"Everyday AI" hasn't even been built yet tbh. Where is my assistant that notices my flight has been delayed and reschedules my appointments and lets my contacts know?
I think your example highlights why this kind of "everyday AI" would be nearly impossible. If my phone automatically rescheduled my appointments and notified my contacts, without my explicit direction, I would be pissed as all hell. There are some "confirmation" notifications that could assist here ("We noticed your flight is delayed - would you like to reschedule these appointments?"), but even then, I'd say the majority of notifications I get these days are annoying and I spend a ton of time trying to figure out how to turn off annoying notifications while not totally silencing ones I depend upon. I'd have a difficult time believing that AI systems wouldn't just add to my list of over-burdensome notifications.
If you were an important CEO or something, and you had a competent human Personal Assistant - would you allow them to reschedule your appointments if you were running late?
Seems to me the problems are (1) the "assistants" aren't anywhere near good enough to be trusted to make the right decisions, and (2) a trustworthy assistant isn't compatible with the adtech business model, so it's unlikely facebook or google would produce such a thing.
The CEO would trust the personal assistant to do this if they have a deep trust in the assistance competence. They would also need to know the assistant has a deep enough understanding of the their preferences to not do something they don't like. AI can mirror that.
More importantly though there will be consequences if the human assistant makes a big mistake and books the wrong flight. They would have to take responsibility for the mistake.
The LLM is always just going to write in text it is sorry if it makes a mistake. That is never going to be good enough for anything of consequence. The LLM would practically have to be omniscient in a way that is not going to be possible in a world filled with uncertainty.
So much of human activity is built around the network of trust that another human takes the blame if something goes wrong. So much activity involves coin flips and that someone takes the blame when the coin lands on heads but we bet on tails.
>If you were an important CEO or something, and you had a competent human Personal Assistant - would you allow them to reschedule your appointments if you were running late?
Yes, why wouldn’t I? I could also give them parameters like “if I’m more than 20 minutes late please re-schedule this” or “if my flight is delayed please let everyone know it’s delayed”
Why wouldn’t I do that? Presumably the person hired is competent to make determinations within parameters specified.
I could also let them know when it’s inappropriate to do this. Again, they should be competent enough to discern the differences between when it is and isn’t appropriate.
This could honestly be done by an algorithm if you give it the correct inputs and outputs and it could be fed updates, the only real limit is the fact that some of this isn’t exposed via an API either in a timely fashion or at all
Important CEOs bring their trusted human assistant with them. Those of us at a lower level don't get that option, but at the CEO level you get to hire your own sectary and you spend years teaching them how you work and what to do in all the situations that come up and so they will make the right decisions often enough that you can trust them. Or they know they are not trusted to reschedule that appointment and so they don't.
That years of training is what we are missing. I don't think modern AIs can be trained in the way the assistants of old could be, at least not yet.
I don’t even think you need machine learning for this, it’s an API problem mostly like I said.
Being able to collate the requisite inputs from outside sources is the real problem. If you can’t do that reliably it’s simply hard to build an algorithm around it. Flights for example would require your calendar program to reliably pull data from an API regarding the flight information that is current and effectively real time. That’s the actual hard part, and this expands across services.
For all the advances we have made with computers and smartphones in particular they suck at meaningfully exposing a way to collate data sources and create actions around them reliably
Personalizing any automation like that is a privacy nightmare. The system needs to know a lot about your preferences and the decisions you'd normally make yourself as well as your current circumstances since those will also influence your choices. How do you feed that into any AI without being problematic for privacy?
Having one running locally helps but it's still necessarily storing information that you might not want to have stored where someone could potentially retrieve it, either via some sort of exploit or by forcibly compelling you to give it up.
A personal assistant is also a privacy nightmare - to be effective they need to know a lot of personal data about you. But at least a human is one person to blame, automation means you have no idea where the data is or who can abuse it.
Your problem isn't AI, it's shitty AI. Why wouldn't you trust an AI that was competent and understood what you wanted, like any good human personal assistant?
I worked on a (failed) system that was supposed to help with this in the pre-ChatGPT era. The obvious limitations is getting the data, and scaling that to everyone. Learning about your flights, staying up to date on them, etc is such a daunting privacy-busting task that everyone is scared to start. Either you go use-case by use-case (flights, restaurants, calendars… etc) and never get traction or you just start scanning emails and open up huge data risks.
Today, this is nearly available, nearly. Probably only something Google/apple can realistically offer. Apple “intelligence” has started to read your notifications and rewrite them for you, so it shouldn’t be a big leap to listen for a United App notification and decide it’s urgent enough take action. Should be “trivial” for Google to do as well, and they could even run it server side to help without a phone present.
I love how the goal post is being moved publicly as to what AI means.
AI is anything automated it seems, and now they’re being subcategorized into niches as to what they do, e.g. “Agentic AI”, “LLM backed AI systems” etc.
If it’s not real intelligence then it isn’t really AI, and I wish the world at large would call it out.
LLM, Machine Learning, Neural Networks etc are all great but none of them have true spontaneous intelligence or learning ability.
Please, someone point out how any of these systems have organic spontaneous learning ability for a subject it was not pre-data seeded on. This is a generally accepted measure of higher level sentience as far as I’m aware
None of these exhibit any accepted definitions of intelligence markers. The intelligence isn’t artificial, it doesn’t exist is my point. If you apply the commonly accepted definitions of what is considered display of intelligent behavior. One aspect of which is the ability to adapt to new circumstances that you haven’t experienced before.
There has been considerable success in programming computers to draw inferences, for example, but not actual reasoning. You can mimic some forms of reasoning but you can’t take one ML set - like recognizing photos with mountains, then expect it to correctly identify a similar geographical element - a hill. It can’t do that. It may correctly identify that it’s not a mountain but that isn’t the same thing as actually learning it’s similar to a mountain but not the same, which would be a rudimentary definition of a hill that an intelligent entity could conceivably use if it knew what a mountain was but not a hill.
Machine Learning was always a more honest place to have This discourse. I am indeed pushing back on the idea that we should be calling ChatGPT or anything like it intelligence.
It’s Machine Learning, clever algorithms, Large language Models, among other things, that are trained on ways to mimic certain aspects of intelligence, but it does not actually possess any real intelligence. Look at the LLM hallucination problem for example. It can’t be self corrected because it’s not an intelligent system.
Moving the goal post on what AI means (and pushing AGI as some new goalpost) is disingenuous, and relatively recent.
I’d care not if it wasn’t for the fact there is so much misinformation around capabilities and the future of AI, that it’s already negatively crept into policy making for example.
I’m more annoyed by the sheer amount of effort and time we’re spending now as a society to rationalise the AI bullshit and argue against it. For example everything you said is valid, but you were provoked into painstakingly writing this elaborate rebuttal, by a bunch of parasitic VCs, who have zero intellectual integrity and are simply trying to advertise their investment.
1. How does it know how/when to reschedule that doctor's appointment that you need to call to reschedule? How do you know that receptionist won't hang up on your "AI agent" who tries to call them, b/c they think it's some sort of scam bot?
2. How does it know which contacts to contact? Does that acquaintance you talked to for some professional reason need to know your flight got rescheduled? What about that travel agency you talked to last night to confirm the flight?
I would say the problem there is the requirement to phone a human to change a record in their database.
If they had an app then an AI assistant should be able to tie things together. Where things seem to be going is apps provide an intent-based API wrapper plus UI widgets to interact with it. That way assistants can operate them too.