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Comment on Microsoft AI CEO pushes back against critics after recent Windows AI backlash — "the fact that people are unimpressed ... is mindblowing to me"

rudyharrelson@lemmy.radio ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

I dunno if I’d say I’m “unimpressed” with AI. I certainly find the technology itself fascinating. I worked with machine learning for years before consumer generative AI became mainstream and it’s profoundly impressive what decades of research and development have yielded. I genuinely do admire the painstaking work that underappreciated computer scientists have put in to make such things possible.

That said, “AI” is the new “blockchain” insofar as virtually every company on the S&P 500 has decided this is the new be-all-end-all feature that must be integrated into every aspect of every project. I don’t need AI to be part of my OS. I will open a new tab in my web browser if I decide I have a task for it. Granted, I am not a representative sample of a typical computer user (I use GNU/Linux btw).

To say nothing of the unethical manner in which these models are trained, using works produced by actual writers, artists, programmers, etc. Obviously profiting from their works while offering zero compensation (and actively taking work away from them by offering AI as an alternative to their craft).

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Goodeye8@piefed.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Yeah. It technically very impressive and and can have very impressive results if used properly. But all of the excellent uses and technical marvels get vastly overshadowed non-technical management going “what if you could have a chat with your toaster as it toasts your bread? Genius.” The people at the top have no fucking idea what they have and thus they have no idea how to use it which is why they throw everything at it to see what sticks.

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floofloof@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
It’s impressive, just not particularly useful, and certainly not something most people consider a priority.

Windows still takes forever to delete files, has a search indexer that makes laptops too hot to touch, steals focus while you’re typing in a password, takes much longer than Linux to open a web browser, turns apps white and “Not responding” for no apparent reason, has an ugly and slow Start menu that doesn’t foreground the things you want, pops up needless crap like stock tickers and news stories while you’re trying to get on with other things, sneakily turns on settings you deliberately turned off, and hassles you continually to agree to things you already said no to… Microsoft, those are all higher priorities for real users than some AI assistant.

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- rudyharrelson@lemmy.radio ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  It’s impressive, just not particularly useful,
  
  I will have to disagree with this. I have found LLMs to be remarkably useful in a variety of circumstances because they are pretty good at regugitating API documentation in a relatively small context.
  
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  - floofloof@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I agree that they are useful for this. In fact, as a programmer I find them quite useful whenever I need a bit of a guided start on something that otherwise I’d have to trawl the internet to find. Once the LLM has given a pointer it’s easier to follow up with appropriate resources. And the LLM is useful for writing code when the code is predictable and you know reasonably precisely what you need, and the LLM really just saves you some typing.
    
    But I don’t think LLMs are as useful a tool as the business people want them to be. Programming is unusual in that it involves very predictable patterns, and the aim is to find the most appropriate pattern for the task. And software documentation too follows very predictable patterns. Where an LLM has seen the exact same pattern many times, it will be good at producing it on demand. So programming and explaining software is a good use case for LLMs. But not many areas of activity are like this, and when you get out into all the nuance and complexity of other less formal domains, LLMs are so prone to slipping up that they’re much less useful.
    
    I’ve tried getting LLMs to summarize notes for talks on complex topics, and they are not good at it. I’ve tried getting them to tidy documents and they’re not good at it. I’ve tried getting them to explain complex topics for someone who knows nothing, and they can be good at it but they can also be misleading, and you don’t know which one you’re getting unless you go to other sources you could have checked in the first place.
    
    So I think they’re most useful for a quick orientation on a topic that points you to further sources, or for very highly formalized activities like programming. But they can’t be trusted for math or physics or law or medicine or literature or philosophy or complex decision making or psychology or any number of other areas.
    
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