this post was submitted on 03 May 2024
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Why are there AI boxes popping up everywhere? They are useless. How many times do we need to repeat that LLMs are trained to give convincing answers but not correct ones. I've gained nothing from asking this glorified e-waste something, pulling out my phone and verifying it.
What I don't get is why anyone would like to buy a new gadget for some AI features. Just develop a nice app and let people run it on their phones.
That's why though. Because they can monetize hardware. They can't monetize something a free app does.
Plenty of free apps get monetized just fine. They just have to offer something people want to use that they can slather ads all over. The AI doo-dads haven't shown they're useful. I'm guessing the dedicated hardware strategy got them more upfront funding from stupid venture capital than an app would have, but they still haven't answered why anybody should buy these. Just postponing the inevitable.
The answer is "marketing"
They have pushed AI so hard in the last couple of years they have convinced many that we are 1 year away from Terminator travelling back in time to prevent the apocalypse
s/Crypto/AI/
Because money, both from tech hungry but not very savvy consumers, and the inevitable advertisers that will pay for the opportunity for their names to be ejected from these boxes as part of a perfectly natural conversation.
I have now heard of my first "ai box". I'm on Lemmy most days. Not sure how it's an epidemic...
I haven't seen much of them here, but I use other media too. E.g, not long ago there was a lot of coverage about the "Humane AI Pin", which was utter garbage and even more expensive.
It's not black or white.
Of couse AI hallucinates, but not all that an LLM produces is garbage.
Don't expect a "living" Wikipedia or Google, but, it sure can help with things like coding or translating.
I don't necessarily disagree. You can certainly use LLMs and achieve something in less time than without it. Numerous people here are speaking about coding and while I had no success with them, it can work with more popular languages. The thing is, these people use LLMs as a tool in their process. They verify the results (or the compiler does it for them). That's not what this product is. It's a standalone device which you talk to. It's supposed to replace pulling out your phone to answer a question.
I quite like kagis universal summarizer, for example. It let's me know if a long ass YouTube video is worth watching
I use LLMs as a starting point to research new subjects.
The google/ddg search quality is hot garbage, so LLM at least gives me the terminology to be more precise in my searchs.