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by neepi 376 days ago
Oh the press AI hit job. Here we go.

No one has reached the bar.

2 comments

How so?

AI products have shown a lot of progress over the past few years, even if they haven't "reached the bar".

But Apple is failing to deliver anything solid in the same time frame. Disregarding an arbitrary notion of "reaching the bar", they need to show progress.

What has Microsoft delivered? What has any hardware manufacturer delivered? What features of any operating system have been added by any company, that are worth while?

There's basically one "killer ai app", that's the chatbot. There's a second, plausible case, for agentic additions to IDEs.

But where is this high bar we're meant to be seeing? All I see is google and stackoverflow being replaced by openai.

I think part of the problem is nobody has a clear vision of what "progress" would look like here. What is the thing that they should be shipping today that would get someone to upgrade their phone, or to switch to iPhone?

Inverting it, what are the AI features that Google has shipped that are getting people to upgrade their Android phones, or to switch to Android?

My Apple devices are pretty useful for AI devices now given that I can run e.g. ChatGPT and Claude on them. I know they have to do something so the tech press can stop saying they are behind, but it still feels premature given lack of consensus on how best to integrate phones with the unreliable AIs we have today.

> they need to show progress

To whom?

Customers deciding whether or not to buy new phone models.
How much do normie customers actually care about AI features on their new phones?
No one has delivered anything solid. Progress is asymptotic here and everything x months and y billion dollars away.

We have shitty chatbots which confidently spew garbage and a new button on laptops no one wanted.

And the customers are worried that the technology is coming for their jobs, their income and their lives.

That’s what I was thinking. The most valuable AI tools are probably coding assistants, and I’d argue they haven’t even reached the bar. What AI products have reached the bar?