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So I know a lot of posters here are doing some really advanced stuff with AI, but I have a quick little anecdote from my own luddite life that might help explain why most normies don't really see AI as something particularly useful.
I just asked Google's free AI what the current value of 0.035 ounces of gold is and it completely face-planted, ignoring the decimal and the zero and giving me the value for 35 ounces. This isn't a case of overactive guardrails or confusing syntax or hallucinating plausible details into a news story; it's the most basic of transcription errors, the kind that dumb, pre-LLM systems have solved for decades. Old google never would have made such an error.
This is the technology that's going to completely upend the world order? It makes sense for normies to be skeptical. Regardless of what the frontier labs have cooking, the AI most people actually interact with is worse than useless half the time.
Anybody else have one of these "the fuck are we even doing here?" moments with AI recently?
"I've heard all about these Chinese cars totally upending the global auto market and I'm told they're absolutely mogging the established auto players in basically every non Western country, so to investigate I test drove a 2003 BYD Flyer and it sucked balls, so clearly this is all fake news"
What's funny is I actually agree with your thesis. I think that the various free/quantized models that normies largely interact with (most notably, google search and copilot) have totally given everyone a terrible impression.
But this style of the motte investigative reporting is just ... Lmao
The difference is that BYD isn't pushing their 25-year-old cars for marketing purposes. For example, most of the time that a new food product comes out, you have to buy it if you want to try it. Sometimes, the manufacturer will hire a company to distribute free samples in grocery stores. Imagine if, in order to save money, the samples all came from batches that QC rejected for being not up to par. If the product failed to sell, and market research suggested that people weren't impressed with the samples, and the company's response was "You can't judge the product based on the free samples; you have to get the real version", nobody would have any sympathy for them. It would end up in marketing textbooks as an example of what not to do, and people like Rory Sutherland would repeat the story every time they gave a talk.
I agree that the free AI samples are trash, I just think once we're all operating at the meta-level of understanding this, repeatedly pointing this out is a pointless exercise. Like congratulations, you have successfully noticed that something that is obviously low quality is low quality. Are the AI labs dumb for letting this pollute their brand/the overall "brand" of AI? Yes.
It's like mild "boo outgroup" posting but the outgroup is free shitty AI models
If people repeatedly went to McDonald's to make effort posts about how bigmacs are trash compared to their local favorite smashburger place, I'd have the same opinion.
It's also mildly funny to me that ~4 years ago AI was primarily used to make me laugh in /r/subreddit_simulator with shit tier Markov chains/GPT-2 and now we're mocking an AI model so cheap it can be served for free missed a decimal but otherwise was able to instantly answer a question with live information. In your food examples, yeah they're failing QC, but the food failing QC is significantly better than the failed QC food 4 years ago, the QC bar is a few orders of magnitude higher, and overall quality is skyrocketing year over year.
The companies are using the free samples as a sales come-on though -- like if the smashburger place were giving out shitty frozen burgers on the street as an ad campaign to get people to come pay for their good burgers, it would be weird, right?
Most normies are experiencing AI through the lens of Google's shitty free one -- which seems particularly shitty if you ask it about normie things. It seems like this should be anti-convincing in terms of driving adoption of the paid product.
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