Your example of catastrophic failure is… e-mail? Spam filters are wrong all the time, and they’re still fantastic. Glancing in the folder for rare exceptions is cognitively easier than categorizing every single thing one-by-one.
If there’s one false negative, you don’t go “Holy shit, it’s the actual prince of Nigeria!”
But sure, let’s apply flawed models somewhere safe, like analyzing medical data. What?
And it doesn’t matter if it gets it wrong one time in a hundred, that one time is enough to completely negate all potential positives of the feature.
Obviously fucking not.
Even in car safety, a literal life-and-death context, a camera that beeps when you’re about to screw up can catch plenty of times where you might guess wrong. Yeah - if you straight-up do not look, and blindly trust the beepy camera, bad things will happen. That’s why you have the camera and look.
If a single fuckup renders the whole thing worthless, I have terrible news about human programmers.
Okay, so you can’t conceive of the idea of an email that it’s important that you don’t miss.
Let’s go with what Apple sold Apple Intelligence on, shall we? You say to Siri “what time do I need to pick my mother up from the airport?” and Siri coombs through your messages for the flight time, checks the time of arrival from the airline’s website, accesses maps to get journey time accounting for local traffic, and tells you when you need to leave.
With LLMs, absolutely none of those steps can be trusted. You have to check each one yourself. Because if they’re wrong, then the output is wrong. And it’s important that the output is right. And if you have to check the input of every step, then what do you save by having Siri do it in the first place? It’s actually taking you more time than it would have to do everything yourself.
AI assistants are being sold as saving you time and taking meaningless busywork away from you. In some applications, like writing easy, boring code, or crunching more data than a human could in a very short time frame, they are. But for the applications they’re being sold on for phones? Not without being reliable. Which they can’t be, because of their architecture.
Your example of catastrophic failure is… e-mail? Spam filters are wrong all the time, and they’re still fantastic. Glancing in the folder for rare exceptions is cognitively easier than categorizing every single thing one-by-one.
If there’s one false negative, you don’t go “Holy shit, it’s the actual prince of Nigeria!”
But sure, let’s apply flawed models somewhere safe, like analyzing medical data. What?
Obviously fucking not.
Even in car safety, a literal life-and-death context, a camera that beeps when you’re about to screw up can catch plenty of times where you might guess wrong. Yeah - if you straight-up do not look, and blindly trust the beepy camera, bad things will happen. That’s why you have the camera and look.
If a single fuckup renders the whole thing worthless, I have terrible news about human programmers.
Okay, so you can’t conceive of the idea of an email that it’s important that you don’t miss.
Let’s go with what Apple sold Apple Intelligence on, shall we? You say to Siri “what time do I need to pick my mother up from the airport?” and Siri coombs through your messages for the flight time, checks the time of arrival from the airline’s website, accesses maps to get journey time accounting for local traffic, and tells you when you need to leave.
With LLMs, absolutely none of those steps can be trusted. You have to check each one yourself. Because if they’re wrong, then the output is wrong. And it’s important that the output is right. And if you have to check the input of every step, then what do you save by having Siri do it in the first place? It’s actually taking you more time than it would have to do everything yourself.
AI assistants are being sold as saving you time and taking meaningless busywork away from you. In some applications, like writing easy, boring code, or crunching more data than a human could in a very short time frame, they are. But for the applications they’re being sold on for phones? Not without being reliable. Which they can’t be, because of their architecture.