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AI: Accelerated Incompetence

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Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#51

Post by nssnsjsjsjs »

EncomLab wrote: post #14

Remember when 3d printing was going to replace all manufacturing? Anybody? AI is closer to this sentiment than it is to the singularity.

3d printing will slowly edge its way into more manufacturing. The humble stepping motor really is eating the world. 3dp is one manifestation of it!

Back to AI though.

I just checked the customer support page of a hyped AI app generator and its what you expect: "doesn't work on complex project" "wastes all my tokens" and "how to get a refund"

These things are over promising and a future miracle is required to justify valuations. Maybe the miracle will come maybe not.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#52

Post by paradite »

mjburgess wrote: post #43
paradite wrote: post #25

> LLMs as they currently exist cannot master a theory, design, or mental construct because they don't remember beyond their context window. Only humans can can gain and retain program theory. False. > An LLM is a token predictor. It works only at the level of text. It is not capable of working at a conceptual level: it doesn't reason about ideas, diagrams, or requirements specifications. False. Anyone who have spent…

The problem with people "who have spent time in machine learning or reinforcement learning" is that they've spent no time, literally none, understanding what a concept is. There is no such thing as a higher dimensional concept, nor can they be projected into a weight space, because they aren't quantities. The concept, say, "Dog" composes with the concept, "Happy" to form "Happy Dog". The extension(Dog) is all possibl…

You seem to believe "concept" is a concept in English language. It is not.

Concept is an abstraction layer above human languages.

Here's a good article that touched on this topic: https://www.neelnanda.io/mechanistic-interpretability/glossa...

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#53

Post by johnecheck »

EncomLab wrote: post #14

Remember when 3d printing was going to replace all manufacturing? Anybody? AI is closer to this sentiment than it is to the singularity.

Great analogy. 3d printing is awesome and incredibly useful tech. Truly world changing. But injection molding is here to stay.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#54

Post by bryancoxwell »

EncomLab wrote: post #14

Remember when 3d printing was going to replace all manufacturing? Anybody? AI is closer to this sentiment than it is to the singularity.

I honestly don’t, although maybe that hype cycle was before my time.

But this seems an unfair comparison. For one, I think 3D printing made me better, not worse, at engineering (back when mechanical engineering was my jam), as it allowed me to prototype and make mistakes faster and cheaper. While it hasn’t replaced all manufacturing (or even come close), it plays an important role in design without atrophying the skills of the user.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#55

Post by zaphar »

frenchmajesty wrote: post #40

I disagree with the author here. His point can be summarized as "LLMs produce bad code, LLMs lead to the teams's average skills decreasing and they can't maintain large codebases over time". Yet nowhere he addresses the #1 flaws to his position: rate of improvement of the technology, and its promise to deliver on saved money and gained speed. In all the companies I've seen engineering leadership hardly really gives a…

The LLM trend lines may indicate that further research, experimentation, and investment in LLMs is warranted. But it is a mistake to assume that trend lines predict the future. Yet this is the primary evidence that is raised in support of LLMs in response to critics.

It's not at all clear that the upside gained outweighs the cost in your hypothetical scenario nor is should it be taken as a given that the trend line will continue as is for long enough to create enough upside to outweigh that cost.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#56

Post by yahoozoo »

frenchmajesty wrote: post #40

I disagree with the author here. His point can be summarized as "LLMs produce bad code, LLMs lead to the teams's average skills decreasing and they can't maintain large codebases over time". Yet nowhere he addresses the #1 flaws to his position: rate of improvement of the technology, and its promise to deliver on saved money and gained speed. In all the companies I've seen engineering leadership hardly really gives a…

Are they going to be 10x better though?

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#57

Post by karn97 »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #15

> If you're a skilled, experienced engineer and you fear that AI will make you unemployable, adopt a more nuanced view. LLMs can't replace human engineering. I don't think LLMs were ever meant to completely replace human engineering, at least in the way we think of engineering as a craft. But the truth is the world is changing, and with LLMs/AI, the goalposts are changing, too. With massive economies of scale and hug…

Even the latest models are terrible, absolute garbage at engineering. They can't engineer solutions at all. Even in the simplest of cases.

Tells me a lot about people like you who make these comments rather than llms.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#58

Post by api »

karn97 wrote: post #45
api wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For large companies this is true, and this may be the best AI coding take I have read. It's similar with full self drive. FSD is better than a bad, drunk, or texting human driver, and that's a lot of the drivers on the road.

[flagged]

Upvote for peak HN comment.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#59

Post by conradfr »

namaria wrote: post #31
vouaobrasil wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are omitting a third class: the people who would not have written anything at all but are now writing AI slop because the bar has been lowered.

Pretty much the reason I think electronic music was fantastic right up to the point DAWs became a thing. When everyone with a laptop and some software licenses can just put out slop that sounds like the originators, quality fell off the cliff. 90s and 2010s electronic music are a world apart.

You're not wrong but there's entire jams on YouTube from people with real gear and no DAW that produce uninteresting synth based music.

Yet The Prodigy made good albums entirely with Reason.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#60

Post by furyofantares »

I'm quite big on using LLMs in coding, and aside from the inflammatory graphic at the top and the comment about loss of joy (I haven't lost my joy at all personally), I agree with the entire rest of the post completely. (For context I've been programming for 30 years now and still love it.)

I'm still trying to figure out how to produce a codebase using LLMs and end up as a expert in the system at the end of it while still coming out ahead. My hope is I can be more of an expert a bit faster than before, not less of an expert a lot faster.

It feels within reach to me as long as there's frequent periods of coming to a complete understanding of the code that's been produced and reshaping it to reduce complexity. As well as strong technical guidance as input to the LLM to begin with.

I think there's still a lot of learning to do about how to use these things. For example, I've tried LLM-heavy things in lua, C, and C#. The LLM was great at producing stuff that works (at first) in lua, but lua was miserable and the code ended up a huge mess that I can't be bothered to become an expert in. The LLM was really tripped up on C and I didn't make it that far, I didn't want to watch it fight the compiler so hard. C# has been great, the LLM is reasonably effective and I have an easy time consuming and reshaping the LLM code.

I've always liked static type systems but I like them even more now, in part because they help the LLM produce better code, but mostly because they make it a lot easier to keep up to speed on code that was just produced, or to simplify it.

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