> There's a dichotomy in the software world between real products (which have customers and use cases and make money by giving people things they need) and hype products (which exist to get investors excited, so they'll fork over more money).
AI is not both of these things? There are no real AI products that have real customers and make money by giving people what they need?
> LLMs are a more substantive technology than blockchain ever was, but like blockchain, their potential has been greatly overstated.
What do you view as the potential that’s been stated?
Please don't do this, make up your own definitions.
Pretty much anything and everything that uses neural nets is AI. Just because you don't like how the definition has been since the beginning doesn't mean you get to reframe it.
In addition, if humans are not infallible oracles of wisdom, they wouldn't be an intelligence in your definition.
I also don't understand the LLM ⊄ AI people. Nobody was whining about pathfinding in video games being called AI lol. And I have to say LLMs are a lot smarter than A*.
Yes one needs some awareness of the technology. Computer vision: unambiguously AI, motion planning: there are classical algorithms but I believe tesla / waymo both use NNs here too.
Look I don't like the advertising of FSD, or musk himself, but we without a doubt have cars using significant amounts of AI that work quite well.
None of those things contain actual intelligence. On that basis any software is "intelligent". AI is the granddaddy of hype terms, going back many decades, and has failed to deliver and LLMs will also fail to deliver.
A way to state this point that you may find less uncharitable is that a lot of current LLM applications are just very thin shells around ChatGPT and the like.
In those cases the actual "new" technology (ie, not the underlying ai necessarily) is not as substantive and novel (to me at least) as a product whose internals are not just an (existing) llm.
(And I do want to clarify that, to me personally, this tendency towards 'thin-shell' products is kind of an inherent flaw with the current state of ai. Having a very flexible llm with broad applications means that you can just put Chatgpt in a lot of stuff and have it more or less work. With the caveat that what you get is rarely a better UX than what you'd get if you'd just prompted an llm yourself.
When someone isn't using llms, in my experience you get more bespoke engineering. The results might not be better than an llm, but obviously that bespoke code is much more interesting to me as a fellow programmer)
AI is not both of these things? There are no real AI products that have real customers and make money by giving people what they need?
> LLMs are a more substantive technology than blockchain ever was, but like blockchain, their potential has been greatly overstated.
What do you view as the potential that’s been stated?