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

I Am Tired of AI

ontestautomation.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

881–890 of 1001 posts

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#881

Post by kobenni »

throw987987123 wrote: post #826
COAGULOPATH wrote: post #737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some domains (math and code), progress is still very fast. In others it has slowed or arguably stopped. We see little progress in "soft" skills like creative writing. EQBench is a benchmark that tests LLM ability to write stories, narratives, and poems. The winning models are mostly tiny Gemma finetunes with single-digit parameter counts. Huge foundation models with hundreds of billions of parameters (Claude 3 Opu…

It feels ironic if the only thing that the current wave of Ai enables (other than novelty cases) is a cutdown of software/coding jobs. I don't see it replacing math professionals too soon for a variety of reasons. From an outsiders perspective on the software industry it is like it's practioners voted to make themselves redundant - that seems to be the main takeaway of ai to normal non tech people ive chatted with. M…

It may seem this way from an outsiders perspective, but I think the intersection between people who work on the development of state-of-the-art LLMs and people who get replaced is practically zero. Nobody is making themselves redundant, just some people make others redundant (assuming LLMs are even good enough for that, not that I know if they are) for their own gain.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#882

Post by _w1tm »

andrepd wrote: post #879
kenjackson wrote: post #830

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually humans are much worse in this regard. The top performer on my team had a divorce and his productivity dropped by like a factor of 3 and quality fell of a cliff. Another example from just yesterday is I needed to solve a complex recurrence relation. A friend of mine who is good at math (math PhD) helped me for about 30 minutes still without a solution and a couple of false starts. Then he said try ChatGPT and…

I call absolute bullshit on that last one. There's no way ChatGPT solves a maths problem that a maths PhD cannot solve, unless the solution is also googleable in 30s.

> unless the solution is also googleable in 30s.

Is anything googleable in 30s? It feels like finding the right combination of keywords that bypasses the personalization and poor quality content takes more than one attempt these days.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#883

Post by low_tech_love »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #563
low_tech_love wrote: post #27

The most depressing thing for me is the feeling that I simply cannot trust anything that has been written in the past 2 years or so and up until the day that I die. It's not so much that I think people have used AI, but that I know they have with a high degree of certainty, and this certainty is converging to 100%, simply because there is no way it will not. If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply…

> If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. You're out. Only if you're competing on volume.

Who isn’t? Can you rely on your readers to rebel against AI and value more your writing than that of your peers? If one of your competitors write 10 articles while you write 1, and charge 10% of what you charge, they already equaled your wins. Raise it to 20% and they are already making twice what you make. Can you really trust that your writing is so good and so incredibly special that someone would be willing to pay 10x more for your content, against one that was assisted by the absolute state of the art of a technology that has revolutionized the world?

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#884

Post by lmm »

fluoridation wrote: post #781
COAGULOPATH wrote: post #737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some domains (math and code), progress is still very fast. In others it has slowed or arguably stopped. We see little progress in "soft" skills like creative writing. EQBench is a benchmark that tests LLM ability to write stories, narratives, and poems. The winning models are mostly tiny Gemma finetunes with single-digit parameter counts. Huge foundation models with hundreds of billions of parameters (Claude 3 Opu…

>But once a model is large enough to generate coherent sentences, persuasiveness kinda...stops. All large models are about equally persuasive. No runaway scaling laws are evident here. Isn't that kind of obvious? Even human speakers and writers have problems changing people's minds, let alone reliably.

The ceiling may be low, but there are definitely human writers that are an order of magnitude more effective than the average can-write-coherent-sentences human.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#885

Post by lmm »

bschmidt1 wrote: post #793
Animats wrote: post #666

I'm tired of LLMs. Enough billions of dollars have been spent on LLMs that a reasonably good picture of what they can and can't do has emerged. They're really good at some things, terrible at others, and prone to doing something totally wrong some fraction of the time. That last limits their usefulness. They can't safely be in charge of anything important. If someone doesn't soon figure out how to get a confidence me…

I love how people are like "there's no use case" and there's already products on shelves. I see AI art everywhere, AI writing, customer support - already happened. You guys are naysaying something that already happened people already replaced jobs with LLMs and already profit due to AI. There are already startups with users where you provide a OPENAI_API_KEY, or customers where you provide theirs. If you can't see ho…

> I see AI art everywhere, AI writing, customer support - already happened.

Is any of it adding value though? I can see that AI has made it easier to do SEO spam and make an excuse for your lack of customer support, just like IVR systems before it. But I don't believe those added any real value (they may have generated profits for their makers, but I think that was a zero- or negative-sum trade). Put it this way: is AI being used to generate anything that people are actually happy to receive?

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#886

Post by _w1tm »

throw987987123 wrote: post #826
COAGULOPATH wrote: post #737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some domains (math and code), progress is still very fast. In others it has slowed or arguably stopped. We see little progress in "soft" skills like creative writing. EQBench is a benchmark that tests LLM ability to write stories, narratives, and poems. The winning models are mostly tiny Gemma finetunes with single-digit parameter counts. Huge foundation models with hundreds of billions of parameters (Claude 3 Opu…

It feels ironic if the only thing that the current wave of Ai enables (other than novelty cases) is a cutdown of software/coding jobs. I don't see it replacing math professionals too soon for a variety of reasons. From an outsiders perspective on the software industry it is like it's practioners voted to make themselves redundant - that seems to be the main takeaway of ai to normal non tech people ive chatted with. M…

> If all it does is allow us to churn more high level software, which let's be honest is demand inelastic due to mostly large margins on software products (i.e. they would of paid a person anyway due to ROI) it doesn't seem it will add much to society other than shifting profit in tech from Labor to Capital/owners.

If creating software becomes cheaper then that means I can transform all the ideas I’ve had into software cheaply. Currently I simply don’t have enough hours in the day, a couple hours per weekend is not enough to roll out a tech startup.

Imagine all the open source projects that don’t have enough people to work on them. With LLM code generation we could have a huge jump in the quality of our software.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#887

Post by shswkna »

The elephant in the room is this question:

What do we value? What is our value system made up of?

This is, in my opinion, the Achille‘s heel of the current trajectory of the West.

We need to know what we are doing it for. Like the OP said, he is motivated by the human connectedness that art, music and the written word inspire.

On the surface, it seems we value the superficial smuckness of LLM-produced content more.

This is a facade, like so many other superficial artifacts of our social life.

Imperfect authenticity will soon (or sometime in the future) become a priceless ideal.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#888

Post by ku1ik »

nucleardog wrote: post #409
Gigachad wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like I’m being gaslit about these AI code tools. I’ve got the paid copilot through work and I’ve just about never had it do anything useful ever. I’m working on a reasonably large rails app and it can’t seem to answer any questions about anything, or even auto fill the names of methods defined in the app. Instead it just makes up names that seem plausible. It’s literally worse than the built in auto suggestion…

I'm in the same boat. I've tried a few of these tools and the output's generally been terrible to useless big and small. It's made up plausible-sounding but non-existent methods on the popular framework we use, something which it should have plenty of context and examples on. Dealing with the output is about the same as dealing with a code review for an extremely junior employee... who didn't even run and verify thei…

> Except here's the problem. Even for intermediate developers, I'm essentially always in a situation where the process of explaining the problem, providing feedback on a potential solution, answering questions, reviewing code and providing feedback, etc takes more time out of my day than it would for me to just _write the damn code myself_.

Exactly. And I’ve been telling myself „keep doing that, it lets them teach, otherwise they will never level up and be able to comfortably and reliably work on this codebase without much hand holding. This will pay off”. Which I still think is true to a degree, although less so with every year.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#889

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

low_tech_love wrote: post #880
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't use AI in my own blogging, but then, I don't particularly care whether or not someone reads my stuff (the ones that do, seem to like it). I have used it, from time to time, to help polish stuff like marketing fluff for the App Store, but I'd never use it verbatim. I generally use it to polish a paragraph or sentence. But AI hasn't suddenly injected untrustworthy prose into the world. We've been doing that, fo…

When I wrote about trust, I see that I made a mistake: most people seem to have understood it as being in regard to fake things. I just meant trust as in, it’s not AI-generated. Your comment about the fluff is exactly what I mean. I read some fluff that is AI-generated and some kind of disgust happens in my stomach, and I wish there was nothing written there at all. I just feel like it’s be best to not read anything…

Well, I apologize for using the word “fluff.” That was a mistake.

As a lifelong engineer, I “grew up” with a somewhat antagonistic relationship with Marketing, so became used to disparaging their work, even if I had to change hats, myself, and act in a Marketing capacity.

I should have probably used the word “copy,” instead.

But you have a good point.

I think that one “legitimate” use for AI-generated text, will be for non-native speakers of a language, using it to correct their vocabulary.

For things like patents and papers, this is probably a good thing. AI can generate clear, concise vernacular. I often specify the reading level, in my prompts (usually tenth grade), so that the prose is accessible.

For things like presentation proposals; not so much. You may get a proposal that reads like it was written by an English professor, and the actual presentation is barely comprehensible.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#890

Post by fulafel »

Coming from a testing specialist - the facts are right but the framing seems negatively biased. For the generalist who wants to get some Playwright tests up, the low hanging fruit is definitely helped a lot by generative AI. So I emphatically disagree with "there are no shortcuts".
Post reply on HN