A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress • Hacker News Board

Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#71

Post by xnx » Mon, Mar 10, 2025, 8:15 AM UTC

roncesvalles wrote: post #64

roenxi wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I knew Uber, Netflix, Spotify were revolutionary the first time I used them. Maybe re-tune your revolution sensor. None of those are revolutionary companies. Profitable and well executed, sure, but those turn up all the time. Uber's entire business model was running over the legal system so quickly that taxi licenses didn't have time to catch up. Other than that it was a pretty obvious idea. It is a taxi service. T…

They were revolutionary as product genres, not necessary individual companies. Ordering a cab without making a phone call was revolutionary. Netflix at least with its initial promise of having all the world's movies and TV was revolutionary, but it didn't live up to that. Spotify because of how cheap and easy it was to have access to all the music, this was the era when people were paying 99c per song on iTunes. I've…

> Ordering a cab without making a phone call was revolutionary.

With the power of AI, soon you'll be able to say "Hey Siri, get me an Uber to the airport". As easy as making a phone call.

Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#72

Post by Paradigma11 » Mon, Mar 10, 2025, 8:27 AM UTC

colonCapitalDee wrote: post #26

Yeah, I'd buy it. I've been using Claude pretty intensively as a coding assistant for the last couple months, and the limitations are obvious. When the path of least resistance happens to be a good solution, Claude excels. When the best solution is off the beaten track, Claude struggles. When all the good solutions lay off the beaten track, Claude falls flat on its face. Talking with Claude about design feels like ta…

I am not so sure about that. Using Claude yesterday it gave me a correct function that returned an array. But the algorithm it used did not return the items sorted in one pass so it had run a separate sort at the end. The fascinating thing is that it realized that, commented on it and went on and returned a single pass function.

That seems a pretty human thought process and shows that fundamental improvements might not depend as much on the quality of the LLM itself but on the cognitive structure it is embedded.

Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#73

Post by RamtinJ95 » Mon, Mar 10, 2025, 8:41 AM UTC

csomar wrote: post #25

kiratp wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re not using the best tools. Claude Code, Cline, Cursor… all of them with Claude 3.7.

Nope. I try the latest models as they come and I have a self-made custom setup (as in a custom lua plugin) in Neovim. What I am not, is selling AI or AI-driven solutions.

Do you mean that you have successfully managed to get the same experience in cursor but in neovim? I have been looking for something like that to move back to my neovim setup instead of using cursor. Any hints would be greatly appreciated!

Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#74

Post by jemmyw » Mon, Mar 10, 2025, 8:44 AM UTC

xnx wrote: post #71

roncesvalles wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were revolutionary as product genres, not necessary individual companies. Ordering a cab without making a phone call was revolutionary. Netflix at least with its initial promise of having all the world's movies and TV was revolutionary, but it didn't live up to that. Spotify because of how cheap and easy it was to have access to all the music, this was the era when people were paying 99c per song on iTunes. I've…

> Ordering a cab without making a phone call was revolutionary. With the power of AI, soon you'll be able to say "Hey Siri, get me an Uber to the airport". As easy as making a phone call.

And end up at an airport in an entirely different city.

Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#75

Post by HenryBemis » Mon, Mar 10, 2025, 8:45 AM UTC

My predictions on the matter:

  LLMs are already super useful. 
  It does all my coding and scripting for me @home
  It does most of the coding and scripting at the workplace
  It creates 'fairly good' checklists for work (not perfect, but it takes a 4 hour effort and makes it 25mins - but the "Pro" is still needed to make this or that checklist usable - I call this a win)(need both the tech AND the human)
  If/when you train an 'in-house' LLM it can make some easy wins (on mega-big-companies with 100k staff they can get quick answers on "which Policy writes about XYZ, which department can I talk to about ABC, etc.)
  We won't have the "AGI"/Skynet anytime soon, and when one will exist the company (let's use OpenAI for example) will split in two. Half will give LLMs for the masses at $100 per month, the "Skynet" will go to the DOD and we will never hear about it again, except in the Joe Rogan podcast as a rumor.
  It is a great 'idea generator' (search engine and results aggregator): give me a list of 10 things I can do _that_ weekend in _city_I_will_be_traveling_to so if/when I go to (e.g. London): here are the cool concerts, theatrical performances, parks, blah blah blah

Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#76

Post by jemmyw » Mon, Mar 10, 2025, 8:55 AM UTC

Paradigma11 wrote: post #72

colonCapitalDee wrote: post #26

Yeah, I'd buy it. I've been using Claude pretty intensively as a coding assistant for the last couple months, and the limitations are obvious. When the path of least resistance happens to be a good solution, Claude excels. When the best solution is off the beaten track, Claude struggles. When all the good solutions lay off the beaten track, Claude falls flat on its face. Talking with Claude about design feels like ta…

I am not so sure about that. Using Claude yesterday it gave me a correct function that returned an array. But the algorithm it used did not return the items sorted in one pass so it had run a separate sort at the end. The fascinating thing is that it realized that, commented on it and went on and returned a single pass function. That seems a pretty human thought process and shows that fundamental improvements might n…

I've been writing code that implements tournament algorithms for games. You'd think an LLM would excel at this because it can explain the algorithms to me. I've been using cline on lots of other tasks to varying success. But it just totally failed with this one: it kept writing edge cases instead of a generic implementation. It couldn't write coherent enough tests across a whole tournament.

So I wrote tests thinking it could implement the code from the tests, and it couldn't do that either. At one point it went so far with the edge cases that it just imported the test runner into the code so it could check the test name to output the expected result. It's like working with a VW engineer.

Edit: I ended up writing the code and it wasn't that hard, I don't know why it struggled with this one task so badly. I wasted far more time trying to make the LLM work than just doing it myself.

Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#77

Post by gmt2027 » Mon, Mar 10, 2025, 9:24 AM UTC

randomNumber7 wrote: post #58

gmt2027 wrote: post #52

The typical AI economic discussion always focuses on job loss, but that's only half the story. We won't just have corporations firing everyone while AI does all the work - who would buy their products then? The disruption goes both ways. When AI slashes production costs by 10-100x, what's the value proposition of traditional capital? If you don't need to organize large teams or manage complex operations, the advantag…

Idk where you live, but in my world "being a capitalist" requires you to own capital. And you know what, AI makes it even better to own capital. Now you have these fancey machines doing stuff for you and you dont even need any annoying workers.

By "capitalist," I'm referring to investors whose primary contribution is capital, not making a political statement about capitalism itself.

Capital is crucial when tools and infrastructure are expensive. Consider publishing: pre-internet, starting a newspaper required massive investment in printing presses, materials, staff, and distribution networks. The web reduced these costs dramatically, allowing established media to cut expenses and focus on content creation. However, this also opened the door for bloggers and digital news startups to compete effectively without the traditional capital requirements. Many legacy media companies are losing this battle.

Unless AI systems remain prohibitively expensive (which seems unlikely given current trends), large corporations will face a similar disruption. When the tools of production become accessible to individuals and small teams, the traditional advantage of having deep pockets diminishes significantly.

Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#78

Post by danielbln » Mon, Mar 10, 2025, 9:34 AM UTC

randomNumber7 wrote: post #50

colonCapitalDee wrote: post #26

Yeah, I'd buy it. I've been using Claude pretty intensively as a coding assistant for the last couple months, and the limitations are obvious. When the path of least resistance happens to be a good solution, Claude excels. When the best solution is off the beaten track, Claude struggles. When all the good solutions lay off the beaten track, Claude falls flat on its face. Talking with Claude about design feels like ta…

Yes, but on the other hand I don't understand why people think something that you can train something on pattern matching and it magically becomes intelligent.

We don't know what exactly makes us humans as intelligent as we are. And while I don't think that LLMs will be general intelligent without some other advancements, I don't get the confident statements that "clearly pattern matching can't lead to intelligence" when we don't really know what leads to intelligence to begin with.

Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#79

Post by mehphp » Mon, Mar 10, 2025, 11:14 AM UTC

danielbln wrote: post #66

colonCapitalDee wrote: post #26

Yeah, I'd buy it. I've been using Claude pretty intensively as a coding assistant for the last couple months, and the limitations are obvious. When the path of least resistance happens to be a good solution, Claude excels. When the best solution is off the beaten track, Claude struggles. When all the good solutions lay off the beaten track, Claude falls flat on its face. Talking with Claude about design feels like ta…

A tip: ask Claude to put a critical hat on. I find the output afterwards to be improved.

Do you have an example?

Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#80

Post by audessuscest » Mon, Mar 10, 2025, 11:15 AM UTC

> It seems to me that "vibe checks" for how smart a model feels are easily gameable by making it have a better personality.

I don't buy that at all, most of my use cases don't involve model's personality, if anything I usually instruct to skip any commentary and give the result excepted only. I'm sure most people using AI models seriously would agree.

> My guess is that it's most of the reason Sonnet 3.5.1 was so beloved. Its personality was made much more appealing, compared to e. g. OpenAI's corporate drones.

I would actually guess it's mostly because it was good at code, which doesn't involve much personnality