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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?

#141

Post by heisgone »

627467 wrote: post #131

The bottle neck for AI adoption - particularly in the type of companies the Economist is surveying - is the management structure, the "chain of command". As a manager you have to strike a balance between absolute productivity/efficiency and accountability diffusion: lose enough people to spread accountability and it ends up on your plate when things go wrong. "AI f*cK it up" does not sound like as good an argument fo…

To add to this point, AI is lagging in the debugging chain. It's great at generating code but who is going to inherit the maintenance of all this code and show confidence in its maintenance? Most developers already works on the maintenance side, writing a handful of line of code per week, spending most time in meeting, reading code, writing a small modification, doing all sort of manual operation, testing it, waiting for the test to complete, etc. More so, the whole Agile/Scrum movement encouraged to sort of micro-modification approach. You can't just drop an AI in place of those developers.

Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#142

Post by acdha »

thenoblesunfish wrote: post #34

Maybe I'm naive, but .. aren't businesses slow to adopt anything new, unless possibly when it's giving their competition a large, obvious advantage, or when it's some sort of plug-and-play, black box improvement where you just trade dollars for efficiency ? "AI" tools may be very promising for lots of things but they require people to do things differently, which people are slow to do. (Even as someone who works in t…

The other big thing is risk. Companies would switch overnight if they could actually do something like layoff all of their customer service reps but they aren’t going to do that if it can make legally binding promises or trap customers in confusing situations.

Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#143

Post by lithos »

oezi wrote: post #97
sbt wrote: post #54

I have been using it for coding for some time, but I don't think I'm getting much value out of it. It's useful for some boilerplate generation, but for more complex stuff I find that it's more tedious to explain to the AI what I'm trying to do. The issue, I think, is lack of big picture context in a large codebase. It's not useless, but I wouldn't trade it for say access to StackOverflow. My non-technical friends are…

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.

SO sold off their own data and made it insanely web-crawlable.

So makes sense that SO like users will use AI, not to mention they get the benefit of avoiding the neurotic moderator community at SO.

Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#144

Post by PapstJL4U »

crinkly wrote: post #60
rwmj wrote: post #58

I spent a bit of time reviewing and cleaning up the mess of someone who had taken text that I'd carefully written, put it through an AI to make it more "impactful", and revising it to remove the confusions and things I hadn't said. The text the AI wrote was certainly impactful, but it was also exaggerated and wrong in several places. So did AI add value here? It seems to me that it wasted a bunch of my time.

This is the paradox. It's often harder correcting someone else's work than it is doing it in the first place. So you end up having spent more effort.

It's although a lot less enjoyable in for many. I think the fun stories are all about "look what I have build" and not "look at my amazing code review".

For Boilerplate code we need an AI that is less creative and more secure and predictable. I have fun creative a system design with the right tables and I have implementing logic and interaction design. I don't have the biggest fun writing down dtos and entities.

I would need an AI, that can scan an image and just build me the right lego bricks. We are just getting back to an machine that can do UML from less precise sources.

Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#145

Post by elktown »

acdha wrote: post #139
wordofx wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once again. Replies only proving me right. Desperately trying to justify “ai bad I’m superior” mentality.

This is pure trolling when you are unable to engage with the comments or provide evidence supporting your position.

The comment history [0] suggests that it isn't trolling, but fanaticism - with the telltale hope of demise for everyone that can't see the light.

If I digress a bit, I wonder what it is with some hypes - tech or just broader in society - where something reaches a critical mass of publicity where suddenly a surprisingly large portion of people becomes just convinced, regardless of if they have some actual knowledge of the subject or not. Like, anecdotally, watching completely unrelated sports streams and there's a really sincere off-topic comment that AI will change everything now and "society isn't ready" or similar. But I guess it shouldn't be surprising when supposedly intelligent tech gurus and media folks are just eating everything up and starts peddling the narrative to the general public, why shouldn't one believe it? It's like a confluence of incentives that becomes a positive feedback loop until it all blows up.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44163596

Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#146

Post by acdha »

elktown wrote: post #145
acdha wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pure trolling when you are unable to engage with the comments or provide evidence supporting your position.

The comment history [0] suggests that it isn't trolling, but fanaticism - with the telltale hope of demise for everyone that can't see the light. If I digress a bit, I wonder what it is with some hypes - tech or just broader in society - where something reaches a critical mass of publicity where suddenly a surprisingly large portion of people becomes just convinced , regardless of if they have some actual knowledge o…

I guess I was thinking of it as trolling inspired by fandom. It’s cool to like something, but no positive discussion will grow out of making a provocative statement and then saying anyone who disagrees is proof you’re right.

Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#147

Post by paulluuk »

bootsmann wrote: post #121
paulluuk wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I work in R&D, and although I haven't signed an NDA, I think it's best if I don't elaborate too much. But basically we have a large dataset of shows and movies for which we already know how well they did with specific audiences, but we didn't know why exactly. So we use LLMs to reverse-engineer a large amount of metadata about these shows, and then use traditional ML to train a model that learns which feature appeal to which audiences.

Most stuff is obvious: nobody needs to tell you what segment of society is drawn to soap operas or action movies, for example. But there's plenty of room for nuance in some areas.

This doesn't guarantee that it actually becomes a succesful movie or show, though. That's a different project and frankly, a lot harder. Things like which actors, which writers, which directors, which studio are involved, and how much budget the show has.. it feels more like Moneyball but with more intangible variables.

Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#148

Post by logicchains »

surgical_fire wrote: post #116
logicchains wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I have been using it for coding for some time, but I don't think I'm getting much value out of it. I find this perspective so hard to relate to. LLMs have completely changed my workflow; the majority of my coding has been replaced by writing a detailed textual description of the change I want, letting an LLM make the change and add tests, then just reviewing the code it wrote and fixing anything stupid it did. This…

> I find this perspective so hard to relate to. LLMs have completely changed my workflow; the majority of my coding has been replaced by writing a detailed textual description of the change I want, letting an LLM make the change and add tests, then just reviewing the code it wrote and fixing anything stupid it did. I use it in much the same way you describe, but I find that it doesn't save me that much time. It may s…

>Reviewing the code it writes to fix the inevitable mistakes and making adjustments takes time too, and it will always be a required step due to the nature of LLMs.

Yep but this is much less time than writing the code, compiling it, fixing compiler errors, writing tests, fixing the code, fixing the compilation, all that busy-work. LLMs make mistakes but with Gemini 2.5 Pro at least most of these are due to under-specification, and you get better at specification over time. It's like the LLM is a C compiler developer and you're writing the C spec; if you don't specify something clearly, it's undefined behaviour and there's no guarantee the LLM will implement it sensibly.

I'd go so far as to say if you're not seeing any significant increase in your productivity, you're using LLMs wrong.

Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#149

Post by ike2792 »

crinkly wrote: post #33

Among non-technical friends, after the initial wow factor, even limited expectations were not met. Then it was tainted by the fact that everyone is promoting it as a human replacement technology which is then a tangible threat to their existence. That leads to not just lack of adoption but active sabotage. And then there’s the large body of people who just haven’t noticed it at all because they don’t give a shit. Stu…

I would add that no one has shown any solid business benefit or productivity gain due to AI despite there being massive incentives for someone to do so. We've tried to use AI for multiple projects within my company and none of them have panned out.

Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#150

Post by elktown »

acdha wrote: post #146
elktown wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comment history [0] suggests that it isn't trolling, but fanaticism - with the telltale hope of demise for everyone that can't see the light. If I digress a bit, I wonder what it is with some hypes - tech or just broader in society - where something reaches a critical mass of publicity where suddenly a surprisingly large portion of people becomes just convinced , regardless of if they have some actual knowledge o…

I guess I was thinking of it as trolling inspired by fandom. It’s cool to like something, but no positive discussion will grow out of making a provocative statement and then saying anyone who disagrees is proof you’re right.

Yep. The end result is certainly the same either way.
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