What's Going On, Or Not, With AI?

The tech press, or at least The Verge, is finally starting to admit that the AI emperor has no clothes. All this bad AI is wrecking a whole generation of gadgets: We were promised multimodal, natural language, AI-powered everything. We got nothing of the sort.

AI was going to fix everything. You wouldn't need to learn to type. Or to think. Or something. AI assistants would do everything for you.

Which is sort of true. Reddit is full of posts written by AI bots, answered by other AI bots. No one needs to use Reddit anymore, because it is all AI. Mostly AI ads, so not only do you not need to use it, it is mostly full of nothing but garbage.

There was just one problem with the whole theory: the tech still doesn’t work. Chatbots may be fun to talk to and an occasionally useful replacement for Google, but truly game-changing virtual assistants are nowhere close to ready. And without them, the gadget revolution we were promised has utterly failed to materialize.

In the meantime, the tech industry allowed itself to be so distracted by these shiny language models that it basically stopped trying to make otherwise good gadgets. Some companies have more or less stopped making new things altogether, waiting for AI to be good enough before it ships.

Microsoft's continued threats to make AI a part of everything drove me off Windows. I don't want the system taking screen shots of everything I'm doing and uploading them to Microsoft. That's just creepy having Microsoft look at everything I type - including passwords.

I bought my current phone, which is not a high-end smart phone, because the battery on my last phone was failing to hold a charge. My current phone is not that different from my last 2 phones. If I could easily change the battery, and still get security updates (even ROMs like LineageOS only support phones for so long) I would probably still be using that two-phones-ago phone. I certainly don't want AI scanning all my photos, email, messages, whatever.

There is a lot of detail in the article, about Amazon (when was the last time they introduced an interesting bit of hardware?), Apple (Apple Intelligence anyone?), and more.

I've lost track of the number of times I've heard people say that "this next piece of tech" is going to change the world. Maybe someday they will get it right. "But it is not this day."