this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2024
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A big issue that a lot of these tech companies seem to have is that they don't understand what people want; they come up with an idea and then shove it into everything. There are services that I have actively stopped using because they started cramming AI into things; for example I stopped dual-booting with Windows and became Linux-only.
AI is legitimately interesting technology which definitely has specialized use-cases, e.g. sorting large amounts of data, or optimizing strategies within highly restrained circumstances (like chess or go). However, 99% of what people are pushing with AI these days as a member of the general public just seems like garbage; bad art and bad translations and incorrect answers to questions.
I do not understand all the hype around AI. I can understand the danger; people who don't see that it's bad are using it in place of people who know how to do things. But in my teaching for example I've never had any issues with students cheating using ChatGPT; I semi-regularly run the problems I assign through ChatGPT and it gets enough of them wrong that I can't imagine any student would be inclined to use ChatGPT to cheat multiple times after their grade the first time comes in. (In this sense, it's actually impressive technology - we've had computers that can do advanced math highly accurately for a while, but we've finally developed one that's worse at math than the average undergrad in a gen-ed class!)
The answer is that it's all about "growth". The fetishization of shareholders has reached its logical conclusion, and now the only value companies have is in growth. Not profit, not stability, not a reliable customer base or a product people will want. The only thing that matters is if you can make your share price increase faster than the interest on a bond (which is pretty high right now).
To make share price go up like that, you have to do one of two things; show that you're bringing in new customers, or show that you can make your existing customers pay more.
For the big tech companies, there are no new customers left. The whole planet is online. Everyone who wants to use their services is using their services. So they have to find new things to sell instead.
And that's what "AI" looked like it was going to be. LLMs burst onto the scene promising to replace entire industries, entire workforces. Huge new opportunities for growth. Lacking anything else, big tech went in HARD on this, throwing untold billions at partnerships, acquisitions, and infrastructure.
And now they have to show investors that it was worth it. Which means they have to produce metrics that show people are paying for, or might pay for, AI flavoured products. That's why they're shoving it into everything they can. If they put AI in notepad then they can claim that every time you open notepad you're "engaging" with one of their AI products. If they put Recall on your PC, every Windows user becomes an AI user. Google can now claim that every search is an AI interaction because of the bad summary that no one reads. The point is to show "engagement", "interest", which they can then use to promise that down the line huge piles of money will fall out of this pinata.
The hype is all artificial. They need to hype these products so that people will pay attention to them, because they need to keep pretending that their massive investments got them in on the ground floor of a trillion dollar industry, and weren't just them setting huge piles of money on fire.
I know I'm an enthusiast, but can I just say I'm excited about NotebookLLM? I think it will be great for documenting application development. Having a shared notebook that knows the environment and configuration and architecture and standards for an application and can answer specific questions about it could be really useful.
"AI Notepad" is really underselling it. I'm trying to load up massive Markdown documents to feed into NotebookLLM to try it out. I don't know if it'll work as well as I'm hoping because it takes time to put together enough information to be worthwhile in a format the AI can easily digest. But I'm hopeful.
That's not to take away from your point: the average person probably has little use for this, and wouldn't want to put in the effort to make it worthwhile. But spending way too much time obsessing about nerd things is my calling.
You're using the wrong tool.
Hell, notepad is the wrong tool for every use case, it exists in case you've broken things so thoroughly on windows that you need to edit a file to fix it. It's the text editor of last resort, a dumb simple file editor always there when you need it.
Adding any feature (except possibly a hex editor) makes it worse at its only job.
... I don't use Notepad. For anything. Hell, I don't even use Windows.
Not sure where the wires got crossed here.
Yes as others said, the op mentioned notepad and you said notebookllm.
I thought you were talking about notepad and it's new ai features.
I had no idea notepad + AI was a thing. It sounds farcical, so I assumed wrongly it was a reference to NotebookLLM. My mistake. I shouldn't have assumed OP was just being dismissive.
Then either you replied with your first post to the wrong post or you misread "windows putting AI into notepad" as notebookLLM? Because if not there is nothing obvious connecting your post to the parent
I don't think anyone is putting AI into Notepad. It reads to me like a response to NotebookLLM but maybe I was wrong.
I did at least explain what my vision is and why I wanted it which.... doesn't sound anything like Notepad, I think.
Well, you think wrong: https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2024/11/06/new-ai-experiences-for-paint-and-notepad-begin-rolling-out-to-windows-insiders/
Might be, but the person you responded to wrote about windows putting AI into notepad, so everyone assumed you were responding to that and not writing about something that was not even mentioned
I stand corrected. Thank you. I hadn't heard about that. Notepad has always been no frills, and I can't see integrating AI with that over just using AI, but they are and it seems silly, I agree.