I’ve seen reports and studies that show products advertised as including / involving AI are off-putting to consumers. And this matches what almost every person I hear irl or online says. Regardless of whether they think that in the long-term AI will be useful, problematic or apocalyptic, nobody is impressed Spotify offering a “AI DJ” or “AI coffee machines”.
I understand that AI tech companies might want to promote their own AI products if they think there’s a market for them. And they might even try to create a market by hyping the possibilities of “AI”. But rebranding your existing service or algorithms as being AI seems like super dumb move, obviously stupid for tech literate people and off-putting / scary for others. Have they just completely misjudged the world’s enthusiasm for this buzzword? Or is there some other reason?
It delights me to lie to myself that they are nervous someone somewhere would pick a golden ticket with their AI application and they’d miss out. But more obvious explanation for big corpos is that they hide problematic data-mining, content appropriation, ad personalization and other stuff behind this curtain, maybe not for these crude tools alone, but to force a precedent into existence that they can do it whenever they like in the future. They make you give up your personal stonks for a shiny penny that is corporate LLM genies and they probably pay a lot to showcase their beauty at loss.
It delights me to lie to myself that they are nervous someone somewhere would pick a golden ticket with their AI application and they’d miss out
Tbf, that’s exactly what happens sometimes. CVS partnered with Theranos despite the lack of evidence supporting their product. Their reasoning was that if only Walgreens partnered with Theranos and it was a success, then CBS would have been screwed
businesses are hoping they can use ai to higher cheaper labor. they want to be able to higher someone who does not know how to use the relevant program but can coax a machine to produce it or can get enough information from a machine to do the job. also they hope to eliminate human trainers and such.
FYI
higherhireno no. I meant they can hire cheaper labor and get them to a higher potential and…yeah I typoed.
No worries mate, we all po it.
My understanding is that a lot of venture capitalist funding is driven by gut feel and personal connection. Like, they’ll tell you that they’re the vanguard of the future with a vision, but most of the time they’re just cliquey bros going “dude, sick” and burning money.
There’s an anecdote in the book “the cold start problem” about how zoom got funding even though the guys funding it thought it was a solved problem, that a new video company wouldn’t go anywhere, but the zoom guy was their bro so they gave him millions of dollars.
I feel like it’s possible some future will look back at this the way we look at feudalism. Just like, that’s such a bad system , why did people put up with it?
Just like, that’s such a bad system , why did people put up with it?
Because hindsight is 20/20 and people had preconceptions back then that filled in the gaps, as they do right now.
The gaps are and were actually full of nonsense like “he’s my buddy I’ll give him money” but people expect the process to be a lot more reliable and solid, because they think they’d be more careful with that kind of money, not realising that to some millions are pocket change (and nobody is careful with pocket change) and that others gamble with other people’s money and thus are a lot more cavalier.
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Investor FOMO
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Threatening Labor
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It’s all a sunk-cost fallacy. They’ve dumped all of this money into it, so therefore they have to double down on it.
Especially if they’re trying to get a bunch of money from Wall Street and other investors.
The biggest contributor being all of these companies believe they can now just lay off a bunch of workers and make up the difference with these LLMs even though they are not at all a replacement for humans.
Less workers, less people that have to pay, and more money can be funneled to the top.
And don’t forget: companies are just a group of people, and they can fall for a good hyped up scam as easily anyone else.
It was super cool for like three weeks. Now it’s the gambler’s fallacy they’re hanging on to.
Ohhh, you fn nailed it. Nice comparison.
I was discussing this with a friend. We came to the conclusion that “entrepreneur” means “unskilled, uneducated and unable to work” and that the harder a product is marketed, the more worthless it is.
Attracts investors.
When people are evaluating companies, and see a company missing out on the current trend, how is that going to factor into their valuation of the stock prices?
They think they’ll get money.
Is why.
Unless a hyped-up investor gives it to them, they won’t.
AI has some useful applications, just most of them are a bit niche and/or have ethical issues so while it’s worth having the tools and functionality to do things, no one can do much with them.
Like for example we pretty much have AIs that could generate really good audio books using your favourite actors voi e likeness, but it’s a legal nightmare, and audio books are a niche already.
In game development being able to use AI for texture generation, rigging, animations are pretty good and can save lots of time, but it comes at the cost of jobs.
Some useful applications for end users are things like noise removal and dynamic audio enhancement AIs which can make your mic not sound like you are talking from a tunnel under a motorway when in meetings, or being able to do basic voice activation of certain tools, even spam filtering.
The whole using AI to sidestep being creative or trying to pretend to collate knowledge in any meaningful way is a bit out of grasp at the moment. Don’t get me wrong it has a good go at it, but it’s not actually intelligent it’s just throwing out lots of nonsense hoping for the best.
It hypes investors. Investors are the customers.
Suits heard about this secret sauce called AI that can cut down on the need for those pesky humans that are always looking for handouts and luxuries like a living wage and benefits. The consumer will have to accept it when the only choices they’re offered are varying flavors of the same shit.
Can confirm this is absolutely true. The number of meetings I’ve been in where execs are salivating…
Whereas in reality so far the payoffs are projected to be something like 2%. Not counting the costs of developing and running the AI stuff.
(but also it doesn’t work and they are, in fact, just dumb)
And then when it doesn’t work, you blame other people and fire humans anyway and give yourself a raise for saving the company money. Stock prices rise.
A lot of people have come to realize that LLMs and generative AI aren’t what they thought it was. They’re not electric brains that are reasonable replacements for humans. They get really annoyed at the idea of a company trying to do that.
Some companies are just dumb and want to do it anyway because they misread their customers.
Some companies know their customer hate it but their research shows that they’ll still make more money doing it.
Many people that are actually working with AI realize that AI is great for a much larger set of problems. Many of those problems are worth a ton of money; (eg. monitoring biometric data to predict health risks earlier, natural disaster prediction and fraud detection).
Many people that are actually working with AI realize that AI is great for a much larger set of problems. Many of those problems are worth a ton of money; (eg. monitoring biometric data to predict health risks earlier, natural disaster prediction and fraud detection
None of those are LLMs though, or particularly new.
You’re right. They’re not LLMs and they’re not particularly new.
The main new part is that new techniques in AI and better hardware means that we can get better answers than we used to be able to get. Many people also realize that there’s a lot of potential to develop systems that are much better at answering those questions.
So when people ask, “Why are companies investing in AI when customers hate AI.” Part of the answer is that they’re investing in something different than what most people think of when they hear “AI”.
Think like a venture investor.
A small chance of huge growth via new technology can have a big payoff. They expect most companies to fail and are more worried about missing an opportunity than losing money in a single bad investment.
Nobody is quite sure where AI technology will be in ten years, but if it’s big, it’s going to make people who got in early very rich. It doesn’t matter that it sucks now; the web sucked in 1995, but it made people who got in (and out) at the right time very rich.
AI is the new ad driven model.
Everything that AI touches, ends up machine learning content.
AI DJ? I now have your name your email address and every single taste you have in music. As you use the app I will gain more insight into more music that you are or might be interested in.
That roomba thats running around your house looking for socks and cables not to run over, is also image processing on everything in your house. We know how big your house is they probably know how big my TV is.
They’re not just farming your email and text messages to figure out what to sell you they know at a core intimate level what you’re interests are.
They’re in for a rude awakening in a few years. All of this AI information gathering is a bubble. You have companies like anovo complaining that they can’t afford to host a single website. All this AI training is not cheap and the return on investment is not great after the initial plunge right?
