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Do AI companies work?

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Re: Do AI companies work?

#341

Post by janalsncm »

fsmv wrote: post #313
cgearhart wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pretty common perspective that was introduced to me as “shifting the goalposts” in school. I have always found it a disingenuous argument because it’s applied so narrowly. Humans are intelligent + humans play go => playing go is intelligent Humans are intelligent + humans do algebra => doing algebra is intelligent Meanwhile, humans in general are pretty terrible at exact, instantaneous arithmetic. But we ar…

Is it really in context learning though? It's just recalling and interpolating things from the internet which there's quite a lot of.

Someday if we have computers that are capable of doing 100% of the cognitive tasks humans do, better than any human can, we might still say it’s “just” doing X or Y. It might even be disappointing that there isn't a “special sauce” to intelligence. But at the end of the day, the mechanism isn’t important.

We are already playing with some incredible ingredients. Machines that can instantly recall information, (in principle) connect to any electronic device, and calculate millions of times faster than brains, and perfectly self-replicate. Just using these abilities in a simple way is already pretty darn powerful.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#342

Post by janalsncm »

hatthew wrote: post #263
cubefox wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the best definition is AI = machine learning Yes, that makes a convolutional net trained on recognizing digits an AI.

What about computer characters in video games? They're usually controlled by a system that everyone calls AI, but there's almost never any machine learning involved. What about fitting a line to a curve, i.e. linear regression? Definitely ML, but most people don't call it AI.

The way it was explained to me, ML is a part of AI, but AI also contains things like planning and symbolic reasoning.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#343

Post by Propelloni »

yibg wrote: post #216
LASR wrote: post #147

I lead an applied AI research team where I work - which is a mid-sized public enterprise products company. I've been saying this in my professional circles quite often. We talk about scaling laws, superintelligence, AGI etc. But there is another threshold - the ability for humans to leverage super-intelligence. It's just incredibly hard to innovate on products that fully leverage superintelligence. At some point, AI…

* We're seeing much less of "it's making mistakes" these days.* Perhaps less than before, but still making very fundamental errors. Anything involving number I'm automatically suspicious. Pretty frequently I'd get different answers for the same question (to a human). e.g. ChatGPT will give an effective tax rate of n for some income amount. Then when asked to break down the calculation will come up with an effective t…

LLMs don't do math in that sense. They build a string of tokens out of a billion pre-weighted ones that gets a favorable probably distribution when taking your prompt into account. Change your prompt, get a different printout. There is no semantic understanding (in the sense of does what is printed make sense) and it therefore cannot plausibility check its response. A LLM will just print gibberish if it gets the best probability distribution of tokens. I'm sure that's something that will be addressed over time, but we are not there yet.

I'm not keen on marketing words like "superintelligence" but boiling it down that's what in my mind the OP said. These systems are limited in ways that we do not yet fully appreciate. They are not silver bullets for all or maybe even many problems. We need to figure out where they can be deployed for greater benefit.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#344

Post by smolder »

chatmasta wrote: post #199
foobiekr wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In particular: "There is, however, one enormous difference that I didn’t think about: You can’t build a cloud vendor overnight. Azure doesn’t have to worry about a few executives leaving and building a worldwide network of data centers in 18 months." This isn't true at all. There are like 8 of these companies stood up in the last three or four years fueled by massive investment of sovereign funds - mostly the saudi,…

While it might be possible for a deep-pocketed organization to spin up a cloud provider overnight, it doesn't mean that people will use it. In general, the switching cost of migrating compute infrastructure from one service to another is much higher than the switching cost of changing the LLM used for inference. Amazon doesn't need to worry about suddenly losing its entire customer base to Alibaba, Yandex, or Oracle.

Amazon has spent a ton on developing features that lock in users beyond what is fundamentally 'cloud', i.e. the ability to lease computers as a commodity. I have always warned employers about the downside of adopting all that extraneous stuff, with little effect.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#345

Post by t43562 »

Obviously there's a huge technical change waiting in the wings because we don't need billions of dollars to make a human. Nor does a human need hundreds of kilowatts of electricity to think.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#346

Post by smolder »

kridsdale1 wrote: post #188
SoftTalker wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber the company was profitable last year, for the first time[1]. But I am doubtful that the larger enterprise that is Uber (including all the drivers and their expenses and vehicle depreciation, etc) was profitable. I haven't seen that analysis. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/8/24065999/uber-earnings-pro...

Because they put ads on their UI.

I haven't used Uber any time recently but this both made me laugh and feel deeply sad.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#347

Post by roenxi »

jcgrillo wrote: post #295
gleenn wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the rules of HN is to assume good intent. People do and say the right thing often even when it's antithetical to their source of income. If there is a substantive way to otherwise then say it, don't immediately write-off people's opinions, especially people in their fields because of a possibility of bias.

OK, but the post this was in response to was bloviating about all kinds of sci-fi stuff like "super-intelligence" and the like. It was the opposite of "antithetical to their source of income", instead it was playing into some techno-futurist faith cult.

There is a strong argument that super-intelligence is already in the rear-view mirror. My computer is better than me at almost everything at this point; creativity, communication, scientific knowledge, numerical processing, etc. There is a tiny sliver of things that I've spent a life working on where I can consistently outperform a CPU, but it is not at all clear how that could be defensible given the strides AI has made over the last few decades. The typical AI seems more capable than the typical human to me. If that isn't super-intelligence then whatever super-intelligence is can't be far away.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#348

Post by JustFinishedBSG »

ActionHank wrote: post #122
bhouston wrote: post #90

I think we are in the middle of a steep S-curve of technology innovation. It is far from plateauing and there are still a bunch of major innovations that are likely to shift things even further. Interesting time and these companies are riding a wild wave. It is likely some will actually win big, but most will die - similar to previous technology revolutions. The ones that win will win not just on technology, but on t…

The car wasn't a horse that was better, but a car has not changed drastically since they went mainstream. They've gotten better, more efficient, loaded with tech, but are still roughly 4 seats, 4 doors, 4 wheels, driven by petroleum. I know that this is a massive oversimplification, but I think we have seen the "shape" of LLMs\Gen AI\AI products already and it's all incremental improvements from here on out with more…

The car was very much a horse that was better though. It has replaced the horse ( or other draught animal ) and that's basically it. I'm not even sure it has brought fundamentally new and different use cases.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#349

Post by KronisLV »

obirunda wrote: post #332
KronisLV wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snarky tone aside, there are different audiences. For example, I primarily work with web dev and some DevOps and I can tell you that the state of both can be pretty dire. Maybe not as much in my particular case, as in general. Some examples to illustrate the point: supply chain risks and an ever increasing amount of dependencies (look at your average React project, though this applies to most stacks), overly abstract…

I think at its core it's not that there isn't value or future value, but currently there is an assertion, maybe some blind faith, that it's inevitable that a future version will deliver a free lunch for society. I think the testimonies often repeated by coders that use these code completion tools is that "it saved me X amount of time on this one problem I had, therefore it's great value". The issue is that these all…

> I think at its core it's not that there isn't value or future value, but currently there is an assertion, maybe some blind faith, that it's inevitable that a future version will deliver a free lunch for society.

To me it seems very much like we're somewhere near the peak of the hype cycle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle

Except in the case of "AI" we get new releases that seem somewhat impressive and therefore extend the duration for which the inflated expectations can survive. For what it's worth, stuff like this is impressive https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41693087 (I fed my homepage/blog into it and the results were good, both when it came to the generated content and the quality of speech)

> The truth lies in the aggregate data of the quality and crucially the speed by which fixes and requirements are being implemented at scale across code bases.

Honestly? I think we'll never get that, the same way I cannot convincingly answer "How long will implementing functionality X in application Y with the tech stack Z for developer W take?"

We can't even estimate tasks properly and don't have metrics for specific parts of the work (how much creating a front end takes, how much for a back end API, how much for the schema and DB migrations, how much for connecting everything, adding validations, adding audit, fixing bugs etc.) because in practice nobody splits them up in change management systems like Jira so far, nor are any time tracking solutions sophisticated enough to figure those out and also track how much of the total time is just procrastination or attending to other matters (uncomfortable questions would get asked them, way too metrics would be optimized for).

So the best we can hope for is some vague "It helps me with boilerplate and repeatable code which is most of my enterprise CRUD system by X% and as a result something that would take me Y weeks now takes me Z weeks, based on these specific cases." Get enough of those empirical data points and it starts to look like something useful.

I think lots of borderline scams and/or bad products based on overblown products will get funded but in a decade we'll probably have mostly those sticking around that have actual utility.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#350

Post by bjornsing »

bradhilton wrote: post #114

Kind of feels like the ride-sharing early days. Lots of capital being plowed into a handful of companies to grab market share. Economics don't really make sense in the short term because the vast majority of cash flows are still far in the future (Zero to One). In the end the best funded company, Uber, is now the most valuable (~$150B). Lyft, the second best funded, is 30x smaller. Are there any other serious ride sh…

Bolt? Fairly big in Europe I think.
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