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AI: Accelerated Incompetence

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Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#91

Post by gwbas1c »

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]

I don't get the downvotes.

When I used the free trials of FSD, It kept doing dangerous things and I kept needing to intervene. It seems a lot of people conflate the fact that the technology is impressive with the fact that it's still quite dangerous.

> FSD is way more unreliable than an average drunk driver.

I'm thinking you mean something like someone who blows a 0.1 or 0.12, or possibly drank 2-3 beers. (IE, someone who is impaired but probably won't get into an accident.) That would be an interesting thing to try to test objectively, because there are way more people who drive in that state, (including off-duty police officers), than a lot of people realize.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#92

Post by namaria »

conradfr wrote: post #59
namaria wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure what point you're making. I never claimed any set of tooling is necessary of sufficient to produce good music. I merely pointed out that, as it became more accessible to produce music, the overall quality of the output decreased.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#93

Post by lolinder »

baq wrote: post #86
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 have a 3d printer and cadded me some parts, I don't have an injection molding plant.

Yep, I think this further illustrates OP's point—hobbyists building low-stakes projects get enormous benefits from LLM tooling even while professionals working on high-stakes projects find that there are lots of places where they still need something else.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#94

Post by ak_111 »

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.

It might not lead to singularity but for people who work in academia, in terms of setting and marking assignments and lecture notes, for good or bad AI has had an enormous impact.

You might argue that LLMs have simply exposed some systematic defects instead of improving anything, but the impact is there. Dozens of lecturing workflows that were pretty standard 2 years ago are no longer viable. This includes the entirety of online and remote education which ironically dozens of universities started investing in after Covid, right around when chatgpt launched. To put this impact in context, we are talking about the tertiary and secondary sector globally.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#95

Post by cultofmetatron »

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.

for small run manufacturing, 3d printing is absolutely killing it. the major limitation of 3d printing is that it will never be able to crank out thousands of parts per hour the way injection molding can and thats ok. creating an injection molded part requires a huge up front investment. if you're doing small runs of a part, 3d printing more than makes up for the slow marginal time with skipping the up front costs alltogether.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#96

Post by rhubarbtree »

8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #3

Is AI perhaps an opportunity for years of paid cleanup and re-design work that those of us who have dedicated decades to learning the craft of software engineering will be able to cash in on?

If AI creates a mess, why won’t future AI be able to continue building a mess on top?

And if it does hit a dead end, just regenerate a new version of the entire system in minutes.

I don’t know what’s going to happen with AI coding, but it often seems to me that people are making fundamental errors when framing the problem.

“But how will humans maintain AI code?” Is one such example. Why would we expect one part (code creation) to change dramatically without all other parts equally undergoing a revolution?

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#97

Post by vouaobrasil »

karn97 wrote: post #57
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.

Not sure what you mean by your snarky comment but I never claimed that LLMs produced any good solutions.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#98

Post by paradite »

mjburgess wrote: post #85
paradite wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I'm very well-familiar with the literature in this area. I understand that computer scientists, with obscene and wild abandon, will just pick whatever word suits their agenda and define it opportunistically, without regards to the confusion it will cause -- indeed, seemingly with this aim -- to "impress" the reader and make their research seem extraordinary. "Concept" is not a term from computer science, its use here…

You have biased view on the definition of "concept" based on English language and logic.

In Chinese language, concept is 概念.

In Chinese language, happy dog is 快乐的狗.

Notice it has an extra "的" that is missing in English language. This tells you that you can't just treat English grammar and structure as the formal definition of "concept". Some languages do not have words for happiness, or dog. But that doesn't mean the concept of happiness or dog does not exist.

The reverse is also true, you can't claim a concept does not exist if it does not exist in English language. Concept is something beyond any particular language or logical construct or notations that you invent.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#99

Post by vouaobrasil »

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.

Yeah, it seems to be a problem, especially when it comes to 'discoverability'. Just like the app store: I hate browsing app stores like Apple/Google Play and stopped doing it entirely because every query has 40+ different apps doing very similar things.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#100

Post by rTX5CMRXIfFG »

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…

I agree with your main point, and almost as if to nitpick: more and more output (specifically in the context of LLM-produced code) is paradoxical to economies of scale, precisely because LLMs make too many mistakes at scale. So then we necessarily have to limit their use to relatively simple and mundane tasks. That is, of course, still valuable in itself, but history teaches us that there _will_ be a mass movement to building large, complex, risky products using LLMs.

I don't believe that that's something that we can stop. Somehow, I feel like the popularization of LLMs is a force of natural selection where those who are smart enough to keep training their minds will find themselves more financially secure than those who don't, and therefore more likely to survive.

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