Cramming useless, unwanted bloat into existing products is what corporations do when they’ve lost the ability to innovate but don’t want to admit it.
Manufacturers do the same thing. I spent a couple of years at a company that makes industrial power tools. Those jokers tried adding a line of “smart” tools, apparently not understanding that people don’t buy a tool that costs thousands of dollars because of some irrational compulsion to connect everything to WiFi. They do it because they need a tool that stands up to a highly abusive environment while doing it’s job every single time without fail. Management was somehow shocked when this new point of failure was not well received.
msage@programming.dev 4 weeks ago
The real answer:
companies put billions into the AI craze hoping to achieve AGI and ‘winning’ the race to stop the open internet from existing, and capturing every user into their controlled bubble.
Now that the reality of LLMs not being able to deliver that, they need to find some excuse to explain why that was not a dumb investment.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
The real real answer:
Companies don’t care whether AGI is ever achieved. All that matters to them is to look hype and fresh enough that investors think they will the AI race.
Large companies don’t care about the product, they don’t care about the customer, they don’t even care about whether they will ever make money. They are just a horse to bet on for investors, so all they care about is looking good in a way that investors dump their money into the company.
It’s nothing else than NFTs but for people with actually serious money.
msage@programming.dev 4 weeks ago
Oh but if they could create an assistant that would do 100% of tech interactions with you, from web searches to shopping to communication, they would capture the entire globe by the balls forever.
And that is a sweet deal. I expect OpenAI to start selling ad slots in their responses, just because they already are a brand name and most people don’t use other bots. And I expect it to spread everywhere.
My hope for humanity has fallen so low, that I expect people to just accept it all.