> Is your argument that because AI can’t currently do the arbitrary things you wish it would do, it is therefore bullshit?
It is sold as a research tool, but it cannot be trusted to return facts, because it will happily recombine disconnected pieces of data. AI cannot tell truth from lies, it is good at constructing output that looks like an answer but it does not care about the factual correctness. Google search result summaries are a good example of this problem. When I searched for "what happened to the inventor of Tetris?" it took bios of two Russian-born developers, one Pajitnov and another a murderer and combined them into one presenting Pajitnov as a murderer. I thought it did not sound right and did some additional searching and sure enough it wasn't true, but how many people who were shown that answer have become convinced that he was a murderer? What if his neighbours saw it? What if such made up summaries are fed into a system that decides who can board a plane? When I bring this problem up people tell me it's not an issue and you should always go back and verify facts, but what if the sources I use have the same problem of being made up content? We are not telling people to stop, think, and verify outputs produced by AI, we are telling them AI is making them "more productive" so they use it to produce garbage content without checking the facts. Please explain to me the usefulness of a tool I cannot trust? Producing garbage faster is not something I wake up in the morning wanting to do more of.
> 2. Future advancements to the tech (billions are pouring in, but this takes time to manifest in prod)
Unlike AI VCs can count and would like to see a return in their investments. I don't think there's much to show for it so far.
Your first section is very much a limit of LLMs, but again, that's not all AI — if you want an AI to play chess, and you want to actually win, you use Stockfish or AlphaZero, because if you use an LLM it will perform illegal moves.
Why would I want to use an AI to win a game of chess? Where's the fun and challenge in it? "Go win me a chess tournament" is the wish nobody has unless we are talking about someone who wants to pretend to be a chess master. It's still a small market. Examples like these are very common in the AI community, they are solutions to problems nobody has.
Though such a question misses the point: use the right tool for the job.
(For a non-ML example, I don't know why 5/8 wrenches exist, but I'm confident of two things: (1) that's a very specific size, unlikely to be useful for a different sized problem; (2) using one as a hammer would be sub-optimal).
I'm not interested in creating a taxonomy of special purpose AI models which each do one thing well and nothing else. What I can do is give a handful of famous examples, such as chess.
Other choices at my disposal (but purely off the top of my head and in no way systematic) include the use of OCR to read and hence sort post faster than any human and also more accurately than all but the very best. Or in food processing for quality control (I passed up on a student work placement for that 20 years ago). Or the entirity of Google search, Gmail's spam filters, Maps' route finding and at least some of its knowledge of house numbers, their CAPTCHA system, and Translate (the one system on this list which is fundamentally the same an LLM). Or ANPR.
It's like you're saying "food is bad" because you don't like cabbage — the dislike is a valid preference, of course it is, but it doesn't lead to the conclusion.
It is sold as a research tool, but it cannot be trusted to return facts, because it will happily recombine disconnected pieces of data. AI cannot tell truth from lies, it is good at constructing output that looks like an answer but it does not care about the factual correctness. Google search result summaries are a good example of this problem. When I searched for "what happened to the inventor of Tetris?" it took bios of two Russian-born developers, one Pajitnov and another a murderer and combined them into one presenting Pajitnov as a murderer. I thought it did not sound right and did some additional searching and sure enough it wasn't true, but how many people who were shown that answer have become convinced that he was a murderer? What if his neighbours saw it? What if such made up summaries are fed into a system that decides who can board a plane? When I bring this problem up people tell me it's not an issue and you should always go back and verify facts, but what if the sources I use have the same problem of being made up content? We are not telling people to stop, think, and verify outputs produced by AI, we are telling them AI is making them "more productive" so they use it to produce garbage content without checking the facts. Please explain to me the usefulness of a tool I cannot trust? Producing garbage faster is not something I wake up in the morning wanting to do more of.
> 2. Future advancements to the tech (billions are pouring in, but this takes time to manifest in prod)
Unlike AI VCs can count and would like to see a return in their investments. I don't think there's much to show for it so far.