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The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

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Re: The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

#111

Post by saratogacx »

petralithic wrote: post #87
JKCalhoun wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read on then — the author suggests a 4th camp that I believe you (and I as a matter of fact) can agree with. "I propose a fourth: AI is now as good as it's going to get, and that's neither as good nor as bad as its fans and haters think…" I suppose I disagree with "as good as it's going to get" … but for the time being (this decade?) this might be correct.

Yeah, it does seem like progress has plateaued considerably. The leaps from GPT 2 to 3, 3 to 4, and 4 to 5 shrinks with each one, with 5 being particularly disappointing.

I, with no evidence, feel like GPT-5 was an efficiency release. Save as much power/compute while mitigating the quality loss leaving only the top model (using similar compute as previous models) to show real improvement.

Re: The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

#112

Post by Nextgrid »

jacinabox wrote: post #103
jqpabc123 wrote: post #2

One of the lowest level jobs in the market is taking orders at a fast food drive thru. If AI can't do this job, it probably can't do yours either. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c722gne7qngo Bottom line: AI has very poor grasp of reality --- because (surprise, surprise) it has zero real world experience.

I just did a captcha the other day that asked the user to select which items can fit inside the sample item (which was a handbag). You'd think that a multimodal deep learning model could figure out what objects fit inside other objects if it's going to cure cancer or whatever, but no I'm assuming that it needs to be taught explicitly.

This is a defense against AI, not a training step. Though a multimodal model should be able to pass it.

Re: The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

#113

Post by OtherShrezzing »

mh- wrote: post #77
JKCalhoun wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read on then — the author suggests a 4th camp that I believe you (and I as a matter of fact) can agree with. "I propose a fourth: AI is now as good as it's going to get, and that's neither as good nor as bad as its fans and haters think…" I suppose I disagree with "as good as it's going to get" … but for the time being (this decade?) this might be correct.

Taking out the fact we're talking about "AI" for the moment.. doesn't it seem unusual to speculate that despite recent progress, it's just going to be.. flat from here out? (That's directed at El Reg, not you.) Hard to take the rest of it seriously with them taking a position like that. I can't think of a time that's been true for any technology in my career. Whether they were ones I found useful or not.

There was lots of progress in NFTs. Not much going on there these days.

Re: The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

#114

Post by jmaestrooper »

Very dumbed-down take on the subject. What's "AI"? ChatGPT and Google AlphaFold are both AI.

I very much doubt speech and voice recognition and synthesis, as well as visual object recognition, are "as good as they will get" (however scary some of the practical applications might look like). Ditto specialized neural networks like aforementioned AlphaFold.

General-purpose chatbots trained on randomly selected data from stolen books and social media (and increasingly on its own slop)? Very likely.

Architectures allowing the said chatbots trigger actions online or (worse yet) IRL? Almost definitely.

Re: The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

#115

Post by sfn42 »

joshstrange wrote: post #107
sfn42 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the issue. All these technologies can be nice and snappy. The problem is that developers suck at making software nice and snappy. I've taken over several react apps over the years and one thing I always end up doing is remove a bunch of spinners because you don't need a spinner when the page loads instantly - as it should. Its very common for pages to take 10-60+ seconds to load, and when I look into it it…

> I always end up doing is remove a bunch of spinners because you don't need a spinner when the page loads instantly I always have to remind people to add spinners, just because it loads instantly on your developer machine with a fiber connection (if not talking to a local container even) doesn't mean it will in the real world. But spinners only show when actively fetching so if it's fast they only show for a split-s…

Yeah, I don't like the split second spinners. And I work on company internal apps so every user is generally on a good connection.

What I might do is just add a global spinner using tanstack query, what I don't like is having 50 different spinners for every little component. Makes the site feel janky and weird.

I just don't see the point unless it's loading for 5+ seconds. If it's faster than that then the user won't have time to wonder if it's stuck anyway. And I prefer to have one or very few requests, rather than 10+ different ones for a single page.

Re: The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

#116

Post by sfn42 »

Nextgrid wrote: post #110
sfn42 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the issue. All these technologies can be nice and snappy. The problem is that developers suck at making software nice and snappy. I've taken over several react apps over the years and one thing I always end up doing is remove a bunch of spinners because you don't need a spinner when the page loads instantly - as it should. Its very common for pages to take 10-60+ seconds to load, and when I look into it it…

> All these technologies can be nice and snappy Maybe in theory, but in practice I see it very rarely. Maybe it starts out great and fast and then devolves into a shitfest. Given how frequent this is, maybe it’s time to actually blame the technology itself if it makes it so easy to mess up?

No, devs being bad is not a solvable problem. You just have to find devs who know what they're doing, or at least have a few who can teach the less talented ones and check their work.

There is no programming language that you can't write slow code in.

Re: The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

#117

Post by mvdtnz »

therealpygon wrote: post #62
an0malous wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use a notes app multiple times a day for work. Does this make notes apps worth $1T in global investments?

If everyone is competing to be THE notes app, and there is an expectation for every person in the entire world to use said Notes apps for nearly all tasks in the future? Yea, it absolutely could deserve a global investment of roughly just 3% U.S. GDP. Moreover, isn’t it up to the people investing to decide that, rather than people who used ChatGPT once and then complained on the internet?

No, it absolutely wouldn't justify that level of investment and if that was happening we'd have hacker news articles rightly calling the notes app bubble.

Re: The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

#118

Post by mvdtnz »

jmaestrooper wrote: post #114

Very dumbed-down take on the subject. What's "AI"? ChatGPT and Google AlphaFold are both AI. I very much doubt speech and voice recognition and synthesis, as well as visual object recognition, are "as good as they will get" (however scary some of the practical applications might look like). Ditto specialized neural networks like aforementioned AlphaFold. General-purpose chatbots trained on randomly selected data from…

As you well know, even when you're pretending you don't, in this context when people say "AI" they mean LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude, not AlphaFold.

Re: The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

#119

Post by mh- »

thegrim33 wrote: post #97
fragmede wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla self-driving/Waymo/Comma.ai isn't perfect, but they're good at what they do. That's a pretty dramatic change, in the last year or so. You get in the car, and then don't actually have to drive it, the car does it for you. Sure there are some corner cases that still haven't been solved, but most of the time, I get in the car and it just does its thing for me.

Something I've been doing a lot lately is investigating the people on HN that push various beliefs, and in this comment thread there's two voices pushing for how much AI is going to continue to grow, going forwards. Who are these two voices? Well, we've got fragmede, who, looking through their HN profile, works at NVIDIA as a "senior AI infrastructure engineer", and we've got mh-, who, looking through their HN profil…

Thanks. It's worthwhile context that I perhaps should have disclosed, but I don't think it affects my opinions in this thread.

My opinion was simply in reaction to an, IMO, nonsensical claim:

> AI is now as good as it's going to get

And it would have been the same no matter what* technology we're discussing.

* Ok, someone commented NFTs. But I never considered that a technology.

(Since it's in the thread now: my opinions are mine, not my employer's.)

Re: The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

#120

Post by scotty79 »

dmonitor wrote: post #94
scotty79 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because to replace a notes app you need pen and paper. But to replace LLM you need at least a human. There's literally nothing else. And humans don't come cheap.

Most AI applications are just enhanced google (to make up for how trashed google got by LLMs!)

Still, you couldn't enhance google in this manner without hiring a person to do the googling for you
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