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Ask HN: Anyone else disillusioned with "AI experts" in their team?

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Re: Ask HN: Anyone else disillusioned with "AI experts" in their team?

#11

Post by illwrks »

randomgermanguy wrote: post #5
illwrks wrote: post #2

I work in house and had a similar AI agency day over the last few months. I came to the same observations; lots of experts not much expertise. I think my wider team are on par with their ability and understanding so we now can sift through the BS a bit easier. Nod, smile, accept that no one has a clear understanding.

But why do you think this is? Like is it just the money/status that comes with calling yourself an "AI"-expert ?

I try and frame things from an agency perspective.

Agencies are like a production line, they need raw materials coming in; clients with cash, armed with opportunities, scraps of ideas or formed briefs to be worked on. They need this business so they can generate the output and keep the lights on.

AI is everywhere and everything for a lot of people now. You can be sure that Exec’s are asking their teams how are we using AI, how is it helping the business grow etc. However there’s so much AI news, it’s moving so quick and seeping into everything that difficult (from a naïeve client point of view) to know what’s fantasy and what’s reality.

So my perception is… agencies do the sifting and maintain visibility of what is real or not because they have to start drumming up future sales and business, and AI is hot right now.

Perhaps they have some training in CoPilot etc, or with some experience of creating a model, maybe they have integrated something small with something big. It may even be that being ann angency they have a more open way of working that a corporate does, and that’s the sell.

Anyway, the sales teams will proclaim themselves experts because they have to sell.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else disillusioned with "AI experts" in their team?

#13

Post by zippyman55 »

I learned a huge amount from my team members, and they were usually smarter than I was. So, sure, I occasionally corrected them and impressed them, but all the bread crumbs they threw out, I gobbled up and learned a ton. But, they never said stupid stuff! (Ok, maybe about social events, but they were geeks). When team members spout off erroneous stuff and it is not "occasionally" you have to question what you are going to be learning from your co-workers. So, your whole team may be inferior and contribute little to your learning and growth. This extends to management and the decisions they make regarding AI.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else disillusioned with "AI experts" in their team?

#14

Post by illwrks »

randomgermanguy wrote: post #6
illwrks wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real talent is building this stuff, everyone else is just part of the marketing effort.

What do you mean with "building this stuff"? As in building LLMs, or building applications on-top of them.

Building LLM’s. In my mind those engineers are the ones that have more intimate knowledge of the data and input, and can create the LLM’s for their specific tasks. Everyone else is a customer to them.

I can tell you how a house is built, that doesn’t make me a builder that makes me informed and opinionated. I can decorate my house however I like but im not a painter/decorator or a tradesman. I can assemble some ikea furniture, but I’m not a carpenter. I’m a consumer and I can tweak something to my liking but I can’t do anything significant.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else disillusioned with "AI experts" in their team?

#15

Post by randomgermanguy »

nis0s wrote: post #12

Maybe this is a joke, there’s a lot of talent out there. But if you’re not kidding, start looking for a job somewhere else on the dl, this ship isn’t fit to steer.

Not a joke. I'm still a student, like half a year away from finishing my masters, so switching jobs at this point feels bit risky/early? Maybe im wrong though

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else disillusioned with "AI experts" in their team?

#16

Post by brailsafe »

Eh, probably overthinking it, let it matter if it matters, if it's your liability, but otherwise take the opportunity for what it is. Focus on what you're there to do. The purpose of any of it is to bring money in, and if that happens.

Early on in my career I was hyper-fixated on building features correctly at this particular company, according to what I thought was a proper way to build websites. I was probably right, but my job wasn't to be right, my job was to get things done in a certain period of time according to whatever people who controlled the money at the company thought was important, not what a nerd would necessarily care about.

When you're in school or just graduated, you're basically qualified to start learning (outside academia) and it's important to pay attention to what other people value, then do your best within that until you have the power to determine what's worth valuing.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else disillusioned with "AI experts" in their team?

#17

Post by sohojoe »

randomgermanguy wrote: post #9
incomingpain wrote: post #7

>We had an internal-workshop led by our internal AI-team (mostly just LLMs), and had the horrible realisation that no one in that team actually knows what the term "AI" even means, or how a language model works. I'm the AI expert for my org. Everyone else is more or less opposed to AI. >One senior-dev (team-lead also) tried to explain to me that AI is a subfield of machine-learning, and always stochastic in nature (s…

> machine learning is the sub field of AI. That's what I tried to explain then as well, and i brought up stuff like path-finding algorithms for route-finding (A*/heuristic-search) as an more old-school AI part, which didn't really land I think. > Not really stochastic as far as I know. The whole random seed and temperature thing is a bit of a grey area for my full understanding. Let alone the topk, top p, etc. I ofte…

yeah, stochastic is there because we give up control of order of operations for speed

so the order in which floating-point additions happen is not fixed because of how threads are scheduled, how reductions are structured (tree reduction vs warp shuffle vs block reduction)

Floating-point addition is not associative (because of rounding), so: - (a + b) + c can differ slightly from a + (b + c). - Different execution orders → slightly different results → tiny changes in logits → occasionally different argmax token.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone else disillusioned with "AI experts" in their team?

#20

Post by echelon_musk »

randomgermanguy wrote: post #15
nis0s wrote: post #12

Maybe this is a joke, there’s a lot of talent out there. But if you’re not kidding, start looking for a job somewhere else on the dl, this ship isn’t fit to steer.

Not a joke. I'm still a student, like half a year away from finishing my masters, so switching jobs at this point feels bit risky/early? Maybe im wrong though

Halve is a verb, half is the noun you were looking for.
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