I think articles like these might just be noise now. There is a demand for it. I work at an analytics company and our customers are demanding it and when we deliver they are using it. You wouldn’t...
I think articles like these might just be noise now.
There is a demand for it. I work at an analytics company and our customers are demanding it and when we deliver they are using it.
You wouldn’t think that customers of a product thats meant to give them accurate answers all the time would accept such a thing as an agentic AI that often makes mistakes, but they are actually demanding it, paying for it, and then using it.
I hate it and I think the whole thing is gobbling up land resources and using rocks to replace human workers and its not sustainable and the products that are created are stupid but the customer does actually want this nonsense.
So many people are using agentic browsers. Mozilla has no choice but to keep up.
it depends on how they weigh "customer". his poll is clearly biased, but DDG from the article: again, skewed. But I see general polls go around 60-70% of users. Now if you treat customers as...
but the customer does actually want this nonsense.
it depends on how they weigh "customer". his poll is clearly biased, but DDG from the article:
Another great example came from DuckDuckGo, which opened a poll asking whether you are for or against AI. After more than 175,000 votes, 90% of respondents said no to AI.
again, skewed. But I see general polls go around 60-70% of users.
Now if you treat customers as money, then yes. a lot of money wants to say it wants AI. I think even that reached an inflection point with Pintrest's reaction to their layoffs, but we'll see.
They don't let you turn it off. Hence the article title. Options are always nice. We aren't given an option. The bare minimum to let me hide my dissatisfaction is to let me turn off the feature. Meanwhile, Microsoft tries to push Copilot on the searchbar and Google pushes pop ups every dozen searches (which I blocked most of. but not the "are you interested in AI mode?"). Nadella's reaction to the negativity doesn't suggest we'll get such options
We need to get beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication and develop a new equilibrium in terms of our “theory of the mind” that accounts for humans being equipped with these new cognitive amplifier tools as we relate to each other.
I'll be kinder than the article interpretation and say this amounts to "the user's input doesn't matter. This is going to make us so much more productive!". Which still supposes this god complex, as if they know what's best for all of us. But "all of us" are very diverse. What use does a plumber need for AI in the day to day? maybe some device they use? What about a grade school teacher? A politician (past bribes to de-regulate it)?
You sound like your work in B2B. In that case the users are very different from the buyers. Your buyers are clamoring for AI. But if your AI sucks, then the users most definitely aren’t. But that...
You sound like your work in B2B. In that case the users are very different from the buyers. Your buyers are clamoring for AI. But if your AI sucks, then the users most definitely aren’t. But that surprises me. Vibe coding analytics is right up there in terms of things LLMs can do reasonably well.
I agree with a lot of what you're saying. Definitely agree that AI is being forced into many places that it just doesn't belong. Medium-sized companies (like Proton or Atlassian) are building...
I agree with a lot of what you're saying. Definitely agree that AI is being forced into many places that it just doesn't belong. Medium-sized companies (like Proton or Atlassian) are building their own chat bots/models to try to compete with the big players and it just makes no sense to me. I think very few people are going to choose to use lumo when big name models like gpt, claude, gemini are available.
With that said, I think you're understating the usefulness of AI a little bit. Maybe it's not "revolutionary" (I don't really know how to quantify that), but it is pretty damn useful. I've been using Claude Opus for work and for personal projects. It's good enough now to create an entire small project for you. If you're creative about the information you give it, it can also help a ton with large codebases. Not to soapbox too much, but as an example, this past weekend I got interested in identifying home-installation solar panels using aerial imagery. Essentially, I was interested in replicating the work of this Stanford study, Deep solar. Within a day, I had a complete python pipeline that would, given imagery I downloaded from state government sources (116GB GeoTiff), split the images into tiles, use image classification on the tiles to identify solar panels, and present the results in an HTML Leaflet app (including tile-server to display the GeoTiff on the map for easy verification of results). I wasn't super pleased with the performance of the image classifier (identifying metal roofs as solar panels was one issue), so the AI was even able to build me a labelling tool so that I could easily work through a few hundred examples and label false positives that I could use to fine-tune the classifier. Throughout the process, I could even take screenshots of the map and give those to claude and, with enough explanation, it can identify issues in the screenshots and provide fixes.
It's very far from a perfect tool, and anyone calling an AI model their "friend" I think needs to get outside more and talk to some real people... But as a tool for software engineering and automation, it is really really good. Better than it was a year ago. Way beyond a "glorified auto complete".
economically, it doesn't make sense. It'a a billion dollar tool with trillion dollars of investment. It's not sustainable as it is now from that angle alone. That's why a bubble popping and a soft...
With that said, I think you're understating the usefulness of AI a little bit.
economically, it doesn't make sense. It'a a billion dollar tool with trillion dollars of investment. It's not sustainable as it is now from that angle alone.
That's why a bubble popping and a soft reset in terms of not trying to stuff money into any mention of it. Bring out real customer demand and real (current, not "in 10 years") benefits to it. Which won't be as omnipresent as it is trying to portray.
I think you're probably right about the economics and I hope you're right about a soft reset. There is certainly a tremendous amount of waste happening right now for the sake of "the investors are...
I think you're probably right about the economics and I hope you're right about a soft reset. There is certainly a tremendous amount of waste happening right now for the sake of "the investors are all excited about this AI thing, so let's spend money on it".
I was more just trying to make the case that what we have today is useful and there is real demand for it today. But yeah, probably not enough demand to justify the trillions that are being thrown at it.
I think articles like these might just be noise now.
There is a demand for it. I work at an analytics company and our customers are demanding it and when we deliver they are using it.
You wouldn’t think that customers of a product thats meant to give them accurate answers all the time would accept such a thing as an agentic AI that often makes mistakes, but they are actually demanding it, paying for it, and then using it.
I hate it and I think the whole thing is gobbling up land resources and using rocks to replace human workers and its not sustainable and the products that are created are stupid but the customer does actually want this nonsense.
So many people are using agentic browsers. Mozilla has no choice but to keep up.
again, skewed. But I see general polls go around 60-70% of users.
Now if you treat customers as money, then yes. a lot of money wants to say it wants AI. I think even that reached an inflection point with Pintrest's reaction to their layoffs, but we'll see.
I'll be kinder than the article interpretation and say this amounts to "the user's input doesn't matter. This is going to make us so much more productive!". Which still supposes this god complex, as if they know what's best for all of us. But "all of us" are very diverse. What use does a plumber need for AI in the day to day? maybe some device they use? What about a grade school teacher? A politician (past bribes to de-regulate it)?
You sound like your work in B2B. In that case the users are very different from the buyers. Your buyers are clamoring for AI. But if your AI sucks, then the users most definitely aren’t. But that surprises me. Vibe coding analytics is right up there in terms of things LLMs can do reasonably well.
I agree with a lot of what you're saying. Definitely agree that AI is being forced into many places that it just doesn't belong. Medium-sized companies (like Proton or Atlassian) are building their own chat bots/models to try to compete with the big players and it just makes no sense to me. I think very few people are going to choose to use lumo when big name models like gpt, claude, gemini are available.
With that said, I think you're understating the usefulness of AI a little bit. Maybe it's not "revolutionary" (I don't really know how to quantify that), but it is pretty damn useful. I've been using Claude Opus for work and for personal projects. It's good enough now to create an entire small project for you. If you're creative about the information you give it, it can also help a ton with large codebases. Not to soapbox too much, but as an example, this past weekend I got interested in identifying home-installation solar panels using aerial imagery. Essentially, I was interested in replicating the work of this Stanford study, Deep solar. Within a day, I had a complete python pipeline that would, given imagery I downloaded from state government sources (116GB GeoTiff), split the images into tiles, use image classification on the tiles to identify solar panels, and present the results in an HTML Leaflet app (including tile-server to display the GeoTiff on the map for easy verification of results). I wasn't super pleased with the performance of the image classifier (identifying metal roofs as solar panels was one issue), so the AI was even able to build me a labelling tool so that I could easily work through a few hundred examples and label false positives that I could use to fine-tune the classifier. Throughout the process, I could even take screenshots of the map and give those to claude and, with enough explanation, it can identify issues in the screenshots and provide fixes.
It's very far from a perfect tool, and anyone calling an AI model their "friend" I think needs to get outside more and talk to some real people... But as a tool for software engineering and automation, it is really really good. Better than it was a year ago. Way beyond a "glorified auto complete".
economically, it doesn't make sense. It'a a billion dollar tool with trillion dollars of investment. It's not sustainable as it is now from that angle alone.
That's why a bubble popping and a soft reset in terms of not trying to stuff money into any mention of it. Bring out real customer demand and real (current, not "in 10 years") benefits to it. Which won't be as omnipresent as it is trying to portray.
I think you're probably right about the economics and I hope you're right about a soft reset. There is certainly a tremendous amount of waste happening right now for the sake of "the investors are all excited about this AI thing, so let's spend money on it".
I was more just trying to make the case that what we have today is useful and there is real demand for it today. But yeah, probably not enough demand to justify the trillions that are being thrown at it.