enthusiasm from investors is based on the premise of replacing all keyboard jobs (programmer, lawyer, accountant, etc.), but it is not a good look to talk about this to the general public (who might be programmers, lawyers, accountants, etc.).

AI heaven is using a computer to do your job. AI hell is your boss using a computer to do your job.

There's a lot of truth to this: Execs want their own use case covered. In addition, everyone wants to be better than the competition at basic use cases, because that's what people compare first - even though we all know they are not a good reflection of reality. I'm currently working on exactly a project like this.

And all of these things can easily go wrong with this halfbaked "AI" technology - getting thow wrong tickets you can't cancel, loosing all your money due to bot buying random titanium cubes & deleting your emails!

All those stupid Bell Labs researchers not inventing Uber or Tinder. How come they didn't just build the obviously popular and profitable businesses that became possible once they invented the internet?

Compare that to Xerox, for example. Pretty early on, they had visions to replacing / enhancing largely "common" use cases (basically, everything that required printing a letter or sending an mail) [1]

I don't know if, at the time, people where doubting that it would be useful. (Practical ? Affordable ? Other legitimate questions.)

But here, the contrast between the promises ("it will cure cancer and solve climate change") and the demo ("it can cost you money on stuff you never asked to buy") is a bit telling.

But I agree that you can't expect the enablers to think of all the uses cases and applications.

Still, just so I know: what ARC-xyz score means the LLM has cured climate poney cancer, exactly ?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTOtty7ZVcA

Maybe this is why they NEED AGI (does it come with a soul?)

tarpit ideas

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