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Why is AI so slow to spread?

economist.com

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Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#121

Post by bootsmann »

paulluuk wrote: post #27
o11c wrote: post #4

That's a whole lot of twisting to avoid admitting "it usually doesn't work, and even when it does work, it's usually not cost-effective even at the heavily-subsidized prices." Or maybe it's more about refusing to admit that executives are out of touch with concrete reality and are just blindly chasing trends instead.

It really depends on the use-case. I currently work in the video streaming industry, and my team has been building production-quality code for 2 years now. Here are some things that are going really well: * Determine what is happening in a scene/video * Translating subtitles to very specific local slang * Summarizing scripts * Estimating how well a new show will do with a given audience * Filling gaps in the metadata…

> Estimating how well a new show will do with a given audience

Can you elaborate on this point?

Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#122

Post by jeisc »

AI is a myna bird it can do nothing new which would seek to make our user experiences better in life and using our devices. It has more potential to do us harm then it has to do us well. A tool does not make a craftsperson it just makes a dangerous individual.

Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#123

Post by yvdriess »

the_duke wrote: post #112
easyThrowaway wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it also feels way more like a modernized version of those "UML To Code" Generators from the early 2000 rather than the "magic AI" that MS and Google are trying to market.

I'd disagree with that, if given enough compute LLMs can have impressive capabilities in finding bugs and implementing new logic, if guided right. It's hit or miss at the moment, but it's definitely way more than "UML code generators".

It's not the same, but boy it sure does rhyme.

Typical prose in late 90's early 00s: Designing the right UML meta-schema and UML diagram will generate a bug-free source code of the program, enabling even non-programmers to create applications and business logic. Programs can check the UML diagram beforehand for logic errors, prove security and more.

Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#124

Post by birn559 »

danbruc wrote: post #113
oezi wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the issues certainly is that Stackoverflow is absolutely over. Within the last twelve months the number of users just fell off a cliff.

That might be a good thing after all, at least in a certain sense. Stack Overflow has been dying for the last ten years or so. In the first years there where a lot of good questions that were interesting to answer but that changed with popularity and it became an endless sea of low effort do my homework duplicates that were not interesting to answer and annoying to moderate. If this now gets handled by large language…

Is it really dying? There's only so much growth possible without having it flooded with low effort stuff. They try to instead grow by introducing more topics, but that's limited as well.

I personally didn't use it so much (meaning: Writing content) because it always felt a bit over engineered. From what I remember the only possible entry point is writing questions that get up voted. Not allowed to even write comments, vote and of course not allowed to answer questions. Maybe that's not correct but that has always been my impression.

In general stack exchange seems to be a great platform. I think "it's dying" has an unfortunate connotation. It's not like content just vanishes, just the amount of new stuff is shrinking.

Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#125

Post by gregjor »

rckt wrote: post #9

Slow?? AI is literally being shoved into everything. It took only several years to see AI being advertised as a magic pill everywhere. It’s not meeting the expectations, probably because of this aggressive advertising. But I would in no way say that it’s spreading slow. It is fast.

Agree. It has spread like toenail fungus, infecting almost everything with half-baked and useless AI features.

The Economist should look for businesses that have actually used AI to get measurable benefits, or tried and failed to do so, rather than falling back on niche studies of organizational behavior.

Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#126

Post by tornikeo »

rwmj wrote: post #117
tornikeo wrote: post #110

It seems that the average employee doesn't currently benefit from completing their job more efficiently; i.e., they have no interest in AI. To accelerate mass AI adoption in workplaces, it may be necessary to expose the average worker to the risks and rewards of business ownership. However, it might be the case that the average worker simply doesn't want that risk. If there's no risk, there can't be a reward. So I ca…

Your underlying assumption is that AI could allow workers to complete their jobs more efficiently if only they could be persuaded to use it. I'm not convinced this assumption is true right now (unless your job involves producing content-free marketing bullshit, in which case yes you ought to be worried).

Unfortunately, i don't have the cold hard data on what job complexity distribution looks like right now. But I don't think it's far fetched to assume that most days, most tasks people do are route and boring. Possibly a fraction of those tasks are amenable to AI-base acceleration. Who knows? But we do know (from that article) that people are hesitant to even try using AI.

Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#128

Post by UncleMeat »

wordofx wrote: post #14
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #8

I don't often use AI in my work because it is not sufficiently useful not sufficiently trustworthy. It is my ongoing experience that AI + My Oversight requires more time than not using AI. Sometimes AI can answer slightly complex things in a helpful way. But for most of the integration troubleshooting I do, AI guidance varies between no help at all and fully wasting my time. Conversely, I support folks who have the c…

I still haven’t found anyone who AI wouldn’t be helpful or that isn’t trustworthy enough. People make the /claim/ it’s not useful or they are better without it. When you sit down with them it often turns out they just don’t know how to use AI effectively.

A couple weeks ago I was working on a parser that needed to handle a new file format that was a large change from existing formats. I wanted some test inputs, both valid and invalid cases. I had the codebase of a tool chain that I knew could generate valid files, some public documentation about the new file format, and my parser codebase.

A good problem to throw at AI, I thought. I handed the tools to a SOTA model and asked it to generate me some files. Garbage. Some edits to the prompts and I still get garbage. Okay, that's pretty hard to generate a binary with complex internal structure directly. Let's ask it to tell me how to make the toolchain generate these for me. It gives me back all sorts of CLI examples. None work. I keep telling it what output I am getting and how it differs from what I want. Over and over it fails.

I finally reach out to somebody on the toolchain team and they tell me how to do it. Great, now I can generate some valid files. Let's try to generate some invalid ones to test error paths. I've got a file. I've got the spec. I ask the LLM to modify the file to break the spec in a single way each time and tell me which part of the spec it broke each time. Doesn't work. Okay. I ask it to write me a python program that does this. Works a little bit, but not consistently and I need to inspect each output carefully. Finally I throw my files into a coverage guided fuzzer corpus and over a short period of time it's generated inputs that have excellent branch coverage for me.

What would effective have looked like to you in this situation?

Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#129

Post by csa »

darkwater wrote: post #85
csa wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Among non-technical friends, after the initial wow factor, even limited expectations were not met. Indeed. I think that current AI tech needs quite a bit of scaffolding in order for the full benefits to be felt by non-tech people. > Then it was tainted by the fact that everyone is promoting it as a human replacement technology Yeah. This is a bad move. AI is a human force multiplier (exponentializer?). > which is t…

> Yeah. This is a bad move. AI is a human force multiplier (exponentializer?). If it's a multiplier you need to either increase the requested work to keep the same humans or reduce the humans needed if you keep the same workload. It's not straightforward which way each business will follow.

> If it's a multiplier you need to either increase the requested work to keep the same humans or reduce the humans needed if you keep the same workload. It's not straightforward which way each business will follow.

I guess what you’re saying is technically true while being somewhat misleading.

“Increase the requested work” is one way of saying “reduce the amount of scutwork that needs to be done”. Personally, I’m ok having less scutwork. I’m also ok letting AI do optional scutwork that falls into the “nice to have” category (e.g., creating archival information).

On a personal level, I have used AI to automate a lot of required scutwork while freeing up my time to engage in higher added-value tasks. In terms of time, the biggest areas have been preliminary research, summaries, and writing drafts.

Additionally, in one specific use case that I can talk about, I have helped a medical billing office prioritize and organize their work based on estimated hourly value of items processed as well as difficulty (difficult stuff was prioritized for certain times of the day). This work had been eye-balled in the past, and could be done with a decent degree of accuracy with quite a bit of time, but AI did it with higher accuracy and almost no dedicated human time. The whole office appreciated the outcomes.

There are many wins like this that are available with AI, and I think many folks just haven’t found them yet.

Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#130

Post by danbruc »

birn559 wrote: post #124
danbruc wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might be a good thing after all, at least in a certain sense. Stack Overflow has been dying for the last ten years or so. In the first years there where a lot of good questions that were interesting to answer but that changed with popularity and it became an endless sea of low effort do my homework duplicates that were not interesting to answer and annoying to moderate. If this now gets handled by large language…

Is it really dying? There's only so much growth possible without having it flooded with low effort stuff. They try to instead grow by introducing more topics, but that's limited as well. I personally didn't use it so much (meaning: Writing content) because it always felt a bit over engineered. From what I remember the only possible entry point is writing questions that get up voted. Not allowed to even write comments…

Maybe it changed, but you could ask and answer questions right after signing up, just commenting, voting, and moderation rights required a certain amount of points. I only answered questions and was among the top 100 contributors at my peak activity but that was at least a decade ago.

I stopped contributing when the question quality fell of a cliff. Existing contributors got annoyed by the low effort questions, new users got annoyed because their questions got immediately closed, it was no longer fun. There were a lot of discussions on meta how to handle the situation but I just left.

So admittedly things might have changed again, I do not really know much about the development in the last ten or so years.

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