Engineering will always be hard, but I think a lot of this current AI hype cycle doesn't even have a product - its just "well that's cool so I want that."
I don’t think that’s very generous - I think it’s “wow that’s amazing I’d like to find a way to integrate it” which I think is perfectly reasonable given it is amazing (even though I think it’s overestimated in its current form, and underestimated due to its current form)
That's the same thing - integrating Google Search in your product was hot at one point but brought no value, people would just use Google instead of your site search anyway.
Working towards having a chat box on every website is not a useful outcome for users or businesses, just OpenAI.
Yes but that’s seeing it as a finished product rather than a demo of a limited technology. The effort here wasn’t using it as a chat box either. The effort here was using natural language generate non trivial queries that are semantically aware of the underlying trace system without the human learning the complex query language. I’m surprised if that’s hard see the value of and how it’s different than a chat box.
When “it could be used for anything” really means only that they haven’t found a market fit and are just a solution in search of a problem, as with most venture-baked enterprises.
I know at every company I’m working with they’ve found pretty useful and interesting fits for this tech. It fills a space that’s been impossible to date - an abductive reasoning ability in an abstract semantic space. While they can’t actually reason - any more than our inductive or deductive reasoning systems of yore - the missing piece in a lot of stuff has been the ability to navigate an abstract space and find a likely “meaning” then produce a likely output that’s semantically “accurate.” The optimizing, constraining, informing via goal based agency, information retrieval, etc - those are simply integrations, as this article discusses. By looking at LLMs as a finished product you missed the magic. It’s not a product, it’s a capability in a larger system being displayed in demo ware. The larger systems are where the magic happens. Don’t take my word for it - while we will see more hype than we ever have before, we will also see systems that transcend what was possible by amazing leaps and bounds. The jaded are both right, and profoundly wrong - as are the wild eyed dreamers.
Search was already solved - I could find anything I wanted using any number of search engines within seconds, and it provided much more exact information.
LLMs are purely suited for search precisely because they can't guarantee to "find" information that actually exists in the real world, but they do add a lot of unnecessary noise, making it harder to weed out the truth, not easier.
