I am really tired of this kind of moralizing. The reality is that every time geeks come up with some utopian ideal, such as that we should publish all our software under free licenses or make all human knowledge freely accessible to anyone, the same geeks later show up and build extractive industries on top of this. Be a part of the open source revolution... so that you do unpaid labor for Facebook. Make a quirky homepage... so that we can bootstrap global-scale face recognition tech. Help us build the modern-day library of Alexandria... so that OpenAI and Anthropic can sell it back to you in a convenient squeezable tube.
Maybe it's time to admit that the techie community has a pretty bad moral compass and that we're not good stewards of the world's knowledge. We turn lofty ideals into amoral money-making schemes whenever we can. I'm not sure that the EFF's role in this is all that positive. They come from a good place, but they ultimately aid a morally bankrupt industry. I don't want archive.org to retain a copy of everyone's online footprint because I know it be used the same way it always is: to make money off other people's labor and to and erode privacy.
> The ideal is that something intelligent understands what you want to do and gets it done.
Maybe? For a couple of decades, we believed that computers you can talk to are the future of computing. Every sci-fi show worth a dime perpetuated that trope. And yet, even though the technology is here, we still usually prefer to read and type.
We might find out the same with some of the everyday uses of agentic tech: it may be less work to do something than to express your desires to an agent perfectly well. For example, agentic shopping is a use case some companies are focusing on, but I can't imagine it being easier to describe my sock taste preferences to an agent than click around for 5 minutes and find the stripe pattern I like.
And that's if we ignore that agents today are basically chaos monkeys that sometimes do what you want, sometimes rm -rf /, and sometimes spend all your money on a cryptocurrency scam. So for the foreseeable future, I most certainly don't want my OS to be "agentic". I want it to be deterministic until you figure out the chaos monkey stuff.
I think your last paragraph is the real issue that will forever crush improvements over clicking on stuff. Once you get to "buy me socks" you're just entering some different advertising domain. We already see it with very simple things like getting Siri to play a song. Two songs with the same name, the more popular one will win, apply that simple logic to everything and put a pay to play model in it and there's your "agentic" OS of the future.
I beg to differ that "the technology is here". Everyone I see who uses voice commands have to speak in a very contrived manner so that the computer can understand them properly. Computer vision systems still run into all sorts of weird edge cases.
We've progressed an impressive lot since, say, the nineties when computers (and the internet) started to spread to the general consumer market but the last 10% or so of the way is what would really be the game changer. And if we believe Pareto, of course that is gonna be 90% of the work. We've barely scratched the surface.
> it may be less work to do something than to express your desires to an agent perfectly well
As I use AI more and more to write code I find myself just implementing something myself more and more for this reason. By the time I have actually explained what I want in precise detail it's often faster to have just made the change myself.
Without enough detail SOTA models can often still get something working, but it's usually not the desired approach and causes problems later.
yeah for me even with other people, the amount of times you think "it would be easier for me to just show you" is maybe 30% of interactions with agents currently.
perplexity keeps trying to get me to use "computer" and for the life of me I can't think of anything I'd actually do with it.
I don't even think if singling out Dell is useful. Most US companies have long decided that providing good customer support is a drag on revenue and that you can get away with not providing it if the product is problem-free for 99% of your users.
Have you tried calling UPS with an atypical problem? Bank of America? United? It's all the same, and the thing is, you don't find out until you actually have a problem with the service you purchased.
There are some exceptions to this rule, for example many brokerages have real customer support. Amazon stands out too - they're not prepared to handle anything unusual, but their model is to refund you almost no matter what.
But by and large, it's absolutely awful in the US and I'm often positively surprised when I need to interact with customer support in other countries, where you actually can reach a courier about your delivery, etc.
FWIW, Airlines are actually great /if/ you're a frequent flyer. I get great service from United on the phone and did so previously from Delta, but in both cases I was a frequent traveler and so they automatically route your call into a better queue with better trained staff.
I think in the consumer electronics space this is where Apple shines and is heavily underrated. People balk at the prices of their products, but if you've ever used their support, they are easy to access and approach, in-store, over the phone, or live chat -- for any of their product and services -- and always try to get to the bottom of your issue. Oftentimes I end up solving the problem myself as I troubleshoot with them, or find a bug that requires an engineer to track on their backend that doesn't get fixed until 2 or 3 major releases later, but at least it's been flagged.
This type of support cannot be had with any of the PC vendors it seems.
Disproportionately many geeks have very strong opinions about psychiatry, probably because we have a lot of people who consider themselves neurodivergent, as well as plenty of folks who experiment with drugs.
> He had some pretty awful views that he was pretty loud about, especially later in life. He also cheated on his wife at one point.
In 1961, in his early 20s. You get ~80 years on this planet to make mistakes and have views that some other people will dislike. If these are the worst things we can accuse him of, while acknowledging all his charitable work, I'd say he fared OK compared to many other role models we have.
Alternatively, there's money to be lost in the transition. The vast majority of "crypto investors" did not walk away from it any richer. Some folks have gotten lucky, but it's just that: their thesis about the future of money was evidently wrong, they just happened to get the timing right. Getting lucky for the wrong reasons is not a good investment strategy.
Meanwhile, the main category of people who have consistently gotten rich off the "crypto revolution" were various scammers and pump-and-dumpers who have since moved on to meme stocks, AI content farming, and so on.
But I wouldn't use crypto as a benchmark because AI has more substance. We can debate if it's going to change the world, but you can build some new types of businesses and services if you have near-perfect natural language comprehension on the cheap.
The comparison gets picked up as the headline; the admission does not. This is exploited quite often, e.g. in science reporting. I'm not saying this is what Waymo did - they don't seem to be bad actors - but absolutely, the pattern does occur.
Because most of these things are not multi-trillion-dollar ideas. "We found a way to make illustrators, copyeditors, and paralegals, and several dozen other professions, somewhat obsolete" in no way justifies the valuations of OpenAI or Nvidia.
>Because most of these things are not multi-trillion-dollar ideas.
That's right, but there's more. When you think about the cost of compute and power for these LLM companies, they have no choice. It MUST be a multi-trillion-dollar idea or it's completely uninvestable. That's the only way they can sucker more and more money into this scheme.
This is literally the first time I've heard this. What is your source? I can type the exact same query three times and though the general meaning may be the same, the actual output is unique every single time. How do you explain this if it's cached?
I don't know about OpenAI, but Nvidia's valuation seems more justifiable based on their actually known revenue and profit, and because it's publicly traded.
Though if the bubble(?) bursts and Nvidia starts selling fewer units year-over-year, that could be problematic.
We paid for newspapers and they ran ads. We paid for cable TV and it had ads. We went to the cinema and watched ads.
Ad-free paid services were a brief aberration, essentially a bait-and-switch: "see how much nicer we are from the old-school competitors". Now that the competitors are gone, Netflix is doing ads, Amazon is doing ads... why wouldn't Spotify?
I hate it, but the reality is that we groan on online forums but don't actually leave.
It's very much easier to ignore ads in a newspaper. It's not so easy when you are forced to listen to them before the thing you paid for. It's not the same.
"But you don't leave" is an excuse the human-hating producers tell themselves. But it's normal for consumers to be protected from the petty misery of natural market forces by legislation. We have enacted many such controls.
maybe you did, but I did not. my attention is valuable to me and I do not pay people to waste it. i had tapes, CDs, mp3s, and paid spotify. this is a well-proven market.
Maybe it's time to admit that the techie community has a pretty bad moral compass and that we're not good stewards of the world's knowledge. We turn lofty ideals into amoral money-making schemes whenever we can. I'm not sure that the EFF's role in this is all that positive. They come from a good place, but they ultimately aid a morally bankrupt industry. I don't want archive.org to retain a copy of everyone's online footprint because I know it be used the same way it always is: to make money off other people's labor and to and erode privacy.
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