Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI-first – We're just 6 months away from AGI

revontulet.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 52 posts

Re: AI-first – We're just 6 months away from AGI

#21

Post by rvnx »

Flemlo wrote: post #19
mrweasel wrote: post #16

That's pretty much my take. LLMs aren't a bad idea, they are useful, in certain fields, but they aren't living up to the sales pitch and they are to expensive to run. My personal take is that the whole chat based interface is a mistake. I have no better solution, but for anything beyond a halluciating search engine, it's not really the way we need to interact with AI. In my mind we're 6 months away from one of the bi…

The AI hype also made voice to text and text to voice a lot better. It's not just chat. But I really enjoy the Claude or chatgpt chat UI. I'm not sure what your problem with that UI is tbh? I don't think there will be any crash soon. I'm hoping for lower prices but I can't imagine not having these tools available anymore. I'm also waiting for better and cheaper support for local development and inferencing. I'm waiti…

It would feel like a regression to not have access to such tools, models like Claude are really useful on a day-to-day basis (not only for programming, but for any question you have in life where you would typically use Google and read yourself a lot of information).

We don't need AGI to have increased productivity and benefits.

If it would be _that_ useless, half a billion people wouldn't use such tools every week (and this is not even counting Chinese users).

I think many hate LLMs because they realize that it starts to eat their bread and butter and are already taking their job and find it difficult to accept.

Investors are over-paying, because they are betting on companies that can be outpaced by others, but the technology itself is here to stay and grow, until it can do more and more tasks that are done by humans.

It doesn't mean that LLMs and other AI tools are going to run completely alone anytime soon (maybe with cars first ?), but eventually it could be.

What will be the world in 10 or 20 years from now ?

Re: AI-first – We're just 6 months away from AGI

#22

Post by dgb23 »

> For a good 12 hours, over the course of 1 1/2 days, I tried to prompt it such that it yields what we needed. Eventually, I noticed that my prompts converged more and more to be almost the code I wanted. After still not getting a working result, I ended up implementing it myself in less than 30 minutes.

This is very common. We need a name for this phenomenon. Any analogies/metaphors?

I generated (huh!) some suggestions and the funniest one seems to be:

> Just One More Prompt Syndrome (JOMPS)

But I assume there's a better one that describes or hints at the irony that describing precisely what a program should be doing _is_ programming.

Re: AI-first – We're just 6 months away from AGI

#24

Post by rvnx »

dgb23 wrote: post #22

> For a good 12 hours, over the course of 1 1/2 days, I tried to prompt it such that it yields what we needed. Eventually, I noticed that my prompts converged more and more to be almost the code I wanted. After still not getting a working result, I ended up implementing it myself in less than 30 minutes. This is very common. We need a name for this phenomenon. Any analogies/metaphors? I generated (huh!) some suggesti…

Could be that some people are not familiar with the limitations of LLMs and what to expect from them, and could benefit from learning how to properly do prompting, before outright rejecting them.

The LLMs are sometimes frustrating, but over time you learn how to drive them properly, exactly like when you learn how to use the right keywords on Google.

Also, considering he is a free user, the author might be using one the default models ("auto" -> o4-mini or gpt-4o, rarely Claude Sonnet/Opus 3) in Cursor

-> Both of them are rather weak, especially with the automatic context splitting that Cursor does to save money

Claude Code + Opus 4 would likely yield better results here.

Re: AI-first – We're just 6 months away from AGI

#25

Post by rednafi »

Not saying people should read the article, but it's a short one and hides some nuanced points behind an ambiguous title. Probably intentional. I liked how it showed plenty of examples of scaleups getting egg-faced after overpromising AI capabilities. LLMs are useful, but still too costly to run and too error-prone to be let loose on anything mission-critical. I use these tools daily, but that doesn't mean I want AI rammed down my throat at every turn.

A few of my favorite tech authors and OSS contributors have gone full AI-parrot mode lately. Everything they post is either "how they use AI," "how amazing it is," or "how much it sucks." I think a bunch of us have had enough and just want to move on. But try saying anything even slightly critical about AI, or about how the big companies are forcing it into everything in the name of “progress,” and suddenly you're a Luddite.

I'm just glad more folks in the trenches are tired of the noise too and are starting to call it out.

Re: AI-first – We're just 6 months away from AGI

#26

Post by creesch »

Kiro wrote: post #17
creesch wrote: post #4

Did you drop that ";-)" from the title because you want to showcase how few people actually read articles posted on HN and just respond to titles. Or did you not read further yourself and didn't even notice it? :P

I think the article is way more bullish on AI than what the ";-)" and you imply.

The smiley very much implies that the title shouldn't be taken seriously. I'd say it is right on the mark.

To be clear, bullish has a few meanings. But they all boil down to assertively communicating. From your comment I gather you might think it's etymology traces back to "bullying", but it actual relates back to "bull".

Re: AI-first – We're just 6 months away from AGI

#28

Post by rednafi »

rvnx wrote: post #24
dgb23 wrote: post #22

> For a good 12 hours, over the course of 1 1/2 days, I tried to prompt it such that it yields what we needed. Eventually, I noticed that my prompts converged more and more to be almost the code I wanted. After still not getting a working result, I ended up implementing it myself in less than 30 minutes. This is very common. We need a name for this phenomenon. Any analogies/metaphors? I generated (huh!) some suggesti…

Could be that some people are not familiar with the limitations of LLMs and what to expect from them, and could benefit from learning how to properly do prompting, before outright rejecting them. The LLMs are sometimes frustrating, but over time you learn how to drive them properly, exactly like when you learn how to use the right keywords on Google. Also, considering he is a free user, the author might be using one…

> Also, considering he is a free user, the author might be using one the default models ("auto" -> o4-mini or gpt-4o, rarely Claude Sonnet/Opus 3) in Cursor

I wonder where you got the free user info.

Re: AI-first – We're just 6 months away from AGI

#29

Post by mrweasel »

Flemlo wrote: post #19
mrweasel wrote: post #16

That's pretty much my take. LLMs aren't a bad idea, they are useful, in certain fields, but they aren't living up to the sales pitch and they are to expensive to run. My personal take is that the whole chat based interface is a mistake. I have no better solution, but for anything beyond a halluciating search engine, it's not really the way we need to interact with AI. In my mind we're 6 months away from one of the bi…

The AI hype also made voice to text and text to voice a lot better. It's not just chat. But I really enjoy the Claude or chatgpt chat UI. I'm not sure what your problem with that UI is tbh? I don't think there will be any crash soon. I'm hoping for lower prices but I can't imagine not having these tools available anymore. I'm also waiting for better and cheaper support for local development and inferencing. I'm waiti…

> I'm not sure what your problem with that UI is tbh?

It's not a particularly efficient way to interact with the LLMs. Despite how people hate AI being integrated into everything, I do think that's the only way it can be done effectively. My take is that the AI/LLM isn't the product, it's just a feature of a product. Like when there's "AI" in the camera apps on your phone, or some sort of machine learning in medical imaging. To get the full benefit it needs to be a technology built into your product, not a product in it self.

The voice to text, text to voice is a good example. Voice to text is a feature of a transcription or video conference system. Text to voice is an accessibility feature. It doesn't matter that it's powered by an LLM.

If Claude, ChatGPT, whatever do become cheaper the market will crash. My thinking is: Prices go down (they will eventually), if that happens to fast, OpenAI will tank, their valuation is to high to support a $20 a month AI offering, or worse a world where ChatGPT isn't a product, but a feature. If OpenAI goes down the entire industry will have to re-align to a world where we now know that there's a limit to the value an LLM can command. Most of the current AI companies will be bought up at high discounts (as compared to their current valuations) and people are going to be laid off.

Post reply on HN