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A new AI winter is coming?

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Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#191

Post by krupan »

marknutter wrote: post #153
beachtaxidriver wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true, but do you really trust the AI generated + Nurse Review output more than Organic Nurse generated? In my experience, management types use the fact that AI generated + Nurse Review is faster to push a higher quota of forms generated per hour. Eventually, from fatigue or boredom, the human in the loop just ends up being a rubber stamper. Would you trust this with your own or your children's life? The human in…

These same questions could be asked about self driving cars, but they've been shown to be consistently safer drivers than humans. If this guy is getting consistently better results from ai+human than it is from just humans, what would it matter if the former results in errors given the latter results in more and costs more?

TFA's while point is that there is no easy way to tell if LLM output is correct or not. Driving mistakes provide instant feedback if the output of whatever AI is driving is correct or not. Bad comparison.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#193

Post by bitwize »

Eric S. Raymond (yes, that ESR; insert long-winded DonHopkins rant, extensively cross-referenced to his own USENET and UNIX-HATERS mailing list postings, about what a horrible person "Eric the Flute" is) reports a shortening of time to implement his latest project from weeks to hours. He says the advantages of LLMs in the programming space are yet to truly unfold, because they not only let you do things faster, they let you try things you wouldn't have started otherwise because it'd be too much of a time/effort commitment.

Assuming these claims are even partially true, we'd be stupid—at the personal and societal level—not to avail ourselves of these tools and reap the productivity gains. So I don't see AI going away any time soon. Nor will it be a passing fad like Krugman assumed the internet would be. We'd have to course-correct on its usage, but it truly is a game changer.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#194

Post by paganel »

_se wrote: post #150
paganel wrote: post #19

I've been reading about this supposed AI winter for at least 5 years by now, and in the meantime any AI-related stock has gone 10x and more.

5 years? That's so interesting bro. Tell us more about what your thoughts on ChatGPT were back in 2020. Go ahead and double check when the LLM craze started and perhaps reconsider making things up.

May 2018: AI winter is well on its way (piekniewski.info) [1]

January 2020: Researchers: Are we on the cusp of an ‘AI winter’? (bbc.co.uk) [2]

I'm sure you can easily find more. Felt good to be called a "bro", though, made me feel younger.

[1] HN discussion, almost 500 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17184054

[2] HN discussion on BBC article, ~110 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22069204

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#195

Post by saltcured »

bloppe wrote: post #148
baq wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> maybe even 3.1 years would have been considered magic I vividly remember sitting there for literally hours talking to a computer on launch day, it was a very short night. This feeling of living in the future has not left me since, it's got quieter, but it's still there. It's still magic after those three years, perhaps even more so. It wasn't supposed to work this well for decades! and yet.

I think you're missing the point of "AI winter". It's not about how good the products are now. It's about how quickly the products are improving and creating the potential for profit. That's what drives investment. 3 things we know about the AI revolution in 2025: - LLMs are amazing, but they have reached a plateau. AGI is not within reach. - LLM investment has sacrificed many hundreds of billions of dollars, much of…

Many technologies plateau, but we don't say they all have winters. Terrestrial radio winter? Television winter? Automobile winter? Air travel winter? Nuclear power comes close in terms of its tarnished image and reluctance to reinvest.

I personally believe contemporary AI is over-hyped, but I cannot say with confidence that it is going to lead to a similar winter as the last time. It seems like today's products satisfy enough users to remain as a significant area, even if it doesn't greatly expand...

The only way I could see it fizzling as a product category is if it turns out it is not economically feasible to operate a sustainable service. Will users pay a fair price to keep the LLM datacenters running, without speculative investment subsidies?

The other aspect of the winter is government investment, rather than commercial. What could the next cycle of academic AI research look like? E.g. exploration that needs to happen in grant-funded university labs instead of venture-funded companies?

The federal funding picture seems unclear, but that's true across the board right now for reasons that have nothing to do with AI per se.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#196

Post by [deleted] »

frotaur wrote: post #35
gishh wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> something fundamental has changed that enables a computer to pretty effectively understand natural language. You understand how the tech works right? It's statistics and tokens. The computer understands nothing. Creating "understanding" would be a breakthrough. Edit: I wasn't trying to be a jerk. I sincerely wasn't. I don't "understand" how LLMs "understand" anything. I'd be super pumped to learn that bit. I don't…

It astonishes me how people can make categorical judgements on things as hard to define as 'understanding'. I would say that, except for the observable and testable performance, what else can you say about understanding? It is a fact that LLMs are getting better at many tasks. From their performance, they seem to have an understanding of say python. The mechanistic way this understanding arises is different than huma…

[deleted]

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#197

Post by l1ng0 »

reducesuffering wrote: post #160
svaha1728 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a music blog, yes! Now go try to rewrite the firmware for your car.

95% of the work engineers on this forum do are high level apps like a "music blog", and not car firmware...

And then there's the small % doing music firmware :)

(and no, I don't find LLMs much use on this)

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#198

Post by hackingonempty »

cmiles8 wrote: post #31

LLMs are an amazing advancement. The tech side of things is very impressive. Credit where credit is due. Where the current wave all falls apart is on the financials. None of that makes any sense and there’s no obvious path forward. Folks say handwavy things like “oh they’ll just sell ads” but even a cursory analysis shows that math doesn’t ad up relative to the sums of money being invested at the moment. Tech wise I’…

Most of the researchers outside big tech only have access to a handful of consumer GPUs at best. They are under a lot of pressure to invent efficient algorithms. The cost coming down by orders of magnitude seems like a good bet.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#199

Post by ako »

bloppe wrote: post #148
baq wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> maybe even 3.1 years would have been considered magic I vividly remember sitting there for literally hours talking to a computer on launch day, it was a very short night. This feeling of living in the future has not left me since, it's got quieter, but it's still there. It's still magic after those three years, perhaps even more so. It wasn't supposed to work this well for decades! and yet.

I think you're missing the point of "AI winter". It's not about how good the products are now. It's about how quickly the products are improving and creating the potential for profit. That's what drives investment. 3 things we know about the AI revolution in 2025: - LLMs are amazing, but they have reached a plateau. AGI is not within reach. - LLM investment has sacrificed many hundreds of billions of dollars, much of…

I think of LLMs like brains or CPUs. They're the core that does the processing, but needs to be embedded in a bigger system to be useful. Even if LLMs plateau, there will be a lot of development and improvement in the systems that use these LLM. We will be seeing a lot of innovation going forward, especially in systems that will be able to monetize these LLMs.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#200

Post by int_19h »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #26
agubelu wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that what the author means? "it still requires genuine expertise to spot the hallucinations" "works very well if you do know what you are doing"

But it can work well even if you don't know what you are doing (or don't look at the impl). For example, build a TUI or GUI with Claude Code while only giving it feedback on the UX/QA side. I've done it many times despite 20 years of software experience. -- Some stuff just doesn't justify me spending my time credentializing in the impl. Hallucinations that lead to code that doesn't work just get fixed. Most code I wr…

> Hallucinations that lead to code that doesn't work just get fixed

How about hallucinations that lead to code that doesn't work outside of the specific conditions that happen to be true in your dev environment? Or, even more subtly, hallucinations that lead to code which works but has critical security vulnerabilities?

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