The thing I find the most funny about all of these demos is they outsource tasks that are pretty meaningful ... choosing where to hike, learning more about the world around you, instead, you'll be told what to do and live in blissful ignorance. The challenge of living life is also the joy, at least to me. Plus I would never trust a company like openai with all of my personal information. This is definitely just them wanting greater and greater control and data from their users.
To me AI is like having a young graduate come to live with you as an assistant. It's happy to do some research for you though not very inspired. But make lunch? No. Do some cleaning. Def no, but happy to chat about how you should do it. It all seems a bit pointless in the end.
I have a sad semi-fantasy, semi-fear, that AI will show us that everything we do online is rather pointless and force us back into the real world (this would cause me and most of this site to lose our jobs, hence the fear part)
How could you positively and constructively add to the discussion by literally having the truth in your hands of what the future will be? The only thing I know it is that it's not even a young graduate, as soon as you have someone with a bit of domain expertise it will tell you how many lies they output
Remember Quibi? It was a streaming platform of TV shows, where they were filmed in portrait mode instead of landscape, and the episodes were 5 minutes instead of 30.
Their pitch was basically: "Nobody has time to sit down and watch a whole TV show anymore, that's why the short form content like Instagram and TikTok is doing so well - we're going to make TV shows to compete with those platforms that you can watch while you're waiting in line for a coffee!"
They got like billions of dollars in runway because the idea resonated so deeply with the boardrooms full of executives that they were pitching to, but the idea was completely dead on arrival. Normal (non-career-obsessed) people actually have a TON of free time. They chain-smoke entire seasons of shitty reality TV in one sitting. They plop down on the weekend and watch sports for hours on end, not on a phone, but on an actual TV in their living room.
I definitely agree that a ton of these AI use cases seem hyper-tailored to the executives running these companies and the investors that are backing them, and may not resonate at all with the broader population nor lead to widespread adoption.
I find the hike itself more meaningful than the searching for it. If an LLM can recommend be me a better hike, I’m all for it.
The word choice here: “you’ll be told what to do” doesn’t really reflect my experience with LLMs. You can always ask for more recommendations or push back.
(As an aside, I’ve found LLMs to be terrible for recommending books.)
I found a big part of what makes doing an activity enjoyable is the time spent thinking/planning involed to make it happen.
For example if I spent a week looking at exactly how to plan my trip, and then finally going out to accomplish it vs just waking up one morning and someone guiding me on exactly what to do
I'm the complete opposite. Nothing enjoyable about it whatsoever. I love going on trips with a friend group where someone takes lead and I don't need to be involved in the planning at all.
You can usually do with less than the full history. "Here are five books where I liked the tone/setting/worldbuilding/topic, gimme more" has proven pretty successful.
With gradual refinement - "I like #1 and #4, but I wonder if something like that exists with a 40s scifi tone. Gimme your top 10"
It's... mostly worked out so far. (It also turns out that some topics, I seem to have thoroughly explored. Taking recommendations for off-the-beaten-path heist novels :)
It would be great if it could do my taxes, or schedule a doctor's appointment, or do literally anything that's actually difficult and time consuming, but because those problems haven't already been solved by APIs it can't and never will be able to.
These things aren't difficult because they have to be. It's because the people in your town/state/country make them difficult. Personally, to make a doctor's appointment I open an app, select a time slot, and wait for a call later that day. If they want me to come in, they give me a time and I go in. Taxes is mostly automated but for the bits that aren't I tell them how much I made in total, fill in a short form, and get told what I owe. Simple.
Yes, that's obviously my point. A wrapper around already simple problems is not impressive. And yes, most of the time scheduling a doctor's appointment or doing regular taxes isn't hard, but the points when they do become complicated (finding a specialist, dealing with some unusual one off income) is where I want a tool to save me time, not reordering enough Cheetos for the month.
I've done my taxes through an API for years and it would be trivial to hook up an AI if I wanted to. I also don't see what would be so hard about scheduling a doctor's appointment when I'm already doing it through an app.
Yea totally - like those Black Mirror-esque (and South Park?) videos of people having AI talk to their partner about deep relationship stuff.
We just built a mechanical parts AI search engine [1], and a lot of what it does it just get the best options clustered together, and then give the user the power to do the deeper engineering work of part selection in a UI that makes more sense for the task than a chat UI.
Feels like this pattern of "narrow to just the good options, but give the user agency / affordances" is far better.
> people having AI talk to their partner about deep relationship stuff.
I have read stories about people using AI to write their Tinder messages, eulogies, etc.
Did we watch the same demo. Maybe I skipped over those parts. It nailed one of my immediate needs. Grocery shopping. I really don’t want to waste time adding items to my Walmart shopping cart for pickup or delivery. I want to send a bunch of recipe videos, get back a book of my version of how to format a recipe and also a cart full for me to click purchase. They nailed this.
I'm Italian, I love cooking in my free time, it's also part of our culture. I honestly can't figure out what's stressfull and time wasting shopping for groceries, I often get lost inside the smell of vegetables, pickin the right one, looking for the right color, even optimizing for cost and less waste. I find it so relaxing and like a zen experience
Time is money and picking out ingredients is incredibly low return on my time. I love grocery shopping, going to HEB or Central Market or other boutique store. I don’t want to do it every week multiple times a day though. I am sure some of this is cultural and what type of stores are available.
Nobody said it was stressful, it’s simply a huge chunk of time gone, would much rather spend it with family or doing the cooking itself. Go to any grocery store in America, even if you have a specific list it’s takes a good chunk of time. Why would I want to spend it smelling the veggies. I am sure you could probably get a slightly better taste or quality but I imagine on average it’s minimal. Everyone is different though. I cook a lot, have worked in kitchens, but with kids and a job, I have little interest in being selective on a daily basis. I can simply spend 5 mins, add a list of items to order, get it delivered and have saved probably a good hour in total.
I can't relate at all. I also hate just deciding on dishes. Subscribing to weekly meal kits is one of the best things I've done. I don't need to plan any meals and I only need to shop for basic stuff. I also cook way more varied recipes that I would otherwise never even think of.
If I were to start smelling vegetables in the local supermarket I'd be escorted out. I also hate cooking and hate shopping. I generally order the same items, order them online in 5 mins, and have them delivered.
Until you look at the demo video and they put $12 worth of green onions in the shopping bag because chatgpt thought 6 green onions == 6 bunches of green onions
The guy did say "it could just checkout if you ask it too, but I prefer to review it first myself". Reviewing a list is much quicker than doing the whole shop provided it's 90% accurate. In the case you mention you click the minus button 5 times.
If this ever gets popular then sellers will “optimize” their product listings to exploit the LLM (a “soft” prompt injection if you will). This will definitely be the case in marketplaces (like Amazon and Walmart). It’ll turn the old boring task of shopping into a fun puzzle to spot the decoy item or overpriced product.
It could happen but I am not building an Amazon shopping list. It’s about building a list from a physical store that will get delivered to me in a few hours. This is for shopping through a retailer, not the market place.
I do think it’s a concern but I think it’s no different than the exact problem that exists today in these marketplace operations like Amazon. I know for me I will actually split my shopping up and often shop less with an Amazon and more with a Walmart because of it.
I can totally see wanting to automate your life like this for work - "re-order that shipment from last week" or "bump my flight a day". But using this for personal stuff, it does seem like a slide towards just living a totally automated life.
There is something so cutsey and stupid about the sample prompts they do in these videos. I really hope people aren't as helpless as they seem in these ads. Maybe they are, and that's why they are billion dollar companies.
