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AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

ludic.mataroa.blog

111–120 of 320 posts

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#111

I think AI is only part of the problem. The Multi-crisis ahead, makes it even less of a proposition to be in charge right now- and AI offers a "responsibility" cope out for already stressed to the limit human systems who have no solutions for the problems, because there often arent any. Take climate change- you have torrential rainfalls, sweping away whole city-parts in mountanous regions, in some enormous russian ro…

Does Europe even have burbs?

Russian roulette was a good pun. I don't know if it was intended.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#112
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.

The article is a fun read. There's a certain amount of hyperbole and subtext which may perhaps be unfamiliar to some readers.

But the point is fair. Where are the huge AI wins? Why haven't Anthropic and OpenAI produced a regular series of case studies where Company X did Fun AI Thing and incredible success ensued?

Why do these conversations always end up mentioning chat bots?

Why do c-suites seem to be full of people chasing trends instead of leading?

Does anyone remember what customers are, or are corporations aiming for Platonic abstraction, where business activities become ends in themselves, with no useful output?

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#114
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It hasn't worked out like that It seems quite premature to say that. We're 3 to 4 years into the LLM revolution and the rate of progress is still impressive. The recursive self-improvement aspect that is necessary for the actual singularity is something we're only really starting to get into this year. If the singularity is 5 years from now, that is still much sooner than most people (including me) previously expec…

> It seems quite premature to say that. We're 3 to 4 years into the LLM revolution and the rate of progress is still impressive. When we were 3 to 4 years into mobile phone revolution it was already abundantly clear that it's changing the way people leave. Ditto when mobile phones became smartphones, and for many other tech items we got in the past decades. As for LLMs... outside of a few precious professions you cou…

This isn't accurate. The first mobile phone came out in 1983. It took at least a decade before they started to become common.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#115
post #94

Most of us on some level felt confident that AI would completely revolutionise our society. The singularity made sense to me, at least. It hasn't worked out like that, but rather than accept the crushing reality of our mistake and take a second to re-evaluate, we've decided to LARP out the future we promised ourselves by crowbar-and-vaselineing AI into every crack and crevice we can find and loudly proclaiming progre…

> Most of us on some level felt confident that AI would completely revolutionise our society. Seriously? Maybe I’m just getting old, but having lived through the dot-com hype in the 1990s, the XML hype in the 2000s, and the cloud hype in the 2010s, this has been an utterly predictable hype cycle around AI. This does not mean that AI is completely useless. It will impact the world but not in the ways the snake oil sal…

> having lived through the dot-com hype in the 1990s

Having not lived through this, I'm actually curious as to how similar it was to the current hype cycle. Was there a general sense that something singularity-like was approaching?

I don't and wouldn't claim that AI is completely useless, I personally use it for at least a couple hours out of each working day and feel that it boosts my productivity significantly. My point is that the kind of benefits we're seeing from AI are not the ones we expected, and the difference between expectation and reality doesn't seem to have sunk in for most. I regularly hear friends talk of the post-scarcity future which is just around the corner, something like the culture Minds from Ian M. Banks, and this pseudoreligious narrative seems to be what the big AI players are deliberately selling. What I'm actually seeing is something more akin to Mr Meeseeks from Rick and Morty.

> So, you’re committed to falling for the next one, too, eh?

Haha, no. The point was that I've seen better things in the long winters between hype cycles than in any hype cycle.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#116
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The article is a fun read. There's a certain amount of hyperbole and subtext which may perhaps be unfamiliar to some readers. But the point is fair. Where are the huge AI wins? Why haven't Anthropic and OpenAI produced a regular series of case studies where Company X did Fun AI Thing and incredible success ensued? Why do these conversations always end up mentioning chat bots? Why do c-suites seem to be full of people…

[deleted]

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#117
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As @simonw said, the Ford example isn’t a good one. As for AI-assisted engineering going well, I think the jury is still out. Here on HN and with the engineers I know, you see people claiming multiples of productivity on coding tasks. But you also see people complaining about drowning in slop PRs. I think there’s a lot of confounding factors to these reports. The type of work matters a lot: bug fixing good, prototypi…

> As for AI-assisted engineering going well, I think the jury is still out. Anecdotally, AI-assisted engineering has helped me flesh out ideas or to learn extremely complicated APIs faster than trying to understand the docs (which usually are labyrinthine). MS COM ones, for example. I can go read the docs but it's easier to get a quick idea of what I need to do if I ask Claude to provide me an example of doing someth…

The Microsoft API docs are a special case where i'd say you pretty much need LLMs nowadays because after a bunch of document format conversions over the years they degraded massively.

If you can find some MSDN CDs/DVDs from the early 2000s, the content is much better (and you can clearly see that the current docs are often missing descriptions and names for method arguments or even entire paragraphs).

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#118
post #100

Just this past week, I have had to answer two surveys, from different sources, asking how I use AI in my work. Both had a "choose all that apply" checkbox, and, funnily enough, neither allowed me to select zero options. "This question is mandatory". :)

Apparently, there is confabulating AI autofill browser extension. Would be nice to seamlessly bullshit them back.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#119
post #94

Most of us on some level felt confident that AI would completely revolutionise our society. The singularity made sense to me, at least. It hasn't worked out like that, but rather than accept the crushing reality of our mistake and take a second to re-evaluate, we've decided to LARP out the future we promised ourselves by crowbar-and-vaselineing AI into every crack and crevice we can find and loudly proclaiming progre…

> It hasn't worked out like that It seems quite premature to say that. We're 3 to 4 years into the LLM revolution and the rate of progress is still impressive. The recursive self-improvement aspect that is necessary for the actual singularity is something we're only really starting to get into this year. If the singularity is 5 years from now, that is still much sooner than most people (including me) previously expec…

> We're 3 to 4 years into the LLM revolution and the rate of progress is still impressive.

The “Attention Is All You Need” paper came out in 2017 and OpenAI released GPT-1 in 2018. ChatGPT was released in late 2022 but that was not the beginning of LLMs. Transformers and generative AI go back even further.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#120
post #94

Most of us on some level felt confident that AI would completely revolutionise our society. The singularity made sense to me, at least. It hasn't worked out like that, but rather than accept the crushing reality of our mistake and take a second to re-evaluate, we've decided to LARP out the future we promised ourselves by crowbar-and-vaselineing AI into every crack and crevice we can find and loudly proclaiming progre…

> It hasn't worked out like that It seems quite premature to say that. We're 3 to 4 years into the LLM revolution and the rate of progress is still impressive. The recursive self-improvement aspect that is necessary for the actual singularity is something we're only really starting to get into this year. If the singularity is 5 years from now, that is still much sooner than most people (including me) previously expec…

As a vocal advocate for the use of machine intelligence in certain contexts and a skeptic of claims they are useless or always hallucinate or whatever...

It hasn't been even close to even the recent claims! It's been like three straight years where it was supposed to utterly transform society any minute now.

I think we more or less have a fragile consensus that in like, computer programming and really very little else, that on a good day you're probably going to come out ahead with the AI assist. That seems relatively uncontroversial now. But it also seems like success with AI is largely about working hard to get good at it, as a first order concern. It is not at all obvious that blind, uncritical use by anyone is a net win.

It's pretty unclear, sone might say dubious, that anyone has made serious, aboveboard money net of debt and equity, other than the hardware vendors. There's some pretty serious revenue, but it's a drop in the proverbial bucket against the outlay. There like a two trillion dollar balance sheet hole in the US alone where investment into AI has gone.

While I personally don't agree with them, multiple S-tier machine learning researchers think we've got our wheels stuck in the mud, that autoregressive decoder architectures on a tokin-suffix pre-train is tapped out as a paradigm.

It's ok to say "AI is starting to get useful in pretty durable ways" and not sound like an Anthropic shareholder/employee, i.e. completely full of shit.

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