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EVERYBODY has bad AI.

And it's NOT going to get better. It ALL hallucinates, LLMs are NEVER going to be better than a flat earther on a good day, and they're mostly going to be about flat earther on a a bad day level.

Is the money bubble going to pop? Yes. Is it going to be soon? I don't know, I certainly hope so, we need to put this idiocy behind us, and by 'us' I mean humanity.
In a perfect world this technology would never have been used outside labs.

As it is, it’s very valuable for certain use cases, and if you or others reading this haven’t used modern paid models in the last 2 months then your POV is already outdated.

I agree with you about fundamental problems, have worked in leading edge CS research managing teams and although there are flaws there is real utility.

I don’t think Joe Anybody should be able to start a conversation with ChatGPT and within 10 prompts be told that chemtrails are real and we need to “wake up” (I did this experiment myself a couple days ago), but if you work in this industry and are writing off these tools than you’re making a grave mistake because they already have a ~10% measurable impact on increasing throughput even as flawed as they are, and that’s with now-outdated models.

Ignore the metrics about % of code written etc. and focus on the researchers who care about productivity.

As an accelerator to a solo developer who knows what they’re doing it’s intellisense levels or better, and I don’t even know how to quantify the utility of “rubber ducking” with the best models, it’s invaluable to a certain degree in that regard.

You’re right there is a bubble, especially for companies who are just tweaked front-ends for frontier models, but they aren’t going away. We will see a continued shift toward automation using these tools, and the places they aren’t a good fit will be scaled back after ~6-12 quarters of reduced productivity in those areas once upper management figures out where they best fit.

Using one model, I wrote Javascript to customize Macrumors in my browser a few days ago, and I have never written a line of Java anything in my life. It took ~5-10 minutes. Once I knew what I was doing I customized some other sites I regularly visit in less than 2 minutes. Made my browsing experience measurably better, even though this is a silly toy example it is a real one.

Stuff like these small things add up, I know models struggle with large contexts and start to fall apart (Apple’s paper on that last month was excellent), and I also know that scale alone can’t solve some of these things, but small improvements add up to real productivity.

Think about how batch scripts made things a lot faster in the older days, some of those simple things saved hundreds of hours over the course of their lifetime in production – in my early career I worked with someone who won awards writing them to automate some esoteric stuff at a large company.

All this is not near-term, it is now. Anyone who thinks this is a fad or that these models are just stochastic parrots is willfully ignorant at this point, even from a technological perspective you can read some of Anthropic’s research (it’s nice that they are actually publishing still unlike OpenAI) that fully debunks that theory that possibly only really applied to GPT-1.

Do LLMs and GenAI models have intractable problems? For now, yes. Probably permanently. Are they still worthwhile and rapidly improving to become even more useful despite these faults? Also yes.*

*Disregarding the fundamental harm to society that they cause especially when using them without a deep understanding of the caveats.



In ~5 years once World Models come out, if they work, everything will change. And I don’t think AGI is anywhere near close, but World Models are real and are coming. Read up on them if you haven’t and care about these things – we’re going to see dramatic shifts in society probably within a decade and within 15 years the way we interacted with technology pre-2020 will be nearly unrecognizable, similar to a car phone from the 1980s vs. an iPhone.

They won’t be an evolution of any LLM either, they will be a wholly new thing. Zuckerberg knows this, has people like Yann working for him that know this, and so Meta is willing to pay any money to make sure they are either at the lead or near it.

Apple isn’t even able to keep researchers working on extant, known quantity technology. It’s a problem.

Moonshot R&D is necessary in these fields. Tim needs to go and Apple needs either a futurist visionary like Jobs or a modern technologist like Jensen leading their company in a decision-making role.
 
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I don't see the BoD showing Tim Cook the door. They'll let him leave on his own terms.
I agree. I sound like an AI hype person in my post and I’m really not, it has enormous flaws, but I’m also not blind to the shift happening under our feet and I continually use these things and stay current with research to understand what’s happening so I’m not blindsided in my field.

There’s a real chance Apple is going to be the IBM of the 2030s, and it would be a shame if they let that happen. I don’t want them to release some LLM themselves at this point but they need these researchers and R&D internally because there is a reasonable chance our entire interaction model with technology is going to change very soon in relative terms.

When I was a kid and had a Nokia I would never have imagined using the internet on a device like that, now the majority of most people’s computing outside of work is done on handheld devices. Apple spent 8 billion dollars on a car project that was dubious at best from the start, they need to think about over time throwing at least a similar amount at this.

I think the restructuring we heard about was Tim’s effort to stay in the seat for the rest of the decade, we’ll see if that happens but the head of their foundation model team leaving is a super bad sign, especially since the MLX team just nearly left a few weeks ago. It will be too late once the board forces him out if that were to happen, and I do think the bets he’s making on AR may pay off to a degree too, but it’s not enough on its own.
 
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Yes, it seems to be working.

It's exciting in a way, especially for those guys with the crazy salaries.

Anyone care to speculate on what that is? :)
Sure. AI is quite literally seen by the United States government and the Military as the new “Nuclear Arms Race”. There is an unlimited checkbook for this kind of military advantage. Zuck is seeing his ad revenue eaten into by Apple’s privacy standard and by competitors. He bought into the scam that was the “Ready Player One” VR Metaverse from whence he got the name change for Meta. His own Meta crypto venture crashed and burned.

But AI is different. It allows him to cut expenses at Meta. It allows ads to not only be placed better but actually be created. Content moderation can now be done with AI. Code inside Meta can be created with AI. All of this and more saves on Human Resources.

But the Military and Domestic Intelligence and Surveillance side is where Zuckerberg is gunning for. He’s looking at Amazon with Anthropic and Palintir and Anthropic getting all that sweet sweet government and military contracts and he wants in big time. Zuck literally has the world’s greatest centralized repository of not only AI multi-model trading data and one that gets updated with fresh data every waking second by billions of people worldwide but Facebook is also the largest single repository of user generated real time intelligence in the world. This is why Zuckerberg is letting the DoD use Llama LLM for security and intelligence purposes and he has partnered with Palmer Lucky of Anduril to design Occulus VR goggles and the VR framework Meta came up with for their VR Facebook world for military training purposes.

In short Zuckerberg and Meta are slowly but surely becoming Defense Contractors for the US military and eventually Civilian LE. And AI and Facebooks database are an integral portion of that. Zuck will stop and nothing and will outspend Apple by an order of magnitude on AI just because of this.
 
It’s somehow really enjoyable seeing the Apple fanboys grasping at straws here, saying AI isn’t all that great or Apple could just as well use OpenAI’s model.

The thing is, Apple had the vision for what AI could be in the 80’s:


Steve Jobs wanted to have Siri, and I’m very certain that if he lived that’s where most of the investment of Apple would go to.

Apple is behind, and most responses on this forum give me the same feeling as the video of Steve Balmer laughing at the iPhone.
but the thing is though, I don’t understand the Steve Balmer comparison.
He laughed, but he was laughing at an actual product that would go on to basically reinvent entire consumer electronics space.
AI… isn’t a product. It wants to be a product, it wants to be a product really bad, but it’s not. at most it’s a subscription service.
“AI” isn’t killing anything because it’s not a product, you can’t hold it in your hand. it’s an app, or a website, but it’s not a phone.
 
but the thing is though, I don’t understand the Steve Balmer comparison.
He laughed, but he was laughing at an actual product that would go on to basically reinvent entire consumer electronics space.
AI… isn’t a product. It wants to be a product, it wants to be a product really bad, but it’s not. at most it’s a subscription service.
“AI” isn’t killing anything because it’s not a product, you can’t hold it in your hand. it’s an app, or a website, but it’s not a phone.
Both, OpenAI and Meta, are working on hardware products that revolve around their AI models. Will Apple be up to the challenge when that happens?
 
Speaking of IBM, their CEO has turned the company around by making it a leader in AI and quantum computing. IBM is starting to become "cool" again.
Yeah, that’s true they just solved some major problems with error correction in distributed systems which unlocks scalability for the first time in the history of Quantum Computing. That research is fascinating and it’s another cutting-edge technology that could be paradigm shifting (in other ways) within the near future. Interesting times.
 
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Both, OpenAI and Meta, are working on hardware products that revolve around their AI models. Will Apple be up to the challenge when that happens?
I think the bigger question is, are open AI and Meta able to actually make a hit product?
Meta has two, sort of. The quest was bought and isn’t exactly the most universal product, and the glasses which are pretty much only a hit until Samsung and Apple very likely blow them out of the water with custom silicon, better cameras, and everything they’ve learned about hardware from making phones.

OpenAI is a lot more of a wild card, they have Johnny Ive but even he has never really been able to prove that he can do anything outside of Apple yet.
 
Oh Tim, what are you doing my dear boy
I have been around for a long time and seen so many tech upheavals over the last 40 years. (I bought one of the original macs, iPhones and iPads.) I also don't think I have commented for years on this web site. So I'm not a doomsayer but an apple fan. So here it is.

Apple doesn't realize what they had and fumbled with Siri. I have seen similar problems for tech companies before and the outcomes are the same. Now apple will begin its path down. It won't be immediate but it will be the same as all of the other tech companies before them. This is so sad. Sorry but apple is cooked and I'm really bummed.
 
Since apple seems to have no AI department at all, what’s the problem?
 
I don't know what that even means. Are we supposed to magically read your mind?


I've worked for companies small and large. When somebody leaves, you'd USUALLY be smart to let them go. But on a couple of occasions, a key person was ready to leave and the company met them halfway with some type of accommodation or another, and that person not only stayed; they were high-contributors, they made a positive difference in their team or in the organization as a whole, and they did not keep thinking or talking about leaving. In each case, money was not the motivator for the person's decision to leave (or for them changing their mind and deciding to stay after all).

Obviously, it's not something you want to keep doing, or people catch on that all they need to do is threaten defection and you'll give them money or bennies to keep them...and you end up losing all control of the ship due to people trying to pocket more cash, benefits, or power.

I worked for one company that kept getting threats from one particular person in the IT group. He was highly protective of his job responsibilities and didn't like sharing knowledge. So whenever he would start talking about leaving, the company knew that they had nobody able to take on his role, and the manager would have to come up with more money or something else to keep this guy from hurting the whole team with his whining and complaining.

What management did NOT know, was that anybody on the team could have taken that guy's role fully with probably only 6 months or so of dedicated effort.

Nobody at Apple (or Meta or any other company) is really all THAT critical. Apple could let them go and still be successful. For Meta's part, they also could probably decide to not make offers to any of the Apple people and still be successful. That's the problem with aggressive headhunting/poaching from your competitor. In the long run, it's not always the REAL ANSWER that you're looking for.
Well we certainly don’t have to read yours since you explained it in a 98 paragraph post. Seems like people are getting my statement just fine 👍
 
When the visionary Scott Forstall was in charge of iOS, Siri was first integrated into iOS with the release of iOS 5 in October 2011. Tim Cook fired Forstall one year later in October 2012.

Had it not been for Cook being so clueless and mediocre by firing Forstall just one year after Siri was released, Siri would’ve likely been far better today, and still an industry-leading technology.

And apparently he kicked Forstall out to appease Johnny Ives.
Horrible decision. Ives is the single most overrated Silicon Valley guy in history.
 
Hmmm….if Meta is getting SIRI AI specialists…Zuck’s plans for a super intelligence are about to go the way of his Metaverse efforts…
 
Good to know about the changes within Apple. Hopefully this will not slow down Apple's plans to have a proper version of Apple Intelligence/Siri.
 
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