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Comment by d--b | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one to think that the AI world is divided into 2 groups:

1. Deepmind, who solved go, protein folding, and that seems really onto something.

2. Everyone else, spending billions to build machines that draw astronauts on unicorns, and smartish bot toys.

It all feels like the early days of electricity. How to turn a neat party trick into something more useful, but it was those people who kept on at better and better party tricks that actually formed the foundations for what was needed to do some really useful things electricity as well as understand it at a deeper level.

OpenAI is one of the leading companies in AI that makes models with real world applications. I don't see their efforts as misdirected or futile in anyway. If anything I'm always impressed with their announcements because it's always mind blowing what their models can do!

The same technology that is drawing cute unicorns can be used for endless other use cases. Perhaps the PR side of the launch and the subject matter they show unveil their product is just that, PR.

It's like Apple Memoji thing (not sure if I'm spelling it correctly). You can think of as trivial and waste of talent to use their Camera/FaceID to animate cute animals based on facial expression, but that same tech will enable lots other things to come.

Your second group represents the core "inner loop" of about a thousand revolutionary applications. Take the basic capability of translating image->text->speech (and the reverse), install it on a wearable device that can "see" an environment, and add domain-specific agents. From this setup, you're not too far away from having an AI that can whisper guidance into your ear like a co-pilot, enabling scenarios like:

1. step-by-step guidance for a blind person navigating the use of a public restroom.

2. an EMS AI helping you to save someone's life in an emergency.

3. an AI coach that can teach you a new sport or activity.

4. an omnipresent domain-expert that can show you how to make a gourmet meal, repair an engine, or perform a traditional tea ceremony.

5. a personal assistant that can anticipate your information need (what's that person's name? where's the exit? who's the most interesting person here? etc.) and whisper the answer in your ear just as you need it.

Now, add all of the above to an AR capability where you can now think or speak of something interesting and complex, and have it visualized right before your eyes. With this capability, I could augment my imagination with almost super-human capabilities that allow one to solve complex problems almost as if it was an internal mental monologue.

All of these scenarios are just a short hop from where were at now, so mark my words: we will have "borgs" like those described above long before we reach anything like general AI.

These are good examples of what we're getting close to, but I'd add that Copilot is already an extremely helpful tool for coding. I don't blindly trust its output, but its suggestions are what I want often enough to save a lot of typing.

I still have to do all the hard thinking, but once I figure out what I want written and start typing, Copilot will spit out a good portion of the contextually-obvious lines of code.

There’s a third group for your list: AI stuff that’s so good we don’t think about it any more.

For example, recent phone cameras can estimate depth per pixel from single images. Hundreds of millions of these devices are deployed. A decade ago this was AI/CV research lab stuff.

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