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Artificial intelligence is losing hype

economist.com

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Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#131
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seriously I am a 2x coder compared to what I was because of this. You probably shouldn't advertise that.

I am highly skeptical that a competent coder sees a 2x boost.

I am a competent coder. I have been a coder since I was in middle school. I know at least 10 languages, and I could write my own from scratch.

I know c++ dart golang java html css javascript typescript lua react vue angular angularjs c# swift sql in various dialects including mysql and postgres, and have worked professionally in all these regards. I love to challenge myself. In fact, if I done something before, I find it boring.

So copilot helps me because I always find something new to do, something I don't understand, something I'm not good at.

So yes, I'm confident I'm competent. But I always do things I'm not good at for fun. So it helps me become well rounded.

So your assertion it only helps me because I'm incompetent is true and false. I'm competent, I just like to do new stuff.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#132

I've trained as a neuroscientist and written a book about consciousness. I've worked in machine learning and built products for over 20 years and now use AI a fair bit in the ed-tech work we do. So I've seen how the field has progressed and also have been able to look at it from a perspective most AI/engineering people don't -- what does this artificial intelligence look like when compared to biological intelligence.…

> And I must say I am absolutely astonished people don't see this as opening the flood-gates to staggeringly powerful artificial intelligence.

This looks like a cognitive dissonance and they are addressed by revisiting your assumptions.

No flood-gates have been opened. ChatGPT definitely found uses in a few areas but the number is very far from what many people claimed. A few things are really good and people are using them successfully.

...But that's it. Absolutely nothing even resembling the beginnings of AGI is on the horizon and your assumption that the rate of progress will remain the same -- or even accelerate -- is a very classic mistake of the people who are enthusiasts in their fields.

> There are hundreds of billions of dollars figuring out how to get to the next level, and it's clear we are close.

This is not clear at all. If you know something that nobody else does, please let us know as well.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#133
ML is born in two master branches, one it's image manipulation, where video manipulation follow, another is textual search and generation toward the saint Graal of semantic search.

The first was started with simple non-ML image manipulation and video analysis (like finding baggage left unmoved for a certain amount of time in a hall, trespassing alerts for gates and so on) and reach the level of live video analysis for autonomous drive. The second date back a very big amount of time, maybe with the Conrad Gessner's libraries of Babel/Biblioteca Universalis ~1545 with a simple consideration: a book is good to develop and share a specific topic, a newspaper to know "at a glance" most relevant facts of yesterday and so on but we still need something to elicit specific bit of information out of "the library" without the human need to read anything manually. Search engines does works but have limits. LLMs are the failed promise to being able to juice information (in a model) than extract it on user prompt distilled well. That's the promise, the reality is that pattern matching/prediction can't work much for the same problem we have with image, there is no intelligence.

For an LLM if a known scientist (as per tags in some parts of the model ingested information) say (joking in a forum) that eating a small rock a day it's good for health, the LLM will suggest such practice simply because it have no knowledge of joke. Similarly having no knowledge of humans a hand with ten fingers it's perfectly sound.

That's the essential bubble, PRs and people without knowledge have seen Stable Diffusion producing an astronaut riding a horse, have ask some questions to ChatGPT and have said "WOW! Ok, not perfect but it will be just a matter of time" and the answer is no, it will NOT be at least with the current tech. There are some use, like automatic translation, imperfect but good enough to be arranged so 1 human translator can do the same job of 10 before, some low importance ID checks could be done with electronic IDs + face recognition so a single human guards can operate 10 gates alone in an airport just intervening where face recognition fails. Essentially FEW low skill jobs might be automated, the rest is just classic automation, like banks who close offices simply because people use internet banking and pay with digital means so there is almost no need to pick and deposit cash anymore, no reasons to go to the bank anymore. The potential so far can't grow much more, so the bubble burst.

Meanwhile big tech want to keep the bubble up because LLM training is a thing not doable at home as single humans alone, like we can instead run a homeserver for our email, VoIP phone system, file sharing, ... Yes, it's doable in a community, like search with YaCy, maps with Open Street Maps etc but the need of data an patient manual tagging is simply to cumbersome to have a real community born and based model that match or surpass one done by Big Tech. Since IT knowledge VERY lately and very limited start to spread a bit enough to endanger big tech model... They need something users can't do at home on a desktop. And that's a part of the fight.

Another is the push toward no-ownership for 99% to better lock-in/enslave. So far the cloud+mobile model have created lock-in but still users might get data and host things themselves, if they do not operate computers anymore, just using "smart devices" well, the option to download and self host is next to none. So here the push for autonomous taxis instead of personal cars, connected dishwashers who send 7+Gb/day home and so on. This does not technically work so despite the immense amount of money and the struggle of the biggest people start to smell rodent and their mood drop.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#134
post #124
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I am yet to see any reasoned argument for why it is far more difficult and will take far longer I am yet to see any reasoned argument for why it is easy to build real AI and that it will come fast. As you said, AI has been there for decades and stagnated for pretty much the whole time. We've just had a big leap, but nothing says (except BS hype) that we're not in for a long plateau again.

> I am yet to see any reasoned argument for why it is easy to build real AI and that it will come fast. We have "real ai" already. As for future progress, have you tried just simple interpolation of the progress so far? Human level intelligence is very near. (Though of course artificial intelligence will never exactly match human intelligence: it will be ahead/behind in certain aspects...)

- We don't have a "real AI" at all. Where's Skynet, where's HAL-9000? Where are the cute robotic butlers from the "I, Robot" movie?

- Simple interpolation of the progress is exactly the problem here. Look at the historical graphs of AI funding and tell me with a straight face that we absolutely must use simple interpolation.

- Nope, human-level intelligence is not even close. It remains as nebulous and out of reach as ever. ChatGPT's imitation of intelligent speech falls apart very quickly when you chat with it for more than a few questions.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#135
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am highly skeptical that a competent coder sees a 2x boost.

I am a competent coder. I have been a coder since I was in middle school. I know at least 10 languages, and I could write my own from scratch. I know c++ dart golang java html css javascript typescript lua react vue angular angularjs c# swift sql in various dialects including mysql and postgres, and have worked professionally in all these regards. I love to challenge myself. In fact, if I done something before, I fin…

That's all very nice but it contains a fatal logical flaw: it assumes CoPilot actually gives you good code. :D

I mean it does, sometimes, but usually it's either boilerplate or something you don't care about. Boilerplate is mostly managed very well by most well-known IDEs. And neither them nor CoPilot are offering good algorithmic code... OK, I'll grant you the "most of the time, not never" thing.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am highly skeptical that a competent coder sees a 2x boost.

I use multiple daily and have definitely seen a productivity boost. If nothing else, it saves typing. But I'd argue they are in essence a better search engine - it answers "you don't know what you don't know" questions very well, providing a jumping off point when my conception of how to achieve something with code or tooling is vague.

Typing is, or at least it should be, the least of your time spent during the day doing programming. I don't find optimizing the 5-10% of my workday spent typing impressive, or even worth mentioning.

Granted there are languages where typing takes much more time, like Java and C# but... eh. They are quite overdue for finding better syntax anyway! :)

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am highly skeptical that a competent coder sees a 2x boost.

You shouldn't be. For code bases where context is mostly local they destroy human throughput by comparison. They only fall down hard when used in spaghetti dumpster fire codebases where you have to paste the contents of 6+ files into context or the code crosses a multiple service boundaries to do anything. A competent engineer architects their systems to make their tools as effective as possible, so maybe your idea o…

> They only fall down hard when used in spaghetti dumpster fire codebases where you have to paste the contents of 6+ files into context or the code crosses a multiple service boundaries to do anything.

So humans do better than them in at least 80% of all code everywhere, if not 95% even? Cool, good to know.

Care to provide some examples to back your otherwise extraordinary claim btw?

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#138
post #33
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you using AI to double your coding productivity? Are you using ChatGPT, or Claude, or GitHub Copilot? I am an AI-skeptic, so I am curious here. Thanks!

I've tried various AI coding solutions and have found at best a mild boost but not the amazing multipliers I hear about online. Copilot gives you some autofill that sometimes can be helpful but often not that helpful. I think the best it did for me was helping with something repetitive where I was editing a big list of things in the same way (like adding an ID to every tag in a list) and it helped take over and finis…

> I get a little paranoid about AI provided code not actually working so I end up writing a large number of tests to check it, which could be a good thing but can feel tedious.

This is a good thing. We need more tests on such critical places like regexes because they can be finicky and non-obvious. Tedious or not, we are not artists; the job must be done. Kudos for sticking to the good practices.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#139

It’s certainly possible that AI is being overhyped, and I think in some cases it definitely is - but being tired of hearing about it in no way correlates to its actual usefulness. In other words, lot of people seem to think that human attention spans are what determine everything, but the technological cycles at work here are much much deeper. Personally I have used Midjourney and ChatGPT in ways that will have huge…

> It’s certainly possible that AI is being overhyped, and I think in some cases it definitely is - but being tired of hearing about it in no way correlates to its actual usefulness.

Please tell that to all types on HN who downvote anything related to Rust without even reading past the title. :D

> In other words, lot of people seem to think that human attention spans are what determine everything, but the technological cycles at work here are much much deeper.

IMO no reasonable person denies this, it's just that the "AI" technology regularly over-promises and under-delivers. At one point it's no longer discrimination, it's just good old pattern recognition.

> Personally I have used Midjourney and ChatGPT in ways that will have huge impacts on many activities and industries. Denying that because of media trendiness about AI seems shortsighted.

Some examples with actual links would go a long way. I for one am skeptical of your claim but I am open to have my mind changed (f.ex. my CFO told me once that ChatGPT helped him catch several bad contract clauses).

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#140
post #13

Whether and to what extent AI can be monetized is an open question. But there's no question that LLMs are already seeing extensive use in everyday office work and already making large improvements to productivity.

I and many others are questioning it. Please provide some proof. I've only seen some lazy programmers get boilerplate generated quicker, and some kids cheating on homework. I actually saw executives make use of ChatGPT's text summarization capabilities... until one of them made the critical mistake to fully trust it and flunked an important contract because ChatGPT overlooked something that would be super obvious to a human.

So again, let's see some proof of this extensive use and large improvements to productivity.

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