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A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

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Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#91

Post by Rediscover »

csomar wrote: post #67
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…

> None of those are revolutionary companies. Not only Uber/Grab (or delivery app) were revolutionary, they are still revolutionary. I could live without LLMs and my life will be slightly impacted when coding. If delivery apps are not available, my life is severely degraded. The other day I was sick. I got medicine and dinner with Grab. Delivered to the condo lobby which is as far as I can get. That is revolutionary.

FWIW, local Yellow Cab et al, in the U.S., has been doing that for /decades/ in the areas I've lived.

Rx medicine delivery used to be quite standard for taxis.

Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#92

Post by _huayra_ »

csomar wrote: post #22

> LLMs still seem as terrible at this as they'd been in the GPT-3.5 age. Software agents break down once the codebase becomes complex enough, game-playing agents get stuck in loops out of which they break out only by accident, etc. This has been my observation. I got into Github Copilot as early as it launched back when GPT-3 was the model. By that time (late 2021) copilot can already write tests for my Rust function…

Ultimately, every AI thing I've tried in this era seems to want to make me happy, even if it's wrong, instead of helping me.

I describe it like "an eager intern who can summarize a 20-min web search session instantly, but ultimately has insufficient insight to actually help you". (Note to current interns: I'm mostly describing myself some years ago; you may be fantastic so don't take it personally!)

Most of my interactions with it via text prompt or builtin code suggestions go like this:

1. Me: I want to do X in C++. Show me how to do it only using stdlib components (no external libraries).

2. LLM: Gladly! Here is solution X

3. Me: Remove the undefined behavior from foo() and fix the methods that call it

4. LLM: Sure! Here it is (produces solution X again)

5. Me: No you need to remove the use of uninitialized variables as the out parameters.

6. LLM: Oh certainly! Here is the correct solution (produces a completely different solution that also has issues)

7. Me: No go back to the first one

etc

For the ones that suggest code, it can at least suggest some very simple boilerplate very easily (e.g. gtest and gmock stuff for C++), but asking it to do anything more significant is a real gamble. Often I end up spending more time scrutinizing the suggested code than writing a version of it myself.

Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#93

Post by ForHackernews »

hattmall wrote: post #41
cglace wrote: post #32

The thing I can't wrap my head around is that I work on extremely complex AI agents every day and I know how far they are from actually replacing anyone. But then I step away from my work and I'm constantly bombarded with “agents will replace us”. I wasted a few days trying to incorporate aider and other tools into my workflow. I had a simple screen I was working on for configuring an AI Agent. I gave screenshots of…

There are some fields though where they can replace humans in significant capacity. Software development is probably one of the least likely for anything more than entry level, but A LOT of engineering has a very very real existential threat. Think about designing buildings. You basically just need to know a lot of rules / tables and how things interact to know what's possible and the best practices. A purpose built…

Good freaking luck! The inconsistencies of the software world pale in comparison to trying to construct any real world building: http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...

Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#94

Post by HelloMcFly »

immibis wrote: post #86
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…

"Do something existing with a different mechanism" is innovative, but not revolutionary, and certainly not a new "product genre". My parents used to order pizza by phone calls, then a website, then an app. It's the same thing. (The friction is a little bit less, but maybe forcing another human to bring food to you because you're feeling lazy should have a little friction. And as a side effect, we all stopped being as…

> innovative, but not revolutionary

The experience of Netflix, Spotify, and Uber were revolutionary. It felt like the future, and it worked as expected. Sure, we didn't realize the poison these products were introducing into many creative and labor ecosystems, nor did we fully appreciate how they would operate as means to widen the income inequality gap by concentrating more profits to executives. But they fit cleanly into many of our lives immediately.

Debating whether that's "revolutionary" or "innovative" or "whatever-other-word" is just a semantic sideshow common to online discourse. It's missing the point. I'll use whatever word you want, but it doesn't change the point.

Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#95

Post by Dakizhu »

InfiniteTitan wrote: post #87
csomar wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> None of those are revolutionary companies. Not only Uber/Grab (or delivery app) were revolutionary, they are still revolutionary. I could live without LLMs and my life will be slightly impacted when coding. If delivery apps are not available, my life is severely degraded. The other day I was sick. I got medicine and dinner with Grab. Delivered to the condo lobby which is as far as I can get. That is revolutionary.

Is it revolutionary to order from a screen rather than calling a restaurant for delivery? I don’t think so.

Honestly, yes. Calling in an order can result in the restaurant botching the order and you have no way to challenge it unless you recorded the call. Also, as someone who’s been on both sides of the transaction, some people have poor audio quality or speak accented English, which is difficult to understand. Ordering from a screen saves everyone valuable time and reduces confusion.

Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#96

Post by Workaccount2 »

swazzy wrote: post #38

I see no reason to believe the extraordinary progress we've seen recently will stop or even slow down. Personally, I've benefited so much from AI that it feels almost alien to hear people downplaying it. Given the excitement in the field and the sheer number of talented individuals actively pushing it forward, I'm quite optimistic that progress will continue, if not accelerate.

If LLM's are bumpers on a bowling lane, HN is a forum of pro bowlers.

Bumpers are not gonna make you a pro bowler. You aren't going to be hitting tons of strikes. Most pro bowlers won't notice any help from bumpers, except in some edge cases.

If you are an average joe however, and you need to knock over pins with some level of consistency, then those bumpers are a total revolution.

Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#97

Post by bookofjoe »

bloomingkales wrote: post #3

Let's imagine that we all had a trillion dollars. Then we would all sit around and go "well dang, we have everything, what should we do?". I think you'll find that just about everyone would agree, "we oughta see how far that LLM thing can go". We could be in nuclear fallout shelters for decades, and I think you'll still see us trying to push the LLM thing underground, through duress. We dream of this, so the bear cas…

leave dang out of this

Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#98

Post by HelloMcFly »

usaar333 wrote: post #30

Author also made a highly upvoted and controversial comment about o3 in the same vein that's worth reading: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ao4enANjWNsYiSFqc/o3?comment... Oh course lesswrong, being heavily AI doomers, may be slightly biased against near term AGI just from motivated reasoning. Gotta love this part of the post no one has yet addressed: > At some unknown point – probably in 2030s, possibly tomorrow (bu…

Was that comment intended seriously? I thought it was a wry joke.

Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#99

Post by lackoftactics »

>GPT-5 will be even less of an improvement on GPT-4.5 than GPT-4.5 was on GPT-4. The pattern will continue for GPT-5.5 and GPT-6, the ~1000x and 10000x models they may train by 2029 (if they still have the money by then). Subtle quality-of-life improvements and meaningless benchmark jumps, but nothing paradigm-shifting.

It's easy to spot people who secretly hate LLMs and feel threatened by them these days. GPT-5 will be a unified model, very different from 4o or 4.5. Throwing around numbers related to scaling laws shows a lack of proper research. Look at what DeepSeek accomplished with far fewer resources; their paper is impressive.

I agree that we need more breakthroughs to achieve AGI. However, these models increase productivity, allowing people to focus more on research. The number of highly intelligent people currently working on AI is astounding, considering the number of papers and new developments. In conclusion, we will reach AGI. It's a race with high stakes, and history shows that these types of races don't stop until there is a winner.

Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#100

Post by redlock »

notTooFarGone wrote: post #63
roenxi wrote: post #51

This seems to be ignoring the major force driving AI right now - hardware improvements. We've barely seen a new hardware generation since ChatGPT was released to the market, we'd certainly expect it to plateau fairly quickly on fixed hardware. My personal experience of AI models is going to be a series of step changes every time the VRAM on my graphics card doubles. Big companies are probably going to see something s…

hardware improvements don't strike me as the horse to bet on. LLM Progression seems to be linear and compute needed exponential. And I don't see exponential hardware improvements besides some new technology (that we should not bet on coming ayntime soon).

Moore's law is exponential
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