I am wondering where exactly are the AI products. I am not talking about boring, nerd stuff but rather about products that are well-known (to the point where non-technical users have heard of them) and are used on a daily basis by a significant amount of people. Currently only ChatGPT fits this bill despite the fact that the "AI revolution" is nearly two years old at this point.
> I am wondering where exactly are the AI products
ChatGPT is most popular and often in news, because it is the first of its kind(after siri/cortana) which was accessible to general public. I think, I have seen at least 100+ indie and commercial wrappers/apps offering access to better chat interface and common place to access various models from OAI/Anthropic/Mistral. At least one business I read about this weekend uses OAI API to ingest and summarize extensive mountain of documents to simplify some sort of regulatory certification process for medical device manufacturers. There was another one, which allowed a virtual assistant with basic activity ability(book appointments, write emails, transcribe phone calls, summarize letters etc.)
Things will come eventually, as more and more people get access to the APIs and access becomes cheap(current model of per-token price is still immensely expensive imho) and general people do not understand what context is, what embedding is, what exactly is a model, what is an API.
AI was/is being used massively in medical sector, defense/military, fraud detection(finance) and various other sectors for decades or more. Unfortunately, those applications are behind closed door and do not need to drum up public interest or investments directly as those are already well financed and usually referred to as ML/DL/CV etc.
For example, I was doing an internship many many years back where my employer was using "AI"(though it was not referred to as such) to combine vision, noise, vibration, pressure and hundreds of other data to detect hit-n-run, break-in crimes, structural damage, prediction of collapse of large structures etc. and these were prominently used by insurance as well as some public service offices. These were specialized things, and outside of their closed doors, no one was interested about these.
The old chestnut about AI just being a term for things we haven't quite figured out yet might apply here. "Products that are well-known... and are used on a daily basis by a significant amount of people" are almost by definition not AI.
But here are some examples of things that used to fall under the AI umbrella but don't really anymore:
- Fulltext search with decent semantic hit ranking (Google)
- Fulltext search with word sense disambiguation (Google)
- Fulltext search with decent synonym hits (Google)
- Machine translation
- Text to speech
- Speech to text
- Automated biometric identification (Like for unlocking your phone)
If you're more specifically asking for everyday applications of GPT-style generative large language models, I don't think that's going to happen for cost reasons. These things are still far too expensive for use in everyday consumer products. There's ChatGPT, but it's kind of an open secret that OpenAI is hemorrhaging money on ChatGPT.
The point is that you will not see them. They will be used to generate products and services that you think will come from a human. It may be the drive-through window or tech support line that sounds like a real person. It will be the background in the next Marvel movie that was animated by an AI algorithm rather than a graphics designer. It will be the website that generates a bespoke price quote aimed at the maximum price you are willing to pay for a service or product.
I am pretty sure we will see communication devices to surpass any language barriers within the next few years. The technology is already there, but not accessible to the broad masses in a fast and convenient enough way. Already, people are using their phones to break language barriers (Google lens, translation websites), but this will become much more common.
It is used for a while in a lot of places that does not market itself as "AI". Tiktok, instagram, faceapp, facebook, netflix, google ads, youtube, etc... where you can see any complex image/video filters or targeted suggestions there is likely some AI in the background.
