Live data from Hacker News

AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

ludic.mataroa.blog

71–80 of 320 posts

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies with projects that are doing well don't try to hire consultants who specialized in saving failing projects. No company with a good AI strategy is going to go to the Hermit Tech website where text written in Ye Olde Font explains that they'll use ancient techniques from the 80s and 90s to make your software work and thinks, "These are the right people for our AI job!" These people are trying to carve out a n…

Christ they are profiting off of reaction, they're like Trump but even worse since at least Trump is not stupid enough to be anti-technology.

Tale as old as time. Revolution has been merchandised. The action and the reaction, they all have suppliers, which often turn out to be the same entities supplying to both sides.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#72
post #65

This part toward the end of the article resonated with me: > If you’re being asked to review huge volumes of terrible AI code, just assume that the organisation is going to burn you out and fire you. You will not convince the person drowning you in 2000 line PRs to stop. Start looking for a new job as if you have already been fired. I have seen this happen many times now I suspect we will see this phenomenon more and…

I'm in this quote and I don't like it.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#73
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read the footnote, they follow up to say they've rejected 100% of the AI projects brought to them. Go to their home page and one of their consulting selling points is recovering struggling projects. One of their front-page selling points is that they use "ancient techniques" from books written prior to the year 2000, because presumably everything newer than that is bad? > For non-executive management who might…

it's not surprising as LLM's will generally fail you when you yourself don't know what you want. it's surprising how many people and organizations just blunder around scribbling code without clear goals in mind - for such people LLM's are a net negative as they will just end up with even more scribbles and no hope to make sense of it all.

[dead]

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#75
post #33
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do yo have links handy for AI-assisted engineering going positively? The case I have on my mind of it going negatively is this recent Ford case [1] It's not that I believe it couldn't go positively, of course. [1] Ford rehires human engineers after AI fails to match quality checks https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgrkd41n2v9o

That Ford story was really misleading. It wasn't about modern LLMs, and the way it was reported implied that Ford had fired and then hired people but if you read closer that wasn't necessarily the case at all - it sounded more like they were re-hiring people who had retired because they needed expertise that had left the company. You need to get through the Bloomberg paywall: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2…

I think it's not clear from the article why they left (e.g. could be anything from retirement to going to work at another firm/contracting to being fired to switching careers), and likely it's going to be a mix, plus not all were previous Ford employees. Similarly the "AI" isn't clearly defined (but like you I would be surprised if it were LLMs). I suspect though why the article exists (and a possible source of your downvotes) is signalling against "AI", which if Ford wants more expert employees (given their issues), is something Ford wants to present.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#76
post #26

This is excellent. > Employees don’t use internal chatbots because companies tend to have low-quality documentation and an LLM is not psychic – it can only know things that have been written down and made accessible. Then later: > In one extreme case, I have seen an executive confess that they had never even used ChatGPT or any AI tool in their life, immediately after producing a technical strategy for an organisatio…

[deleted]

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#79
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read the footnote, they follow up to say they've rejected 100% of the AI projects brought to them. Go to their home page and one of their consulting selling points is recovering struggling projects. One of their front-page selling points is that they use "ancient techniques" from books written prior to the year 2000, because presumably everything newer than that is bad? > For non-executive management who might…

Yeah, the "ancient techniques" thing is a joke.

Yeah, and how and what someone jokes about will often tell you something about what and how they think. I don't think they'll literally just ignore everything after that point, but I do expect that they are going to tend towards an old-school approach.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#80
post #16

> All of the AI projects we have observed as a team are failing. Every single one – we have seen 0% success in a year and a half, not only amongst projects we have been asked to participate in, but even within projects that we have observed in passing while doing totally unrelated work. That's got to be hyperbole, which blows out their credibility. They chose to say 'AI' rather than, for example, LLM, or Transformer…

> And who hasn't seen productivity gains from more established AI technology You have to be very careful about claiming productivity gains. There may have been some instances of gains in a specific part of a workflow but does it slow down others or result in overall gains is yet to be empirically measured and validated. We’re seeing metrics like more lines of code, better unit tests, documentation, faster PRs etc. bu…

These things have been "good" for a while now. And yet, companies like Amazon and Microsoft aren't showing significant improvement in their most visible products.

If it's not obviously showing for the all-in, AI-selling companies, I simply don't expect serious improvement for everyone else.

They're undeniably neat tools, but so far there's no observable evidence that they're transformative.

Post reply on HN