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I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

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Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#111

Post by throw310822 »

leeoniya wrote: post #16

> "no no, it has full test coverage" i don't have enough fingers (and toes) to count how many times i've demonstrated that "100% coverage" is almost universally bullshit.

Wholeheartedly agree, but in fairness, I trust the tests of the best AI models more than those of the average human developer. There's a lot of people around that combine high diligence with complete intellectual laziness, producing tons of useless tests.

Actually no, cancel that. I realise now that I trust AIs more than the average developer, period. At this point they do produce better code than most people I've dealt with.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#112

Post by com2kid »

impulser_ wrote: post #48

I'm pretty sure he's talking about companies and people outsourcing their decision making and thinking to AI and not really about using AI itself. I don't think using AI to write code is AI psychosis or bad at all, but if you just prompt the AI and believe what it tell you then you have AI psychosis. You see this a lot with financial people and VC on twitter. They literally post screenshots of ChatGPT as their thinki…

I wonder how different this is from having companies let Fortune or Inc magazine do their thinking for them.

Or random consultants.

Is "AI said it was a good idea" and worse than "we were following industry trends"?

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#113

Post by zmmmmm »

I think AI rescue consulting is going to be come a significant mode of high value consulting, similar to specialists who come in to try and deal with a security breach or do data recovery.

Purely AI written systems will scale to a point of complexity that no human can ever understand and the defect close rate will taper down and the token burn per defect rate scale up and eventually AI changes will cause on average more defects than they close and the whole system will be unstable. It will become a special kind of process to clean room out such a mess and rebuild it fresh (probably still with AI) after distilling out core design principles to avoid catastrophic breakdown.

Somewhere in the future, the new software engineering will be primarily about principles to avoid this in the first, place but it will take us 20 years to learn them, just like original software eng took a lot longer than expected to reach a stable set of design principles (and people still argue about them!).

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#114

Post by hedgehog »

crnkofe wrote: post #104

Sounds pretty accurate. Bunch of comments on this thread sound like AI is some kind of a new doomsday cult. The most annoying thing I find personally is that all engineering principles are getting crushed by non techies. Management counting token usage, forcing agent use, reducing headcount in the name of productivity gain. Devs building bridges but nobody knows what the bridge is, what are the standards to which it…

[dead]

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#115

Post by uuyy »

biophysboy wrote: post #103
impulser_ wrote: post #48

I'm pretty sure he's talking about companies and people outsourcing their decision making and thinking to AI and not really about using AI itself. I don't think using AI to write code is AI psychosis or bad at all, but if you just prompt the AI and believe what it tell you then you have AI psychosis. You see this a lot with financial people and VC on twitter. They literally post screenshots of ChatGPT as their thinki…

The way I put this to myself is that AI gives “correct correct answers and incorrect correct answers”. They almost always generate logically correct text, but sometimes that text has a set of incorrect implicit assumptions and decisions that may not be valid for the use case. Generating a correct correct solution requires proper definition of the problem, which is arguably more challenging than creating the solution.

It’s simpler than that - it’s a guessing machine that has superior access to a whole load of information and capacity to process at a speed at which we humans cannot compete.

Does it make it better than us? No because ultimately the thing itself doesn’t ‘know’ right from wrong.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#117

Post by jas- »

impulser_ wrote: post #48

I'm pretty sure he's talking about companies and people outsourcing their decision making and thinking to AI and not really about using AI itself. I don't think using AI to write code is AI psychosis or bad at all, but if you just prompt the AI and believe what it tell you then you have AI psychosis. You see this a lot with financial people and VC on twitter. They literally post screenshots of ChatGPT as their thinki…

I digress; this article actually has helped identify useful knowledge gaps around topics I have researched. https://drensin.medium.com/elephants-goldfish-and-the-new-go...

While you have to think about things objectively no matter what, when I start researching topics like physics, using AI as suggested in that article has proven very useful.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#118

Post by uuyy »

zmmmmm wrote: post #113

I think AI rescue consulting is going to be come a significant mode of high value consulting, similar to specialists who come in to try and deal with a security breach or do data recovery. Purely AI written systems will scale to a point of complexity that no human can ever understand and the defect close rate will taper down and the token burn per defect rate scale up and eventually AI changes will cause on average m…

AI janitors

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#119

Post by AnimalMuppet »

bayindirh wrote: post #64
taffydavid wrote: post #22

This post calls out how you can't argue with these people because they say its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!" the top reply is from someone doing exactly that, arguing "but the agents are so fast!"

I was talking with a friend in the early days of AI boom. I argued that over-reliance in AI will create all kinds of catastrophes. The answer I got is "It's game theory. Someone will do it, and you'll be forced to do it, too. It can't be that bad". I mean, yes, logic is useful, but ignorance of risks? Assuming that moving blazingly fast and pulverizing things will result in good eventually? This AI thing is not progr…

> It's game theory. Someone will do it, and you'll be forced to do it, too.

You'll be forced to do it, or lose. The unstated assumptions are that, first, it will work, and second, that you can't afford to lose. But let's just assume those for the sake of argument.

> It can't be that bad

That does not follow at all. It can in fact be that bad. That was what made the game theory of MAD different from the game theory of most other things.

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