Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?

ChatGPT has certainly made a splash, but it's part of a larger trend. I started following developments in modern AI when Kevin Kelly tweeted[1] this in 2016:

> The business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to forecast: Take X and add AI.

I think the AI hype cycle isn't done building. A few days ago, Paul Graham tweeted[2] this:

> One of the differences between the AI boom and previous tech booms is that AI is technically more difficult. That combined with VC funds' shift toward earlier stage investing with less analysis will mean that, for a while, money will be thrown at any AI startup.

[1]: https://twitter.com/kevin2kelly/status/718166465216512001

[2]: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1623060319403905026

I feel ya. If your job is to kick back bad code, and now there is a tool that generates bad code, how does this not make your job more important?

Why not get some of the freed up, Copilot augmented developer labor budget moved to testing and do more there or build more tools to make your personal, boilerplate, repetitive tasks more efficient?

If the coders are truly just dumping bad code your way, that's an externality and the cost should be called out.

No, I absolutely love it and can't get enough of it. I'm really happy that AI tools are going mainstream.

I'm a Civil Engineer with a modest background including some work in AI. I'm pretty impressed with it. It's about as good or better than an average new intern and it's nearly instant.

I think a big part of my success with it is that I'm used to providing good specifications for tasks. This is, apparently, non-trivial for people to the point where it drives the existence of many middle-management or high-level engineering roles whose primary job is translating between business people / clients / and the technical staff.

I thought of a basic chess position with a mate in 1 and described it to chatGPT, and it correctly found the mate. I don't expect much in chess skill from it, but by god it has learned a LOT about chess for an AI that was never explicitly trained in chess itself with positions as input and moves as output.

I asked it to write a brief summary of the area, climate, geology, and geography of a location I'm doing a project in for an engineering report. These are trivial, but fairly tedious to write, and new interns are very marginal at this task without a template to go off of. I have to lookup at least 2 or 3 different maps, annual rainfall averages over the last 30 years, general effects of the geography on the climate, average & range of elevations, names of all the jurisdictions & other things, population estimates, zoning and land-use stats, etc, etc. And it instantly produced 3 or 4 paragraphs with well-worded and correct descriptions. I had already done this task and it was eerily similar to what I'd already written a few months earlier. The downside is, it can't (or rather won't) give me a confidence value for each figure or phrase it produces. ...So given it's prone to hallucinations, I'd presumably still have to go pull all the same information anyway to double check. But nevertheless, I was pretty impressed. It's also frankly probably better than I am at bringing in all that information and figuring out how to phrase it all. (And certainly MUCH more time efficient)

I think it's evident that the intelligence of these systems is indeed evolving very rapidly. The difference in ChatGPT 2 vs 3 is substantial. With the current level of interest and investment I think we're going to see continued rapid development here for at least the near future.