Software companies want to shove AI everywhere because it's the shiny new thing. Hardware companies love it because they can finally have a way to fight the "it's good enough for email and browsing" argument to sell us more hardware.
And yet, weirdly, MS have chosen to just make it their entire personality at this point.
There has, for a number of years, been a move away from Windows to macOS and Linux for devs. I suspect this will start to accelerate because people don't want tools that are obnoxiously omnipresent.
Carpenters have various ways to keep their most used tools at hand, but you don't see them wearing a charm bracelet of every tool they need.
It seems like every product manager (or program manager) or maybe all the way down to staff have got “incorporating AI” as some kind of KPI - on which your performance is measured.
There is a hoard of people who "work in tech" that don't work in tech.
These are people who are missing valuable business insights or who are working on novel solutions and include many developers. Those are the ones who will struggle with relevance going forward.
Equally, large corporations are at significant risk if the productivity of a single person increases further. If you look at the game industry, indie games are running circles around the AAA games, but this is limited to exceptional individuals or teams. Make more people individually exceptional and it's going to be real hard for big companies to eat.
They're shoving AI everywhere because it's extraordinarily powerful and truly differentiating. Being jaded and cynical about it doesn't change that reality.
Obviously there will be winners and losers and it will shake out -- personally I can't imagine using notepad for more than pasting arbitrary text and it seems like the least features is the best -- but bonafide text tools without AI in 2024 are crippling.
If AI is so powerful why don’t we see a massive productivity spike around the globe?
It may be convenient but more than once just replaced the time I needed to write my code by time fine tuning the prompt because the AI didn’t quite got what I wanted.
On top of that I must review foreign code. That’s harder than code I already know.
And on top of that the end result lacks the feeling of accomplishment in solving a problem because it wasn’t me who wrote it.
I‘m degraded to some kind customer of the AI.
Assembly line workers are said to be alienated from the product they produce, I guess the same will happen for AI users.
>If AI is so powerful why don’t we see a massive productivity spike around the globe?
We overestimate the short term effects and underestimate the long term effects (Amara's law). We're currently in the trough of disillusionment where people are running around saying that AI failed, was overblown, etc, while people like me are working with corporations to completely change how they operate, to an outrageous efficiency boost. Our world is going to look very different in a decade.
>It may be convenient but more than once just replaced the time I needed to write my code by time fine tuning the prompt because the AI didn’t quite got what I wanted
Most software developers spend very little of their time actually "coding", and most of their time investigating, understanding, comparing, and so on. I have never used AI for "production" code -- I never copy/paste something into my code -- but dozens of times a day I do use it to get rough outlines, investigate libraries and their use, and most importantly to get heuristics on paths to take in the code I do write. It has proven absolutely invaluable to me and I can't imagine not having it as an accelerator now.
What imaginary "efficiency data" are you citing? Ignoring that US "productivity" data has been skyrocketing, when loads of large orgs are laying off loads of people and specifically citing it as the reason, maybe it is actually starting to have an impact?
If it is causing a huge gain in efficiency, it should be trivial to demonstrate with data. You're talking about "Amara's law", and "trough of disillusionment". None of that shit matters. Just share the data, and people will agree.
>Just having AI in your product description makes people hate your product
They compare "AI" to "New Technology", and there was a mild preference for the phrase "New Technology". Casting that as "hating" it is a bit of a misrepresentation. Further "AI" as a general term is mysterious and unknown. One of their examples was an "AI-Powered TV"...like, what does that even mean? Or an "AI-powered financial service". They sound terrible.
>As soon as AI is added to anything people immediately start googling how to disable it
Okay? Some people dislike almost everything new or different. Most people don't. If every major company is busy trying to get in front of AI, maybe it isn't quite the big "makes everyone hate it!" thing you imagine it is, no?
It's a 15% reduction on intention to buy (on the TV case, 20% on the car) just by putting AI there on the name is a really big deal. That's about half of the deviation on the data.
The ugly is that it's a self-reported poll, but it's a well run self-reported poll, with a large effect, and good statistical relevance.
Ooof, boy is Apple in for a disaster with their iPhone and Mac products! Has someone told them? Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon, and all of the other big companies as well! They're doomed!
Putting an amorphous "AI-powered" on an imaginary product is nonsensical, and doesn't carry over to the conclusion that "people hate AI". Yes, I would be wary of a "AI-powered coffee maker" or an "AI-powered toothbrush" because that just sounds like nonsense. But there are a lot of places where people already understand the value proposition, and the more people experience it, the more they demand it and it becomes entry stakes.
Just the most trivial example: one of my children has a habit of sending thoughts as a long series of texts. One thought split over a dozen texts. The "AI-powered" summarization of notifications in iOS 18.2 is absolutely brilliant for those times I can only glance, looking at it in detail when the situation avails. Thus far it has been 100% accurate and profoundly useful. That's the most tosser, simplistic example of many, many ways AI has added to my life.
> Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon, and all of the other big companies as well! They're doomed!
Many of them are certainly in a bit of trouble because they've poured obscene amounts of money into AI and it really hasn't turned into anything people really want. They keep forcing AI at people in every product they can because they're hoping that eventually something will stick and people will fawn over it, but so far people just haven't found AI to be all that useful, they don't trust it (https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2023/06/05/in-ai-w...) and they have privacy concerns (with good reason).
It's great that you've found it useful. I know a few people who get some value out of it, even if only as a toy, but there's no killer app for AI certainly nothing that justifies the insane costs that went into it. Most of the time it's just getting in people's way and it's largely been ignored by the public (https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/artificial-inte...)
>Considering how fanatical Apple users can be about literally anything Apple throws at them they were not excited about AI
No True Scotsman all over here. Where people embrace and adopt AI, it isn't real. But a million incredibly dumb sociology surveys of nebulous, imaginary things are super convincing.
>Many of them are certainly in a bit of trouble
Literally none of them are "in trouble". I mean, Google has kind of underperformed and is behind the ball, but absolutely none of them have retreated at all.
Seriously, this whole discussion is hilarious. Every single major company is dumping enormous efforts into AI, redoubling and redoubling again their commitment based upon market analysis and what they've seen. If you counter this by pointing at some asinine college survey of fantasy products with absurd titles, you might be deluding yourself.
> Seriously, this whole discussion is hilarious. Every single major company is dumping enormous efforts into AI, redoubling and redoubling again their commitment based upon market analysis and what they've seen. If you counter this by pointing at some asinine college survey of fantasy products with absurd titles, you might be deluding yourself.
I also know what I see around me. Every time a search engine or social media site or OS pushes an AI feature I see people coming to me asking if I know how to turn it off. Tips like adding -"ai" -"stable diffusion" -"midjourney" -"prompt hunt" -"open art" to searches have spread to everyone I know.
You're right that Google and Microsoft would have better numbers than I do and maybe it's better to trust the hype-train fed to us by the multi-billion dollar corporations who have massive sunk costs to justify to their shareholders, over glorified internet surveys. I'm not even saying that AI can't ever become wildly popular, but I know that nobody around me is impressed or even optimistic about AI, most everyone wants to get away from it, and that includes the stereotypical grandmother types who genuinely want the tech they interact with to be easier to use and the the stereotypical tech/nerd types who want it to be more powerful. That's not a very good sign.
Also, let's not pretend that those "fantasy products with absurd titles" aren't representative of the kind of absurd products we've all seen "AI" slapped onto.
Have you not seen market hype cycles before? They don't necessarily correlate with success, and when they do it's not necessarily with the ones who sunk the most money in. see: .com bubble (which did eventually turn out to be huge, just not for most of the companies in the first wave), 3D TVs (which didn't, now dead), VR (still a bit in limbo, but the hype has died down from where it was, a lot of companies haven't recouped their investments). "Lots of companies are putting lots of money into it" does not mean it's actually a good idea.
(and honestly, I think the only data most people in the market are basing their decision off is 'chatGPT got a million users in 5 days'. But then, their monthly site visits are now down more than 90% from their peak. I think there is value in AI in general, but it's very over-hyped and there's a lot of quite frankly crap integrations which provide little to negative value)
100%. Notepad has always been just a simple ASCII text tool, with Wordpad being the discount word processor. Microsoft's insistence in shoving word processing features into Notepad has never made sense.
whtsthmttrmn left the following comment, but then deleted it-
"I know this is rude to say, but I feel you weren't too skilled before LLMs became a household term."
This is such a howler that I am going to indirectly reply to them here because this is a position that comes up constantly as some sort of rather strange defensive posture: A Luddist "If you aren't dismissive of them, clearly you must be mediocre. Look at my world-weary cynicism that makes me elite"
I've worked in software development for just shy of three decades. I have been a lead engineer or organization-wide architect for multiple medium to large organizations. I was a "senior engineer" at 23 for an industrial controls company. I have always been the guy when it comes to coding challenges or choices at every single organization I've worked at. I've done embedded development, did interactive web applications before almost anyone, have published papers and magazine articles, and have an extremely rich resume across many languages and platforms, with a long history of wins.
Yeah, I'm pretty good at this stuff. And I find "AI" extremely useful to my life. I have subscriptions across multiple products, and at this moment am building a Jina v3 embedding system for an insurance company.
Sneering and acting dismissive isn't going to make it not the game changer that it is. It's coming and you can't stuff your head into sand. Well...you can, but you're just assuring your upcoming unemployment.
In fact let me turn this completely around and say that only the truly mediocre are riding this Luddism train. In an average day I'm working across a half dozen different programming languages, multiple platforms, many endpoints and toolings, and operations and mathematics that I constantly have to refresh myself on. If I was doing copy/pasta template code all day in a tiny little niche I probably wouldn't find LLMs useful. But I don't, so I do.
> Being jaded and cynical about it doesn't change that reality.
Downvotetards need to understand this harder to break out of their funk. Criminally underrated comment, thank you and I wish I could give you more karma.
