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AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

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Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#71

Post by falcor84 »

esafak wrote: post #55
falcor84 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure you can't point it to a Jira ticket and get a PR You absolutely can. This is exactly what SWE-Bench[0] measures, and I've been amazed at how quickly AIs have been climbing those ladders. I personally have been using Warp [1] a lot recently and in quite a lot of low-medium difficulty cases it can one-shot a decent PR. For most of my work I still find that I need to pair with it to get sufficiently good results…

How does Warp compare to others you have tried?

I've not used it for long enough yet for this to be a strong opinion, but so far I'd say that it is indeed a bit better than Claude Code, as per the results on Terminal Bench[0]. And on a side note, I quite like the fact that I can type shell commands and chat commands interchangeably into the same input and it just knows whether to run it or respond to it (accidentally forgetting the leading exclamation mark has been a recurring mistake for me in Claude Code).

[0] https://www.tbench.ai/

Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#72

Post by throwawayoldie »

viccis wrote: post #57
smiley1437 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people aren't aware of how wrong they can be, and the errors take effort and knowledge to notice. I have friends who are highly educated professionals (PhDs, MDs) who just assume that AI\LLMs make no mistakes. They were shocked that it's possible for hallucinations to occur. I wonder if there's a halo effect where the perfect grammar, structure, and confidence of LLM output causes some users to assume expertise?

> I wonder if there's a halo effect where the perfect grammar, structure, and confidence of LLM output causes some users to assume expertise? I think it's just that LLMs are modeling generative probability distributions of sequences of tokens so well that what they actually are nearly infallible at is producing convincing results. Often times the correct result is the most convincing, but other times what seems most…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect

> In computer science, the ELIZA effect is a tendency to project human traits — such as experience, semantic comprehension or empathy — onto rudimentary computer programs having a textual interface. ELIZA was a symbolic AI chatbot developed in 1966 by Joseph Weizenbaum and imitating a psychotherapist. Many early users were convinced of ELIZA's intelligence and understanding, despite its basic text-processing approach and the explanations of its limitations.

Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#73

Post by dns_snek »

falcor84 wrote: post #46
crazygringo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree it wasn't a helpful comment. On the other hand, I don't know what this mythical downvote button for stories is you describe. I've certainly never seen it. Would be nice if HN actually had that.

It's what "flag" is for: > Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This article is neither spam nor off topic.

Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#74

Post by cropher »

Really liked this article.

I wonder: the graphs treat learning with and without AI as two different paths. But obviously people can switch between learning methods or abandon one of them.

Then again, I wonder how many people go from learning about a topic using LLMs to then leaving them behind to continue the old school way. I think the early spoils of LLM usage could poison your motivation to engage with the topic on your own later on.

Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#75

Post by precompute »

I'd argue that AI reduces the distance between the floor and the ceiling, only both the floor and ceiling move -- the floor moves up, the ceiling downwards. Just using AI makes the floor move up, while over-reliance on it (a very personal metric) pushes the ceiling downwards.

Unlike the telephone (telephones excited a certain class of people into believing that world-wide enlightenment was on their doorstep), LLMs don't just reduce reliance on visual tells and mannerisms, they reduce reliance on thinking itself. And that's a very dangerous slope to go down on. What will happen to the next generation when their parents supply substandard socially-computed results of their mental work (aka language)? Culture will decay and societal norms will veer towards anti-civilizational trends. And that's exactly what we're witnessing these days. The things that were commonplace are now rare and sometimes mythic.

Everyone has the same number of hours and days and years. Some people master some difficult, arcane field while others while it away in front of the television. LLMs make it easier for the television-watchers to experience "entertainment nirvana" while enticing the smart, hard-workers to give up their toil and engage "just a little" rest, which due to the insidious nature of AI-based entertainment, meshes more readily with their more receptive minds.

Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#76

Post by samsartor »

mattnewport wrote: post #24
TimPC wrote: post #20

People should be worried because right now AI is on an exponential growth trajectory and no-one knows when it will level off into an s-curve. AI is starting to get close to good enough. If it becomes twice as good in seven months then what?

What's the basis for your claim that it is on an exponential growth trajectory? That's not the way it feels to me as a fairly heavy user, it feels more like an asymptotic approach to expert human level performance where each new model gets a bit closer but is not yet reaching it, at least in areas where I am expert enough to judge. Improvements since the original ChatGPT don't feel exponential to me.

This also tracks with my experience. Of course, technical progress never looks smooth through the steep part of the s-curve, more a sequence of jagged stair-steps (each their own little s-curve in miniature). We might only be at the top of a stair. But my feeling is that we're exhausting the form-factor of LLMs. If something new and impressive comes along it'll be shaped different and fill a different niche.

Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#77

Post by serial_dev »

cropher wrote: post #74

Really liked this article. I wonder: the graphs treat learning with and without AI as two different paths. But obviously people can switch between learning methods or abandon one of them. Then again, I wonder how many people go from learning about a topic using LLMs to then leaving them behind to continue the old school way. I think the early spoils of LLM usage could poison your motivation to engage with the topic o…

I learn about different subjects mixing traditional resources and AI.

I can watch a video about the subject, when I want to go deeper, I go to LLMs, throw a bunch of questions at it, because thanks to the videos I now know what to ask. Then the AI responses tell me what I need to understand deeper, so I pick a book that addresses those subjects. Then as I read the book and I don’t understand something, or I have some questions that I want the answer for immediately, I consult ChatGPT (or any other tool I want to try). At different points in the journey, I find something I could build myself to deepen my understanding. I google open source implementations, read them, ask LLMs again, I watch summary videos, and work my way through the problem.

LLMs serve as a “much better StackOverflow / Google”.

Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#78

Post by jononor »

andrenotgiant wrote: post #8

This tracks for other areas of AI I am more familiar with. Below average people can use AI to get average results.

Above average people can also use it to get average results. Which can actually be useful. For many tasks and usecases, the good enough threshold can actually be quite low.

Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#79

Post by recursive »

lubujackson wrote: post #67
stillpointlab wrote: post #29

This mirrors insights from Andrew Ng's recent AI startup talk [1]. I recall he mentions in this video that the new advice they are giving to founders is to throw away prototypes when they pivot instead of building onto a core foundation. This is because of the effects described in the article. He also gives some provisional numbers (see the section "Rapid Prototyping and Engineering" and slides ~10:30) where he sugge…

Oo, the "pets vs. livestock" analogy really works better than the "craftsmen vs. slop-slinger" arguments. Because using an LLM doesn't mean you devalue well-crafted or understandable results. But it does indicate a significant shift in how you view the code itself. It is more about the emotional attachment to code vs. code as a means to an end.

I don't think it's exactly emotional attachment. It's the likelihood that I'm going to get an escalated support ticket caused by this particular piece of slop/artisanally-crafted functionality.

Re: AI is a floor raiser, not a ceiling raiser

#80

Post by djeastm »

exasperaited wrote: post #45
throe23486 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read this as interloper. What's an extraloper?

Opposite of "inter-" is "intra-". Intraloper, weirdly enough, is a word in use.

So we have also have the word "extra", but oddly the word "exter" is left out.

I'm exter mad about that.

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