Have you found any amazing uses for AI?

Sorry for being pedantic (this time for real). Deep learning is a building block of AI, but no use of AI.

I just spent 10 minutes trying to listen to a damned voice message left in the phone mail box. Apparently it was one those call centers because lots of people talking the background for 5s, the telemarketer ended the call after leaving the useless message.

I just found Sunrise has a speech-to-text service for voice messages. So, maybe speech-to-text mediated by AI is one legit application.

Sounds like he needs to apply it to his own AI. :zany_face:

Depressing or encouraging, anyway a useful study

Nearly 40% of companies that measured AI cost savings landed below 10%, despite targeting 11% to 20%, yet 90% are increasing their budgets again, Bain & Company’s Automation and AI Pathfinder Survey shows.

44% of companies are funding the next AI wave from prior automation savings that have consistently come in below target.

Your AI Budget Is Growing. Your Returns Aren’t. Here’s Why. | Bain & Company

Not sure if this is AI but anyway modern technology is getting too much for me

I was in a new car park yesterday, searching around for the machine to pay

Eventually I asked someone, they said photograph the QR code on the ticket with Twint then the exit machine calculates the cost and charges Twint

I got out of the car park okay but nothing charged to my Twint

One of the car parks we use in the UK is heading in that direction too. Of course, never think of those people who don’t have/want a mobile phone. How are we supposed to pay for parking? Don’t use that car park any more I guess. Really customer friendly. Not to mention all the scams being perpetrated with scammers sticking different QR codes over the ones on the payment machines. No thanks. Let me pay by cash or debit card.

Be patient :rofl:

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What about the people who don’t like carrying cash or debit cards?

I hate those payment machines when you need to pay by card or cash - but I’m an adult so I just get on with it.

The answers AI gives are only as good as the information it finds on the web - and that can be a problem.

Some scientists created a fake illness, made up a name for it and wrote a paper about it which was uploaded to a pre-release site but not published in a peer-reviewed journal.

The illness was called ‘bixonimania’ and was caused by too much blue light.

Sure enough, the bots picked up on it and diagnosed some people with the condition.

What I found more worrying is that as well as AI, a few scientists also cited the discovery - which meant they hadn’t actually read the paper as if they had, they would have realised it was all fake as it included:

…funding from the Galactic Triad and Lord of the Rings, as well as appreciation of colleagues at the Starship Enterprise and Professor Ross Geller, per “Science Quickly.” At least one of the papers even explicitly stated, “This entire paper is made up,” reports Nature .

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Just have multiple payment methods, it’s not hard. Previously the car park I mentioned you could pay by cash, card or phone. Simple. But iirc they did stop taking cash a while back.

Cash is prone to theft, requires regular visits to empty the machine and regular maintenance to keep the cash counting mechanism in order.

You need to stop thinking of mobiles as phones - only about 10% of usage time is used for making and receiving calls.

Try thinking of them as a powerful pocket computer - I assume you don’t have a problem with those.

Of course not - when it’s sat on my desk. Carrying one around with me all the time on the other hand …

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Funnily enough, my co-workers have created a ChatGPT-like internal chatbot based on MiniMax2.7 (and OpenWebUI).

With web-search and some other plugins, it works actually well, given the simple tasks I gave it.

It’s running on 4 H200 cards at 20-something k per pop. So not exactly cheap.

Our parent company though, is apparently burning (incinerating really) 100k per month on Claude tokens. So, there’s some desire to reduce that.

Though I suspect that once you have started using agents for coding, going back is similar to a cold-turkey heroin detox.

OpenCode can be used with our internal LLM, though. So it’s not too bad.

Customers are looking for ways to “optimize their business with AI” - but have no idea how to describe what they actually want to get done.

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Pretty much. Moving from AI coding would be like going back to punch cards now.

Have no fear. One day soon, thanks to modern technology, we will be able to go about our daily business while our hard earned money gets automatically withdrawn from our bank accounts. By then we will have no toll barriers, no cashier check outs, can freely shop for our needs. Of course one might build up certain debt. But hey! There is always bound to be side effects due to progress!

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Actually I never liked em

Hiring a personal assistant is way better. And he or she can also bring coffee.

Copilot refused to answer a question today. So, I’m trying the Swiss AI:

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I’m not going to pay 100 francs just to try it. Is there no free trial?

Yes here, but you have to create a user account https://chat.publicai.co/

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