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Artificial intelligence is losing hype

economist.com

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Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#491

Post by stevenhuang »

southernplaces7 wrote: post #477
stevenhuang wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The tokens could be patterns of colored shapes with no actual meaning, only statistical distributions and nothing about how the LLMs work would change. I can put your brain in a vat and stimulate your sensory neurons with a statistical distribution with no actual meaning, and nothing about how your brain works would change either. The LLM and your brain would attempt to interpret meaning with referent from training…

>I can put your brain in a vat and stimulate your sensory neurons with a statistical distribution with no actual meaning, and nothing about how your brain works would change either. The LLM and your brain would attempt to interpret meaning with referent from training, and both would be confused at the information-free stimuli. Because during "training" in both cases, the stimuli received from the environment is struc…

> Your LLM on the other hand, has no context in which it shows such a level of cognitive capacity

Yes, it will be confused as well, and for all outwards observable signs will fail to make sense of the stimuli, yet it will "aware" of its inability to understand, much like a human brain would.

If you doubt that, open a new session and type some random tokens, you will get the answer that it's confused.

Any other statement as to "consciousness" verges into the philosophical and unanswerable via empirical means.

And ah, to frame it as an appeal to authority when the topic is precisely the subject of a neuroscientist's study.

Sounds like you know a thing or two about nonsense and emotional attachment to bad ideas.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#492

Post by thelittleone »

Calavar wrote: post #359
_acco wrote: post #207

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 leveragin…

I feel like I'm living in a different universe sometimes. The consensus on HN seems to be that you can be pretty productive with LLMs as coding assistants, but every time I try I find it borderline impossible to get functional code even for pretty straightforward prompts. I decided to fire up GPT-4o again today to see if maybe things have gotten better over the past few months. I asked GPT to write code to render a t…

Try something like maestro which uses agents and orchestrator. The looping quality checks have been very helpful. Claude-engineer from same developer is also good to experience how superior that ia to regular chat.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#493

Post by fire_lake »

ChaitanyaSai wrote: post #52

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.…

The argument that we are going to see massive progress soon is weak in my view. It seems to be:

- we had some big breakthroughs recently

- some AI “godfathers” are “really worried”

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#494

Post by brailsafe »

Calavar wrote: post #359
_acco wrote: post #207

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 leveragin…

I feel like I'm living in a different universe sometimes. The consensus on HN seems to be that you can be pretty productive with LLMs as coding assistants, but every time I try I find it borderline impossible to get functional code even for pretty straightforward prompts. I decided to fire up GPT-4o again today to see if maybe things have gotten better over the past few months. I asked GPT to write code to render a t…

I'd go one step further and suggest that one of the few things LLMs are good at is acting as astroturfing agents for themselves. I must be crazy to not be completely changing my workflow and job title with [THE_GOOD_ONE] and not that other one, and wow so many other people vocally feel the same way on every other forum that's extremely easy to manipulate.

Fwiw, I've had some helpful successful prompts here and there, and in some very narrow scopes I'll get something usable, like parsing JSON or scaffolding some test cases, which is real saved time, but I stopped thinking about these tools long ago.

To get real value out of something like your example, I'd be using it as a back and forth to help me understand how some concepts work or write example questions I can drill on my own, but nothing where precision matters

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#495

Post by dogcomplex »

KoolKat23 wrote: post #228
randcraw wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 -- o…

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 the…

Agreed. System 2 strategizing may simply be the recursive application of symbolic System 1 tooling. An LLM is entirely capable of reading a problem, determining the immediate facts and tokens (fast and intuitive system 1) and determining the ideal algorithm to resolve them (logical analytical system 2). The execution to do all those steps at once is lacking in current LLMs (debatably - they get better every month) - but any basic architecture breaking things down into component sub-questions clearly works.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#496

Post by slidehero »

ainonsense44 wrote: post #471
slidehero wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Whether or not it's useful has nothing to do with whether or not it's spam. I think it has a lot to do with it. I can't see how generating educational content for the purpose of enhancing student outcomes with content reviewed by expert teachers can fall under the category of spam. >As for your hypothesis, I've had interactions where it did a good job of generating alternative activities/exercises, and interactions…

There are countless existing, human-vetted, designed on special purpose, bodies of work full of material like the stuff your chatgpt just "created". Why not use those? Also, each of your examples had at least one error, did you not see them?

>Also, each of your examples had at least one error, did you not see them?

I didn't could you point them out?

>There are countless existing, human-vetted, designed on special purpose, bodies of work full of material like the stuff your chatgpt just "created". Why not use those?

As a classroom teacher I can tell you that piecing together existing resources is hard work and sometimes impossible because resource A is in this text book (which might not be digital) and resource B is on that website and quiz C is on another site. Sometimes it's impossible or very difficult to put all these pieces together in a cohesive manner. GPT can do all that an more.

The point is not to replace all existing resources with GPT, this is all or nothing logic. It's another tool in the tool belt which can save time and provide new ways of doing things.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#497

Post by slidehero »

ainonsense44 wrote: post #472
slidehero wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Exercises, quizes and explanations are routine enough that good teachers I know can generate them on the spot. Every year there are thousands of graduate teacher looking for tools to help them teach better. >good teachers I know can generate them on the spot Even the best teacher can't create an interactive multiple choice quiz with automatic marking, tailored to a specific class (or even a specific student) on the…

> Even the best teacher can't create an interactive multiple choice quiz with automatic marking, tailored to a specific class (or even a specific student) on the spot. Neither can "AI" though, so what's the point here?

I'm creating tools on top of AI that can which is my point.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#498

Post by phyalow »

Calavar wrote: post #359
_acco wrote: post #207

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 leveragin…

I feel like I'm living in a different universe sometimes. The consensus on HN seems to be that you can be pretty productive with LLMs as coding assistants, but every time I try I find it borderline impossible to get functional code even for pretty straightforward prompts. I decided to fire up GPT-4o again today to see if maybe things have gotten better over the past few months. I asked GPT to write code to render a t…

Thats because GPT products are in a different (much worse) universe to Anthropics Sonnet/Opus, they are truly phenomenal.

Give Anthropic a shot (its even better via the API console.anthropic.com/workbench).

OpenAI is yesterdays news.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#499

Post by dogcomplex »

julienchastang wrote: post #240

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…

To be fair there is a certain level of blindly-pragmatic "so AI can help me with programming - so what! It takes just as long to converse with it as for me to code it myself" - which is mostly true. But I think those people fail to grok the sheer ridiculous power of what they're saying - that these tools are close enough they're nearly at parity. Sure, the error-correcting architectures aren't sufficient yet for them to run unsupervised, but this is crazy already.
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