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The Eternal Sloptember

geohot.github.io

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Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#131

Post by CTDOCodebases »

fontain wrote: post #6

We all remember cryptocurrency. Everyone in tech proclaimed fiat was dead, every office buzzed with talk of every possible way that cryptocurrency could be used, billions of dollars flooded in to projects losing money hand over fist. The cynics reacted to the froth with outright rejection of the idea. And today… cryptocurrency exists, it has some use, but it didn’t take over the world, it didn’t kill fiat, it was use…

It’s a matter of timeframes too.

Cryptocurrency is more popular and intertwined with the financial system than it ever was so while the claim isn’t currently true it doesn’t mean it won’t be on a long enough timeframe.

If you are old enough then you would be aware that similar claims were made about email but only one country that I know of (the Netherlands) no longer processes mail. Still if we had to guess I would say that we are still early and email will replace the worlds postal systems.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#132

Post by parineum »

bluegatty wrote: post #52
nilirl wrote: post #38

I agree that I can write better code than an agent. But it can write working code much faster than I can. And in a lot of cases, unfortunately, faster beats better.

At a granular level, it's almost guaranteed that you cannot write better code than an agent. Agents now are writing extremely consistent, normalized canonical code, that usually compiles the first time. Right out of the 'textbook'. For what it's trying to do - it writes nearly perfect code. The only thing you could nominally disagree with are some of the conventions and idioms. It 'writes a perfect novel, in perfect…

> the quality of the output is the quality of your guidance

I wish you just started with the copout.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#133

Post by ungreased0675 »

andrewflnr wrote: post #31
fontain wrote: post #6

We all remember cryptocurrency. Everyone in tech proclaimed fiat was dead, every office buzzed with talk of every possible way that cryptocurrency could be used, billions of dollars flooded in to projects losing money hand over fist. The cynics reacted to the froth with outright rejection of the idea. And today… cryptocurrency exists, it has some use, but it didn’t take over the world, it didn’t kill fiat, it was use…

I wish people would stop comparing AI with cryptocurrency. The hype/perception was the only thing that was similar between them. The fundamental usefulness of the respective technologies are not comparable.

One of the reasons it gets compared with crypto is because the same people who were all in on crypto schemes are now all in on AI schemes.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#134

Post by lazide »

latentsea wrote: post #67
sodafountan wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I don't have anything important to say other than I 100% agree with this comment. AI in its current state is akin to Stack Overflow and Google on steroids, but from my experience, it doesn't do well building out full-scale applications other than perhaps some initial scaffolding. If I were to use it against a legacy, rather poorly written codebase, where the code may be hard to understand without some in-depth a…

> Yes, I don't have anything important to say other than I 100% agree with this comment. AI in its current state is akin to Stack Overflow and Google on steroids, but from my experience, it doesn't do well building out full-scale applications other than perhaps some initial scaffolding. We're currently using it to build out a full-scale application. It does as well as you care to coax into doing tbh. You have to inve…

In my experience, you’ll eventually hit a context window issue and it will just start spouting gibberish/doing wrong things, and nothing will significantly improve it. But hey, maybe it’s improved.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#135

Post by cheevly »

blobbers wrote: post #30

I don't think LeCun is saying they won't be able to program. I think he says we won't hit AGI. Programming does not require AGI; it's a pretty specific skill! -- I think this article is COPE, if I'm being quite honest. I thought of putting cute analogies, like the C programmers saying the Python and Javascript programmers are not "hardcore" enough... but the truth should be obvious to anyone using LLMs effectively. -…

This is my experience. Though ice been writing LLM harnesses, agents, tooling, etc for 5 years now and believe it requires several hundred hours of experience before understanding how to consistently outperform at scale.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#136

Post by mreid »

jhanschoo wrote: post #80

I don't think Geohot has a good idea about LeCun and Hutter's views on the limitations of LLMs. I think that on abstract, textual domains, LLMs perform superbly, and they would agree. I am not too well-informed about LeCun and Hutter's views either, but I think that: LeCun thinks that LLMs are a bad fit for AI that understands the physical, dynamical systems that we inhabit, and that understanding this is necessary f…

From the article:

> Without fully endorsing all their ideas, I’m now in the LeCun/Marcus camp on LLMs.

I'm pretty sure he means "Yann LeCun and Gary Marcus" not "Yann LeCun and Marcus Hutter".

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#137

Post by forgetfreeman »

bad_username wrote: post #127
forgetfreeman wrote: post #105

"It’s definitely a better Google for most searches" This is dangerously incorrect. AI summaries of search results consistently return incorrect information and grossly oversimplified and thus misleading summaries, neither of which are detectable unless one either has prior domain knowledge or spends time drilling into search results to validate the AI output.

My experience with ChatGPT as a search engine - it is totally paranoid about checking and re-checking its answers by referencing them in multiple places (I usually read its thinking output). I have not seen an outright hallucination for at least a year. (It is of course a different situation with Google's "AI summary" which is wrong half of the time.)

Ironically I quit using ChatGPT a while back. I decided to run it through it's paces and asked it some rather detailed questions about a range of topics that I have significant domain knowledge on. Without exception the responses I got back where glibly superficial to the point the responses were almost totally devoid of meaningful information. The AI summary on Google search results is so bad it represents an assault on reason.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#138

Post by readthenotes1 »

There's a time and a place for assembly language programming. Of course, I knew someone who would say there's a time and a place for machine language programming (improved it by reprogramming a device by flipping the 17 switches on the front panel)

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#140

Post by latentsea »

nixgeek wrote: post #51
bluegatty wrote: post #29

" Agents cannot program, and it’s taking longer and longer to realize that they can’t. They are a highly sophisticated statistical model designed to mimic the distribution of programming" In other words - they can program, and probably better than you. I don't like being too critical but this is a really superficial post - as if either 'AI is a Software Engineer - or - It must be Fraud' It's an extremely powerful too…

It’s not like the author is a noob. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz In fact, he’s done several things that are truly hard, and has a well-deserved engineering reputation.

Well he doesn't write CRUD apps, which plenty of us do, and with a decent harness, agents can do decent enough work on them.
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