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Artificial intelligence is losing hype

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171–180 of 814 posts

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seriously I am a 2x coder compared to what I was because of this. Isn't the energy consumption of this technology pretty catastrophic? Do you consider the issue of energy consumption so abstracted you don't worry about it? Do you do anything to offset your increased carbon emissions?

They certainly are not providing these services at less than electricity costs. So if you are spending $20 a month on it, they are spending less than that on electricity. It's very low compared to any person in the first world's energy spend.

Actually, they probably are. OpenAI is projected to lose $5 billion this year in ChatGPT costs.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I am a neophite in this area, but my thesis for why "this time is different" compared to previous AI bubbles is that this time there exist a bunch of clear products (or paths to products) that work and only require what is currently available in terms of technology. Coding assistants today are useful, image generation is useful, speach recognition/generation is useful. All of these can support businesses, even in…

I don't find coding assistants to be very useful. Image generation was fun for a few weeks. Speech recognition is useful. Anyway, considering all these things can be done on device, where is the long term business prospect of which you speak?

> Speech recognition is useful.

Now try to mute a video on youtube and understand what's being said from the automatic subtitles.

If you do it in english, be aware that it's the best performing language and all others are even worse.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#173

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.…

Why are you throwing in 'consciousness' in a comment regarding mechanical intelligence?

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#174
post #123

I'm really wondering if we're going to see a lack of people with CS degrees a few years from now because of Jensen Huang saying AI will do all that and we should stop learning how to program.

Clearly Jensen is a genius and just ensured us infinite job security. Well, either that or he was just driving the hype b/c nvidia sells the shovels for the AI gold rush.

Personally, I'd wager the latter.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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! :)

I didn't mean typing in the sense of autocomplete, I meant typing in the sense of stubbing out an entire class or series of test cases. It gives me scaffolding to work with which I can take and run with.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#176
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 think for more boilerplate-esque code-monkey type code it can be a boon.

I think the unfortunate reality is that this makes up a shockingly large amount of software engineering. Take this object and put it into this other object, map this data to that data, create these records and move them into this object when then goes into that other object.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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! :)

I didn't mean typing in the sense of autocomplete, I meant typing in the sense of stubbing out an entire class or series of test cases. It gives me scaffolding to work with which I can take and run with.

Yes that's fair. If it helps reduce writing boilerplate then I'm all for it.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#178
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok I jumped on copilot when it first came out so I have been using it for a long time. Since I have been using it so long, I have a really good intuition of what it is “thinking” in every scenario and a pretty good idea of what it can do for me. So that helps me get more use out of it. So for example one of the projects I’m doing now is a flutter project - my first one. So I don’t remember all the widgets. But I just…

I don't think you need an LLM just to parse class properties and turn them into a map. Not that familiar with Dart, but that's the kind of thing IDEs have been able to do for a while now just by parsing syntax the old-fashioned way.

The thing is, when you dig into the claims many people make when they say that they get a 10x productivity boost using "AI" its usually some basic tasks that either generates boilerplate code or performs a fancy autocomplete and while those are great, in no way it supports their original claim.

I think people just want to be part of the hype and use the cool new technology whenever possible. We've seen this over and over again: Machine Learning, Blockchains, Cryptos, "Big Data", "Micro Services", "Kubernetes", etc.

I just don't think the current design of "AI" will take us there..

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#179
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- 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 a…

To be fair, I’ve talked to a lot of people who cannot consistently perform at the mistral-12b level. I think we expect AGI to be much smarter than the average joe, and free of occasional stupidity. What we’ve got is an 85IQ generalist with unreliable savant capabilities, that can also talk to a million people at the same time without getting distracted. I don’t see how that isn’t absolutely a fundamental shift in cap…

> I’ve talked to a lot of people who cannot consistently perform at the mistral-12b level

This is honestly one of the most gpt-2 things I’ve ever read.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#180
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They certainly are not providing these services at less than electricity costs. So if you are spending $20 a month on it, they are spending less than that on electricity. It's very low compared to any person in the first world's energy spend.

How do you know?

Common sense, having been around cloud operations for a bit. The big cloud providers run gross margins around 30%. So if openai are using MSFT and getting a "good deal" maybe MSFT only get 20% GM. So, $1 of openai compute costs MSFT say $0.80. Of that cost of providing the service, something like 30-40% goes to electricity. So, lets say the electricity cost is $0.30 for $1 of OpenAI compute. (And that's probably a steelman, I think it's actually more like $0.20. )

There is about zero chance OpenAI are running their service at a 70% negative gross margin.

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