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Ask HN: Anyone else disillusioned with "AI experts" in their team?
51–60 of 63 posts
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else disillusioned with "AI experts" in their team?
#52The entire AI ecosystem is a giant hype bubble. I dont really think it matters much if your team understands AI, the bubble is going to pop either way.
I guess the question is if it's like the crypto-bubble, where theres no real value left in the end (haven't heard of a good use for those ASICs). Or more like the dot-com bubble where fiber-cable installed is still valuable without pets.com around. But since I wasn't really around for either of those ... ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
I have no special knowledge but i lean towards more like dot com. AI occasionally does useful things, but nobody really knows what to do with it so people are trying everything and seeing what sticks. Eventually the money will dry up and a lot will fail. However i think chat-gpt-esque things are not going away (the fibre-cable in this metaphor).
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else disillusioned with "AI experts" in their team?
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Shouldn’t be a political play then. In a good market I’d say you should look around. In this market, keep your head down and get some experience.
In my experience, politics can happen at any sized company. e.g. I've worked at firms with 300,000 people and 150 people. The smaller company had MORE politics in some ways. Or as a manager of mine in Hong Kong once said: "In Chinese there is a saying: if there are 3 people then there will be politics"
Fair enough. I guess my take is more that a CEO of a 100 person company should know who the best person for the role is. The CEO of a 100,000 person company is less likely.
I’ve seen what you’ve seen too though: companies that haven’t grown past everyone thinking they report to the CEO turning into gossip factories.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else disillusioned with "AI experts" in their team?
#54About like 6-7 years I was staying in an Airbnb where the host was an Indian doctor, and one of his other guests also happened to be a coder. One evening we were sitting at the shared dining table, and the host brought up if someone could make an "AI medical app"..
He didn't say what the app would do or offer, he just said "an AI medical app hasn't been done before", he just wanted it to be "AI"
Before that I had people ask me if I could help them make a website, or an app, and they wouldn't say what the app/website would actually do, just that it would be nice to have one.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else disillusioned with "AI experts" in their team?
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ord…
Oh actually yeah that's true. You have correctly out-nitpicked my nitpick lol. But at that point i feel like we are getting close to "everything that isn't a perfect Turing-machine is somewhat-stochastic" ;) Edit: someone corrected me above, it does seem to matter more then I thought
> someone corrected me above, it does seem to matter more then I thought
if you llm agent takes different decisions from the same prompt, then you have to deal with it
1) your benchmarks become stochastic so you need multiple samples to get confidence for your AB testing
2) if your system assumes at least once completion you have to implement single record and replay so you dont get multiple rollout of with different actions
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else disillusioned with "AI experts" in their team?
#56This is pervasive right now.
I’m at a company, on an AI team. I’ve been in this role for a year and we’ve not delivered a single AI… anything. Worse, we had a failed launch midway through the year and instead of re-evaluating our focus, are doubling down. New people have been brought onboard and the culture has completely shifted.
If anyone is looking for someone with ~20 years of SWE experience who really, really wants to deeply understand internal processes, how they relate to the company’s product and bottom line, and implement with an eye toward efficiency and automation… let me know.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else disillusioned with "AI experts" in their team?
#57This is the nature of tech now (perhaps the whole time due to being a relatively "new" field). Most people don't have the slightest clue what they're doing beyond their ability to parrot buzzwords. Mean? Sure. Reality? You betcha. It's incredibly rare these days to encounter truly competent professionals. Most are just hoping the guy below them doesn't know enough to spot their shortfalls and speak up. This aligns sh…
On the bright side, the corporate IT security team has someone they can look down on now.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else disillusioned with "AI experts" in their team?
#58Wait until you find out that's it's not just AI, or even tech. Everywhere you look, you'll find groups, businesses and organizations being run mostly by people who are just winging it and one or two who actually know what they're doing. Ever seen a cashier struggle to calculate change, or had a doctor misdiagnose? Something something Pareto Principle.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else disillusioned with "AI experts" in their team?
#59This is pervasive right now. I’m at a company, on an AI team. I’ve been in this role for a year and we’ve not delivered a single AI… anything. Worse, we had a failed launch midway through the year and instead of re-evaluating our focus, are doubling down. New people have been brought onboard and the culture has completely shifted. If anyone is looking for someone with ~20 years of SWE experience who really, really wa…
Truly understanding the computer has been detrimental for a career in tech for a while now. The jobs where that understanding is actually required are very few and filled by personal and academic affiliation.
Right now this understanding is a liability. Having someone able to do reality checks can only slow down a team and expose everyone else.
I don't think we will ever see deep knowledge of computers and ability to develop non trivial software independently being as valued as it was by the job market from 1990 to 2020. That was a fluke caused by a confluence of factors that won't repeat.
The edge of the tech hype has already moved on. We can at best look forward to a normalization to back where things were, remuneration wise, to late 20th century, at a much lower level of demand.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else disillusioned with "AI experts" in their team?
#60This is the nature of tech now (perhaps the whole time due to being a relatively "new" field). Most people don't have the slightest clue what they're doing beyond their ability to parrot buzzwords. Mean? Sure. Reality? You betcha. It's incredibly rare these days to encounter truly competent professionals. Most are just hoping the guy below them doesn't know enough to spot their shortfalls and speak up. This aligns sh…
This is 100% true in tech.
It's also true in any industry that has high turnover. The people that fake it the best rapidly rise to the top and then just before their reputation pops, they move somewhere else and run the same routine all over again.