Youtube has been serving me videos of these gadgets that are like “personal AI assistants” for people who want to carry around an extra device that is just chatGPT with a voice prompt. It’s a super weird niche because we already have phones that do the same thing. It just seems like maybe they’re just kickstarter scams for gadget nerds who are bricked up over AI.
Anyways, every time I see one of these things, my cursed brain goes immediately to “god, what if I was dating someone and they had just gotten this thing after having preordered the kickstarter 6 months ago. Now they’re trying to find every possible excuse to use it in order to justify getting it.”
We’re at a restaurant and he’s like, “what are the best qualities in a carbonara,” or whatever.
Please help me escape this mental prison. Why am I doing this to myself?
It sucks, right? One of the profs at my uni who I really respect and look up to has a course all about miniaturizing ML models to run on this kind of device. Of course it’s kinda different since in his case it’s all about actually running the model locally, and I think he’s more interested in some sort of medical device. But it seems like this is the direction a lot of the techbro hype is going in.
I also can’t help but feel like ultimately, any advances in running ML models in embedded devices are just mostly going to be used for surveillance equipment, military hardware, and robot cop dogs once the garbage AI assistant bubble pops. You can’t escape hellworld.