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Microsoft CEO Admits That AI Is Generating Basically No Value (ca.finance.yahoo.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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"The real benchmark is: the world growing at 10 percent," he added. "Suddenly productivity goes up and the economy is growing at a faster rate. When that happens, we'll be fine as an industry."

Needless to say, we haven't seen anything like that yet. OpenAI's top AI agent — the tech that people like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman say is poised to upend the economy — still moves at a snail's pace and requires constant supervision.

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[–] 61 points 2 years ago (5 children)

It is fun to generate some stupid images a few times, but you can't trust that "AI" crap with anything serious.

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  • [–] 46 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    I was just talking about this with someone the other day. While it’s truly remarkable what AI can do, its margin for error is just too big for most if not all of the use cases companies want to use it for.

    For example, I use the Hoarder app which is a site bookmarking program, and when I save any given site, it feeds the text into a local Ollama model which summarizes it, conjures up some tags, and applies the tags to it. This is useful for me, and if it generates a few extra tags that aren’t useful, it doesn’t really disrupt my workflow at all. So this is a net benefit for me, but this use case will not be earning these corps any amount of profit.

    On the other end, you have Googles Gemini that now gives you an AI generated answer to your queries. The point of this is to aggregate data from several sources within the search results and return it to you, saving you the time of having to look through several search results yourself. And like 90% of the time it actually does a great job. The problem with this is the goal, which is to save you from having to check individual sources, and its reliability rate. If I google 100 things and Gemini correctly answers 99 of those things accurate abut completely hallucinates the 100th, then that means that all 100 times I have to check its sources and verify that what it said was correct. Which means I’m now back to just… you know… looking through the search results one by one like I would have anyway without the AI.

    So while AI is far from useless, it can’t now and never will be able to be relied on for anything important, and that’s where the money to be made is.

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  • [–] 16 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Even your manual search results may have you find incorrect sources, selection bias for what you want to see, heck even AI generated slop, so the AI generated results will just be another layer on top. Link aggregating search engines are slowly becoming useless at this rate.

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  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    While that’s true, the thing that stuck out to me is not even that the AI was mislead by itself finding AI slop, or even somebody falsely asserting something. I googled something with a particular yea or no answer. “Does X technology use Y protocol”. The AI came back with “Yes it does, and here’s how it uses it”, and upon visiting the reference page for that answer, it was documentation for that technology where it explained very clearly that x technology does NOT use Y protocol, and then went into detail on why it doesn’t. So even when everything lines up and the answer is clear and unambiguous, the AI can give you an entirely fabricated answer.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    What's really awful is that it seems like they've trained these LLMs to be "helpful", which means to say "yes" as much as possible. But, that's the case even when the true answer is "no".

    I was searching for something recently. Most people with similar searches were trying to do X, I was trying to do Y which was different in subtle but important differences. There are tons of resources out there showing how to do X, but none showing how to do Y. The "AI" answer gave me directions for doing Y by showing me the procedure for doing X, with certain parts changed so that they match Y instead. It doesn't work like that.

    Like, imagine a recipe that not just uses sugar but that relies on key properties of sugar to work, something like caramel. Search for "how do I make caramel with stevia instead of sugar" and the AI gives you the recipe for making caramel with sugar, just with "stevia" replacing every mention of "sugar" in the original recipe. Absolutely useless, right? The correct answer would be "You can't do that, the properties are just too different." But, an LLM knows nothing, so it is happy just to substitute words in a recipe and be "helpful".

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