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Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

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Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#91

Post by pjc50 »

jdmoreira wrote: post #63

It’s sad that we ended up here. I can’t fathom that young people aren’t excited about technology anymore. I was young once and naive, and I read a bunch of sci-fi. I could never have imagined having these LLMs or coding agents during my lifetime. Never. It was unthinkable to me that something like this could even happen. And yet, here we are. Even if you think it’s just a statistical trick, you should still be blown…

> But now we can’t even get them excited about technology?

> What have we done?

Arguably this transition happened a lot earlier; the first half of the 20th century was the time for pure techno-optimism, then somewhere between nuclear weapons, global warming, and reporting like The Silent Spring people realized that there were downsides. Medicine had its peak with antibiotics, the edge blunted by the thalidomide disaster, and now sits in a complex web of paranoia and propaganda.

It's not enough for technology to be "cool" in an apolitical vacuum. People have to believe that there will be benefits for them. And the big pitch from the AI companies is the "great replacement" of all white collar jobs with AI. No wonder they're upset.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#92

Post by pjmlp »

paganel wrote: post #82
lnsru wrote: post #34

Actual intelligence is useless when decision makers send new weekly AI rules to be better employees. It’s race to the bottom. Race to an endless technical debt. Some companies will implode when codebases stop being manageable. The small minority will thrive. But majority not. I see it used in hardware world. Clever dudes without prior experience with software craft working Python scripts, automate tests, control hard…

> internal memo requiring all code to be produced from prompts That is absolutely insane. Thing is I can honestly believe that it happens, which makes it even more insane.

This is basically the next step of all the AI trainings and hacktons that many of us are now required to take part into, with KPI metrics on how each one is using their tokens.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#94

Post by almostdeadguy »

ungreased0675 wrote: post #68
Jtarii wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies that use AI well will replace the companies that use AI badly. There is no world in which AI is not used extensively in all employment going forward.

Right now LLMs are heavily subsidized. When that ends, the actual cost of the service may exceed its usefulness for many use cases.

I'm less sure of the fact that ending subsidized token consumption (in isolation) will happen and change this. I think we've seen this play out before with other tech companies where discounting early use ends up entrenching demand and allowing the company to build larger and more efficient infrastructure.

I'm slightly _more_ convinced (still not all that strongly) that the rising cost of memory and chips, data center construction that gets outpaced by computing demand, increasing energy costs, and low switching costs for customers will force the model labs to make changes that increase the barrier to entry (either via higher pricing, more restrictive rate limiting, etc.). or force their customers into longer term commitments.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#95

Post by [deleted] »

dchftcs wrote: post #33

Unsurprising he'd be cheered for saying what they wanted to hear. But perhaps whether or not his stance is correct, the students needed to hear this. They (we) have to believe human brains still have value and find a way out; for otherwise there'd be no point to try anymore.

[deleted]

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#96

Post by anonyfox »

Maybe I am in a minority position here, but despite me vibecoding for many months now (havent written a single line by hand and forced me todo so in the beginning), I still have my IDE open right next to Codex/CC and while the LLM is crucnching along and doing TDD loops I actually read whats created/changed and just sit with it judding if its only right on surface or semantically stupid underneath, essentially realtime-architecting and steering the code agents sometimes even midflight. so I do end up with these 200k+ LoC projects now since typing is lightning fast and 2/3 of my codebase is tests (I insist on regression tests after every steer) but in fact I perfectly know what each piece is doing and where it is, as well as the still not optimal parts and have a mental list for refactoring it later when I have time or a spare parallel agent can do it when feature work isn't crossing the same areas.

so I COULD take over by hand again like I did the decades before just fine, but I refuse to and instead play a codebase like a RTS - lots of stuff happening in parallel but at all times a understanding where is which thing going on and have the next steps in mind (sometimes directly queued as follow up instructions). For me vibecoding is a strict speedboost and literally gamified projects I work on, and the guardrails not only in textfiles but much more in executable code (linters, tests, dependency checks, playwright, ...) as feedback loops agents can spin on on their own made it all click together to the point my main bottleneck is stuff like the Codex app itself using high CPU and memory on my local mac.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#97

Post by aubanel »

This contrast is a bit sad. When Eric Schmidt told students the truth about the importance that AI will take in the future ("It will touch every profession, every lab..."), students booked him But the takes like "AI is not real/powerful, human intelligence is better", which are basically pleasant myopic lies, are cheered. Cope bias is powerful.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#98

Post by holtkam2 »

limflick wrote: post #69
bayindirh wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woz is a different kind of geek, appreciates the craft, and can sort out the cruft out of it. AI will be there, but it'll transform. When I say I don't use AI (i.e. LLMs, chat interfaces, agents and "autocomplete") for coding, research and whatnot, people label me as a luddite. The fact is I know how to use them. I test them from time to time. Occasionally these tools help. More often they hinder. "Resistance is futi…

Auto-complete on steroids, is still my favorite analogy for AI. I don't mean that in a negative way either. Autocomplete is very good, but that never stopped me from learning English grammar and spelling.

The way I think of it has evolved a lot over the last 5 years. At this point I think human brains probably do something analogous to next token prediction when we think. For all the hype, I think LLMs are actually more, not less, intelligent than that average person realizes. I think it’s legit, actual intelligence, not just “artificial” intelligence. That may be a hot take but it’s just my perception.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#99

Post by gruez »

remix2000 wrote: post #77
dchftcs wrote: post #33

Unsurprising he'd be cheered for saying what they wanted to hear. But perhaps whether or not his stance is correct, the students needed to hear this. They (we) have to believe human brains still have value and find a way out; for otherwise there'd be no point to try anymore.

I don't believe there will ever be any artificial intelligence, not with Markov chains (next token prediction), not otherwise. Especially not now when the current ML hype is already winding down. And yes this is a matter of belief since I don't think any science precludes agi from existing nor is there any reason to be sure it could someday materialize. I honestly would rather believe societal collapse hits us before…

>I don't believe there will ever be any artificial intelligence, ...

Sounds like you're talking about AGI, not AI. AI is here today.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#100

Post by jcgrillo »

master-lincoln wrote: post #39
weird-eye-issue wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to me... Maybe a ESL thing

"Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence " Could be interpreted as Steve himself cheered. Or it could be interpreted as the passive which is meant here but I would argue it should then say "Steve Wozniak cheered at after telling..." but I am not a native speaker. The original title "Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak got cheers, not boos, after telling students they 'all have AI — a…

Language is often ambiguous! You have to guess the intended meaning based on context clues. Unambiguously phrased language sounds less natural, because it is. Incidentally, this is part of what makes natural language such an awful fit for controlling a computer.
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