this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2024
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I agree with this. Its wildly misunderstood and it's the name. AI is absolutely the most amazing marketing name for it but its only a thin veneer of our sci fi dreams. Over time that veneer might get a bit thicker but it wont be what people think it will be. It is good at certain things, like you know, being a large language model, but it is a (very) limited subset of what human intelligence is.
It's not "widely misunderstood", it's been widely hyped by the people actively selling it. The tech bros are pumping and dumping it, just like with every other tech panacea.
It's not the public, it's the snake oil salesmen.
That's what I am saying. The buyers wildly misunderstand it. The seller presents it with a very effective and misleading pitch.
Look at the Intuit CEO who just fired 10% of their labor to pivot to AI to um, "give financial advise." And then goes on to say any other company who doesn't do the same will fall behind and fail. Time will tell but I am going to go with, people will laugh when Intuit is on fire.
I suspect Intuit fired those workers for other reasons (free file) and are using AI as an excuse because to admit that free-file is an existential threat to their business is to admit that their company has no long term business prospects.
That seems entirely plausible for the staffing change. But Intuit is more than their tax software for example Quickbooks isn't going anywhere. I am sure they do other stuff, probably payment processing and I don't know what else. So they will survive at some level, it would be hard to kill Quickbooks.