OpenAI updates terms to forbid usage for medical and legal advice

HN Headline is categorically false.

"you cannot use our services for: provision of tailored advice that requires a license, such as legal or medical advice, without appropriate involvement by a licensed professional"

So, they didn't add any handrails, filters, or blocks to the software. This is just boilerplate "consult your doctor too!" to cover their ass.

While you are correct, the question now becomes whether the disclaimer can ever be removed.

If the AI isn’t smart enough to replace a licensed expert even given unlimited access to everything a doctor would learn in medical, where is the value in the AI?

Plenty of other automation supports licensed experts without replacing them and has value, so if even AI supports licensed efforts but can never replace them, it could still have value in that application.

But this isn’t what was advertised by the AI companies themselves. They’ve been telling us AGI is imminent.

Now we are moving the goalposts to “it’ll be a nice tool to use like SaaS software.”

> But this isn’t what was advertised by the AI companies themselves. They’ve been telling us AGI is imminent.

Other than OpenAI, I don’t think that’s actually true of what the companies have been advertising.

But, in any case, things can have value and still fall short of what those with a financial interest in the public overestimating the imminent significance of an industry promote. The claim here was about what was necessary for AI to have value, not what was necessary to meet the picture that the most enthusiastic, biased proponents were painting. Those are very different questions, and, if you don’t like moving goalposts, you shouldn’t move them from the former to the latter.

When I originally said “where’s the value in the AI?” in my first comment the implied situation relates to how vastly more expensive it is than traditional SaaS to deliver.

AI is undoubtedly useful, but at its current infrastructure cost it’s not going to be worth selling unless it can actually put people out of work so that enterprise customers are motivated to spend salary-level money on it. That’s the only way to make the numbers black with the kind of deficits the industry has.

Making existing employees 5-20% more productive isn’t enough. You can already get that kind of improvement for very cheap. That’s the kind of improvement you get by buying your employees catered lunch or a SaaS license for a CRUD app.

My company is paying less money for AI subscriptions per seat than some pretty low impact tools like password managers.

You’d think that CoPilot might charge us $100 instead of $10 if they really thought it was that valuable.

There’s no goalpost being moved on my end.

> AI is undoubtedly useful, but at its current infrastructure cost it’s not going to be worth selling unless it can actually put people out of work

This doesn't even make sense unless you make the false assumption that the work to do is fixed: things that increase productivity increase employment (they increase the value delivered by each unit of labor, which at a fixed cost of labor increases the range of applications at which it is profitable to apply the same labor or, holding employment level fixed, increases market-clearing pay, the usual result of which is that both employment and pay go up in the field whose priductivity was increased, but less than you would expect in each case if the other was fixed.)