this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2024
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Companies are going all-in on artificial intelligence right now, investing millions or even billions into the area while slapping the AI initialism on their products, even when doing so seems strange and pointless.

Heavy investment and increasingly powerful hardware tend to mean more expensive products. To discover if people would be willing to pay extra for hardware with AI capabilities, the question was asked on the TechPowerUp forums.

The results show that over 22,000 people, a massive 84% of the overall vote, said no, they would not pay more. More than 2,200 participants said they didn't know, while just under 2,000 voters said yes.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

There is more to AI than self driving cars and LLMs.

For example, I work at a company that trained a deep learning model to count potatoes in a field. The computer can count so much faster than we can, it’s incredible. There are many useful, but not so glamorous, applications for this sort of technology.

I think it’s more that we will slowly piece together bits of useful AI while the hyped areas that can’t deliver will die out.

[–] jj4211 15 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Machine vision is absolutely the most slam dunk "AI" does work and has practical applications. However it was doing so a few years before the current craze. Basically the current craze was driven by ChatGPT, with people overestimating how far that will go in the short term because it almost acts like a human conversation, and that seemed so powerful .

[–] AA5B 0 points 5 months ago (2 children)

That’s why I love ai: I know it’s been a huge part of phone camera improvements in the last few years.

I seem to get more use out of voice assistants because I know how to speak their language, but if language processing noticeably improves, that will be huge

Motion detection and person detection have been a revolution in cheap home cameras by very reliably flagging video of interest, but there’s always room for improvement. More importantly I want to be able to do that processing real time, on a device that doesn’t consume much power

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

None of what you're describing is anything close to "intelligence". And it's all existed before this nonsense hype cycle.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

AI camera generation isn't camera improvement.

[–] AA5B 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

When my phone takes a clearer picture in darker situations and catch a recognizable action shot of my kid across a soccer field, it’s a better camera. It doesn’t matter whether the improvements were hardware or software, or even how true to life in some cases, it’s a better camera

Apple has done a great job of not only making cameras physically better, but integrating LiDAR for faster focus, image composition across multiple lenses, improved low light pictures, and post-processing to make dramatically better pictures in a wide range of conditions

[–] EliteDragonX 4 points 5 months ago

That’s nice and all, but that’s nowhere close to a real intelligence. That’s just an algorithm that has “learned” what a potato is.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

So... A machine is "intelligent" because it can count potatoes? This sort of nonsense is a huge part of the problem.