[HN Gopher] Artificial intelligence is losing hype
___________________________________________________________________
Artificial intelligence is losing hype
Author : bx376
Score : 151 points
Date : 2024-08-20 01:13 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| megamike wrote:
| tell me I am already bored with it next.....
| mrinfinitiesx wrote:
| Good. It's decent for summarizing and giving me bullet points and
| explaining things like I'm 5, makes it easy to code things that I
| don't want to code or spend time figuring out how to do with new
| languages, other than that, I see no real world applications
| outside of listening to burger king orders and putting them on a
| screen for people to make them. Simple support requests, and of
| course making buzzword-esque documents that you can feed in to a
| deck-maker for presentations and stuff.
|
| All in all, it helps assist us in new ways. Had somebody take a
| picture of a car part that had no markings and it identified it,
| found the maker/manufacturer/SKU and gave all the details etc.
| That stuff is useful.
|
| But now we're looking at in-authentic stuff. Artists, writers
| being plagiarized, job cuts (for said marketing/pitches, BS
| presentations to downsize teams). It's not just losing its hype,
| its losing any hype in building humanity for the better. It's
| just more buzzwords, more 'glamour' more 'pop' shoved in our
| faces.
|
| The layoffs aren't looking pretty.
|
| Works well to help us code though. Viva, sysadmins unite.
| parpfish wrote:
| Im really hoping that when this hype cycle ends and the next AI
| winter starts that all the generative stuff gets culled but we
| still see good work and tech using all the other advances (that
| would be described as "mere" deep learning).
|
| Document embedding from transformers are great and fit into
| existing search paradigms.
|
| Computer vision and image segmentation is at a level I thought
| impossible 10 years ago.
|
| Text to speech that sounds natural? I might actually use Siri
| and Alexa! (Ok, that one might be considered "generative")
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| I'm just surprised something nearly replaced google in my
| lifetime.
| PcChip wrote:
| Kagi. Kagi replaced Google.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Hard to say they replaced them, when they use Google in their
| backend...
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| And they have 30K users and serve 600K queries a day while
| Google serves some 8.5B a day apparently.
|
| Love Kagi but they're definitely not replacing Google
| anytime soon.
| 0points wrote:
| What a ridiculous claim.
| langcss wrote:
| Google is now "a tool" not "the tool" for finding information.
| Perplexity and Phind do a good job and DDG is there for the
| privacy angle. In addition to LLMs just giving you the answer
| you need.
| bamboozled wrote:
| How on earths name do you use an LLM to find information ? I
| just don't get it. For current events it out of date and it
| confidently feeds me shit ?
|
| I might use them occasionally for a rubber ducky but ,
| replacing Google ? Hm
| langcss wrote:
| Usually more for solution suggestion for programming stuff.
| Anything where I cam verify the answer.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Yeah fair enough. I just don't see how this is entirely
| revolutionary though. We still need to know our stuff.
| stephenitis wrote:
| ChatGPT often googles it for me and gives me a summary
| bamboozled wrote:
| But it's still Google.
| jimjimjim wrote:
| But what about all those organizations that have "Do _something_
| with AI " as the goal for the quarter? All those bonuses driving
| people to somehow add AI to products. All the poor devs that have
| been told to replace features driven by deterministic code with
| AI good-enough-ness.
| 11thEarlOfMar wrote:
| Not until we've seen a plethora of AI startups go public with no
| revenue.
| upon_drumhead wrote:
| I'm not sure that is realistic anymore. The run of free money
| is over and I expected that markets are going to be very picky
| compared to a few years ago
| freemoney99 wrote:
| I must have missed the memo. Where could I get the free
| money? "a few years ago" we had a global pandemic. Are you
| claiming that markets will be very picky compared to that
| time?
| momoschili wrote:
| I think you missed the memo during the pandemic then. That
| was the biggest supply of free money in a while for many
| industries.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Which ones? What did you have to say to get the free
| money?
| rendang wrote:
| It's just interest rates. 0 a few years ago, 5% today.
| ianbutler wrote:
| This supposed "cycle" has been crazy it's been about 1.5 years
| since gpt4 came out, which is really the first generally capable
| model. I think a lot of this "cycle" is media's wishful thinking.
| Humans, especially humans in large bureaucracies, just don't move
| this quickly. Enterprises have barely had time to dip their toes
| in.
|
| For what it's worth hype doesn't mean sustainability anyway. If
| all the jokers go onto a new fad it's hardly the skin off the
| back of anyone taking this seriously, they've been through worse
| times.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I've had a lot of corporate clients this year
|
| Large and small, entire development teams are completely
| unaware of the basics of "prompt engineering" for coding, and
| corporate has an entirely regressive anti-AI policy that doesnt
| factor in the existence of locally run language models, and
| just assumes ChatGPT and cloud based ones digesting trade
| secrets. People arent interested in seeing what the hype is
| about, and are disincentived from bothering on a work computer.
| I'm on one team where the Engineering Manager is advocating for
| Microsoft CoPilot licenses, as in, its a concept that hasnt
| happened and needs buy in to even start considering.
|
| I would say most people really haven't looked into it. Work is
| work, the sprint is the sprint, on to the next part of the
| product, rinse repeat. Time flies for those people, its
| probably most of the people here.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| I think most people outside of tech have barely even touched
| it.
|
| Obviously there are some savy users across all age groups and
| occupations. But from what Ive see its just not part of most
| people's workflow.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| At the same time I think Meta and big tech adding more and
| more cloud based inference is driving demand for the
| processors
|
| OpenAI still hasnt released Sora video prompting for the
| general public and have already been leapfrogged by half a
| dozen competitors. I would say its still niche, but only as
| niche as using professional video editing tools are for
| creatives
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| I've seen this too and it's so weird. The vast majority are
| totally clueless on it.
| al_borland wrote:
| I was getting a lot of mixed messaging at my job for 6-12
| months.
|
| On the one hand, we got an email from high up saying not to
| use Copilot, or other such tools, as they were trying to
| figure out the licensing. But at the same time, we had the
| CIO getting up in front of the company every other month
| talking about nothing but GenAI, and how if we weren't using
| it we were stupid (not in those exact words, but that was the
| general vibe, uncontrolled AI hype).
|
| We were left sitting there saying, "what do you want from us?
| Do as you say or do as you do?"
|
| Eventually they signed the deal with MS and we got Copilot,
| which then seemed forced on us. There is even a dashboard out
| there for it, listing all people using it, their manager,
| rolling all the way up to the CEO. It tells the percentage of
| reports from each manager using it, and how often suggestions
| are accepted. It seems like the kind of dashboard someone
| would make if they were planning to give out bonuses based on
| Copilot adoption.
|
| I've gotten regular surveys about it as well, to ask how I
| was using it. I mostly don't, due to the implementation in VS
| Code. I might use it a few times per month at best.
|
| Maybe that would be different if the rollout wasn't so
| awkward, or the VS Code extension was more configurable.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > It tells the percentage of reports from each manager
| using it, and how often suggestions are accepted. It seems
| like the kind of dashboard someone would make if they were
| planning to give out bonuses based on Copilot adoption.
|
| That's one result. Another result is, due to "checking how
| often suggestions are accepted" is to objectively record
| how much help it is providing.
|
| I assume the sitewide license is costly - this could simply
| be the company's way of determining if the cost is worth
| it.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| You absolutely do not need to be getting Microsoft copilot
| licenses:
|
| Open weight and open source models can be hosted on your own
| hardware nowadays, and its incredibly easy.
|
| https://dublog.net/blog/open-weight-copilots/
|
| You can even use something like RayServe + VLLM to host on a
| big chonky machine for a small team if you're concerned about
| data exfiltration.
| mr_toad wrote:
| Go back ten+ years, replace AI with cloud and it was the
| same. I saw 'no cloud' policies everywhere. But most of the
| anti-cloud people have since retired, so even the most
| hidebound of organisations are adopting it. It will probably
| take another round of retirements for AI to adopted in the
| more conservative environments.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > It will probably take another round of retirements for AI
| to adopted in the more conservative environments.
|
| If that is the case, then the AI isn't really adding enough
| value.
|
| I mean, if it _was_ adding enough value, those companies
| refusing to adopt it will be out-competed _before_ the next
| round of retirements, and so won 't even be around.
|
| We'll see how the landscape looks in 10 years: if there are
| still major companies who have not invested some money or
| time into sprinkling the AI over their operations, then
| that's a signal that the positive impact of AI was
| overblown.
|
| If, OTOH, there exists no large company in 10 years who
| have not incorporated AI into their operations in any way,
| then that's a signal too - the extra value of AI is above
| the cost of adding it to the operations.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| I've been hearing about the AI bubble being about to pop for
| more than decade now. And then just a couple of years ago AI
| took a huge leap...so now another AI winter is even more
| likely?
| Prickle wrote:
| I think we will see something similar to the last boom with
| Neural Net chatbots back in 2014(?).
|
| Public discource will simmer down, as current language models
| either fizzle out or improve. Some will become background
| noise as the models gets integrated into search engines or
| leads to large scale lawsuits.
|
| Unlike the previous neural nets though, those models have an
| actual tangible use. So you will see them around a lot more.
|
| Then I think we will see another big explosion.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| There wasn't really a pullback in 2014, AI tech just kept
| getting better afterwards and the companies were still
| dumping a lot of resources into AI.
| signa11 wrote:
| can someone please post an archive link to this article ? thank
| you !
| nblgbg wrote:
| https://archive.ph/PFmWw
| throwup238 wrote:
| https://archive.ph/PFmWw
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| >1943
|
| >The Manhattan project is losing hype. It's over for fission
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| At some moment people wanted to use radioactivity for
| everything, even marking cattle.
| taberiand wrote:
| And then it swung back too far in the other direction and
| nuclear anything became a bogeyman.
| langcss wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _At some moment people wanted to use radioactivity for
| everything_
|
| And people died without a jaw because somebody sold
| radioactive water as a rejuvenator.
|
| Humanity is generally not strong on principles of
| carefulness.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| It's different though. Did we have the ubiquitous
| implementation of nuclear power in only its nascent early
| days so widespread? To assume it will peter out the same way
| assumes the metaphor is 1:1, when I brought it up to imply
| simply that since a lot of developments are happening in
| secret now and companies are delaying releases for safety
| reasons, to the public is appears as if things are slowing.
| Even so, AI models are still far better and cheaper now than
| they were simply a year ago. We have simply gotten used to
| breakthroughs.
| goatlover wrote:
| Cars, planes, house hold appliances, engineering projects where
| all going to make use of fission. Energy would be
| revolutionized. Yes, we made large, expensive power plants and
| had a nuclear arms race. No, we didn't end up powering
| everything else with nuclear fuel, as you can see from climate
| change.
| ummonk wrote:
| Whether and to what extent AI can be monetized is an open
| question. But there's no question that LLMs are already seeing
| extensive use in everyday office work and already making large
| improvements to productivity.
| burnerquestions wrote:
| I question it. Source?
| hatefulmoron wrote:
| > But there's no question that LLMs are already seeing
| extensive use in everyday office work and already making large
| improvements to productivity.
|
| Are you referencing something specific here, or is there
| something you can link to? To be honest the only significant
| 'disruption' I've seen for LLMs so far has been cheating on
| homework assignments. I'd be happy to read something if you
| have it.
| pdimitar wrote:
| I and many others are questioning it. Please provide some
| proof. I've only seen some lazy programmers get boilerplate
| generated quicker, and some kids cheating on homework. I
| actually saw executives make use of ChatGPT's text
| summarization capabilities... until one of them made the
| critical mistake to fully trust it and flunked an important
| contract because ChatGPT overlooked something that would be
| super obvious to a human.
|
| So again, let's see some proof of this extensive use and large
| improvements to productivity.
| asadotzler wrote:
| Links to studies/surveys/interviews/anything with even the
| suggestion of proof for your claim other than simple assertion?
| j-a-a-p wrote:
| The article suggests the contrary: 4.8% use in US companies,
| down from 5.4%. (I would wish I would have gotten these
| numbers, but for a tech company founded in 2015 these are not
| remarkable).
| h_tbob wrote:
| To be honest, I was surprised by ChatGPT. I didn't think we were
| close.
|
| We are running out of textual data now to train on... so now they
| have switched to VIDEO. Geez now they can train on all the VIDEOS
| on the internet.
|
| And when they finally get bots working, they will have limitless
| streams of TACTILE data...
|
| Writing it off as the next fad seems fun. But to be honest, I was
| shocked by what openai did the first time. So they have my
| respect. I don't think many of us saw it coming. And I think
| writing their creativity off again may not be wise.
|
| So when they say the bubble is about to break... I get it. But I
| don't see how.
|
| I hardly ever pay for anything.
|
| But I gladly spend money on ai to get the answers I need. Just
| makes my work work!
|
| Also I would say the economic benefit of this tech for workers is
| that it will 2x the average worker as they catch on. Seriously I
| am a 2x coder compared to what I was because of this.
|
| Therefore if me a person who hardly ever spends money has to buy
| it... I think eventually all businesses will realize all their
| employees need it. This driving massive revenue for those who
| sell it.
|
| But it may not be the companies we think.
| icholy wrote:
| > Seriously I am a 2x coder compared to what I was because of
| this.
|
| You probably shouldn't advertise that.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| They're a 20x coder now.
| CooCooCaCha wrote:
| I am highly skeptical that a competent coder sees a 2x boost.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| You shouldn't be. For code bases where context is mostly
| local they destroy human throughput by comparison. They
| only fall down hard when used in spaghetti dumpster fire
| codebases where you have to paste the contents of 6+ files
| into context or the code crosses a multiple service
| boundaries to do anything.
|
| A competent engineer architects their systems to make their
| tools as effective as possible, so maybe your idea of
| competent is "first order" and you need higher order
| conception of a good software engineer.
| grogenaut wrote:
| could you provide some examples, code or repos and
| questions where it does a good job for you (question can
| also just be completion). Obviously you're having really
| good experiences with the tools that other aren't having.
| I'd definitely appreciate that over a lot of assurances
| taht I'm doing it wrong with my spaghetti code.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Try these:
|
| Take a SQL schema, and ask AI to generate crud endpoints
| for the schema, then sit down and code it by yourself.
| Then try generating client side actions and state
| management for those endpoints. Time yourself, and
| compare how long it takes you. Even if you're fast and
| you cut and paste from template work and quickly hand
| edit, the AI will be done and on a smoke break before
| you're even a quarter of the way through.
|
| Ask the AI to generate correctly typed seed data for your
| database, using realistic values. Again, the AI will be
| done long before you.
|
| Try porting a library of helper functions from one
| language to another. This is another task where AI will
| win handily
|
| Also, ask AI to write unit tests with mocks for your
| existing code. It's not amazing at integration tests but
| with mocks in play it slays.
| linuxftw wrote:
| Your experience mirrors mine. I use ChatGPT or meta for
| boiler plate code like this. I write golang at my day
| job, and there's a lot of boiler plat for that language,
| saves a lot of time, but most importantly, does the
| tedious boring things I hate doing.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Most of the things you list can be done
| deterministically, without the risk of AI errors. The
| first one in particular is just scaffolding that Visual
| Studio has had for Entity Framework and ASP.NET MVC for a
| decade now. And if you were using, e.g., LISP, you'd just
| write a DEFCRUD macro for it once, and re-use it for
| every similar project.
| Jensson wrote:
| Those things are a tiny part of the work though and are
| all about generating boilerplate code. Tons of
| boilerplate code isn't the hallmark of a great codebase,
| I don't think many programmers spends more than 10% of
| their time writing boilerplate code, unless they work at
| a very dysfunctional org.
|
| It is true it is faster than humans at some tasks, but
| the remaining tasks were most of the time, you can't gain
| more than 11% speedup by speeding up 10% of the work.
| pdimitar wrote:
| > _They only fall down hard when used in spaghetti
| dumpster fire codebases where you have to paste the
| contents of 6+ files into context or the code crosses a
| multiple service boundaries to do anything._
|
| So humans do better than them in at least 80% of all code
| everywhere, if not 95% even? Cool, good to know.
|
| Care to provide some examples to back your otherwise
| extraordinary claim btw?
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| You sure seem invested in hating AI, what's your problem
| brother?
| pdimitar wrote:
| I don't "hate" AI because (1) AI does not exist so how
| can I hate something that doesn't exist? And (2) I don't
| "hate" a machine, I cringe at people who make grand
| claims with zero proof. Yes. Zero. Not small, not
| infinitesimal -- zero.
|
| I just can't make peace with the fact that I inhabit the
| same planet as people who can't make elementary
| distinctions.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| I can't make peace that I'm on the same planet as people
| who can't use google worth a shit:
| https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/how-
| generative...
|
| And yet somehow want to act high and mighty and be
| insulting as fuck.
| pdimitar wrote:
| You failed to mention the word "can", which is a
| theoretical.
|
| We can all Google stuff because internet is big and
| supports anyone's views, which means it's more important
| than ever to be informed and be able to infer well.
| Something that you seem to want to defer to sources that
| support your beliefs. Not nice finding that on a hacker
| forum but statistical outliers exist.
|
| Live long and prosper. And be insulted, I suppose.
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| I use multiple daily and have definitely seen a
| productivity boost. If nothing else, it saves typing. But
| I'd argue they are in essence a better search engine - it
| answers "you don't know what you don't know" questions very
| well, providing a jumping off point when my conception of
| how to achieve something with code or tooling is vague.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Typing is, or at least it should be, the least of your
| time spent during the day doing programming. I don't find
| optimizing the 5-10% of my workday spent typing
| impressive, or even worth mentioning.
|
| Granted there are languages where typing takes much more
| time, like Java and C# but... eh. They are quite overdue
| for finding better syntax anyway! :)
| NoGravitas wrote:
| The languages where typing takes more time also tend to
| have IDE support to mitigate that --- in a deterministic
| way, unlike CoPilot.
| pdimitar wrote:
| True.
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| I didn't mean typing in the sense of autocomplete, I
| meant typing in the sense of stubbing out an entire class
| or series of test cases. It gives me scaffolding to work
| with which I can take and run with.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Yes that's fair. If it helps reduce writing boilerplate
| then I'm all for it.
| dkersten wrote:
| Reminds me of The Primeagen quote: _"If copilot made you
| 10x better, then you were only a 0.1x programmer to begin
| with"_.
|
| As someone who uses ChatGPT and Claude daily, but cancelled
| my Copilot subscription after a year of use because it
| intimately just wasn't that helpful to me and didn't
| provide enough benefit over doing it by hand, I kind of
| sort of agree. Maybe not entirely, but I can't shake the
| feeling that there might be some truth in it.
|
| The code that AI generates for me is rarely good. It's
| possible to get good code out of it, but it requires many
| iterations of careful review and prompting, but for most
| cases, I can write it quicker by hand. Where it really
| shines for me in programming and what I still use ChatGPT
| and Claude for is rubber ducking and as an alternative to
| documentation (eg "how do I do x in css").
|
| Besides the code quality being mediocre at best and
| outright rubbish at worst, it's too much of a "yes man",
| it's lazy (choose between A and B: why not a hybrid
| approach? That's... not what I asked for), and it doesn't
| know how to say "I don't know".
|
| I also feel it makes you, the human programmer, lazy. We
| need to exercise our brains, not delegate too much to a
| dumb computer.
| Izkata wrote:
| > I also feel it makes you, the human programmer, lazy.
| We need to exercise our brains, not delegate too much to
| a dumb computer.
|
| I kinda feel like this isn't talked about enough, my main
| concern right from the beginning was that new programmers
| would rely on it too much and never improve their own
| abilities.
| h_tbob wrote:
| I am a competent coder. I have been a coder since I was in
| middle school. I know at least 10 languages, and I could
| write my own from scratch.
|
| I know c++ dart golang java html css javascript typescript
| lua react vue angular angularjs c# swift sql in various
| dialects including mysql and postgres, and have worked
| professionally in all these regards. I love to challenge
| myself. In fact, if I done something before, I find it
| boring.
|
| So copilot helps me because I always find something new to
| do, something I don't understand, something I'm not good
| at.
|
| So yes, I'm confident I'm competent. But I always do things
| I'm not good at for fun. So it helps me become well
| rounded.
|
| So your assertion it only helps me because I'm incompetent
| is true and false. I'm competent, I just like to do new
| stuff.
| pdimitar wrote:
| That's all very nice but it contains a fatal logical
| flaw: it assumes CoPilot actually gives you good code. :D
|
| I mean it does, sometimes, but usually it's either
| boilerplate or something you don't care about.
| Boilerplate is mostly managed very well by most well-
| known IDEs. And neither them nor CoPilot are offering
| good algorithmic code... OK, I'll grant you the "most of
| the time, not never" thing.
| CooCooCaCha wrote:
| That kinda proves my point. You find it useful when
| you're doing something outside your core competencies.
| octodog wrote:
| I don't see the problem here. What's wrong with that?
| Tools are supposed to make your life easier.
| consteval wrote:
| I think for more boilerplate-esque code-monkey type code it
| can be a boon.
|
| I think the unfortunate reality is that this makes up a
| shockingly large amount of software engineering. Take this
| object and put it into this other object, map this data to
| that data, create these records and move them into this
| object when then goes into that other object.
| Flop7331 wrote:
| 2x loc!
| corytheboyd wrote:
| I've seen copilot spit out garbage dozens of lines long for
| something I swore must be one or two stdlib functions. Yep,
| it was, after reading some real documentation and using my
| brain. It was some NodeJS stuff, which I never work with.
| Don't get me wrong, I still find it a helpful tool, but it
| is not at all a good, seasoned programmer-- it is an
| algorithm predicting the next token based on the current
| tokens.
| djaouen wrote:
| How are you using AI to double your coding productivity? Are
| you using ChatGPT, or Claude, or GitHub Copilot? I am an AI-
| skeptic, so I am curious here. Thanks!
| naet wrote:
| I've tried various AI coding solutions and have found at best
| a mild boost but not the amazing multipliers I hear about
| online.
|
| Copilot gives you some autofill that sometimes can be helpful
| but often not that helpful. I think the best it did for me
| was helping with something repetitive where I was editing a
| big list of things in the same way (like adding an ID to
| every tag in a list) and it helped take over and finish the
| task with a little less manual clicking.
|
| ChatGPT has helped with small code snippets like writing a
| regular expression. I never got 100% regex mastery, usually I
| would have to look up a couple things to write one but GPT
| can shortcut that process. I get a little paranoid about AI
| provided code not actually working so I end up writing a
| large number of tests to check it, which could be a good
| thing but can feel tedious.
|
| I'm also curious how other people are leveraging them to get
| more than I am. I honestly don't try too hard. At one point I
| did try really hard to get AI to do more heavy code lifting
| but was disappointed with my results so I stopped... but
| maybe things have improved a bit since then.
| bamboozled wrote:
| I don't know if I've done something wrong my my copilot is
| so wrong I just turned it off. I don't understand the
| appeal at all.
|
| I don't remember the last time I thought one of its
| suggestions was useful. For me LSP has been the real game
| changer.
| paradite wrote:
| It can get a little tedious if you are just using ChatGPT
| or Claude as it is. Also you are limited by lack of context
| on existing codebase.
|
| That's why there are a lot of tools that help to setup a
| proper workflow around these LLMs.
|
| For terminal-based workflow, you can checkout aider or
| plandex.
|
| For GUI-based workflow, you can try 16x Prompt (I built
| it).
| pdimitar wrote:
| > _I get a little paranoid about AI provided code not
| actually working so I end up writing a large number of
| tests to check it, which could be a good thing but can feel
| tedious._
|
| This is a good thing. We need more tests on such critical
| places like regexes because they can be finicky and non-
| obvious. Tedious or not, we are not artists; the job must
| be done. Kudos for sticking to the good practices.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| What does it mean to be a skeptic here? Have you tried
| ChatGPT? Copilot?
| djaouen wrote:
| Perhaps I should have said "AI hype-skeptic"? I am just not
| seeing the productivity gains that others claim ITT.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| AI is a tool, if you don't know how to use a tool you
| can't expect to get good results with it. That means both
| how to interact with the AI and how to structure your
| code to make the AI's generations more accurate.
| 0points wrote:
| If all you got is a LLM hammer, then every problem is a
| nail.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| GPT-4o is the greatest hammer ever invented.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Got it. Are you using the latest models? Like, GPT-4o ? I
| find it significantly more useful when I'm stuck than
| copilot's autocomplete.
| Mc91 wrote:
| I don't use AI at work at all.
|
| I pay for Leetcode, which usually gives editorial examples in
| Python and Java and such, and paste it into ChatGPT and say
| "translate this to a language I am more familiar with"
| (actually I have other programs that have been doing this for
| some language to language conversions for years, without AI).
| Then I say "make it more compact". Then again "make it more
| compact". So soon I have a big O(n) time, big O(1) space
| solution to Leetcode question #2718 or whatever in a language
| I am familiar with. Actually sometimes it becomes too compact
| and unreadable, and I back it up a little.
|
| Sometimes it hallucinates, but it has been helpful. In the
| past I had problems with it, but not recently.
| el_benhameen wrote:
| I'm not the OP and I wouldn't say that AI has doubled my
| productivity, but the latest Claude models in particular have
| made me less of a skeptic than I was a few months ago.
|
| I'm an experienced backend dev who's been working on some Vue
| frontend projects, and it's significantly accelerated my
| ability to learn the complexities of e.g. Vue's reactivity
| model. I can ask a complex question that involves several
| niche concepts and get a response that correctly synthesizes
| those concepts. I spent an hour the other night trying to
| understand a bug in a component to no avail; once I
| understood the problem well enough to explain it in a few
| sentences, Claude diagnosed the issue and explained it with
| more clarity than the documentation and various stack
| overflow answers.
|
| My default is no longer to assume that the model has a coin
| flip's chance of producing bs. I still verify and treat
| answers with a certain degree of skepticism, but I now reach
| for it as my first tool rather than a last resort or a
| gimmick.
| h_tbob wrote:
| Exactly. It's insanely helpful when u are a dev with
| experience in another language. You know what you want, you
| just don't know the name of the functions, etc. so you put
| a comment
|
| // reverse list
|
| And it writes code in the proper language.
| Sysreq2 wrote:
| I want to double tap this point. In my experience Claude
| out performs GPT-4o, Llama 3.1 and Gemma 1.5 significantly.
|
| I have accounts for all three and will generally try to
| branch out to test them with each new update. Admittedly, I
| haven't gotten to Grok yet, but Claude is far and away the
| best model at the moment. It's not even close really.
| h_tbob wrote:
| Ok I jumped on copilot when it first came out so I have been
| using it for a long time.
|
| Since I have been using it so long, I have a really good
| intuition of what it is "thinking" in every scenario and a
| pretty good idea of what it can do for me. So that helps me
| get more use out of it.
|
| So for example one of the projects I'm doing now is a flutter
| project - my first one. So I don't remember all the widgets.
| But I just write a comment:
|
| // this widget does XYZ
|
| And it will write something that is in the right direction.
|
| The other thing it knows super well is like rote code, and
| for context, it reads the whole file. So like Dart, for
| example is awful at json. So you have to write "toMap" for
| each freaking class where you do key values to generate a map
| which can be turned into json. Same goes for fromMap. So
| annoying.
|
| But with copilot? You just write "toMap" and it reads all
| your properties and suggests a near perfect implementation.
| So much time saved!
| Flop7331 wrote:
| I don't think you need an LLM just to parse class
| properties and turn them into a map. Not that familiar with
| Dart, but that's the kind of thing IDEs have been able to
| do for a while now just by parsing syntax the old-fashioned
| way.
| swat535 wrote:
| The thing is, when you dig into the claims many people
| make when they say that they get a 10x productivity boost
| using "AI" its usually some basic tasks that either
| generates boilerplate code or performs a fancy
| autocomplete and while those are great, in no way it
| supports their original claim.
|
| I think people just want to be part of the hype and use
| the cool new technology whenever possible. We've seen
| this over and over again: Machine Learning, Blockchains,
| Cryptos, "Big Data", "Micro Services", "Kubernetes", etc.
|
| I just don't think the current design of "AI" will take
| us there..
| MrVandemar wrote:
| > Seriously I am a 2x coder compared to what I was because of
| this.
|
| Isn't the energy consumption of this technology pretty
| catastrophic? Do you consider the issue of energy consumption
| so abstracted you don't worry about it? Do you do anything to
| offset your increased carbon emissions?
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| They certainly are not providing these services at less than
| electricity costs. So if you are spending $20 a month on it,
| they are spending less than that on electricity. It's very
| low compared to any person in the first world's energy spend.
| LtWorf wrote:
| How do you know?
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Common sense, having been around cloud operations for a
| bit. The big cloud providers run gross margins around
| 30%. So if openai are using MSFT and getting a "good
| deal" maybe MSFT only get 20% GM. So, $1 of openai
| compute costs MSFT say $0.80. Of that cost of providing
| the service, something like 30-40% goes to electricity.
| So, lets say the electricity cost is $0.30 for $1 of
| OpenAI compute. (And that's probably a steelman, I think
| it's actually more like $0.20. )
|
| There is about zero chance OpenAI are running their
| service at a 70% negative gross margin.
| LtWorf wrote:
| Doesn't seem anything definitive to me.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Not definitive. But if you need a water tight argument to
| change your mind on something, you'll never change it.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Actually, they probably are. OpenAI is projected to lose $5
| billion this year in ChatGPT costs.
| grogenaut wrote:
| isn't the energy consumption of travel, driving, and shipping
| food to you pretty catastrophic? Do you consider the issue of
| energy consumption so abstracted you don't worry about it? Do
| you do anything to offset your increased carbon emissions?
| MrVandemar wrote:
| > Do you do anything to offset your increased carbon
| emissions?
|
| Yes. Quite a lot. I walk the talk.
| LtWorf wrote:
| You think silicon valley types care?
| johnthewise wrote:
| Rest of the developing world care even less.
| h_tbob wrote:
| I'm working on getting a place with solar panels. I think
| that's important for sustainability, plus who wants to have
| to be connected to the grid anyway?
| bawolff wrote:
| I think all this can be true, and we are still in a massive AI
| bubble that may pop at any moment.
|
| ChatGPT truly is impressive. Nonetheless, i still think most
| companies integrating "AI" into their products is buzzword bs
| that is all going to collapse in on itself.
| taberiand wrote:
| Sure it's not all it's cracked up to be but I sure hope there's a
| sweet spot where I can run the latest models for a cheap price
| ($20 / month is a steal), and it doesn't instead crash to the
| point where they get turned off
| freemoney99 wrote:
| These days you can't be a respected news outlet if you don't
| regularly have an article/post/blog about AI losing hype.
| Wondering when that fad will reach its peak...
| Ologn wrote:
| > Since peaking last month the share prices of Western firms
| driving the ai revolution have dropped by 15%.
|
| NVDA's high closes were $135.58 June 18, down to $134.91 July
| 10th and $130 close today. It's highest sale is $140.76. So it's
| close today is 8% off its highest sale ever, and 4% off its
| highest close ever, not a big thing for a volatile stock. It's
| earnings are next week and we'll see how it does.
|
| Nvidia and SMCI are the ones who have been earning money selling
| equipment for "AI". For Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon,
| OpenAI etc., it is all big initial capital expenditure which they
| (and the scolding investment bank analysts) hope to regain in the
| future.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| Asking an API to write three paragraphs of text still takes tens
| of seconds and requires working internet and an expensive data
| center.
|
| Meanwhile we're seeing the first of the new generation of on-
| device inference chips being shipped as commodity edge compute.
|
| When the devices you use every day -- cars, doorbells, TV
| remotes, points-of-sale, roombas -- can interpret camera and
| speech input locally in the time it takes to draw a frame and
| with low enough power to still give you 10h between charges: then
| we'll be due another round of innovation.
|
| The article points to how few parts of the economy are leveraging
| the text-only API products currently available. That still feels
| very Web 1.0, for me.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Which is great, the internet exploded when TV stopped talking
| about "the internet" and everyone just used it.
| 0points wrote:
| Right, I forgot that is why internet became popular /s
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| You confuse causality with correlation, a common mistake.
| ssimoni wrote:
| Hilarious. The article tries to go even one step further past the
| loss of hype, by making an additional argument that ai might not
| be in a hype cycle at all. Meaning they conjecture that it might
| not even come out of the trough of disillusion to mass adoption.
|
| That's gonna be a bad take I think.
| scubadude wrote:
| I'm still waiting for the Virtual Reality from 1996 to change the
| world. Colour me surprised that AI is being found to be 90% hype.
| eesmith wrote:
| Also from the 1990s, "intelligent agents". Here's what Don
| Norman wrote in 1994 at
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/176789.176796 :
|
| > The new crop of intelligent agents are different from the
| automated devices of earlier eras because of their
| computational power. They have Turing-machine powers, they take
| over human tasks, and they interact with people in human-like
| ways-perhaps with a form of natural language, perhaps with
| animated graphics or video. Some agents have the potential to
| form their own goals and intentions. to initiate actions on
| their own without explicit instruction or guidance, and to
| offer suggestions to people. Thus, agents might set up
| schedules, reserve hotel and meeting rooms, arrange
| transportation, and even outline meeting topics, all without
| human intervention.
| technick wrote:
| I was out at Defcon this year and it was all about AI this, AI
| that, AI will solve the worlds problems, AI will catch all
| threats, blah blah blah blah...
| plastic-enjoyer wrote:
| I was at a UX / Usability conference and it was basically the
| same. Everyone talked about AI here and AI there, but no one
| had an actual usecase or idea how to incorporate AI in a
| purposeful way. I can genuinely understand, why people feel
| that AI is a fad.
| bamboozled wrote:
| I work with people like this. The least skilled, least
| experienced, least productive people on my team constantly
| recommend "AI" solutions that are just a waste of time.
|
| I think that's what people like about AI, it's hope, maybe you
| won't have to learn anything but still be productive. Sounds
| nice ?
| 0points wrote:
| My clients are like this lately.
|
| Non techies that now are suggesting how I design solutions
| for them by asking ChatGPT. And they seem to treat me like
| the stupid one for refusing.
| olalonde wrote:
| > Silicon Valley's tech bros
|
| The Economist, seriously?
| keiferski wrote:
| It's certainly possible that AI is being overhyped, and I think
| in some cases it definitely is - but _being tired of hearing
| about it_ in no way correlates to its actual usefulness.
|
| In other words, lot of people seem to think that human attention
| spans are what determine everything, but the technological cycles
| at work here are much much deeper.
|
| Personally I have used Midjourney and ChatGPT in ways that will
| have huge impacts on many activities and industries. Denying that
| because of media trendiness about AI seems shortsighted.
| pdimitar wrote:
| > _It's certainly possible that AI is being overhyped, and I
| think in some cases it definitely is - but being tired of
| hearing about it in no way correlates to its actual
| usefulness._
|
| Please tell that to all types on HN who downvote anything
| related to Rust without even reading past the title. :D
|
| > _In other words, lot of people seem to think that human
| attention spans are what determine everything, but the
| technological cycles at work here are much much deeper._
|
| IMO no reasonable person denies this, it's just that the "AI"
| technology regularly over-promises and under-delivers. At one
| point it's no longer discrimination, it's just good old pattern
| recognition.
|
| > _Personally I have used Midjourney and ChatGPT in ways that
| will have huge impacts on many activities and industries.
| Denying that because of media trendiness about AI seems
| shortsighted._
|
| Some examples with actual links would go a long way. I for one
| am skeptical of your claim but I am open to have my mind
| changed (f.ex. my CFO told me once that ChatGPT helped him
| catch several bad contract clauses).
| keiferski wrote:
| I don't understand how someone could think that ChatGPT or
| Midjourney aren't going to radically change many, many
| industries, and frankly to think this just seems like
| straight up ignorance or laziness. It's not that hard to find
| real examples of this stuff.
|
| But if you insist...here are two very small examples from my
| personal experience with AI tools.
|
| 1. I work as a technical writer. Recently I needed to add a
| summary section to the introduction of a large number of
| articles. So, I copied the article into ChatGPT and told it
| to summarize the piece into 3-4 bullet points. Were I doing
| this task a few years ago, I would have read each article and
| then written the bullet points myself - nothing particularly
| difficult, but very time-consuming to do for dozens of
| articles. Instead, I used ChatGPT and saved myself hours upon
| hours of mundane work.
|
| This is a quite minor and mundane example, but you can
| (hopefully) see how this will have major effects on any kind
| of routine text-creation.
|
| 2. I am working on a side project which requires the creation
| of a large number of custom images. I've had this project
| idea for a few years, but previously couldn't afford to spend
| $20k hiring an illustrator to make them all. Now with
| Midjourney, I am able to create essentially unlimited images
| for $30-100 a month. This new AI tool has quite literally
| unlocked a new business idea that was previously
| inaccessible.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Responding emotionally by using words like "ignorance" and
| "laziness" undermines any argument that you might think you
| are making.
|
| Have you considered that you getting almost angry at
| somebody "not seeing the light" means you might hold
| preconceived notions that might not hold to reality? You
| would not be practicing critical thinking if you are not
| willing to question your assumptions.
|
| It seems your assumption is very standard: "revolution is
| just around the corner, how can you not see it?".
|
| OK, let the revolution come and I'll apologize to you
| personally. Ping me when it happens. For real. But make
| sure it's an actual revolution and not "OMFG next
| Midjourney can produce moon-scapes!", okay?
|
| ---
|
| RE: 1, cool, I heard such success stories and I like them.
| But I also heard about executives flunking contracts
| because they over-relied on ChatGPT to summarize /
| synthesize contract items. I am glad it's making progress
| but people are being people and they will rely on a 100%
| fault-free AI. If that's not in place yet then the
| usefulness drops sharply because double-checking is even
| more time-consuming than doing the thing by yourself in the
| first place.
|
| RE: 2, your side projects are not representative of
| anything at all. And I for one recognize AI images from a
| mile away and steer clear of projects that make use of
| them. Smells like low-effort to me and makes me wonder if
| the author didn't take other, much more fatal, shortcuts
| (like losing my information or selling my PII). And yes I
| am not the only one -- before you attempt that low-effort
| _ad hominem_ technique.
|
| I was not convinced by your comment, very little facts and
| it mostly appeals to the future that's forever just around
| the corner. Surely as an engineering-minded person you see
| how that's not convincing?
| keiferski wrote:
| You asked for examples, and I gave you examples. I didn't
| claim AI revolution was around the corner, I just said I
| used them in these small ways that clearly will have big
| impacts in their respective areas.
|
| My experience is in no way unique, and yes, I think it's
| just laziness or ignorance to think otherwise. Or in your
| case, a kind of zealous hostility as a reaction against
| hype.
|
| I remind you that my initial comment said that yes, there
| are some aspects of AI that are definitely over-hyped,
| but that I have used the tools in ways that obviously
| seem to have huge economic impacts.
|
| P.S. - if you were more familiar with AI image makers,
| you'd know that it's not difficult to make images that
| are indistinguishable from non-AI ones. But that's really
| not relevant here, because my point was that this new
| tool enabled me to create something that didn't exist
| before - not what your personal qualms were about AI
| images.
| asadotzler wrote:
| a stick for carving in the dirt enables you to create
| something that didn't exist before. there's nothing
| special about that stick.
| ChaitanyaSai wrote:
| I've trained as a neuroscientist and written a book about
| consciousness. I've worked in machine learning and built products
| for over 20 years and now use AI a fair bit in the ed-tech work
| we do.
|
| So I've seen how the field has progressed and also have been able
| to look at it from a perspective most AI/engineering people don't
| -- what does this artificial intelligence look like when compared
| to biological intelligence. And I must say I am absolutely
| astonished people don't see this as opening the flood-gates to
| staggeringly powerful artificial intelligence. We've run the
| 4-minute mile. There are hundreds of billions of dollars figuring
| out how to get to the next level, and it's clear we are close.
| Forget what the current models are doing, it is what the next big
| leap (most likely with some new architecture change) will bring.
|
| In focusing on intelligence we forget that it's most likely a
| much easier challenge than decentralized cheap autonomy, which is
| what took the planet 4 billion years to figure out. Once that was
| done, intelligence as we recognize it took an eye-blink. Just
| like with powered-flight we don't need bioliogical intelligence
| to transform the world. Artificial intelligence that guzzles
| electricity, is brittle, has blind spots, but still capable of
| 1000 times more than the best among us is going to be here within
| the next decade. It's not here yet, no doubt, but I am yet to see
| any reasoned argument for why it is far more difficult and will
| take far longer. We are in for radical non-linear change.
| phito wrote:
| > but I am yet to see any reasoned argument for why it is far
| more difficult and will take far longer
|
| I am yet to see any reasoned argument for why it is easy to
| build real AI and that it will come fast.
|
| As you said, AI has been there for decades and stagnated for
| pretty much the whole time. We've just had a big leap, but
| nothing says (except BS hype) that we're not in for a long
| plateau again.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Well he gave you a list of credentials of why you should
| believe him. Isn't that enough ?
| dartos wrote:
| > I've trained as a neuroscientist and written a book about
| consciousness
|
| This has to do with ML and numerical computing, how?
| bamboozled wrote:
| Well I was being sarcastic. I really dislike it when
| people have to first convince you that you should trust
| them.
|
| Either make a good argument or don't.
| lemarchr wrote:
| Argument from authority is a pernicious fallacy, and
| typically effective too. You were right to call it out. I
| must admit I overlooked the sarcasm, however.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > I must admit I overlooked the sarcasm, however.
|
| Don't feel too bad; until I read the next response I was
| in two minds about whether sarcasm was intended or not.
|
| It's bloody hard to tell, sometimes :-/
| carlmr wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
| librasteve wrote:
| it can be for some
| carlmr wrote:
| If people say "believe me" at the end of every second
| sentence you should doubt them. Not thinking of anyone in
| particular.
| dartos wrote:
| Oh, I was bamboozled.
| mmooss wrote:
| > I really dislike it when people have to first convince
| you that you should trust them.
|
| > Either make a good argument or don't.
|
| Human beings can't evaulate the truth of things based
| only on the argument. Persuasive liars, cons, and
| incompetents are a very known phenomenon. Most of human
| history we misunderstood nature and many other things
| because we relied on 'good arguments'. Not that we need
| it, but research shows that human intuition about the
| truth of something isn't good without expertise.
|
| When I need medical advice, I get it from someone who has
| convinced me that they have expertise; I don't look for
| 'good arguments' that persuade me, because I don't know
| what I'm talking about.
|
| I have expertise in other things. In those fields, I
| could easily persuade people without it of just about
| anything. (I don't; I'm not a sociopath.) I imagine
| anyone with professional expertise who reads this can do
| the same.
| phito wrote:
| No. Stating credentials proves nothing at all. Even less so
| on the internet.
|
| edit: oh sorry I didn't get that it was sarcasm
| tasuki wrote:
| > I am yet to see any reasoned argument for why it is easy to
| build real AI and that it will come fast.
|
| We have "real ai" already.
|
| As for future progress, have you tried just simple
| interpolation of the progress so far? Human level
| intelligence is very near. (Though of course artificial
| intelligence will never exactly match human intelligence: it
| will be ahead/behind in certain aspects...)
| pdimitar wrote:
| - We don't have a "real AI" at all. Where's Skynet, where's
| HAL-9000? Where are the cute robotic butlers from the "I,
| Robot" movie?
|
| - Simple interpolation of the progress is exactly the
| problem here. Look at the historical graphs of AI funding
| and tell me with a straight face that we absolutely must
| use simple interpolation.
|
| - Nope, human-level intelligence is not even close. It
| remains as nebulous and out of reach as ever. ChatGPT's
| imitation of intelligent speech falls apart very quickly
| when you chat with it for more than a few questions.
| K0balt wrote:
| To be fair, I've talked to a lot of people who cannot
| consistently perform at the mistral-12b level.
|
| I think we expect AGI to be much smarter than the average
| joe, and free of occasional stupidity.
|
| What we've got is an 85IQ generalist with unreliable
| savant capabilities, that can also talk to a million
| people at the same time without getting distracted. I
| don't see how that isn't absolutely a fundamental shift
| in capability.
|
| It's just that we expect it to be spectacularly useful.
| Not like homeless joe, who lives down by the river.
| Unfortunately, nobody wants a 40 acre call center of
| homeless joes, but it's hard to argue that HJ isn't an
| intelligent entity.
|
| Obviously LLMs don't yet have a control and supervision
| loop that gives them goal directed behaviour, but they
| also don't have a drinking problem and debilitating PTSD
| with a little TBI thrown in from the last war.
|
| It's not that we aren't on the cusp of general
| intelligence, it's that we have a distorted idea of how
| useful that should be.
| pdimitar wrote:
| > _What we've got is an 85IQ generalist with unreliable
| savant capabilities, that can also talk to a million
| people at the same time without getting distracted. I
| don't see how that isn't absolutely a fundamental shift
| in capability._
|
| Very shallow assessment, first of all it's not a
| generalist at all, it has zero concept of what it's
| talking about, secondly it gets confused easily unless
| you order it to keep context in memory, and thirdly it
| can't perform if it does not regularly swallow petabytes
| of human text.
|
| I get your optimism but it's uninformed.
|
| > _To be fair, I've talked to a lot of people who cannot
| consistently perform at the mistral-12b level._
|
| I can find you an old-school bot that performs better
| than uneducated members of marginalized and super poor
| communities, what is your example even supposed to prove?
|
| > _it's hard to argue that HJ isn't an intelligent
| entity._
|
| What's HJ? If it's not a human then it's extremely easy
| to argue that it's not an intelligent entity. We don't
| have intelligent machine entities, we have stochastic
| parrots and it's weird to pretend otherwise when the
| algorithms are well-known and it's very visible there's
| no self-optimization in there, there's no actual
| learning, there's only adjusting weights (and this is not
| what our actual neurons do btw), there's no motivation or
| self-drive to continue learning, there's barely anything
| that has been "taught" to combine segments of human
| speech and somehow that's a huge achievement. Sure.
|
| > _It's not that we aren't on the cusp of general
| intelligence, it's that we have a distorted idea of how
| useful that should be._
|
| Nah, we are on no cusp of general AGI at all. We're not
| even at 1%. Don't know about you but I have a very clear
| idea what would AGI look like and LLMs are nowhere near.
| Not even in the same ballpark.
|
| It helps that I am not in the area and I don't feel the
| need to pat myself on the back that I have managed to
| achieve the next AI plateau which the area will not soon
| recover from.
|
| Bookmark this comment and tell me I am wrong in 10 years,
| I dare you.
| K0balt wrote:
| HJ is Homeless Joe, an inference that a 12b stochastic
| text generator would not have missed lol. But sure, ill
| reflect in 10 years.
|
| TBH I hope im wrong, and that there is magic in HJ that
| makes him special in the universe in a way that GPT26 can
| never be. But increasingly, I doubt this premise. Not
| because of the "amazing capabilities of LLMs" which i
| think are frequently overstated and largely
| misunderstood, but more because of the dumbfounding
| shortcomings of intelligent creatures. We keep moving the
| bar for AGI, and now AGI is assumed to be what any
| rational accounting would classfy as ASI.
|
| Where we are really going to see the bloom of AI is in
| goal directed systems, and I think those will come
| naturally with robotics. I predict we are in for a very
| abrupt 2nd industrial revolution, and you and I will be
| able to have this discussion either over a 55 gallon
| barrel of burning trash, or in our robot manicured
| botanical gardens sometime in the near future lol.
|
| good times, maybe. Interesting times , for sure.
| pdimitar wrote:
| > _Not because of the "amazing capabilities of LLMs"
| which i think are frequently overstated and largely
| misunderstood_
|
| We have found common ground.
|
| > _but more because of the dumbfounding shortcomings of
| intelligent creatures_
|
| Yes, a lot of us utilize defective judgments, myself
| included, fairly often. My point was that LLMs, for all
| their praise, can't even reach 10% of an average semi-
| intelligent organic being.
|
| > _We keep moving the bar for AGI, and now AGI is assumed
| to be what any rational accounting would classfy as ASI._
|
| I don't know who is "we" (and I wish people stopped
| pretending that "we" are all a homogenous mass) but I've
| known what an AGI should be ever since I've watched
| movies about Skynet and HAL-9000. -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| Secondly, it's the so-called "AI practitioners" who
| constantly move the goal posts (now there's "ASI"? -- you
| know what, I actually don't want to know) because they're
| periodically being called out and can't hide the fact
| that they have nearly nothing again. So what's better
| than obfuscating that fact by having 100+ acronyms? It's
| a nice cover and apparently there are still investors who
| are buying it. I get it, we have to learn to say the
| right things to get funding.
|
| > _Where we are really going to see the bloom of AI is in
| goal directed systems, and I think those will come
| naturally with robotics._
|
| I agree. Physical feedback is needed if we want an
| electronic entity to "evolve" similarly to us.
|
| > _I predict we are in for a very abrupt 2nd industrial
| revolution, and you and I will be able to have this
| discussion either over a 55 gallon barrel of burning
| trash, or in our robot manicured botanical gardens
| sometime in the near future lol._
|
| I agree this is 100% inevitable but I don't think it's
| coming as soon as you say. The LLMs are hopelessly stuck
| even today and the whole AI area will suffer for it for a
| while after the bubble bursts... which is the event that
| I am certain is coming soon.
| dartos wrote:
| > I've talked to a lot of people who cannot consistently
| perform at the mistral-12b level
|
| This is honestly one of the most gpt-2 things I've ever
| read.
| tim333 wrote:
| >nothing says ... that we're not in for a long plateau again
|
| The thing that's different this time is the hardware capacity
| in TFLOPs and the like passing human brain equivalence.
|
| There's a massive difference between much worse than human AI
| - a bit meh, and better than human AI - changes everything.
|
| >any reasoned argument for why it is easy to build real AI
| and that it will come fast
|
| It probably won't be easy but the huge value of better than
| human AI will ensure loads of the best and brightest working
| on it.
| cosmicradiance wrote:
| On the current state of AI - do you believe it has
| "intelligence" or is the underlying system a "prediction
| machine"?
|
| What signs do you see that make you believe that the next level
| (biological intelligence) is on the horizon?
| zaptrem wrote:
| We are but prediction machines
| https://www.psy.ox.ac.uk/news/the-brain-is-a-prediction-
| mach...
| ChaitanyaSai wrote:
| We do predictions, but much more important, we are able to
| create new states. Prediction the classical view assigns
| probabilities to existing states. What's unique to us and a
| lot of other biological intelligence is the ability to
| create new states when needed. This is not implicit in the
| narrow view of prediction machines
| bamboozled wrote:
| Is this a good thing ? Because apparently we're supposed to
| be building god. So it sounds like we're on the wrong
| track, am I wrong ?
|
| If we've just copied our feeble abilities, is that supposed
| to be exciting?
|
| Is god like intelligent just a prediction machine too ?
| giardini wrote:
| Well, if we intend "building god" perhaps we're merely
| making a copy of a copy of God:
|
| The Sixth Day
|
| Then God said, "Let Us make man in Our image, after Our
| likeness, to rule over the fish of the sea and the birds
| of the air, over the livestock, and over all the earth
| itself and every creature that crawls upon it." _So God
| created man in His own image; in the image of God He
| created him; male and female He created them._ "...
|
| Genesis 1:26-27 Berean Standard Bible
| cosmicradiance wrote:
| Wrong. As per the article - a part of our brain is a
| prediction machine. A human body is more than the sum of
| its parts.
| seoulmetro wrote:
| What's the next big step? What will it do? Why do we need or
| want it? Surely you have the answer.
|
| This means you are sure we are close to automated driving,
| engineering and hospitality?
| edanm wrote:
| > This means you are sure we are close to automated driving
| [...]
|
| We already have "automated driving" in some sense. Some
| cities have fully autonomous taxi services that have operated
| for a year or more, iirc.
| seoulmetro wrote:
| Nah. We're still not that close. Think of it this way, you
| turn on an appliance at home and it's what, a 0.0001%
| chance it will explode in your face? Now automated driving,
| hospitality etc is all more like a 0.1+% chance something
| goes wrong still. Huge difference.
|
| I don't really take those taxis as a form of solved
| automation. It's a nice step though.
| dartos wrote:
| > I am yet to see any reasoned argument for why it is far more
| difficult and will take far longer.
|
| For language models specifically, they are trained on data and
| have historically been improved by increasing the size of the
| model (by number of parameters) and by the amount and/or
| quality of training data.
|
| We are basically out of new, non-synthetic text to train models
| on and it's extremely hard work to come up with novel
| architecture that performs well against transformers.
|
| Those are some simple reasons why it will be far more difficult
| to improve general language models.
|
| There are also papers showing that training models on synthetic
| data causes "model collapse" and greatly reduces output quality
| by magnifying errors already present in the model, so it's not
| a problem we can easily sidestep.
|
| It's an easy mistake to see something like chatgpt not exist,
| then suddenly exist and assume a major breakthrough happened,
| but behind the scenes there has been like 50 years of R&D that
| led to it, it's not like suddenly there was a breakthrough and
| now the gates are open.
|
| A general intelligence for CS is like the elixir of life for
| medicine.
| whatever1 wrote:
| There is no guarantee that we will not get stuck with these
| probabilistic parrots for 50 more years. Definitely useful,
| definitely not AI.
|
| And by the way I can copy your post character by character,
| without hallucinating. So I am definitely better than this crop
| of "AI" in at least one dimension.
| lasc4r wrote:
| >We've run the 4-minute mile.
|
| >We are in for radical non-linear change.
|
| We aren't running miles much quicker than 4 mins though. The
| last record was 3m:43s set by Hicham El Guerrouj in 1999.
| blitzar wrote:
| The 1-minute mile must be right around the corner, and when
| that inevitably gets broken, the 1-second mile will follow
| swiftly.
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| While this is true, I think you're not appreciating the
| metaphor.
|
| Humankind tried to break the 4 minute mile for hundreds of
| years - since measuring distance and time became accurate
| enough to be sure of both in the mid-18th century, at least -
| and failed.
|
| In May 1954, Roger Bannister managed it. By late June it was
| done again by a different runner. Within 20 years the record
| was under 3:45, and today there are some runners who have
| achieved it more than 100 times and nearly 1800 runners who
| have done it at all.
|
| Impossible for hundred of years, and then somebody did it,
| and people stopped thinking it was impossible and started
| doing it themselves. That's the metaphor: sometimes we think
| of barriers that are really mental, not real.
|
| I'm not sure that applies here either, but the point is not
| that progress is continuously exponential, but that once a
| barrier is conquered, we take on a perspective as if the
| barrier were never real in the first place. Powered flight
| went through this. Computing hardware too. It's not an
| entirely foolish notion.
| randcraw wrote:
| I've worked in AI for the past 30 years and have seen
| enthusiasm as robust as yours go bust before. Just because some
| kinds of narrow AI have done extraordinarily well -- namely
| those tasks that recognize patterns using connections between
| FSMs -- does not mean that same mechanisms will continue to
| scale up to human-level cognition, much less exceed it any time
| soon.
|
| The breakthroughs where deep AI have excelled -- object
| recognition in images, voice recognition and generation, and
| text-based info embedding and retrieval -- these require none
| of the multilevel abstraction that characterizes higher
| cognition (Kahneman's system 2 thinking). When we see steady
| progress on such frontiers, only then a plausible case can and
| should be made that the essentials of AGI are indeed within our
| grasp. Until then, plateauing at a higher level of pattern
| matching than we had expected -- which is what we have seen
| many times before from narrow AI -- this is not sufficient
| evidence that the other requisite skills needed for AGI are
| surely just around the corner.
| spacemanspiff01 wrote:
| So I am a neophite in this area, but my thesis for why "this
| time is different" compared to previous AI bubbles is that
| this time there exist a bunch of clear products (or paths to
| products) that work and only require what is currently
| available in terms of technology.
|
| Coding assistants today are useful, image generation is
| useful, speach recognition/generation is useful.
|
| All of these can support businesses, even in their current
| (early) state. Those businesses have value in funding even 1%
| improvements in engineering/science.
|
| I think that this is different than before, where even in the
| 80s there were less defined products, amd most everything was
| a prototype that needed just a bit more research to be
| commercially viable.
|
| Where as in the past, hopes for the technology waned and
| funding for research dropped off a cliff, today's stuff is
| useful now, and so companies will continue to spend some
| amount on the research side.
| bamboozled wrote:
| I don't find coding assistants to be very useful. Image
| generation was fun for a few weeks. Speech recognition is
| useful.
|
| Anyway, considering all these things can be done on device,
| where is the long term business prospect of which you
| speak?
| LtWorf wrote:
| > Speech recognition is useful.
|
| Now try to mute a video on youtube and understand what's
| being said from the automatic subtitles.
|
| If you do it in english, be aware that it's the best
| performing language and all others are even worse.
| KoolKat23 wrote:
| Just today, I received a note from a gas technician, part
| handwritten, for the life of me I couldn't make out what
| he was saying, I asked ChatGPT and it surprisingly
| understood, rereading the original note I'm very sure it
| was correct.
| WalterSear wrote:
| > I don't find coding assistants to be very useful.
|
| I've come to notice a correlation between contemporary AI
| optimism and having effectively made the jump to coding
| with AI assistants.
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| > effectively made the jump to coding with AI assistants
|
| I think this depend heavily on what _type_ of coding your
| doing. The more your job could be replaced by copy
| /pasting from Stack Overflow, the more useful you find
| coding assistants.
|
| For that past few years most of the code I've written has
| been solving fairly niche quantitative problems with
| novel approaches and I've found AI coding assistants to
| range from useless to harmful.
|
| But on a recent webdev project, they were much more
| useful. The vast majority of problems in webdev are
| fundamentally not unique so a searchable pattern library
| (which is what an LLM coding assistant basically is)
| should be pretty effective.
|
| For other areas of software, they're not nearly as
| useful.
| tarsinge wrote:
| See this is exactly what is wrong with "this time it's
| different" here. AI has been useful and used for decades
| (but under a different name because the term was tainted by
| previous bubbles). Look at the section "AI behind the
| scenes" here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artif
| icial_intellig...
| benreesman wrote:
| "This time is different" in one fundamental,
| methodological, epistemological way: we test on the
| training set now.
|
| This has follow-on consequences for a shattering phase
| transition between "persuasive demo" and "useful product".
|
| We can now make arbitrarily convincing demos that will
| crash airplanes ("with no survivors!") on the first try in
| production.
|
| This is institutionalized by the market capitalizations of
| 7 companies being so inflated that if they were priced
| accurately the US economy would collapse.
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| > this time there exist a bunch of clear products
|
| Really? I work in AI and my biggest concern is that I _don
| 't_ see any real products coming out of this space. I work
| closer to the models, and people in this specific area
| _are_ making progress, but when I look at what 's being
| done down stream I see _nothing_ , save demos that don't
| scale beyond a few examples.
|
| > in the 80s there were less defined products, amd most
| everything was a prototype that needed just a bit more
| research to be commercially viable.
|
| This is literally all I see right now. There's some really
| fun _hobbyist_ stuff happening in the image gen area that I
| think is here to stay, but LLMs haven 't broken out of the
| "autocomplete on steroids" use cases.
|
| > today's stuff is useful now
|
| Can you give me examples of 5, non-coding assistant,
| profitable use cases for LLMs that aren't still in the
| "needed just a bit more research to be commercially viable"
| stage?
|
| I love working in AI, think the technology is amazing, and
| do think there are some under exploited (though less
| exciting) use cases, but all I see if big promises with
| under delivery. I would love to be proven wrong.
| tasuki wrote:
| "AGI" is a nonsense term anyway. Humans don't have "general"
| intelligence either: our intelligence is specialized to our
| environment.
| Jensson wrote:
| Humans is the most general intelligence we know about, so
| that is why we called it general intelligence, because we
| have made so many intelligences that are specialized on a
| specific domain like calculators or chess engines we need a
| word for something that is as general as humans, because
| being able to replace humans is a very important goal.
| ben_w wrote:
| "AGI" means many different things to many different people:
| to me any AI which is general is an AGI so GPT-3.5 counts;
| to OpenAI it has to be economically transformative to
| count; to some commentators here it has to be superhuman to
| count.
|
| I think that none of the initials are boolean; things can
| be degrees of artificial, degrees of general, and degrees
| of intelligent.
|
| I think most would assert that humans count as a "general"
| intelligence, even if they disagree about most of the other
| things I've put in this comment.
| tim333 wrote:
| If you look at AI history there is often fairly steady
| progress in a given skill area for example chess programs
| improved in a steady way on ELO scores and you could project
| pretty well the future by drawing a line on a graph.
| Similarly large language models seem to be progressing from
| toddler like to high school student like (now) to PhD like -
| shortly. There are skills AI are still fairly bad at like the
| higher level reasoning you mention, and in robot form being
| able to pop to the shops to get some groceries say but I get
| the impression those are also improving in a steady way and
| it won't be so long.
| b_be_building wrote:
| I have been using Chat-GPT has a full time expert and I can
| unequivocally tell you that its a transformative piece of
| technology. The technology isn't hyped.
| BoingBoomTschak wrote:
| It is very nice as "Markov chains on steroids", but people
| believing that LLMs are anything but a distracting local
| maximum on the path to AGI are 200% in kool-aid drinking
| mode.
| j-a-a-p wrote:
| I agree as this is also my personal experience. But I also
| see the usage of ChatGPT is falling down fast from 1.8
| billion visitors to 260 million last month [1].
|
| I am probably through some ETF an investor in MS, so I do
| hope the openai API usage is showing a more stable and
| upward trend.
|
| [1]: https://explodingtopics.com/blog/chatgpt-users
| KoolKat23 wrote:
| All Kahneman's system 2 thinking is just slow deliberate
| thinking. And these models do indeed have this characteristic
| to an extent, as evidenced with chain of thought reasoning.
|
| You can see this in action with multiplication. Much like
| humans when asked to guess the answer, they'll get it wrong,
| unless they know the answer from rote learning multiplication
| tables, this System-1 thinking. In many cases when asked they
| can reason further and solve it, by breaking it down and
| solving it step by step, much like a human, this is system-2
| thinking.
|
| In my opinion, it seems nearly everything is there for it it
| to take the next leap in intelligence, it's just putting it
| all together.
| seydor wrote:
| From a neuroscience perspective , current AI has not helped
| explain much about real brains. It did however validate the
| connectionist model of intelligence and memory, to the point
| that alternate theories are much less believable nowadays. It
| is interesting to watch the deep learning field evolve, hoping
| that at some point it will intersect with brain anatomy.
| 0points wrote:
| > There are hundreds of billions of dollars figuring out how to
| get to the next level, and it's clear we are close.
|
| Are we really now?
|
| The smart people I've spoken to on the subject seem to agree
| the current technology based on LLM are at the end of the road
| and that there are no breakthrough in sight.
|
| So what is your take on the next level?
| KoolKat23 wrote:
| Define breakthrough, there's plenty of room to scale and
| optimize without any need for a breakthrough (well my
| definition of breakthrough). Emergent properties so far have
| been obtained purely from scaling.
| floppiplopp wrote:
| When Weizenbaum demonstrated Eliza to his colleagues, some
| thought there was an intelligent consciousness at the heart of
| it. Few even continued to believe this after they were shown
| the source code, which they were able to read and understand.
| Human consciousness is full of biases and the most advanced AI
| cannot reliably determine which of two floats is bigger or even
| solve really simple logic puzzles for little kids. But I can
| see how these things mesmerize true believers.
| hnfong wrote:
| At this point bringing up the ELIZA argument is basically bad
| faith gaslighting...
|
| Finding bugs in some models doesn't mean you have a point
| about intelligence. If somebody could apply a similar
| argument to dismiss human intelligence, you don't have a
| point. And here it goes: the most advanced human intelligence
| can't reliably multiply large numbers or recall digits of Pi.
| Obviously humans are dumber than pocket calculators.
| psb217 wrote:
| Your counterargument is invalid. The most advanced human
| intelligence invented (or discovered) concepts like
| multiplication, pi, etc., and created tools to work around
| the ways in which these concepts aren't well handled by
| their biological substrate. When machine intelligences
| start inventing biological tools to overcome the limits of
| their silicon existence, you'll have a point.
| biomcgary wrote:
| Isn't the comment you are responding to an example of:
| "When machine intelligences start inventing biological
| tools to overcome the limits of their silicon existence,
| you'll have a point"?
| K0balt wrote:
| While it is true that LLM's lack agency and have many
| weaknesses, they form a critical part of what machine
| learning has lacked until transformers became all of the
| rage.
|
| The things that LLM's are bad at are largely solved problems
| using much simpler technology. There is no reason that LLM's
| have to be the only component in an intelligent agent.
| Biological brains have Specialized structures for specialized
| tasks like arithmetic. The solution is probably integration
| of LLMs as a part of a composite system that includes
| database storage, a code execution environment, and multiple
| agents to form a goal directed posit - evaluate loop.
|
| I've had pretty remarkable success with this architecture
| running on 12b models and I'm a nobody with no resources.
|
| LLM's by themselves just come up with the first thing that
| crosses their"mind". It shouldn't be surprising that the very
| first unfiltered guess about a solution might be suboptimal.
|
| There is a vast amount of knowledge embedded in our cultural
| matrix, and a lot of that is captured in the common crawl and
| other datasets.llms are like a search engine for that data ,
| based on meaning rather than semantics.
| ben_w wrote:
| > the most advanced AI cannot reliably determine which of two
| floats is bigger
|
| Some of the most advanced AI are tool users and can both
| write and crucially also execute python, and embed the output
| in their responses.
|
| > or even solve really simple logic puzzles for little kids.
|
| As given in a recent discussion: https://chatgpt.com/share/ee
| 013797-a55c-4685-8f2b-87f1b455b4...
|
| (Custom instructions, in case you're surprised by the opening
| of the response).
| benterix wrote:
| > and it's clear we are close
|
| I'd like to believe it more than you do. Unfortunately, in
| spite of these millions of dollars, the progress on LLMs has
| stalled.
| pdimitar wrote:
| > _And I must say I am absolutely astonished people don 't see
| this as opening the flood-gates to staggeringly powerful
| artificial intelligence._
|
| This looks like a cognitive dissonance and they are addressed
| by revisiting your assumptions.
|
| No flood-gates have been opened. ChatGPT definitely found uses
| in a few areas but the number is very far from what many people
| claimed. A few things are really good and people are using them
| successfully.
|
| ...But that's it. Absolutely nothing even resembling the
| beginnings of AGI is on the horizon and your assumption that
| the rate of progress will remain the same -- or even accelerate
| -- is a very classic mistake of the people who are enthusiasts
| in their fields.
|
| > _There are hundreds of billions of dollars figuring out how
| to get to the next level, and it 's clear we are close._
|
| This is not clear at all. If you know something that nobody
| else does, please let us know as well.
| reportgunner wrote:
| > _I am absolutely astonished people don 't see this as opening
| the flood-gates to staggeringly powerful artificial
| intelligence._
|
| Perhaps it's confirmation bias ?
| limit499karma wrote:
| Why are you throwing in 'consciousness' in a comment regarding
| mechanical intelligence?
| surfingdino wrote:
| What are you talking about? What autonomy? Try the latest
| Gemini Pro 1.5 and ask it for the list of ten places to visit
| in Spain. Then ask it for the Google Maps URLs for those
| places. It will make up URLs that point to nowhere. This os of
| zero value for personal or business use. I have dozens of
| examples of such crappy outcomes from all "latest", "most
| powerful" products. AI is smoke and mirrors. It is being sold
| as a very expensive solution to a non-existent problem and is
| not getting any better in the future. Some wish AI had someone
| like Steve Jobs to properly market it, but even Steve Jobs
| could not make a crappy product sell. The whole premise of AI
| goes against what generations of users were told--computers
| always give correct answers and given the same input parameters
| return the same output. By extension, we were also taught that
| GIGO (Garbage-In, Garbage-Out) is what we can blame when we are
| not happy with the results computers generate. AI peddlers want
| us to believe in and pay for VIGO (Value-In, Garbage-Out) and
| I'm sorry but there is not a valid business model where such
| tools are required.
| matteoraso wrote:
| I don't know anything about neuroscience, but is there anything
| in the brain even remotely like the transformer architecture?
| It can do a lot of things, but I don't think that it's capable
| of emulating human intelligence.
| j_timberlake wrote:
| They were writing pro-AI articles less than 2 months ago. They
| can just post AI-hype and AI-boredom articles so both sides will
| give them clicks. It's like an alternate form of Gell-Mann
| Amnesia that you're feeding.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Shockingly, people can change their minds.
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| AI is not one thing at the moment. We have multiple systems that
| are being developed in parallel:
|
| * text generators
|
| * code generators
|
| * image generators
|
| * video generators
|
| * speech generators
|
| * sound/music generators
|
| * various robotics vision and control systems (often trained in
| virtual environments)
|
| * automated factories / warehouses / fulfillment centers
|
| * self-driving cars (trucks/planes/trains/boats/bikes/whatever)
|
| * scientific / reasoning / math AIs
|
| * military AIs
|
| I find all of these categories already have useful AIs. And they
| are getting better all the time. The progress might slow down
| here and there, but it keeps on going.
|
| Self-driving was pretty bad a year ago, and now we have Tesla FSD
| driving uninterrupted for multiple hours in complex city
| environments.
|
| Image generators now exceed 99.9% of humans in painting/drawing
| abilities.
|
| Text generators are decent. There are hallucination issues, and
| they are not creative at the best human level, but I'd say they
| write better than 90% of humans. When it comes to poetry/lyrics,
| they all still suck pretty badly.
|
| Video generators are in their infancy - we get decent quality,
| but absolutely mental imagery.
|
| Reasoning is the weakest point, in my opinion. Current gen models
| are just not good at reasoning. Sometimes they are brilliant, but
| then they make very silly mistakes that a 10-year old child
| wouldn't make. You just can't rely on their logical abilities. I
| have really high hopes for that area. If they can figure out
| reasoning, our science research will become a lot more reliable
| and a lot more fast.
| asadotzler wrote:
| That you use Tesla as your example for self driving rather than
| Waymo makes me discount everything you've written here or
| anywhere else I recognize your handle.
| castigatio wrote:
| I think many things can be true at the same time:
|
| - AI is currently hyped to the gills - Companies may find it hard
| to improve profits using AI in the short term - A crash may come
| - We may be close to AGI - Current models are flawed in many ways
| - Current level generative AI is good enough to serve many use
| cases
|
| Reality is nobody truly knows - there's disagreement on these
| questions among the leaders in the field.
|
| An observation to add to the mix:
|
| I've had to deliberately work full time with LLM's in all kinds
| of contexts since they were released. That means forcing myself
| to use them for tasks whether they are "good at them" yet or not.
| I found that a major inhibitor to my adoption was my own set of
| habits around how I think and do things. We aren't used to
| offloading certain cognitive / creative tasks to machines. We
| still have the muscle memory of wanting to grab the map when
| we've got GPS in front of us. I found that once I pushed through
| this barrier and formed new habits it became second nature to
| create custom agents for all kinds of purposes to help me in my
| life. One learns what tasks to offload to the AI and how to
| offload them - and when and how one needs to step in to pair the
| different capabilities of the human mind.
|
| I personally feel that pushing oneself to be an early adopter
| holds real benefit.
| jackhab wrote:
| Can you give some examples of the tasks you did manage to
| offload successfully?
| castigatio wrote:
| - Emotional regulation. I suffer from a mostly manageable
| anxiety disorder but there are times I get overwhelmed. I
| have an agent setup to focus on principles of Stoicism and
| its amazing how quickly I can get back on track just by
| having a short chat with it about how I'm feeling.
|
| - Personalised learning. I wanted to understand LLM's at
| foundational technical level. Often I'll understand 90% of an
| explanation but there's a small part that I don't "get".
| Being able to deliberately target that 10% and be able to
| slowly increase the complexity of the explanation (starting
| from explain like I'm 5) is something I can't do with other
| learning material.
|
| - Investing. I'm a very casual investor. But I keep a running
| conversation with an agent about my portfolio. Obviously I'm
| not asking it to tell me what to invest in but just asking
| questions about what it thinks of my portfolio has taught me
| about risk balancing techniques I wouldn't have otherwise
| thought about.
|
| - Personal profile management. Like most of us I have public
| facing touch points - social media, blog, github, CV etc. I
| find it helpful to have an agent that just helps me with my
| thought process around content I might want to create or just
| what my strategy is around posting. It's not at all about
| asking the thing to generate content - it's about using it to
| reflect at a meta level on what I'm thinking and doing -
| which stimulates my own thinking.
|
| - Language learning - I have a language teaching agent to
| help me learn a language I'm trying to master. I can converse
| with it, adapt it to whatever learning style works best for
| me etc. The voice feature works well with this.
|
| - And just in general - when I have some thinking task I want
| to do now - like I need to plan a project or set a strategy
| I'll use an LLM as a thought partner. The context window is
| large enough to accomodate a lot of history - and it just
| augments my own mind - gives me better memory, can point out
| holes in my thinking etc.
|
| __
|
| Edit: actually now that I have written out a response to your
| question I realise It's not so much offloading tasks in a
| wholesale way - its more augmenting my own thinking and
| learning - but this does reduce the burden on me to "think
| about" a range of things like where to get information or to
| come up with multiple examples of something or to think
| through different scenarios.
| moi2388 wrote:
| Well, maybe because people and companies still overwhelmingly
| seem to think LLMs == AI.
|
| AI ain't going nowhere. And certainly isn't overhyped. LLMs
| however, certainly are overhyped.
|
| Then again I find it a good interface for assistants and actual
| AI and APIs that it can call on your behalf
| justmarc wrote:
| Maybe it's because people are finding out that it's actually not
| as intelligent as they thought it would be in its current
| iteration.
|
| The future is most definitely exciting though, and sadly quite
| scary, too.
| carlmr wrote:
| I'm really wondering if we're going to see a lack of people with
| CS degrees a few years from now because of Jensen Huang saying AI
| will do all that and we should stop learning how to program.
| sham1 wrote:
| Clearly Jensen is a genius and just ensured us infinite job
| security. Well, either that or he was just driving the hype b/c
| nvidia sells the shovels for the AI gold rush.
|
| Personally, I'd wager the latter.
| kkfx wrote:
| ML is born in two master branches, one it's image manipulation,
| where video manipulation follow, another is textual search and
| generation toward the saint Graal of semantic search.
|
| The first was started with simple non-ML image manipulation and
| video analysis (like finding baggage left unmoved for a certain
| amount of time in a hall, trespassing alerts for gates and so on)
| and reach the level of live video analysis for autonomous drive.
| The second date back a very big amount of time, maybe with the
| Conrad Gessner's libraries of Babel/Biblioteca Universalis ~1545
| with a simple consideration: a book is good to develop and share
| a specific topic, a newspaper to know "at a glance" most relevant
| facts of yesterday and so on but we still need something to
| elicit specific bit of information out of "the library" without
| the human need to read anything manually. Search engines does
| works but have limits. LLMs are the failed promise to being able
| to juice information (in a model) than extract it on user prompt
| distilled well. That's the promise, the reality is that pattern
| matching/prediction can't work much for the same problem we have
| with image, there is no intelligence.
|
| For an LLM if a known scientist (as per tags in some parts of the
| model ingested information) say (joking in a forum) that eating a
| small rock a day it's good for health, the LLM will suggest such
| practice simply because it have no knowledge of joke. Similarly
| having no knowledge of humans a hand with ten fingers it's
| perfectly sound.
|
| That's the essential bubble, PRs and people without knowledge
| have seen Stable Diffusion producing an astronaut riding a horse,
| have ask some questions to ChatGPT and have said "WOW! Ok, not
| perfect but it will be just a matter of time" and the answer is
| no, it will NOT be at least with the current tech. There are some
| use, like automatic translation, imperfect but good enough to be
| arranged so 1 human translator can do the same job of 10 before,
| some low importance ID checks could be done with electronic IDs +
| face recognition so a single human guards can operate 10 gates
| alone in an airport just intervening where face recognition
| fails. Essentially FEW low skill jobs might be automated, the
| rest is just classic automation, like banks who close offices
| simply because people use internet banking and pay with digital
| means so there is almost no need to pick and deposit cash
| anymore, no reasons to go to the bank anymore. The potential so
| far can't grow much more, so the bubble burst.
|
| Meanwhile big tech want to keep the bubble up because LLM
| training is a thing not doable at home as single humans alone,
| like we can instead run a homeserver for our email, VoIP phone
| system, file sharing, ... Yes, it's doable in a community, like
| search with YaCy, maps with Open Street Maps etc but the need of
| data an patient manual tagging is simply to cumbersome to have a
| real community born and based model that match or surpass one
| done by Big Tech. Since IT knowledge VERY lately and very limited
| start to spread a bit enough to endanger big tech model... They
| need something users can't do at home on a desktop. And that's a
| part of the fight.
|
| Another is the push toward no-ownership for 99% to better lock-
| in/enslave. So far the cloud+mobile model have created lock-in
| but still users might get data and host things themselves, if
| they do not operate computers anymore, just using "smart devices"
| well, the option to download and self host is next to none. So
| here the push for autonomous taxis instead of personal cars,
| connected dishwashers who send 7+Gb/day home and so on. This does
| not technically work so despite the immense amount of money and
| the struggle of the biggest people start to smell rodent and
| their mood drop.
| cs702 wrote:
| The OP is _not_ about AI as a field of research. It 's about
| whether the gobs of money invested in "AI" products and services
| in recent years, fueled by hype and FOMO, will earn a return, and
| whether we are approaching the bust of a classic boom-bust over-
| investment cycle.
|
| Seemingly every non-tech company in the world has been trying to
| figure out an "AI strategy," driven by hype and FOMO, but most
| corporate executives have no clue as to what they're doing or
| ought to be doing. They are spending money on poorly thought-out
| ideas.
|
| Meanwhile, every tech company providing "AI services" has been
| spending money like a drunken sailor, fueled by hype and FOMO.
| None of these AI services are generating enough revenue to cover
| the cost of development, training, or even, in many cases,
| inference.
|
| Nvidia, the dominant software-plus-hardware platform (CUDA is a
| big deal), appears to be the only financial beneficiary of all
| this hype and FOMO.
|
| According to the OP, the business of "AI" is losing hype,
| suggesting we're approaching a bust.
| rifty wrote:
| > Nvidia appears to be the only financial beneficiary
|
| It depends how you look at it. A lot of the spend by big tech
| can be seen as protecting what they already have from
| disruption. Its not all about new product revenues it's about
| keeping the revenue share in the markets they already have.
| gennarro wrote:
| I tried to do some AI database clean up this weekend - simple
| stuff like zip lookup and standardizing spacing, and caps - and
| ChatGPT managed to screw it ip over and over. It's the sort of
| thing there a little error means the answer is totally wrong so I
| spent an hour refining the query and then addressing edge cases
| etc. I could have just done it all in excel in less with less
| chance of random (hard to catch) errors.
| minkles wrote:
| Similar experience.
|
| In fields I have less experience with it seems feasible. In
| fields I am an expert in, I know it's dangerous. That makes me
| worry about the applicability of the former and people's
| critical evaluation ability of the whole idea.
|
| I err on the side of "run away".
| nerdjon wrote:
| I feel like I have to disagree, even though I really don't want
| too. This technology is seriously overhyped.
|
| We have to realize that there is a ton of money right now behind
| pushing AI everywhere. We have entire conventions for leadership
| pushing that a year later "is the time to move AI to Prod" or
| "Moving past the skeptics".
|
| We have investors seemingly asking every company they invest in
| "how are you using generative AI" before investing. We have
| Microsoft, Google, and Apple (to a lesser degree) forcing AI down
| our throats whether we like it or not and ignoring any
| reliability (inaccurate) issues.
|
| FFS Microsoft is pushing AI as a serious branding part of Windows
| going forward.
|
| We have too much money committed to pushing the idea that we
| already have general AI, too much marketing, etc.
|
| Consumer hype and money in this situation are going to be very
| different things. I do think a bust is going to happen, but I
| don't think in any meaningful way the "hype" has died down. I
| think and I hope it will die down, we keep seeing how the
| technology just simply can't do what they are claiming. But I
| honestly don't think it is going to happen until something
| catastrophic happens, and it is going to be ugly when it does.
| Hopefully your company won't be so reliant on it to not recover.
| matrix87 wrote:
| > Silicon Valley's tech bros are having a difficult few weeks.
|
| they need to find a different derogatory slur to refer to tech
| workers
|
| ideally one that isn't sexist and doesn't erase the contributions
| of women to industry
| j-a-a-p wrote:
| TL;DR, article is not so much about AI, it is more about
| Gartner's hype cycle. According the Economist data only 25% of
| tech hypes follow this pattern. Many more (no percentage given)
| are just a flash in the pan.
|
| AI is following more a seasonal pattern with a AI Winters, can we
| expect a new winter soon?
| _acco wrote:
| AI (specifically Claude Sonnet via Cursor) has completely
| transformed my workflow. It's changed my job description as a
| programmer. (And I've been doing this for 13y - no greenhorn!)
|
| This wasn't the case with GPT-4/o. This capability is _very_ new.
|
| When I spoke to a colleague at Microsoft about these changes,
| they were floored. Microsoft has made themselves synonymous with
| AI, yet their company is barely even leveraging it. The big cos
| have put in the biggest investments, but also will be the slowest
| to change their processes and workflows to realize the shift.
|
| Feels like one of those "future is here, not evenly distributed
| yet" moments. When a tool like Sonnet is released, it's not like
| big tech cos are going to transform over night. There's a massive
| capability overhang that will take some time to work itself
| through these (now) slow-moving companies.
|
| I assume it was the same with the internet/dot-com crash.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| What do you see as your biggest wins using Claude?
| _acco wrote:
| It helps me stay in flow by keeping me one layer up.
|
| In pair programming, it's ideal to have a driver (hands on
| keyboard) and a navigator (planning, direction).
|
| Claude can act as the driver most of the time so I can stay
| at the navigator level.
|
| This is so helpful, as it's easy as programmers to get sucked
| into implementation details or low-level minutiae that's just
| not important.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| How did it "change your job description"?
| _acco wrote:
| As I mentioned in a sibling comment, I now "pair program" all
| day. Instead of being the driver and navigator all day, I can
| mostly sit "one layer up" in the navigator seat.
| seanthemon wrote:
| Do you feel yourself becoming disconnected from your
| skills? I used gpt extensively at one stage and I felt very
| rusty getting my hands dirty in code again.
| _acco wrote:
| I don't. But that's probably because I'm very opinionated
| about the implementation details, so I'm scrutinizing and
| tweaking its output a lot.
| sangnoir wrote:
| How is this a change in job description? It may be a
| failure of imagination on my part, but it sounds like
| you're still doing _what_ you have always done - you 've
| changed the _how._
| JamesSwift wrote:
| Right. And in a similar vein, its very easy to replace a
| lot of low-effort outsourcing / junior-dev assignable
| tasks. I still need to describe the problem and clean up
| the answer, but I get the answer immediately and I can
| re-prompt for it to fix it immediately.
| pembrook wrote:
| I see so many people hyping Claude Sonnet + Cursor on
| Twitter/X, yet in real world usage, I find it no better than
| GitHub Copilot (presumably GPT 4o) + VScode.
|
| Cursor offers some super marginal UX improvements over the
| latter (being that it's a fork of VScode), since it allows you
| to switch models. But Claude and GPT have been interchangeable
| at least for my workflows, so I'm not sure the hype is really
| deserved.
|
| I can only imagine the excitement comes from the fact that
| cursor has a full-fat free trial, and maybe most people have
| never bothered paying for copilot?
| _acco wrote:
| Hmm, I've definitely always used paid copilot models.
|
| Perhaps it's my language of choice (Elixir)? Claude
| absolutely nails it, rarely gives me code with compilation
| errors, seems to know and leverage the standard library very
| well, idiomatic. Not the same with GPTs.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > yet their company is barely even leveraging it
|
| ...do you not see the obnoxious CoPilot(TM) buttons and ads
| everywhere? It's even infected the Azure Portal - and every
| time I use it to answer a genuine question I have I get
| factually-incorrect responses (granted, I don't ask it trivial
| or introductory-level questions...).
| _acco wrote:
| I said leveraging, not hawking!
| greenthrow wrote:
| Software engineer for multiple decades here. None of the AI
| assistants have made any major change to my job. They are
| useful tools when it's time to write code like many useful
| tools before them. But the hard work of being a senior+
| software engineer comes before you start typing.
| nerdjon wrote:
| I will admit, if I need to do some one off task and write a
| quick python script to do something I will likely go to
| Claude or something and write it. I am talking 20-40 lines. I
| think it's fine for that, it doesn't need a ton of context,
| it's easy to test, easy to look at and understand, etc.
|
| But outside of that, beyond needing to remember a certain
| syntax, I have found that any time I tried to use it for
| anything more complex I am finding myself spending more time
| going back and forth trying to get code that works than I
| would have if I had just done it myself in the first place.
|
| If the code works, it just isn't maintainable code if you ask
| it to do too much. It will just remove entire functionality.
|
| I have seen a situation of someone submitting a PR, very
| clearly copying a method and sticking it in AI and saying
| "improve this". It made changes for no good reason and when
| you ask the person that submitted the PR why they made the
| change we of course got no answer. (these were not just
| Linter changes)
|
| Thats concerning, pushing code up that you can't even explain
| why you did something?
|
| Like you said with the hard work, sure it can churn out code.
| But you need to have a complete clear picture of what that
| code needs to look like before you start generating or you
| will not like the end result.
| sakopov wrote:
| I think my general perception is that AI is a great assistant
| for some occupations like software engineering, but due to its
| large room for error it's very impractical for majority of
| business applications that require accuracy. I'm seeing this
| trend at my company, which operates in the medical field and
| recently mandated that all engineers use CoPilot. At the same
| time it's a struggle to see where we can improve our business
| processes with AI - outside of basic things like transcriptions
| and spell checking - without getting ourselves into a massive
| lawsuit.
| Loughla wrote:
| It's useful for analyzing data, but only if it can be
| verified. We use it (higher education) to glance at data
| trends that may need further exploration. So it's a fancy
| pivot table, I guess.
|
| Most software vendors are selling their version of AI as
| hallucination free though. So that's terrifying.
| layer8 wrote:
| Does your work not depend on existing code bases, product
| architectures and extensive domain contexts the LLM knows
| nothing about?
|
| Every thread like this over the past year or so has had
| comments similar to yours, and it always remains quite vague,
| or when examples are given, it's about tasks that require
| little contextual knowledge and are confined to very mainstream
| technologies.
|
| What exactly floored your colleague at Microsoft?
| omnee wrote:
| I just asked Google's Gemini the following question:
|
| Q: How many N's are there in Normation?
|
| A: There is one N in the word "Normation"
|
| Note that the answer is the same when asked n's instead of N's.
|
| And this is but one example of many simple cases demonstrating
| that these model are indeed not reasoning in a similar manner to
| humans. However, the outputs are useful enough that I myself use
| Claude and GPT-4o for some work, but with full awareness that I
| must review the outputs in cases where factual accuracy is
| required.
| Chirono wrote:
| This is just an artefact of tokenisation though. The model
| simply isn't ever shown the letters that make up words, unless
| they are spelled out explicitly. It sees tokens representing
| groups of words. This is a little like saying a human isn't
| intelligent because they couldn't answer your question that you
| asked in an ultrasonic wavelength. If you'd like to learn more
| this video is a great resource:
| https://youtu.be/zduSFxRajkE?si=LvpXbeSyJRFBJFuj
| julienchastang wrote:
| As usual, when we see a thread on this topic on HN, the reactions
| tend to be bimodal: either "Yes, AI has transformed my workflow"
| (which is where I mostly fall), or "No, it's over-hyped." The
| latter often comes with an anecdote about how an LLM failed at a
| relatively simple task. I speculate that this diversity in
| opinion might be related to whether or not the user is employing
| a pro-tier LLM. Personally, I've been very impressed by ChatGPT-4
| across a wide range of tasks, from debugging K8s logs to coding
| and ideation. I also wonder if some of the negative reactions
| stem from bad luck with an initial "first contact" with an LLM,
| where the results fell flat for any number of reasons (e.g., poor
| prompting), leading the user to conclude that it's not worth
| their time.
| fragmede wrote:
| You can usually tell that a lot of people just go off rumors
| they read once off Twitter or reddit or somewhere about
| hallucinations or doing math, against a weaker model, without
| every validating what they read online or updating their model
| of how well latest models work.
| jdefr89 wrote:
| It's hilarious seeing people getting LLMs to traditional takes
| traditional discrete algorithms do perfectly already. "Let's use
| LLM to do basic arithmetic!" Like, that's not what they are built
| for. We want more generalization... So much to unpack here and
| I'm tired of having to explain these basic things. You will know
| our models got more powerful if they can do something like solve
| the ARC challenge, not cramming it with new updated information
| we know it will already process a certain way...
| moridin wrote:
| Good, maybe now we can focus on building killer apps rather than
| hype-posturing.
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