why AI sucks to me
Apparently we are all on the verge of watching the singularity occur in real-time. But first we’ll all lose our jobs. A sentiment repeated by the CEOs of major AI companies, tech-fluencers, former presidents, and business tycoons. But what am I noticing as a regular software engineer that they aren’t? Well I’m not in on the take. There’s a lot of money to be made convincing every brand that anything and everything is AI. You know how your smart thermostat already did some basic things that made your life easier. Well it looks like AI took the smart thermostats job too. Never mind that there’s no difference and the price is now 20% higher. AI! Sounds cool. Sure you can ask it questions and it’ll pass some version of the Turing test, but it’s totally providing real world value, honest 🤞. By putting AI in your fridge it can kind of know that you need more Tres Leches cake. I’m sure you have to tell it that you probably aren’t buying cake regularly and that it can stop reminding you. Or that the one off ingredients were actually just a single time purchase. But it’s AI so it’s really smart now. Your fridge is smart… Wow the future really is getting crazy. So remember when Azure got built and started raking in billions. Were there keynotes where the CEO of Microsoft said “cloud” 100 times in 3 minutes? Maybe that happened, but in that case there was good reason to hype it. It’s worth a fortune. Wouldn’t AI be treated the same if it really did bring so much value? And wouldn’t require the meme content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YivUOqd91Nk
It’s going to take our jobs. Well I heard that a couple years ago and I’m unfortunately still gainfully employed. Personally I think I use it less to actually write code because it’s wrong enough to make me not trust it. It hits this magic threshold of being wrong enough to ruin it. And I’m sure most can relate to the frustrating back and forth of trying to correct it and edit its output only for it to forget what you were even talking about in the first place. Then at some point you start over hoping for better results with the zero shot prompt and you realize that you just wasted 10 minutes of your life arguing with a machine. I like to picture myself, but instead of typing I’m arguing with my lawnmower about which Alien movie was better. (A: 2) So this is the billions of venture backed startups? The billions invested into big tech with Nvidia being the primary recipient. For what exactly? Features you don’t like from companies you don’t trust providing functionality to solve problems that don’t exist? Sounds like the future don’t it? Never mind I still have to clean up dog poop off the hardwood floor. I still have to vacuum (the Roomba-like robot vacuum isn’t smart enough to not get stuck under the couch). AI can make life like videos, pictures (that still look mega AI generated but w/e), and text output. The text output ability having many actual real world use cases that utilize the key strengths of the transformer architecture. There are however predictable AI slop emails that get created, formulaic social media posts generated, and bots. Everyone loves the unwanted unsolicited garbled text created by a bot? The point being that the interesting use cases aren’t the flashy nonsense that is making goofy headlines. To touch on a final point where does this data come from that the models train on? So you write code. The AI trains on it. Now it’s super smart right? Wait! Maybe you were the smart one all along? What happens when we’re all out of jobs and the data to train on has been made by the AI itself? The New York Times describes the content/rights holders refusing to give AI companies permission to use their data for training https://web.archive.org/web/20250109144727/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/19/technology/ai-data-restrictions.html
So while I’m still picking up junk off the floor, doing dishes, there’s no brain interface with my computer, no AI to do laundry, no AI to help me stay healthy, or help prevent me from spending money, or really any real world problems that this magical world changing technology is supposedly going to solve. It’s a decent thesaurus though.