Perhaps the real takeaway is that there really is only one product, two if you count image generation.

Perhaps the only reason Cursor is so good is because editing code is so similar to the basic function of an LLM without anything wrapped around it.

Like, someone prove me wrong by linking 3 transformative AI products that:

1. Have nothing to do with "chatting" to a thin wrapper (couldn't just be done inside a plain LLM with a couple of file uploads added for additional context)

2. Don't involve traditional ML that has existed for years and isn't part of the LLM "revolution."

3. Has nothing to do with writing code

For example, I recently used an AI chatbot that was supposed to help me troubleshoot a consumer IoT device. It basically regurgitated steps from the manual and started running around in circles because my issue was simply not covered by documentation. I then had to tell it to send me to a human. The human had more suggestions that the AI couldn't think of but still couldn't help because the product was a piece of shit.

Or just look at Amazon Q. Ask it a basic AWS question and it'll just give you a bogus "sorry I can't help with that" answer where you just know that running over to chatgpt.com will actually give you a legitimate answer. Most AI "products" seem to be castrated versions of ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini.

That sort of overall garbage experience seems to be what is most frequently associated with AI. Basically, a futile attempt to replace low-wage employees that didn't end up delivering any value to anyone, especially since any company interested in eliminating employees just because "fuck it why not" without any real strategy probably has a busted-ass product to begin with.

Putting me on hold for 15 minutes would have been more effective at getting me to go away and no compute cycles would have been necessary.

I have fed LLMs PDF files, asked about the content and gotten nonsense. I would be very hesitant to trust them to give me an accurate summary of my emails.

LLMs are terrible at summarizing technical emails where the details matter. But you might get away with it, at least for a while, in low performing organizations that tolerate preventable errors.

I got an email from the restaurant saying "We will confirm your dinner reservation as soon as we can", and Apple Intelligence summarizing it as "Dinner reservation confirmed." Maybe it can not only summarize, but also see the future??

I fed an LLM the record of a chat between me and a friend, and asked it to summarize the times that we met in the past 3 months.

Every time it gave me different results, and not once did it actually get it all right.

LLMs are horrible for summarizing things. Summarizing is the art of turning low information density text into high information density text. LLMs can’t deal in details, so they can never accurately summarize anything.

> LLMs are so good at summarizing that I should basically only ever read one email—from the AI

This could get really fun with some hidden text prompt injection. Just match the font and background color.

Maybe these tools should be doing the classic air gap approach of taking a picture of the rendered content and analyzing that.

What system are you using to do this? I do think that this would provide value for me. Currently, I barely read my emails, which I'm not exactly proud of, but it's just the reality. So something that summarized the important things every day would be nice.

Do you ever check its work?

What is the reason to unsub ever in that world? Are you saying the LLM can't skip emails? Seems like an arbitrary rule

Oh, I'm sorry if it wasn't clear. I use Claude and ChatGPT to talk to about a ton of topics. I'm mostly referring to AI features being added to existing SaaS or software products. I regularly find that moving the conversation to ChatGPT or Claude is much better than trying to use anything that they may have built into their existing product.

Setting a timer and setting a reminder. Occasionally converting units of measure. That's all I can rely on Siri (or Alexa) for and even then sometimes Siri doesn't make it clear if it did the thing. Most importantly, "set a reminder", it shows the text, and then the UI disappears, sometimes the reminder was created, sometimes not. It's maddening since I'm normally asking to be reminded about something important that I need to get recorded/tracked so I can "forget" it.

The number of times I've had 2 reminders fire back-to-back because I asked Siri again to create one since I was _sure_ it didn't create the first one.

Siri is so dumb and it's insane that more heads have not rolled at Apple because of it (I'm aware of the recent shakeup, it's about a decade too late). Lastly, whoever decided to ship the new Siri UI without any of the new features should lose their job. What a squandered opportunity and effectively fraud IMHO.

More and more it's clear that Tim Cook is not the person that Apple needs at the helm. My mom knows Siri sucks, why doesn't the CEO and/or why is he incapable of doing anything to fix it. Get off your Trump-kissing, over-relying-on-China ass and fix your software! (Siri is not the only thing rotten)

o3 has been a big improvement on Deep Research IMHO. o1 (or whatever model I originally used with it) was interesting but the results weren't always great. o3 has done some impressive research tasks for me and, unlike the last model I used, when I "check its work" it has always been correct.

I've anecdotally tested translations by ripping the video with subtitles and having whisper subtitle it, and also asking several AI to translate the .srt or .vtt file (subtotext I think does this conversion if you don't wanna waste tokens on the metadata)

Whisper large-v3, the largest model I have, is pretty good, getting nearly identical translations to chatgpt or whatever, Google's default speech to text. The fun stuff is when you ask for text to text translations from LLMs.

I did a real small writeup with an example but I don't have a place to publish nor am I really looking for one.

I used whisper to transcribe nearly every "episode" of the Love Line syndicated radio show from 1997-2007 or so. It took, iirc, several days. I use it to grep the audio, as it were. I intend to do the same with my DVDs and such, just so I never have to Google "what movie / tv show is that line from?" I also have a lot of art bell shows, and a few others to transcribe.

Strava employees claim that casual users like the AI activity summaries. Supposedly users who don't know anything about exercise physiology didn't know how to interpret the various metrics and charts. I don't know if I believe that but it's at least plausible.

Personally I wish I could turn off the AI features, it's a waste of space.

Strava's integration is just so lackluster. It literally turns four numbers from right above the slop message into free text. Thanks Strava, I'm a pro user for a decade, finally I can read "This was a hard workout" after my run. Such useful, much AI.

I use AI chatbots for 2+ hours a day but the Garmin thing was too much for me. The day they released their AI Garmin+ subscription, I took off my Forerunner and put it in a drawer. The whole point of Garmin is that it feels emotionally clean to use. Garmin adding a scammy subscription makes the ecosystem feel icky, and I'm not going to wear a piece of clothing that makes me feel icky. I don't think I'll buy a Garmin watch again.

(Since taking off the watch, I miss some of the data but my overall health and sleep haven't changed.)

At this point, "we aren't adding any AI features" is a selling point for me. I've gotten real tired of AI slop and hype.

I've been using Fastmail in lieu of gmail for ten or eleven years. If you have a domain and control the DNS, I recommend it. At least you're not on Google anymore, and you're paying for fastmail, so it feels better - less like something is reading your emails.

The catch is: does anyone actually read this stuff? I've been taking meeting notes for meetings I run (without AI) for around 6 months now and I suspect no one other than myself has looked at the notes I've put together. I've only looked back at those notes once or twice.

A big part of the problem is even finding this content in a modern corporate intranet (i.e. Confluence) and having a bunch of AI-generated text in there as well isn't going to help.

I'm not a CTO so maybe your wold is not my world, but for me the advantage of taking the notes myself is that only I know what's important to me, or what was news to me. Teams Premium - you can argue it's so much worse than your product - takes notes like "they discussed about the advantages of ABC" but maybe exactly those advantages are advantageous to know right? And so on. Then like others said, I will review my notes once to see if there's a followup, or a topic to research, and off they go to the bin. I have yet to need the meeting notes of last year. Shortly put: notes apps are to me a solution in search of a problem.

Is Leexi's AI note-taker able to raise its hand in a meeting (or otherwise interrupt) and ask for clarification?

As a human note-taker, I find the most impactful result of real-time synthesis is the ability to identify and address conflicting information in the moment. That ability is reliant on domain knowledge and knowledge of the meeting attendees.

But if the AI could participate in the meeting in real time like I can, it'd be a huge difference.

But that isn't writing for me, it is taking notes for me. There is a difference. I don't need something to write for me - I know how to write. What I need is someone to clean up grammar, fact check the details, and otherwise clean things up. I have dysgraphia - a writing disorder - so I need help more than most, but I still don't need something to write my drafts for me: I can get that done well enough.

We've had the built-in Teams summary AI for a while now and it absolutely misses important details and nuance that causes problems later.

I've used multiple of these types of services and I'll be honest, I just don't really get the value. I'm in a ton of meetings and I run multiple teams but I just take notes myself in the meetings. Every time I've compared my own notes to the notes that the the AI note taker took, it's missing 0-2 critical things or it focuses on the wrong thing in the meeting. I've even had the note taker say essentially the opposite of what we decided on because we flip-flopped multiple times during the meeting.

Every mistake the AI makes is completely understandable, but it's only understandable because I was in the meeting and I am reviewing the notes right after the meeting. A week later, I wouldn't remember it, which is why I still just take my own notes in meetings. That said, having having a recording of the meeting and or some AI summary notes can be very useful. I just have not found that I can replace my note-taking with an AI just yet.

One issue I have is that there doesn't seem to be a great way to "end" the meeting for the note taker. I'm sure this is configurable, but some people at work use Supernormal and I've just taken to kicking it out of of meetings as soon as it tries to join. Mostly this is because I have meetings that run into another meeting, and so I never end the Zoom call between the meetings (I just use my personal Zoom room for all meetings). That means that the AI note taker will listen in on the second meeting and attribute it to the first meeting by accident. That's not the end of the world, but Supernormal, at least by default, will email everyone who was part of the the meeting a rundown of what happened in the meeting. This becomes a problem when you have a meeting with one group of people and then another group of people, and you might be talking about the first group of people in the second meeting ( i.e. management issues). So far I have not been burned badly by this, but I have had meeting notes sent out to to people that covered subjects that weren't really something they needed to know about or shouldn't know about in some cases.

Lastly, I abhor people using an AI notetaker in lieu of joining a meeting. As I said above, I block AI note takers from my zoom calls but it really frustrates me when an AI joins but the person who configured the AI does not. I'm not interested in getting messages "You guys talked about XXX but we want to do YYY" or "We shouldn't do XXX and it looks like you all decided to do that". First, you don't get to weigh in post-discussion, that's incredibly rude and disrespectful of everyone's time IMHO. Second, I'm not going to help explain what your AI note taker got wrong, that's not my job. So yeah, I'm not a huge fan of AI note takers though I do see where they can provide some value.

In my company have a few "summaries" made by Zoom neural net, which we share for memes on the joke chats, they are so hilariously bad. No one uses that functionality seriously. I don't know about your app, but I've yet to see a working note taker in the wild.

You do you.

I attend a lot of meetings and I have reviewed the results of an AI note taker maybe twice ever. Getting an email with a todo-list saves a bit of time of writing down action items during a meeting, but I'd hardly consider it a game changer. "Wait, what'd we talk about in that meeting" is just not a problem I encounter often.

My experience with AI note takers is that they are useful for people who didn't attend the meeting and people who are being onboarded and want to be able to review what somebody was teaching them in the meeting and much much much less useful for other situations.

What I've found with agents is that they stray from the task and even start to flip flop on implementations, going back and forth on a solution. They never admit they don't know something and just brute force a solution even though the answer cannot be found without trial and error or actually studying the problem. I repeatedly fall back to reading the docs and just finishing the job myself as the agent just does not know what to do.

Can we all quickly move to a point in time where vibe-code is not a word

My websites have this too with MDX, it's awesome. Reminds me of the old Bret Victor interactive tutorials back around when YC Research was funding HCI experiments

Very nice example of an actually usefully interactive essay.

That's right. llm.koomen.dev is a cloudflare worker that forwards requests to openai. I was a little worried about getting DDOSed but so far that hasn't been an issue, and the tokens are ridiculously cheap.

Blog author seems smart (despite questionable ideas about how much real world users would want to interact with any of his elaborate feature concepts), you hope he's actually just got a bunch of responses cached and you're getting a random one each time from that endpoint... and that freely sent content doesn't actually hit OpenAI's APIs.

And dumpster diving in my spam folder for actually important emails

Honestly? I think the AI bubble will need to burst first. Making the rescheduling of appointments and dozens of tasks like that slightly more convenient isn't a billion-dollar business.

I don't have a lot of doubt that it is technically doable, but it's not going to be economically viable when it has to pay back hundreds of billions of dollars of investments into training models and buying shiny hardware. The industry first needs to get rid of that burden, which means writing off the training costs and running inference on heavily-discounted supernumerary hardware.

Reminds me of the robot voice from The Incredibles[1]. It had an obviously-robotic cadence where it would pause between every word. Text-to-speech at the time already knew how to make words flow into each other, but I thought the voice from The Incredibles sounded much nicer than the contemporaneous text-to-speech bots, while also still sounding robotic.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dxV4BvyV2w

Like adding the 'propane smell' to propane.

That doesn't sound like ring modulation in a musical sense (IIRC it has a modulator above 30 Hz, or inverts the signal instead of attenuating?), so much as crackling, cutting in and out, or an overdone tremolo effect. I checked in Audacity and the signal only gets cut out, not inverted.

If you play around with base models, they will insert typos, slang, they will generate curse words and pointless internet flamewars

The system prompt can include examples. That is often a good idea.

No? Not everyone's dream is being a manager. I like writing code, it's fun! Telling someone else to go write code for me so that I can read it later? Not fun, avoid it if possible (sometimes it's unavoidable, we don't have unlimited time).

> and it's much easier (and more productive) to review work already done than to do it yourself

This isn't the tautology you imagine it to be.

Consider the example given here of having AI write one line draft response to emails. To validate such response, you have to: (1) read the original email, (2) understand it, (3) decide what you want to communicate in your reply, then (4) validate that the suggested draft communicates the same.

If the AI gave a correct answer, you saved yourself from typing one sentence, which you probably already formulated in your head in step (3). A minor help, at best.

But if the AI was wrong, you now have to write that reply yourself.

To get positive expected utility from the above scenario, you'd need the probability of the AI to be correct extremely high, and even then, the savings would be small.

A task that requires more effort to turn ideas into deliverables would have better expectation, but complex tasks often have results that are not simple nor easy to check, so the savings may not be as meaningful as you naively assume.

The live demos are using a very cheap and not very smart model. Do not update your opinion on AI capabilities based on the poor performance of gpt-4o-mini

Yeah, I'm with you on this one. Surely in most instances it is easier to just bash out the email plus you get the added bonus of exercising your own mind: vocabulary, typing skills, articulating concepts, defining appropriate etiquette. As the years role by I aiming to be more conscious and diligent with my own writing and communication, not less. If one extrapolates on the use of AI for such basic communication, is there a risk some of us lose our ability to meaningfully think for ourselves? The information space of the present day already feels like it is devolving; shorter and shorter content, lack of nuance, reductive messaging. Sling AI in as a mediator for one to one communication too and it feels perilous for social cohesion.

The counter argument is some people are terrible at writing. Millions of people sit at the bottom of any given bell curve.

I’d never trust a summery from a current generation LLM for something as critical as my inbox. Some hypothetical drastically improved future AI, sure.

For the case of writing emails, I tend to agree though I think creative writing is an exception. Pairing with an LLM really helps overcome the blank page / writer's block problem because it's often easier to identify what you don't want and then revise all the flaws you see.

On that topic I’m the founder of inbox zero: https://getinboxzero.com

May help you get half way there

  instructing an agent to write anything from scratch inevitably takes more time than writing it yourself

But you can reuse your instructions with zero additional effort. I have some instructions that I wrote for a 'Project' in Claude (and now a 'Gem' in Gemini). The instructions give writing guidelines for a children's article about a topic. So I just write 'write an article about cross-pollination' and a minute later I have an article I can hand to my son.

Even if I had the subject matter knowledge, it would take me much longer to write an article with the type of style and examples that I want.

(Because you said 'from scratch', I deliberately didn't choose an example that used web search or tools.)

> Why can’t the LLM just learn your writing style from your previous emails to that person?

It totally could. For one thing you could fine tune the model, but I don't think I'd recommend that. For this specific use case, imagine an addition to the prompt that says """To help you with additional context and writing style, here snippets of recent emails Pete wrote to {recipient}: --- {recent_email_snippets} """

They are saving this for some future release I would guess. A “personalization”-focused update wave/marketing blitz/privacy Overton window shift.

I reread those paragraphs. I find the transformative effect of the email missing from the whole discussion. The end result of the inbox examples is to change some internal information in the mind of the recipient. Agent working within the context of the email has very little to contribute because it does not know the OP's schedule, dinner plans, whether he has time for the walk and talk or if he broke his ankle last week... I'd be personally afraid to have something rummaging in my social interface that can send (and let's be honest, idiots will CtrlA+autoreply their whole inboxes) invites, timetables, love messages etc. in my name. It has too many lemmas that need to be fulfilled before it can be assumed competent, and none of those are very well demonstrated. It's cold fusion technology. Feasible, should be nice if it worked, but it would really be a disappointment if someone were to use it in its current state.

I have a large part of that though. The computer (outlook today) just schedules meetings rooms for me ensuring there are not multiple different meetings in it at the same time. I can schedule my own flights.

When I first started working the company rolled out the first version of meeting scheduling (it wasn't outlook), and all the other engineers loved it - finally they could figure out how to schedule our own meetings instead of having the secretary do it. Apparently the old system was some mainframe based things other programmers couldn't figure out (I never worked with it so I can't comment on how it was). Likewise scheduling a plane ticket involved calling travel agents and spending a lot of time on hold.

If you are a senior executive you still have a secretary. However by the 1970s the secretary for most of us would be department secretary that handled 20-40 people not just our needs, and thus wasn't in tune with all those details. However most of us don't have any needs that are not better handled by a computer today.

I would too, but I would have to trust AI at least as much as a 1970s secretary not to mess up basic facts about myself or needlessly embellish/summarize my conversations with known correspondents. Comparing agents and past office cliches was not to imply agents do it and it's stupid; I'm implying agents claim to do it, but don't.

So AI is SaaS (Secretary as a Service)

I'd prefer to get the bullet points. There's no need to waste time reading autogenerated filler.

> write out the bullets of the points I want to make

Just send those bullet points. Everyone will thank you

My boss does that I am sure

One of their dreadful behaviors, among many

My advice is to stop doing this for the sake of your colleagues

Hopefully you're specifying that your email is written with ChatGPT so other parties can paste it back into ChatGPT and get bullet points back instead of wasting their time reading the slop.

Why not just send the bullet points? Kinder to your audience than sending them AI slop.