vegetaLinus Torvalds reckons AI is ‘90% marketing and 10% reality’
Honestly, he’s wrong though.
I know tons of full stack developers who use AI to GREATLY speed up their workflow. I’ve used AI image generators to put something I wanted into the concept stage before I paid an artist to do the work with the revisions I wanted that I couldn’t get AI to produce properly.
And first and foremost, they’re a great use in surfacing information that is discussed and available, but might be buried with no SEO behind it to surface it. They are terrible at deducing things themselves, because they can’t ‘think’, or coming up with solutions that others haven’t already - but so long as people are aware of those limitations, then they’re a pretty good tool to have.
How’s he wrong?
Did you actually listen to what he said or are you just reading the headline and making it fit another narrative to respond to?
Because he also said he thinks it’s going to change the world, he just hates the marketing BS that’s overhyping it.
Probably because, as anyone who’s actually used AI knows, it has some core weaknesses. But the marketers are happy to gloss over that lie and just say that it will be able to do nearly anything.
It will be interesting when the bubble pops, because that’s probably when we’ll see the useful things it is actually good at
[deleted] in lemmyWhich is how new technologies tend to go see what sticks after exploring what is possible. So it shouldn’t be surprising that ai is goong through the motions, but it is getting annoying how fast it is ruining functioning systems by being jammed in with no guardrails.
SemperverusSummarizing documents, writing documents you don’t want to (within reason), and… whatever the hell Neuro-sama is doing on Vedal’s channel, are like the only ones i’ve found so far that kind of work. And I guess image generation.
It’s amazingly good at moderating user content to flag for moderator review. Existing text analysis completely falls down beyond keyword filtering tbh.
It’s really good at sentiment analysis. Which is great for things like user reviews. The Amazon ai notes on products are actually brilliant at summarizing the pros and cons of a product. I work for a holiday let company and we experimented with using it to find customers we need to follow up with and the results were amazing.
It smashes other automated translating services as well.
I use it a lot as a programmer to very quickly learn new topics. Also as an interactive docs that you can ask follow up questions to. I can pick up a new language as I go much faster than with traditional resources.
It’s honestly a complete game changer.
It’s honestly a complete game changer.
It is, both in good and bad ways. The problem, as Linus and others here are pointing out, is that marketing pushes the good and downplays/ignores the bad, so there’s going to be a rough adjustment period as people eventually see through the BS and find the issues, and the longer that takes, the harder things will crash.
There are plenty of good uses of modern AI approaches, they’re just far fewer than the ones being marketed these days.
The one place where I sincerely hope it takes root and succeeds is in medicine. Having better drugs, helping to identify potential problems or diseases, identifying health patterns (all with human review and proper trials, naturally)…
It’s not even close to the magical AGI that tech bros are promising, but it is good at digesting data, and science and medicine are full of that. Plus, given how overworked doctors and nurses can be, having a preliminary analysis from a computer that doesn’t get tired or overworked seems like it would probably help with accurate diagnosis.
But, it also means we get Sam Altman as the next Elon Musk if he cashes in before the pop. And whatever other tech bros do the same. More filthy-rich men with the emotional maturity of a 12 year old.