Running AI is so expensive that Amazon will probably charge you to use Alexa in future, says outgoing exec::In an interview with Bloomberg, Dave Limp said that he “absolutely” believes that Amazon will soon start charging a subscription fee for Alexa
We need to move AI from the cloud to our own hardware running in our homes. Free, open source, privacy focused hardware. It’ll eventually be very affordable.
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Yes, and you can run a language model like Pygmalion Al locally on koboldcpp and have a naughty AI chat as well. Or non sexual roleplay
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Never underestimate human ingenuity
When they’re horny
Which models do you think beat Pygmalion for erotic roleplay? Curious for research haha
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Oh I see, sorry for the repeat question. Thanks!
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GPT4All is a neat way to run an AI chat bot on your local hardware.
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it does have a very funny name though
In five to ten years, imo, AI will be everywhere and may even replace the need for mobile Internet connections in terms of looking up information.
You’re probably right, but I kinda hope you’re wrong.
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Call it paranoia if you want. Mainly I don’t have faith in our economic system to deploy the technology in a way that doesn’t eviscerate the working class.
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Don’t these models require rather a lot of storage?
Storage is getting cheaper every day and the models are getting smaller with the same amount of data.
I’m just curious - do you know what kind of storage is required?
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Yeah that’s not a lot. I mean… the average consumer probably has 10GB free on their boot volume.
It is a lot to download. If we’re talking about ordinary consumers. Not unheard of though - some games on Steam are 50GB+
So okay, storage is not prohibitive.
God I wish, I would just love local voice control to turn my lights and such on and off… but noooooooooooo
I have home assistant, but have not heard anything good about rhasspy. Just want to control lights and be able to use it to play music and set timers. That being said I run home assistant right now and can control it with Alexa and Siri but… I would like local only
While you may have points against Apple and how effective Siri may be, with this latest version kind of products, even the watch has enough processing power to do voice processing on device. No ads. No cloud services
Pretty much. If you want a voice assistant right now, Siri is probably the best in terms of privacy. I bought a bunch of echos early, then they got a little shitty but I was in, and now I just want them out of my house except for one thing - music. Spotify integration makes for easy multi-room audio in a way that doesn’t really work as well on the other platform that I’ll consider (Apple/Siri) and basically adds sonos-like functionality for a tiny fraction of the price. The Siri balls and airplay are just not as good, and of course, don’t work as well with Spotify.
But alexa is so fucking annoying that at this point I mostly just carry my phone (iPhone) and talk to that even though it’s a little less convenient because I’m really goddamned tired of hearing “by the way…”
I do wonder how much of those voice assistants could run on-device. Most of what I use Bixby for (I know. I KNOW.) is setting timers. I think simple things like that can run entirely on the phone. It’s got a shocking amount of processing in it.
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AI is being touted as the solution to everything these days. It’s really not, and we are going to find that out the hard way.
If IBM actually manages to convert COBOL into Java like they’re advertising, they’ll end up killing their own cash cow
So much still runs on COBOL
It’s not even A.I. either
So they expect that people pay for being spied upon and seriously data mined?
We have a Google mini. They listen to my six year old request the song Poopy Bum Bum all day. The ads get interesting.
Alexa is more like a telemarketer disguised as an assistant. Every interaction is followed by a “by the way . Its a shit experience so I stopped using mine.
Alexa was designed explicitly for that purpose. They lose money on every Echo sold, the whole idea was they would make money selling you stuff. Turns out people would rather use their Echo to check the weather, get recipes, etc. rather than voice shop.
I just can’t see a use case for voice shopping. There are almost zero instances where I want to buy something without having a visual of that thing in front of me at time of purchase.
I could possibly see something like “buy another stick of deodorant”, but even then I want to see if there are deals or some other options and would want to check the price at a minimum.
Seems like yet another MBA idea.
Yeah it seems the execs who had the idea for Alexa never used Amazon for shopping. It’s a shit shopping site full of scammy products. I’d never buy anything from them without checking out the prices reviews, etc.
Ha, I use mine almost exclusively as a light switch. I don’t have to get out of bed to turn off my lights or turn on my fan. I’m sure they’re losing a bunch of money on me
It’s a great lightswitch. Also, thermostat adjustor (my husband is very particular and changes it about a dozen times a day).
And they also have smart lights and phone apps that do the same thing.
It’s also good for setting a timer. But yeah, I’m not buying shit from it.
I use mine to stream spotify.
Setting all my Alexa’s to UK English got rid of all marketing “by the ways.” I still regret going with the Alexa ecosystem but at least for now there is a workaround for the most rage inducing part of it.
So they get massive amounts of free data for Machine Learning, but want to charge users for supplying it?
It’s like charging you for cable and then shoving ads down your throat.
It’s like charging you for Prime Video and then shoving ads down your throat.
It’s like RAAAAIIAAIIIN on your wedding day
That’s often the case. They can have their cake and eat it too. Shareholders would expect nothing less.
I think the data is probably less valuable than people think, especially if the users expect an AI response whenever a data point can be collected from them.
I wake my echo and then grind coffee beans.
Just FYI, Alexa records everything you speak into it, you can listen to it here:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=GHXNJNLTRWCTBBGW
And much of it can be listened to by staff that are hired to label it to train the model.
I already don’t use it, you don’t have to sell me on it.
Alexa has a feature where you tell it you’re leaving the house and it will listen for smoke detectors or breaking glass, alerting you through your phone if it detects something. Amazon is putting that behind a paywall next year.
Let me in your house and I’ll observe it for you for less money
Google did that with Nest Aware years ago as well. It’s super annoying.
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Yep, used to be much better. There was SO much potential with it too. I wish there was a Smart Speaker with integration into ChatGPT. Id love to stand in the shower and ask it shit
You can do this with a Siri shortcut.
It still falls short because LLMs aren’t smart, they’re just approximately not wrong most of the time. I thought it would be a lot cooler than it actually is.
Building your own dystopia I see…
Not following
Yeah, they’re all pretty disappointing. I’d love to have something that feels like how movies portray digital assistants. Movie assistants never misunderstand you or say “I’m sorry, I couldn’t recognize your voice”. I’ve mostly used the Google one and it’s so bad at doing what I feel like is feasible even with inaccuracy.
Eg, I’ve tried to tell my assistant to like a song that was currently playing on YTM but could not find a voice command that worked (and some commands backfired by making it skip to the next song). I’ve had very poor success with getting assistant to cast something to my Chromecast with my voice. It sometimes works, but it fails or gets it wrong so often that it’s not worth the time.
Sometimes I use it for rewinding (e.g., “ok google, rewind 30 seconds”) because many apps don’t have granular rewind buttons and tracking on the track bar is way too inaccurate. But lol, it’s so slow! It takes a few seconds to figure out what I said (so I have to ask it to rewind more than I wish) and it seems every app is unoptimized for rewinding, as it usually takes several seconds of loading.
It can’t really do any kind of research either. You basically can just ask it to google things and it sometimes is able to extract the meaningful part from simple questions. It’s a far way from how Hollywood thinks a digital assistant will work.
I have doubts alexa is using AI, seen how dumb it is, but well
From the article:
Amazon has bet big on AI, with the company unveiling a new, AI-powered version of Alexa alongside updated versions of its Echo Frames and Carrera smart glasses last week.
…charge me to use Alexa?
I already avoid it like the plague.
Good luck, I guess? Got the first Google home, at first it was great, I was asking it tons of questions. Then the questions stopped, used it for turning on the lights and other automations. Then I installed Home Assistant and the only command Google Home got was to set a timer to know when to pull things out of the oven. Eventually I stopped doing that.
At the moment all Google/Nest Homes have their mic cut off, I only use them to stream music in my house from my NAS via Plex. So yeah…
I still use mine for voice commands with home assistant. Works great.
How to make me go back to buying shit in person, by Amazon.com
Their using the public to train AI. Then charging the public for the AI it trained.
Now you know why it’s called a smart device.
can’t be that smart if it’s using me for training
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Yes?
I’ll happily join in bashing Amazon for plenty of reasons, but training an AI is a step that adds significant value to the material. Just like any other product that is an effort that people are willing to pay for.
Something tells me that they’ll still listen to you for free.
