| We're still looking for "that is useful". The stuff they've been trying to sell AI to the public with is increasingly looking as absurd as every 1978 "you'll store your recipes on the home computer" argument. AI text became a Human Centipede story: Start with a coherent 10-word sentence, let AI balloon it into five pages of flowery nonsense, send it to someone else, who has their AI smash it back down to 10 meaningful words. Coding assistance, even as spicy autocorrect, is often a net negative as you have to plow through hallucinations and weird guesses as to what you want but lack the tools to explain to it. Image generation is already heading rapidly into cringe territory, in part due to some very public social media operations. I can imagine your kids' kids in 2040 finding out they generated AI images in the 2020s and looking at them with the same embarrassment you'd see if they dug out your high-school emo fursona. There might well be some more "closed-loop" AI applications that make sense. But are they going to be running on every desktop in the world? Or are they going to be mostly used in datacentres and purpose-built embedded devices? I also wonder how well some of the models and techniques scale down. I know Microsoft pushed a minimum spec to promote a machine as Copilot-ready, but that seems like it's going to be "Vista Basic Ready" redux as people try to run tools designed for datacentres full of Quadro cards, or at least high-end GPUs, on their $299 HP laptop. |