Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI isn’t good enough

skventures.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 374 posts

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#21

Post by andrewjl »

borissk wrote: post #11

Very interesting article. IMHO a key factor in how the world changes in the next 10-20 years will be how far the current wave of AI, based on neural networks can go. If scientists and engineers manage to implement autonomous cars and robots that can do basic human tasks like clean, wait and take care of the sick and elderly we will wake up in a brand new world. It will put a lot of stress on the basics of society, su…

> If scientists and engineers manage to implement autonomous cars and robots that can do basic human tasks like clean, wait and take care of the sick and elderly we will wake up in a brand new world. It will put a lot of stress on the basics of society, such as democracy and having to work for a salary.

Based on the trends TFA discusses we'll be seeing severe social stress if basic tasks don't get automated. All due to labor shortages. Focusing on alternative arrangements to salaried work is backwards, unless the goal is boost labor participation.

Current demographics are baked in for the next 30 years and only point to a greater shortfall of labor in the future.[1] $1,000 signing bonuses for fast food jobs start to look quaint pretty quickly.

[1] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/545397/empty-planet...

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#22

Post by astrange »

petermcneeley wrote: post #3

"too few people for all the jobs, for the most part" - Are wages going up? "But almost everywhere else needs people. Badly. Across retail, restaurants, manufacturing, trades, and on and on, companies are struggling to hire. " - Wow sounds like an exciting star trek future that I cant wait to be part of! "labor became more expensive than capital" - So wages must be going up right? "In essence, the authors show that fo…

Wages are going up and they are going up faster at the low end.

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#23

Post by astrange »

tuatoru wrote: post #16
wilg wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wages are rising: https://www.axios.com/2023/07/12/real-wage-gains-inflation

Just catching up to years of undershooting inflation. In real terms still worse than 1969.

Definitely not. You wouldn't like the food, cars and home appliances of 1969, and you really wouldn't like the healthcare.

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#24

Post by BoorishBears »

jongjong wrote: post #9
jongjong wrote: post #7

As impressive as AI is and what it can do. I've felt the same way in my last job. It was almost there; it was almost good enough such that we could almost ship the project but we didn't. GPT3.5 was not good enough, GPT4 seemed like it was good enough in terms of accuracy but it was too slow and we were getting throttled like crazy. I lost my job over it. When I was worried about AI taking my job, I didn't picture it…

Our use case was that we needed to consider information from thousands of pages of documents to answer customer questions. I let GPT decide where to look based on content tables of the documents (thankfully each section was not more than ~500 words) and only fetched information from the relevant sections to let GPT answer the user's question. GPT3.5 was fast enough to be usable but often inaccurate; it would ignore s…

From what you said your solution wasn't designed correctly?

You should definitely have been using BM25 and SBERT for something like this, you definitely should have been asking 3.5 for structured output and doing any math yourself.

If these were answers from a fixed set of documents there's also a ton of pre-processing you should have been doing.

-

I recently helped a friend with a problem of identifying a certain form of language in EDGAR sourced contracts. He had someone who tried feeding in entire documents into LLMs to find these and the result was some 20 minute search time.

I took a few minutes sitting with him to come up with a demo that used synthetic data and SBERT to process documents in less than 30 seconds. 99% of that was stuff you could do 2 years ago, the part the LLM helped with was creating buckets of synthetic data quickly, and even that could be done procedurally if you had more time.

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#25

Post by paulpauper »

The absence of human workers has become a limiting factor on economic growth in the U.S.

the problem is real GDP growth is flat or negative due to high inflation. having more labor would make this worse, if anything. job creation tends to be inflationary. from 2010-2021 saw strong economic growth and low inflation, but now things suddenly changed due to too much inflation, not a lack of growth.

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#26

Post by paulpauper »

petermcneeley wrote: post #3

"too few people for all the jobs, for the most part" - Are wages going up? "But almost everywhere else needs people. Badly. Across retail, restaurants, manufacturing, trades, and on and on, companies are struggling to hire. " - Wow sounds like an exciting star trek future that I cant wait to be part of! "labor became more expensive than capital" - So wages must be going up right? "In essence, the authors show that fo…

Employers are always talking out of both sides of their mouths. They signal they want more workers yet are more choosy than ever in terms of pre-employment screening. it's like someone who wants to work at McDonald's has to go through a huge gauntlet of background checks , interviews, and tests, yet companies insist thee is a shortage. maybe try lowering the requirements a bit. And then once you get the job it's more requirements and rules. A lot of low-skilled ppl would rather just not work than deal with t all that crap for a minimum wage job. Part of the problem is maybe the quality of the pool of workers has declined , so more screening needed.

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#27

Post by user3939382 »

ambrozk wrote: post #18

This entire piece is based on one massive, unsupported assertion, which is that LLM progress will cease. Or, as the author puts it, "we are at the tail end of the first wave of large language model-based AI... [it] ends somewhere in the next year or two with the kinds of limits people are running up against." I want to know only one thing, which is what gives him the confidence necessary to say that. If that one stat…

I asked ChatGPT how to add a JSDoc type to a Vue 2 prop and it gave me a wrong answer. There have been several times where I’ve asked it questions and it sprinkles in well disguised misinformation. These tools are impressive but they definitely have limitations.

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#28

Post by seanthemon »

user3939382 wrote: post #27
ambrozk wrote: post #18

This entire piece is based on one massive, unsupported assertion, which is that LLM progress will cease. Or, as the author puts it, "we are at the tail end of the first wave of large language model-based AI... [it] ends somewhere in the next year or two with the kinds of limits people are running up against." I want to know only one thing, which is what gives him the confidence necessary to say that. If that one stat…

I asked ChatGPT how to add a JSDoc type to a Vue 2 prop and it gave me a wrong answer. There have been several times where I’ve asked it questions and it sprinkles in well disguised misinformation. These tools are impressive but they definitely have limitations.

Curious, how does it do when you give it examples / use playground.openai?

I find that no examples often leads to the same result as a befuddled junior, but with examples often it gains confidence. Also I find playground to give me much better code snippets than chat sometimes

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#29

Post by cbozeman »

astrange wrote: post #23
tuatoru wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just catching up to years of undershooting inflation. In real terms still worse than 1969.

Definitely not. You wouldn't like the food, cars and home appliances of 1969, and you really wouldn't like the healthcare.

The food of 1969? I've had it. It was my aunt's cooking and my uncle's butchering - shooting a hog right in the head and then gutting it, draining the blood, and prepping it to go onto a gigantic smoker, and it was delicious. And if you really didn't feel like cooking food yourself, McDonald's did exist back then, along with things like Kentucky Fried Chicken, Krystal, Burger King, etc.

They didn't throw sugar into every single product on the market, either.

The home appliances? You mean blenders and toasters and refrigerators and mixers that would last 20-30 years before needing to be replaced because they were so well-engineered? Those 1969 home appliances? Like the KitchenAid K45 mixer that was released in 1962 and stayed in production for decades? Like the one my Mom got in 1971 that she still has today, whose motor still works fine, and the only thing that's ever been done is 30 minutes of taking it apart and checking the worm drive gears and re-greasing them? Those 1969 appliances??

And the cars? Yeah those were kinda shitty compared to what we have now.

For the most part though, you're not just off-base on the food and appliances, you're hilariously off-base.

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#30

Post by atleastoptimal »

"we are already at the tail end of the current wave of AI."

Is that really true? Generative AI spending this year just so far is 4x greater than last year, and the results of that spending haven't been released yet. How can they conclude this?

Most "predictions" about the future I've seen assume that ChatGPT will stay the same and not improve for the next 10 years, or only marginally. Why they make this assumption, I don't know, it seems to go against every past trend we've seen with machine learning scaling. There are even people who say LLMs have reached their limit because we've exhausted all the text data that exists, assuming that the only way for LLMs to improve is to blindly feed it more static data and that no other sources of improvements exist.

Post reply on HN