Submitted 6 months ago by AnActOfCreation@programming.dev to technology@lemmy.world
The AI boom in a nutshell. Repackaged software and content with a shiny AI coat of paint. Even the AI itself is often just repackaged chatgpt.
perplexity for this device. still, excited to get my pre-order if only to add to my teenage engineering collection
It certainly looks sleek. Too bad that’s all it has in its favor.
Unless you have tons of money, why preorder? Just wait for the company to inevitably go under and people start reselling their now-useless devices, and then scoop as many as you want from Ebay. Even if the company survives for a while, the functionality is so underwhelming they might start getting rid of them way sooner.
Repackaging ChatGPT is arguably a very nice potential value add, because going to a website is not always very convenient. But it needs to be done right to convince users to use a new method to access ChatGPT instead of just using their website.
What’s interesting about this device is that it (supposedly) learns how apps work and how people use them, so if you ask it something that requires using an app it could do it.
So while it might be “just an android app”, if it does what’s advertised that would be impressive.
Apps are designed to be easy to use. If this device works as advertised (and that’s a huge if), then it wouldn’t offer much in the way of convenience anyway. From what I’ve been reading, it doesn’t work well at all.
Reviewers are saying it is not able to do this, along with several other promised features.
Why are there AI boxes popping up everywhere? They are useless. How many times do we need to repeat that LLMs are trained to give convincing answers but not correct ones. I’ve gained nothing from asking this glorified e-waste something, pulling out my phone and verifying it.
What I don’t get is why anyone would like to buy a new gadget for some AI features. Just develop a nice app and let people run it on their phones.
That’s why though. Because they can monetize hardware. They can’t monetize something ChatGPT does, but in their own app.
The answer is “marketing”
They have pushed AI so hard in the last couple of years they have convinced many that we are 1 year away from Terminator travelling back in time to prevent the apocalypse
s/Crypto/AI/
I just used ChatGPT to write a 500-line Python application that syncs IP addresses from asset management tools to our vulnerability management stack. This took about 4 hours. The code passed QA and is moving into production next week.
Tell me again how LLMs are useless?
To be honest… that doesn’t sound like a heavy lift at all.
It’s a shortcut for experience, but you lose a lot of the tools you get with experience. If I were early in my career I’d be very hesitant relying on it as its a fragile ecosystem right now that might disappear, in the same way that you want to avoid tying your skills to a single companies product. In my workflow it slows me down because the answers I get are often average or wrong, it’s never “I’d never thought of doing it that way!” levels of amazing.
You used the right tool for the job, saved you from hours of work. General AI is still a very long ways off and people expecting the current models to behave like one are foolish.
Are they useless? For writing code, no. Most other tasks yes, or worse as they will be confiently wrong about what you ask them.
It’s no sense trying to explain to people like this. Their eyes glaze over when they hear Autogen, agents, Crew ai, RAG, Opus… To them, generative AI is nothing more than the free version of chatgpt from a year ago, they’ve not kept up with the advancements, so they argue from a point in the distant past. The future will be hitting them upside the head soon enough and they will be the ones complaining that nobody told them what was comming.
This is not really a slam dunk argument
First off, this is not the kind of code I write on my end, and I don’t think I’m the only one not writing scripts all day. There’s a need for scripts at times in my line of work but I spend more of my time thinking about data structures, domain modelling and code architecture, and I have to think about performance as well. Might explain my bad experience with LLMs in the past.
I have actually written similar scripts in comparable amounts of times (a day for a working proof of concept that could have gone to production as-is) without LLMs. My use case was to parse JSON crash reports from a provider (undisclosable due to NDAs) to serialize it to our my company’s binary format. A significant portion of that time was spent on deciding what I cared about and what JSON fields I should ignore. I could have used ChatGPT to find the command line flags for my Docker container but it didn’t exist back then, and Google helped me just fine.
Assuming you had to guide the LLM throughout the process, this is not something that sounds very appealing to me. I’d rather spend time improving on my programming skills than waste that time teaching the machine stuff, even for marginal improvements in terms of speed of delivery (assuming there would be some, which I just am not convinced is the case).
On another note…
There’s no need for snark, just detailing your experience with the tool serves your point better than antagonizing your audience. Your post is not enough to convince me this is useful (because the answers I’ve gotten from ChatGPT have been unhelpful 80% of the time), but it was enough to get me to look into AutoGen Studio which I didn’t know about!
Who’s going to tell them that “QA” just ran the code through the same AI model and it came back “Looks Good”.
:-)
The code is bad and I would not approve this. I don’t know how you think it’s a good example for LLMs.
I don’t think LLMs are useless, but I do think little SoC boxes running a single application that will vaguely improve your life with loosely defined AI features are useless.
It’s not black or white.
Of couse AI hallucinates, but not all that an LLM produces is garbage.
Don’t expect a “living” Wikipedia or Google, but, it sure can help with things like coding or translating.
I don’t necessarily disagree. You can certainly use LLMs and achieve something in less time than without it. Numerous people here are speaking about coding and while I had no success with them, it can work with more popular languages. The thing is, these people use LLMs as a tool in their process. They verify the results (or the compiler does it for them). That’s not what this product is. It’s a standalone device which you talk to. It’s supposed to replace pulling out your phone to answer a question.
I quite like kagis universal summarizer, for example. It let’s me know if a long ass YouTube video is worth watching
I use LLMs as a starting point to research new subjects.
The google/ddg search quality is hot garbage, so LLM at least gives me the terminology to be more precise in my searchs.
Because money, both from tech hungry but not very savvy consumers, and the inevitable advertisers that will pay for the opportunity for their names to be ejected from these boxes as part of a perfectly natural conversation.
I think it’s a delayed development reaction to Amazon Alexa from 4 years ago. Alexa came out, voice assistants were everywhere. Someone wanted to cash in on the hype but consumer product development takes a really long time.
So product is finally finished (mobile Alexa) and they label it AI to hype it as well as make it work without the hard work of parsing wikipedia for good answers.
Alexa is a fundamentally different architecture from the LLMs of today. There is no way that anyone with even a basic understanding of modern computing would say something like this.
Alexa and Google home came out nearly a decade ago
The best convincing answer is the correct one. The correlation of AI answers with correct answers is fairly high. Numerous test show that. The models also significantly improved (especially paid versions) since introduction just 2 years ago.
Of course it does not mean that it could be trusted as much as Wikipedia, but it is probably better source than Facebook.
“Fairly high” is still useless (and doesn’t actually quantify anything, depending on context both 1% and 99% could be ‘fairly high’). As long as these models just hallucinate things, I need to double-check. Which is what I would have done without one of these things anyway.
An LLM has never generated a correct answer to any of my queries.
I think Meta hates your answer
I have now heard of my first “ai box”. I’m on Lemmy most days. Not sure how it’s an epidemic…
I just started diving into the space from a localized point yesterday. And I can say that there are definitely problems with garbage spewing, but some of these models are getting really really good at really specific things.
A biomedical model I saw seemed lauded for it’s consistency in pulling relevant data from medical notes for the sake of patient care instructions, important risk factors, fall risk level etc.
So although I agree they’re still giving well phrased garbage for big general cases (and GPT4 seems to be much more ‘savvy’), the specific use cases are getting much better and I’m stoked to see how that continues.
There is s fuck ton on money laundering coming from China and they invest millions in any tech-bro stupid idea to dump their illegal cash.
I heard someone even leaked the apk LMAO that’s hilarious that your 200 dollar product can be literally pirated
You wouldn’t download a bunny…
Does the apk have unlimited access to Perplexity AI?
I’m confused by this revelation. What did everybody think the box was?
Magic
In all reality, it is a ChatGPTitty "fine"tune on some datasets they hobbled together for VQA and Android app UI driving. They did the initial test finetune, then apparently the CEO or whatever was drooling over it and said “lEt’S mAkE aN iOt DeViCe GuYs!!1!” after their paltry attempt to racketeer an NFT metaverse game.
Neither this nor Humane do any AI computation on device. It would be a stretch to say there’s even a possibility that the speech recognition could be client-side, as they are always-connected devices that are even more useless without Internet than they already are with.
Make no mistake: these money-hungry fucks are only selling you food cans labelled as magic beans. You have been warned and if you expect anything less from them then you only have your own dumbass to blame for trusting Silicon Valley.
I think the issue is that people were expecting a custom (enough) OS, software, and firmware to justify asking $200 for a device that’s worse than a $150 phone in most every way.
Without thinking into it I would have expected some more custom hardware, some on device AI acceleration happening. For one to go and purchase the device it should have been more than just an android app
Custom hardware and software I guess?
Same. As soon as I saw the list of apps they support, it was clear to me that they’re running Android. That’s the only way to provide that feature.
Isn’t Lemmy supposed to be tech savvy? What do people think the vast majority of Linux OSs are? They’re derivatives of a base distribution. Often they’re even derivatives of a derivative.
Did people think a startup was going to build an entire OS from scratch? What would even be the benefit of that? Deriving Android is the right choice here. This R1 is dumb, but this is not why.
Most of the processing is done server side though.
It could have been a local AI and some special AI chip not found in all android phones, but since it is run in cloud, the privacy is really a problem
The processing was done server-side as it is with the other thing. If you find a way to do it client-side let me know otherwise I’m not interested in your dumb product.
So it's just a single app running on a minimal Android implementation, the AI is done on remote servers and it still gets lousy battery life? Sounds like they dropped the ball on design. Nevertheless, no one is going to carry this that doesn't already have a phone that can do everything the Rabbit does. It has no reason to exist.
I don’t even understand what the point is of this product. Seems like e-waste at first glance.
lol at calling running Android an “emulator”.
Also don’t they have to distribute the actual code for the OS if it’s lightly altered Android?
This is why I cringe at cell phone manufacturers selling cloud and AI features based on phone models because wtf you’re not running that cloud on that handset so why do you gatekeep the product behind that model? It can’t require that many resources, it’s a cloud app!
I defend a lot of misunderstood ai but this doesn’t have any good qualities even if it wasn’t a scam
it has the same cpu as my budget 100$ phone from 2018 lol
Should’ve named the company Snake Oil Inc.
An app that would require root access to fully operate. It is designed to run and use apps automatically. Large Action Mode, I think. Easiest way to get this out is a standalone device
hahahaha the juicero of ai android applications
their page to link accounts to it was not a real webapp, it was a novnc page that would connect to an ubuntu vm that runs chrome with no sandboxing and basic password store under fluxbox wm
someone dumped the home directory from it
The issue isn’t even with what it runs on, albeit selling it as specialized hardware is really bizarre, when it’s just a glorified embedded platform with a scroll wheel
This is the business equivalent of throwing a tantrum.
•Rabbit Inc. is unhappy about details of its tech stack being public, threatening action against unauthorized emulators.
All android devices are “emulators” like their hardware isn’t special
Ubuntu is just a bunch of apps running in Debian! Did you know you can take Ubuntu app .deb files and run them on Debian?
Look. The R1 is stupid, but this isn’t the reason why.
Programmed electronic revealed to be running a program?
I mean, isn’t all software just an app that runs on hardware?
What? No way!
/s
lmao threatening action against their own imminent irrelevance, more like
Not cool guys, not cool at all
And get serious - fuck your “proprietary” details, fuck lying/misrepresentation for money, and fuck you for trying a stunt like this.
Look I think this little thing is a cool gimmicky thing that is cheap and doesn’t really have any practical application at all… I forgot where I was going with that comment but I guess it pretty much sums up my thoughts.
I would like to run the apk, anyone got the app download?
All they had to do was use a SoC with a NPU and they could of gotten away with this scam.
turbowafflz@lemmy.world 6 months ago
It’s so weird how they’re just insisting it isn’t an android app even though people have proven it is. Who do they expect to believe them?
rtxn@lemmy.world 6 months ago
The same question was asked a million times during the crypto boom. “They’re insisting that [some-crypto-project] is a safe passive income when people have proven that it’s a ponzi scheme. Who do they expect to believe them?” And the answer is, zealots who made crypto (or in this case, AI) the basis of their entire personality.
tja@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
In this case the same people made both, so they are already practiced
Fisk400@feddit.nu 6 months ago
Their target audience are the most gullible tech evangelists in the world that think AI is magic. If there was a limit to the lies those people are willing to believe, they wouldn’t be buying the thing to begin with.
capital@lemmy.world 6 months ago
This will flop though. So will the stupid Humane pin.
Either there are very few people that gullible or that group isn’t quite as gullible as you think.
cyrus@sopuli.xyz 6 months ago
They are technically not wrong when they say that the whole experience isn’t made up of just an App
They are intentionally dodging the ACTUAL question.
Anyways here is a leak of their “LAM”, which is just playwright for the most part. web.archive.org/web/20240424133441if_/…/vYHXbUwP?…
With that, we have both components, yay?
Veraxus@lemmy.world 6 months ago
You know, pairing an LLM with Playright is actually a pretty great idea. But that’s something I can totally roll on my own.
sickhack@lemmy.world 6 months ago
It’s the Juicero strategy.
“You can’t squeeze our juice packs! Only our special machine can properly squeeze our juice packs for optimal taste!”
wjrii@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Ahh, the good ol’ days, before we knew how batshit AvE was.
capital@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Reviewer proceeds to squeeze more juice out with their hands than the machine managed.
Anamana@feddit.de 6 months ago
They have thought of a specific design for the device using its own interaction modality and created a product that is more than just software.
Therefore don’t get why people refer to it being just an app? Does it make it worth less, because it runs on Android? Many devices, e.g. e-readers are just Android Apps as well. If it works it works.
In this case it doesn’t, so why not focus on that?
NegativeInf@lemmy.world 6 months ago
The point being, they are charging 200 bucks for hardware that is superfluous and low end for an incomplete software experience that could be delivered without that on an app. The question is, are you going to give up your smartphone for this new device? Are you going to carry both? Probably not.
“It can do 10% of the shit your phone can do, only slower, on a smaller screen, with its own data connection, and inaccurately because you have to hope that our “AI” is sufficiently advanced to understand a command, take action on that command, and respond in a short amount of time. And that’s not to even speak about the horrible privacy concerns or that it’s a brick without connection!”
Everything about this project, other than maybe the aesthetic design from teenage engineering, but even then, they’re design work seems a bit repetitive. But that may be due to how the company is asking for the work. “We wanna be like Nothing and Playdate!!” “I gotchu fam!”
To address your point about e-readers, they have specific use cases. Long battery lives, large, efficient e-ink displays, and the convenience of having all your books, or a large subset, available to you offline! But when those things aren’t a concern, yea, an app will do.
Like with most contemporary product launches, I simply find myself asking, “Who is this for?”
capital@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Why even try to sell me another device though?
Anything and everything this square does, my phone can do better already and has the added benefit of already being in my pocket and not a pain in the ass to use.
Num10ck@lemmy.world 6 months ago
my honda is just android software, if thats the only part you look at too.
conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
No, they’re not.
An ereader is a piece of hardware that has a distinct purpose that cannot be matched by other hardware (high quality, high contrast, low power draw static content). Some of them do run Android, and that’s a huge value add. But the actual hardware is the reason it exists.
This is just a dogshit Android phone. There is no unique hardware niche it’s filling. It’s an extremely obvious scam that is very obviously massively downgraded in all of value, utility, and performance by being forced onto separate hardware.
will_a113@lemmy.ml 6 months ago
Investors who don’t bother reading past the letters A and I in the prospectus.
MonkderDritte@feddit.de 6 months ago
‘Android’ is a certification with requirements in installed Google apps and homscreen links, so there’s that.