Re:Smart devices are turning out to be a poor investment
by Izkata on Sunday March 31, 2024 @07:02PM
(#39889003)
Siri/etc aren't just general disillusionment though, people often talk about features that have been removed and replaced with a web search.
Re:Smart devices are turning out to be a poor investment
by rafaelmn on Sunday March 31, 2024 @07:20PM
(#39889151)
LLM quality drops aren't disillusionment either - it's scale/cost optimization. And those are subscription models - Siri/Google assistant is bundled with device/services.
Re:Smart devices are turning out to be a poor investment
by IncreasePosts on Sunday March 31, 2024 @08:26PM
(#39889571)
Coincidentally, those features were degraded so that those companies would have more compute power available to do inference for their LLMs
Re:Smart devices are turning out to be a poor investment
by aleph_minus_one on Sunday March 31, 2024 @07:05PM
(#39889033)
> Siri/etc aren't just general disillusionment though, people often talk about features that have been removed and replaced with a web search.
Recall that recently Google removed the image generation feature from Gemini after the diversity controversies. :-)
Re:Smart devices are turning out to be a poor investment
by max47 on Sunday March 31, 2024 @07:42PM
(#39889348)
>Initially, when they were new, also Siri, Alexa and Google Home felt mindblowing and "truly like the future".
Strong disagree on that one. It was difficult to get them to do simple things like give the weather if a different location, play the right song. Even asking what time it is wasn't guaranteed to give you an answer if you didn't ask the right way. The marketting material made it sound great but the first hand experience was very underwhelming. The biggest use case at launch was making it say funny things.
Re:Smart devices are turning out to be a poor investment
by VelesDude on Sunday March 31, 2024 @08:25PM
(#39889569)
At first yes, but about a year or two in was when you could do some really cool things, especially with Google. It could be astoundingly context aware, especially regarding a chain of on going queries. I have not seen that happen reliably in at least 5 years.
> And at the same time we've got Siri, Alexa/Amazon Echo stuff, and Google Home stuff that already feels dated and is actively getting worse with each passing year.
Initially, when they were new, also Siri, Alexa and Google Home felt mindblowing and "truly like the future". My bet: in a few years these LLMs will feel similarly dated.
Concerning your "is actively getting worse with each passing year" point: do you remember these HN posts from the last months where people were complaining that ChatGPT and GPT-4 have become worse than they were initially? In other words: it's already happening. :-)