this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2024
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Do people actually want this?
Like, I know the megacorps that control our lives do (since it's a cheap way of adding value to their products), but what about actual users? I think many see it as a novelty and a toy rather than a productivity tool. Especially when public awareness of "hallucinations" and the plight faced by artists rises.
Kinda feels like the whole "voice controlled assistants" bubble that happened a while ago. Sure they are relatively commonplace nowadays, but nowhere near as universal as people thought they would be.
Current LLMs are manifestly different from Cortana (🤢) because they are actually somewhat intelligent. Microsoft's copilot can do web search and perform basic tasks on the computer, and because of their exclusive contract with OpenAI they're gonna have access to more advanced versions of GPT which will be able to do more high level control and automation on the desktop. It will 100% be useful for users to have this available, and I expect even Linux desktops will eventually add local LLM support (once consumer compute and the tech matures). It is not just glorified auto complete, it is actually fairly correlated with outputs of real human language cognition.
The main issue for me is that they get all the data you input and mine it for better models without your explicit consent. This isn't an area where open source can catch up without significant capital in favor of it, so we have to hope Meta, Mistral and government funded projects give us what we need to have a competitor.
Sure, all that may be true but it doesn't answer my original concern: Is this something that people want as a core feature of their OS? My comments weren't that "oh, this is only as technically sophisticated as voice assistants", it was more "voice assistants never really took off as much as people thought they would". I may be cynical and grumpy, but to me it feels like these companies are failing to read the market.
I'm reminded of a presentation that I saw where they were showing off fancy AI technology. Basically, if you were in a call 1 to 1 call with someone and had to leave to answer the doorbell or something, the other person could keep speaking and an AI would summarise what they said when they got back.
It felt so out of touch with what people would actually want to do in that situation.
I hope the LLM bubble pops this year. The degree of overinvestment by megacorps is staggering.