Yeah, it's FUD. AI can't even do customer service jobs well and CEOs make hyperbole statements that they will replace 30% of job.
To be fair, when has being useless stopped adoption of something in the customer service space?
I guess I kinda get why people hate AI
171–180 of 278 posts
Re: I guess I kinda get why people hate AI
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is also what OpenAI’s “safety” angle was all about. “Ohhhh this is so scary! It’s so powerful we have to be very careful with it!” (Buy our stuff or be left behind, Mr. CEO, and invest in us now or lose out)
Anthropic has been the most histrionic about this, with their big blog post about how they need to make sure their models don't feel like they are being emotionally abused by the users being the most fatuous example.
I missed this - which blog post?
Re: I guess I kinda get why people hate AI
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can confirm. We don’t know if AI really is about to make programmers who write code by hand obsolete, but we sure as hell fear our competitors will ship features 10x faster than us. What is the logical next step?? Invest lots of money on AI or keep hoping it’s a fad and risk being left in the dust, even if you think that risk is fairly small?
Why is it an all or nothing decision? Do a small test: if you're 10x faster then keep going. If not, shelve it for a while and maybe try again later
It's not possible to tell if you're 10x faster, or even faster at all, over any non-trivial amount of time. When not using a coding agent, you make different decisions and get the task done differently, at a different level of architecture, with a different understanding of the code.
Re: I guess I kinda get why people hate AI
#174Once I read a reference to Clavicular, I realized that the very first thing this author should do is stop reading the NYTimes. If the goal is to experience things closer to reality haha.
He's kind of hard to avoid at this point if you're a regular on any big social platform (except maybe Instagram?).
You can’t even avoid it on HN now. ;)
Re: I guess I kinda get why people hate AI
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where were the massive devastating wars last time this happened with the internet and mobile phone?
Just for the sake of argument, I don't think the internet and mobile phones are military technologies, nor to GP use those examples. > Industrialized manufacturing of electronics? Ukraine seems to be exploring this and rewriting military doctrine. The Iranian drones the Russians are using seem to be effective, too. The US has drones, too, and we've discovered that drone bombing is not helpful with insurgencies; we ha…
how do you not think the internet is a military technology? i mean (waves hands) like it's from ARPA, the military paid for it, it integrated cold war air defence, it made global comms resilient to attack, and made information non-local on a massive scale
GP's assertion about tech revolutions making wars doesn't make any sense to me on any level, but it's not just because the latest revolutions were 'not military tech'
i'm liking william spaniel's model : wars happen when 1 - there is a substantial disagreement between parties and 2 - there is a bargaining friction that prevents reaching a less-costly negotiated resolution.
I don't see how a technical revolution necessarily causes either, much less both, of those conditions. there sure is a lot of fear and hype going around - and that causes confusion and maybe poor decisions - but we should chill on the apocalyptics
Re: I guess I kinda get why people hate AI
#176> Microsoft’s AI CEO is saying AI is going to take everybody’s job. And Sam Altman is saying that AI will wipe out entire categories of jobs. ANd Matt Shumer is saying that AI is currently like Covid in January 2020—as in, “kind of under the radar, but about to kill millions of people”. > I legitimately feel like I am going insane when I hear AI technologists talk about the technology. They’re supposed to market it.…
FOMO was literally built in into Bitcoin. In the beginning it was a lot easier, and then it slowly gets harder.
But what I really hate about AI and how most people talk about it is that if one day it does what the advertisements say, all white collar jobs collapse.
Re: I guess I kinda get why people hate AI
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
The marketing is clearly effecting individual developers, too. There's a mass psychosis happening
> There's a mass psychosis happening There absolutely is but I'm increasingly realizing that it's futile to fight it. The thing that surprises me is that people are simultaneously losing their minds over AI agents while almost no one is exploring playing around with what these models can really do. Even if you restrict yourself to small, open models, there is so much unexplored around messing with the internals of th…
> The thing that surprises me is that people are simultaneously losing their minds over AI agents while almost no one is exploring playing around with what these models can really do.
I think we all do???
Even if I'm not coding a lot, I use it every day for small tasks. There is not much to code in my job, IT in a small traditional-goods export business. The tasks range from deciphering some coded EDI messages (D.96A as text or XML, for example), summarizing a bunch of said messages (DESADV, ORDERSP, INVOIC), finding missing items, Excel formula creation for non-trivial questions, and the occasional Python script, e.g. to concatenate data some supplier sent in a certain way.
AI is so strange because it is BOTH incredibly useful and incredibly random and stupid. Among the latter, see a comment in my history I made earlier today, the AI does not tell me when it uses a heuristic and does not provide an accurate result. EVERY result it shows me it shows as final and authoritative and perfect. Even when after questioning it suddenly "admits" that it actually skipped a few steps and that's not the correct final result.
Once AI gets some actual "I" I'm sure the revolution some people are commenting about will actually happen, but I fear that's still some way off. Until then, lots of sudden hallucinations and unexpected wrong results - unexpected because normal people believe the computer when it claims it successfully finished the task and presents a result as correct.
Until then it's daily highs and lows with little in between, either it brilliantly really solves some task, or it fails and that includes telling you about it.
A junior engineer will at least learn, but the AI stays pretty constant in how it fails and does not actually learn anything. The maker providing a new model version is not the AI learning.
Re: I guess I kinda get why people hate AI
#178[flagged]
Re: I guess I kinda get why people hate AI
#179Re: I guess I kinda get why people hate AI
#180Disclaimer: self plug[0] I honestly believe everything will be normalized. A genius with the same model as I will be more productive than I, and I will be more productive than some other people, exactly the same as without AI. If AI starts doing things beyond what you can understand, control and own, it stops being useful, the extra capacity is wasted capacity, and there are diminishing returns for ever growing inves…
The margins on inference definetly aren’t negative. An easy way to check this is by looking at the costs of using cloud hosted open source models, which necessarily are served at a positive margin, and are much lower $/token than what you get from the labs.