Honestly these loudmouths are usually quite privileged themselves. These theatrics are either to deflect from themselves, or they are delusional about how tough their life is.
There's definitely folks working on automatically marketing via LLMs, but I have my doubts that it wont just numb people further to marketing as we are close to saturation.
My thought/worry on a lot of the LLM agentic workflow personal assistant stuff is it is just ripe for fraud. The money is more on the adversarial side.
People think they'll just have a personal bot out there buying airline tickets, hotel rooms, jeans, new phone, etc. Meanwhile as soon as you have agents like this out in the wild, the capital will flow to bad actors creating bots to game those bots.
The world is PvP unfortunately. There is more money to be made skimming agents trying to buy stuff than there is in getting people to pay for a personal assistant agent subscription.
It's like why a lot of ad-based stuff doesn't offer a premium option for people to pay to opt out (ex Youtube). The people who can afford to pay and avoid search/social media/etc advertising are exactly the people you can make a lot of money advertising to.
Also, wtf are people doing with their lives where a significant amount of time is spent on stuff like this? It only takes a few minutes to book a flight or hotel/airbnb. Shopping for things can be fun, and if it isn’t, again, a few minutes. The amount of time that a “personal assistant” would save me is minuscule and probably actively harmful.
Are people just so addicted to doomscrolling or whatever that they just can’t spend a few minutes of their day doing some type of human activity?
We aren't talking pocket calculators here (I see the irony of phone app in pocket), LLMs are hugely expensive things made and controlled behind costly commercial subscriptions. And likely in the middle of a huge investment bubble and stability is uncertain. So we all need to be careful about "gee we don't need that skill or person anymore", etc.
Open weight models that run under your desk are not frontier model level, but they are getting closer. Improvements in agentic post training and things like TurboQuant mean that even if all frontier labs pull the plug tomorrow, we will still have agents to work with.
TurboQuant is not a step change, it's more of a smaller incremental improvement to KV quantization, and possibly (unsure) to quantization more generally. I'm actually more positive about SSD weights offload, which opens up very large local models for slow inference (good enough for slow chat) to virtually any hardware or amount of RAM.
I’ve been wondering lately if the next Xbox will have “copilot” in the name. With an easy to accidentally press dedicated button on the controller that interrupts the game you’re playing to start an AI chat.
A valid use case would be AI pretending to be the second player so that you can pretend you're having friends over while actually you're alone. Schizophrenia-as-a-Service.
You jest but there is the Office Hub that seemed like a solution in search of a problem and it was renamed into Microsoft Copilot 365 and has basically the same icon as Copliot. The 365 is paid the non is not.
No idea if this is the case anymore, but many NY Public Libraries had "Stacks" where they kept lots of magazines going back to the 1970s. I havent checked for at least a decade, but that was a lot of fun -- we'd go there and look at old computer ads from the 1980s. They would have a binder per decade -- giant thick binders.
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