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Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

blog.jakesaunders.dev

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Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#271

Post by eloisant »

djeastm wrote: post #239
_doctor_love wrote: post #153

This might sound like snark, but I truly don’t mean it that way. I think what’s interesting about AI, and why there’s so much conversation, is that in order to be a good user of AI, you have to really understand software development. All the people I work with who are getting the most value out of using AI to deliver software are people who are already very high-skilled engineers, and the more years of real experienc…

Any thoughts on what the next generation of software devs is going to look like without as much manual experience?

When C arrived, programmers wonder how software devs would look like when they won't have assembly experience.

Then the same happened with languages that managed memory.

And with IDE that could refactor your code in a click and autocomplete API calls.

And with Stack Overflow where people copy/pasted code they didn't understand.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#272

Post by Insanity »

Yes, and I'm increasingly bored of talking about 'the internet'. AI definitely plays a part in that, I don't want to deal with randomly generated articles or content. But even regular content, like YouTube shorts, are unhealthy for the human brain.

I'm currently reading non-things by Byung-Chul Han, which is an interesting exploration of internet's impact on humanity/humans. Haven't finished it yet, but enjoying it so far.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#274

Post by peterlk »

Chinjut wrote: post #171
peterlk wrote: post #71

Modern AI is a miracle. The math that makes it work is beautiful and really impressive. For example, if you wanted to map all knowledge on earth, how would you do it? AI answers that question by building a high dimensional vector space of embeddings, and traversing that space moves you through a topology of basically every concept that humans have. Or another thought; why is it that a stochastic parrot can solve logi…

Why is it that a stochastic parrot can solve logic puzzles consistently and accurately?

Attention is all you need…?

The short answer, as far as I’m aware, is that no one really knows. The longer answer is that we have a lot of partial answers that, in my mind, basically boil down to: model architectures draw a walk through the high dimensional vector space of concepts, and we’ve tuned them to land on the right answer. The fact that they do so consistently says something about how we encode logic in language and the effectiveness of these embedding/latent spaces.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#275

Post by selimthegrim »

buzarchitect wrote: post #24
marginalia_nu wrote: post #10

I think it's kinda double whammy, one the one hand working with AI leaves a lot of 5-15 minute breaks perfect for squeezing in a comment on a HN thread, while also supplanting the sort of work that would typically lead to interesting ideas or projects, substituting it with work that isn't that interesting to talk about (or at least hasn't been thought about for long enough to have interesting things to say).

This resonates. I build products on top of LLMs, and the most interesting work I do has nothing to do with AI; it's designing structured methodologies, figuring out what data to feed in before a conversation starts, deciding what to do when the model gives a weak answer. The AI is plumbing. But nobody wants to hear about prompt calibration or pipeline architecture. They want to hear "I replaced my whole team with age…

Now do it with knowledge or causal graphs

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#276

Post by elbasti »

thethirdone wrote: post #186
elbasti wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is wrong. AI uses ~4% of the US grid, and projections are that it will grow to 10%+ in the next 6 years. And most of that new capacity will be natural gas. That increase would basically whipe out the reduction in CO2 emissions the USA has had since 2018.

Compare that to ~30% of all energy use for transportation. So approximately 40%*4% = 1.6% vs 30%. I find your correction to be more wrong that the initial statement. > And most of that new capacity will be natural gas. That increase would basically whipe out the reduction in CO2 emissions the USA has had since 2018. Emissions in 2018 were ~5250M metric ton and in 2024 it was 4750M. That is a reduction of 10% total em…

> Compare that to ~30% of all energy use for transportation. So approximately 40%*4% = 1.6% vs 30%. I find your correction to be more wrong that the initial statement.

I don't follow. The comparison is 30% of energy use for transportation vs 4% for AI, and soon 30% for transportation vs 10% for AI.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#277

Post by pesus »

overgard wrote: post #89

I'm like 99% convinced that most of the AI conversation upvotes at this point is astroturfing. I just don't see the correlation with the sentiment I get from talking to people in the real world (mostly negative AI sentiment) vs what I see here

I'm convinced that the majority of people hyping up AI don't actually interact with many people in real life, let alone people that aren't software engineers.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#278

Post by keybored »

_doctor_love wrote: post #153

This might sound like snark, but I truly don’t mean it that way. I think what’s interesting about AI, and why there’s so much conversation, is that in order to be a good user of AI, you have to really understand software development. All the people I work with who are getting the most value out of using AI to deliver software are people who are already very high-skilled engineers, and the more years of real experienc…

A post supposedly about being bored of talking about AI. But psyche, it’s the same AI talking points. And psyche, the top comment is the same sentiment about how the truly skilled will finally have their time to shine.

I don’t know if it’s the Universe delivering this farce or it’s the emergent LLM Singularity.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#279

Post by peterlk »

jakelsaunders94 wrote: post #192
peterlk wrote: post #71

Modern AI is a miracle. The math that makes it work is beautiful and really impressive. For example, if you wanted to map all knowledge on earth, how would you do it? AI answers that question by building a high dimensional vector space of embeddings, and traversing that space moves you through a topology of basically every concept that humans have. Or another thought; why is it that a stochastic parrot can solve logi…

This is a really intersting take, and maybe shows that I haven't been thorough enough with my reading. My guess is that the deep technical articles are few and far between and the higher level 'hot takes' are what fills the room. Do you have any recommendations for interesting places to start?

My favorites are the micrograd series by Andrej Karpathy on youtube [0], and “Why Deep Learning Works Unreasonably Well” [1]

The greats on youtube are also worth watching: 3B1B, numberphile, etc.

[0] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAqhIrjkxbuWI23v9cThsA9Gv... [1] https://youtu.be/qx7hirqgfuU?si=8zmrbazuvnz379gk

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#280

Post by solenoid0937 »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #270
_doctor_love wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious reply to this one: I truly don’t find it any more scary than what’s already taken place many times in human history. We have hundreds and thousands of years of history showing humans committing atrocities against each other well before the advent of computers, or even the introduction of electricity. So while the tool may become so ubiquitous that there’s no option not to engage with it, I don’t think it real…

> Serious reply to this one: I truly don’t find it any more scary than what’s already taken place many times in human history Spoken like someone who thinks they are going to be insulated from the fallout

Many of us are fine with the fallout because we understand the net benefit to humanity is going to be similar to the previous waves of automation.

Sure, it might hurt me personally. I'm not selfish enough to put that over what will be an incredibly empowering development for our species.

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