Re:Cory Doctorow: What Kind of Bubble Is AI?
by coffeecloud on Wednesday December 20, 2023 @02:43AM
(#38706324)
I don’t think he’s questing the technological potential of AI, just the business viability of the current crop of AI companies offering billion dollar models.
Sure, AI can do language translation - but any major money making operation can’t rely solely on an AI translation (or an AI text-to-speech, or an AI transcription). Big important business needs a human in the loop to verify everything the AI does, so there really isn’t much money being saved.
You don’t need a human in the loop for a $10 app to help you learn Spanish, but that’s not the kind of big business that will keep OpenAIs lights on.
Wtf is Doctorow talking about here? Because the voice transcription, text-to-speech, optical character recognition, and language translation applications are already changing the world. I'm open to calling it a "bubble," but the sentence above is absurd. Reminds me of the John McCarthy quote "As soon as it works, no one calls it AI anymore"