There have been multiple things which have gone wrong with AI for me but these two pushed me over the brink. This is mainly about LLMs but other AI has also not been particularly helpful for me.
Case 1
I was trying to find the music video from where a screenshot was taken.
I provided o4 mini the image and asked it where it is from. It rejected it saying that it does not discuss private details. Fair enough. I told it that it is xyz artist. It then listed three of their popular music videos, neither of which was the correct answer to my question.
Then I started a new chat and described in detail what the screenshot was. It once again regurgitated similar things.
I gave up. I did a simple reverse image search and found the answer in 30 seconds.
Case 2
I wanted a way to create a spreadsheet for tracking investments which had xyz columns.
It did give me the correct columns and rows but the formulae for calculations were off. They were almost correct most of the time but almost correct is useless when working with money.
I gave up. I manually made the spreadsheet with all the required details.
Why are LLMs so wrong most of the time? Aren’t they processing high quality data from multiple sources? I just don’t understand the point of even making these softwares if all they can do is sound smart while being wrong.
Oh you sweet summer child.
If you remember anything from this thread, remember this: capitalist markets do not care whether something is useful or useless. Capitalist markets care whether something will make money for its investors. If something totally useless will make money for its investors, the market will throw money at it.
See: tulips, pet rocks, ethanol, cryptocurrency. And now AI.
Because people are stupid. And people will spend money on stupid shit. And the empty hand of capitalism will support whatever people will spend money on, whether it's stupid shit or not.
(And because, unfortunately, AI tools are amazing at gathering information from their users. And I think the big tech companies are really aggressively pushing AI because they want very much to have users talking to their AI tools about what they need and what they want and what their interests are, because that's the kind of big data they can make a lot of money from.)