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As an LLM-skeptic, I still think this is too pessimistic as an outlook for the future. I do think there is a good chance that LLMs as they exist will not change anything nearly as significantly as the hype is predicting. But I think there is scope for the technology, if it continues developing, to significantly help people. The most interesting and clear AI-based product I can imagine is a true personal assistant, that can autonomously handle tasks like "book me a barber's appointment this week" (while taking into account my work days, my meetings, my other personal appointments, etc) or "I want to meet up with Joe, Susan, and Mary for a nice dinner, book us a table" (and your personal assistant would sync up with their personal assistants, or with themselves directly if they don't have one, to arrange this, and suggest some possible venues and so on). And it would help remind you of important upcoming events, help organize your shopping and so on. And of course, it would do all of this semi-interactively ("The best slot I'm seeing for your barber appointment would be on Tuesday at 3 PM, but you have that call with Andrew, can that be moved?"). All of these things seem relatively doable in principle, with existing technologies, as long as AIs improve on their reasoning skills and someone spends the time and effort to connect a single AI to several core technologies (in this case, email, calendars, web search, maybe some reservation apps, and some camera apps to help recognize various things). |
Nobody else is going to be the central point for enough data to make this kind of AI useful.
Example: Atlassian can’t make a product like this because they only have access to a small piece of your personal data in the first place. They don’t have access to your work calendar, emails, chat, conference calls, etc. Many companies who use Atlassian don’t even want to use them for source control or pipelines despite those products being a part of their suite.
Same deal with companies like Slack: they don’t have access to your email or your ticketing system. Notion doesn’t have access to your emails, conference calls, etc.
So realistically, truly helpful AI is going to be gated behind giants like Google and Microsoft, while the companies fighting for LLM scraps are going to all make their ShitGPT support chat bots.
The ultimate death knell for AI is that it’s such a unique technology that the average CTO can’t even conceptualize how it works and what it can do. I think they didn’t have that problem with previous tech industry hype trains.