trying to make this into a consumer product without figuring out what kind of need it serves for the consumer has been a big failure mode - ThreadSky

aelkus.bsky.social • 4 days ago

trying to make this into a consumer product without figuring out what kind of need it serves for the consumer has been a big failure mode

Reposted from Allison Morrow

"AI can never fail, it can only be failed" seems to be the fallacy taking root in some tech circles. It's not that AI sucks, it's that all of us smooth-brained Luddites who just don’t *get* it www.cnn.com/2025/03/27/t...

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marwoodlennox.bsky.social•4 days ago

I feel strangely that more should be written comparing AI boosterism to the Internet of Things in particular the belief by the business that this was the future and then getting mad at consumers, who were clearly wrong, for not being so enthusiastic.

dmnd.me•4 days ago

Nobody wants to accept that “companionship” is the killer consumer use case because waifu apps are bad, actually

funwithnix.bsky.social•4 days ago

many such cases in the last decade of "innovations"

astruckpersonn.bsky.social•4 days ago

a genuinely popular use of ai is. image recognition. it’s so nice being able to search thru my photos for “sunset” or “dog”. and actually get good results

igneous.bsky.social•4 days ago

I think it was done out of necessity for the stock price, and considering the performance over the past year was probably the right move. Their rev and profits are flat, but they crushed the nasdaq. It's still garbage though

joebaldwin.me.uk•2 days ago

I'm more sympathetic to Apple with this than I am Microsoft, given that Apple at least appeared to give *some* thought as to how genAI could be either fun or actively helpful, appeared to only get involved reluctantly, and aren't nearly as obnoxious with the "AI in every single product" spam.

joebaldwin.me.uk•2 days ago

Like at least Apple Intelligence is branded as a feature unto itself and things like notification summaries could be at least *hypothetically* helpful, rather than trying to rename Macs "MacBook AI Pro Max" or some such nonsense and sticking dumb AI buttons everywhere.

joebaldwin.me.uk•2 days ago

The delivery doesn't anywhere near match what they claimed (notification summaries are primarily a source of comedy for me, and the less said about Image Playgrounds the better) but they at least appeared to have something in mind other than "build it and they will come and we will make them."

orko.bsky.social•4 days ago

Technology for the sake of technology

spavel.bsky.social•4 days ago

Executives believe that this is a post use case technology because it can do anything and therefore uses for it will find themselves

aelkus.bsky.social•4 days ago

i have grown very tired of — in politics, in technology, and so many other areas — this predominating sense that you can ignore the need to accept constraints in favor of this attitude that enthusiasm and willpower alone can change material reality

desiderratum.bsky.social•4 days ago

A constant across the various manifestations of said sense is the constitutional cravenness & shortsighted stupidity of so many major institutions: They feel a breeze, believe it is a tempest, & bend accordingly, but somehow they never learn the right lesson

onedayinjune.bsky.social•4 days ago

This is basically Maoism.

vcarchidi.bsky.social•4 days ago

That sense is surprisingly stubborn too. Doesn't fade easily

sham.bsky.social•4 days ago

It's incredibly childish!

aelkus.bsky.social•4 days ago

it feels like we’ve been going through an endless version of this

aelkus.bsky.social•4 days ago

https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/ai-companies-are-pivoting-from-creating

in this case its “we should consider product-market fit” vs “no we don’t”

orko.bsky.social•4 days ago

You’d think investors would care more about the actual economics here as opposed to like the jangling keys aspect but at the end of they day they are just people

lynmw.bsky.social•4 days ago

Working at a couple startups I was amazed at how little technical grasp our investors seemed to have of AI/ML in contrast to the confidence with which they spoke about it.

matunos.bsky.social•4 days ago

I suspect a lot of those investors are either people who got rich off the dot com boom and think they're geniuses rather than lucky, and people with FOMO watching those other idiots get rich

willpierce.bsky.social•4 days ago

The nebulous interactive nature of LLMs creates a blank surface to project on. The Google engineer who swore he was developing something sentient was one facet of the weird dynamics/presumptions shaping these firms internally

The tech & devs are yes-anding eachother. Neither are allowed to say no

lastnpcalex.com•4 days ago

ya, i gripe about this a lot. slowly, tools are developed that are actually easy for me to use, but part of it has been me using more tools that are easier for LLMs to use, and i low-key resent this

lastnpcalex.com•4 days ago

more and more html content because i understand it, it kind of integrates into what i am already using, and LLMs understand it. but... it's definitely a bit of me conforming to a burgeoning technology instead of that technology rising to the challenge of my actual world problems

lastnpcalex.com•4 days ago

ofc my personal problems aren't serious problems, but i think it's illustrative of the broader trend, and people working on the tech are... not really interested in this perspective

ragnarokette.bsky.social•4 days ago

Believe it! How I Learned To Say My Company Is Worth More Money Than God Himself By Watching Naruto

lanticavirtu.bsky.social•4 days ago

Well a thing I've noticed the past 20-25 years is that many of these institutions and the people running them refuse to take the L.
The lessons they took from the Dotcom bubble burst, 9/11, Enron, Iraq, the Recession et al was very Trumpian: lie, delude, obfuscate and eventually it'll be real.

lanticavirtu.bsky.social•4 days ago

And truly I think our society is still desperate to recapture the second half of the 90s in many respects. The dotcom boom was so big and so fast and so prosperous that most of our institutions couldn't handle the comedown and are just trying to get the high again.

incoherent.bsky.social•4 days ago

everyone thinks they're Steve Jobs and they can make the consumer want it

klc.bsky.social•4 days ago

Maybe, just maybe, we all watched enough sci-fi movies and decided to hold onto our humanity *before* the computers take over.

travisatkins.bsky.social•4 days ago

ironically the part of Apple AI that has totally been made into just a consumer product (where it’s simply a fancy grammar checker on any editable text field) works great!

aelkus.bsky.social•4 days ago

more things like that needed

3662brendon.bsky.social•4 days ago

I suspect a lot of them were sold a bill of goods on "AGI" being a labor-killing panacea just around the corner that only needs just $1 trillion of R&D and think of themselves as part of a sort of con on investors to get the money, sure that they'll be forgiven for making everyone capitalist Gods

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