I’m sure there are some good AI products but the vast majority seem to be garbage. The exception is coding agents and simple web text/image interfaces.

So yeah, as a signal the AI brand is about as bad as it gets. Crypto tier. But just like crypto, the investors want to see that signal regardless of any underlying substance.

▲

lqet 5 hours ago | parent [-]

The exception is translation. Translation is what transformers were originally developed for. LLMs shine in translation, and creating code is, after all, a translation from natural language into a programming language.

A lot of what current LLMs are good at seems to boil down to translation:

* Translate some prompt into a planning list of individual TODOs

* Treat each TODO as a new translation (e.g. from TODO to code), or call some external tool (lookup something on the internet, static code analysis, database request)

* Translate the result(s) of these TODOs into a final text, or into a new TODO list

To me, this is interesting, because maybe the Homo Sapiens intelligence simply developed as a side effect of communication (translating words into actions).

	▲	cesarvarela 15 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You could take that a step further and say everything is information, and our brains transform it into reality (Donald Hoffman).
	▲	rrook 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I think that's where it goes, yes. The ability to model the world internally predates spoken language. We (and other animals) already translate what we _sense_ into that internal model. Language is just another translation; all communication is bidirectional translation, internal modeling/thought is wordless.