[ForHackernews]

> Businesses aren’t asking “do we want AI capabilities?” They’re asking “how much can we get, and how soon?”

This is only because businesses are full of folks with short-sighted FOMO desperately trying to cram AI features into any product they can. AI is the new digital clock.

[throw310822]

The problem with current AI is that it's super easy to get half-decent results by hooking up a simple agent to a lot of office software- and when it works it looks like pure magic; but getting reliably good results is way harder. So half assed agents abound (I know, I've added three or four to our apps in the last few months) but they can get frustrating for the users really quickly.

[Spivak]

I really don't know what this means about the state of the corporate world but companies just don't care if it's bad. Higher ups demand the feature be added but then don't care at all if it's good or even if people actually use it. This isn't that uncommon but "integrate AI somewhere I don't care where" is such an obvious manifestation of this pattern.

We've put so many layers between the engineers and customers and diluted any accountability to demonstrate positive ROI—even if it's theoretical—that we do pointless work for nobody. I'm not going to complain too much personally because all those layers make it possible for me to just pull cards and collect a paycheck but I'm surprised nobody on the business side even somewhat cares if the work they're paying for is worthwhile.

[Eisenstein]

Worker efficiency an order of magnitude greater than what it was 50 years ago. An office worker with excel and the internet can accomplish in an hour what would have taken days or weeks for their counterpart to do in 1975 with a calculator and a telephone.

Who has gained from the efficiency? We haven't gotten more vacation days and we haven't gotten more share of the money.

I think it should be natural that jobs end up being mostly pointless. Why should we produce exponentially more value without getting a share of that value?

[throw310822]

> we haven't gotten more share of the money.

But your money buys stuff that 50 years ago would have been too expensive for the richest men in the world. A pocket supercomputer, advanced diagnostics and medicine, instant access to information anywhere in the world.

[WarOnPrivacy]

Material gains (produced by more productive workers) don't offset the increases in

    the number of expenses required to minimally live
       (ex:utilities, transpo, insurance, comms) and
    the ever escalating costs of those added requirements

Nor does it offset the accelerating increases in complexity for basic living factors - complexity that consumes internal resources and time.

More to the point, a pocket supercomputer is an irrelevancy for a typical wage worker, who's earnings are far insufficient for even the barest self-sufficiency.

[throw310822]

> Higher ups demand the feature be added but then don't care at all if it's good or even if people actually use it

Frankly I've added some of the features of my own initiative. They were low hanging fruits and really helpful in some cases, and in others they are placeholders waiting to be better integrated or expanded depending on the users requests. Nobody forces anyone to use them or even notice them, so why not?

As I said: these features look like magic in demos, it's not because of the hype that managers want them integrated but because of genuine enthusiasm. But they require more development and maintenance effort than was apparent from the demo. Also, there's a clear discoverability problem due to the fact that an agent has basically no UI.

[AbrahamParangi]

Candidly, the accusation of short-sightedness doesn't really make sense when it comes to enthusiasm in a technology which often in practice falls short today but which in certain cases and in more cases tomorrow than today is worth tremendous business value.

If anything, you should accuse them of foolhardy recklessness. They are not the sticks in the mud.

[marcyb5st]

Can a company like openAI be worth an estimated 1/5th of Alphabet, which offers a similar product but also has an operative system, a browser, the biggest video platform, the most used mail client, its own silicon to running that product, the 3rd most popular Cloud platform, ... ?

I think that is the recklessness in question. Throw in that there is no profit for OpenAI & co and that everything is fueled by debt and the picture is grim (IMHO)

[swiftcoder]

> and in more cases tomorrow than today is worth tremendous business value

That's a nice crystal ball you have there. From where I'm standing, model performance improvements have been slowing down for a while now, and without some sort of fundamental breakthrough, I don't see where the business value is going to come from

[AbrahamParangi]

The prerequisite for me to be wrong is that the technology needs to stop getting better entirely *right now* AND we need to discover ZERO new uses for what exists today.

That's a fairly tall order.

[jpkw]

So if the plateau is unanimously declared to have been reached tomorrow OR just one more tiny use case exists tomorrow and all others dwindle away to nothing, than you consider yourself to be correct? What a wild assertion!

[AbrahamParangi]

If the plateau is reached at some higher level of capability, I will remain correct, yes. If use cases are discovered that do not exist today, I will also be correct. You said it in a silly way but you're directionally correct.

[jpkw]

No. You state that this is all that it would take to be considered as tremendous business value. You are moving your goal posts on your point. My point is that you are taking an absolute position that there is tremendous business value in its current form(as a miniscule improvement and one insignificant new use case does does not equate to tremendous business value in itself) and so that remains to be seen.

[bigstrat2003]

We don't even have good uses today. That doesn't mean there won't be good uses tomorrow, but neither does it inspire confidence.

[ForHackernews]

Rushing to get on board something that looks like it might be the next big thing is often short-sighted. Some recent examples include Windows XP: Tablet Edition and Google Glass.

[AbrahamParangi]

That's like saying that gambling is shortsighted. It depends entirely on the odds as to whether or not it's wise, but "shortsighted" implies that making the bet precludes some future course of action.

[ForHackernews]

Maybe if you have near-infinite wealth like Google or Microsoft you aren't precluding future choices. For most economic actors, making some bets means not making others.

Companies that are hastily shoehorning AI into their customer support systems could instead devote resources to improving the core product to reduce the need for support.