There's enough vision-impaired people in the world to equal the population of Japan, Korea, and Vietnam combined. And beyond those people who would get obvious utility, this is essentially Google Lens on steroids—I simply can't figure how you could call this "niche". Maybe you won't use it multiple times per day, but plenty of people will. Hell, just now I was wondering why the leaves on one of my plants are starting to brown and could have used this.

Many of those people would be adequately served with a pair of glasses.

This, wouldn't help them, even if they had both a device capable of using it and the means to pay for it.

Even if it could help people, it's an open question if it would be safe, to, for example, use this to scan medication when it is only a probabilistic model that may hallucinate something that isn't actually there.

What you're talking about is a speculative use of a service that might one day exist based on this technology.

What I am talking about is this actual service.

>What you're talking about is a speculative use of a service that might one day exist based on this technology.

It's not a speculative service that might one day happen.

Literally it's rolling out right now

https://www.bemyeyes.com/blog/announcing-be-my-ai

> Many of those people would be adequately served with a pair of glasses.

These people are being served by a preview of the service _right now_.

> Even if it could help people, it's an open question if it would be safe, to, for example, use this to scan medication when it is only a probabilistic model that may hallucinate something that isn't actually there.

Any OCR solution could also make a mistake, like misrecognizing a dosage on a prescription label.

> What you're talking about is a speculative use of a service that might one day exist based on this technology.

> What I am talking about is this actual service.

GPT-4 is six months old. ChatGPT is less than a year old. Why would you benchmark a service by the initial public preview? Of course it's _speculative use_, the damn thing has had its tires kicked for like a day.

baffling that you think 3.5% of the world's population is a niche

You are thinking too small here. Think about a system that could provide you with sophisticated image analysis to the level of a human expert. Tumor identification, quality control, etc. I don't think we are there quite yet, but this is clear and fast progress on that field.

> I’m sitting on my couch right now and ... I can see literally nothing in my visual range want to take a photo of and run image analysis over.

What if you weren't on your couch? Going outside is not "niche".