201–210 of 348 posts
> At the heart of the problem is the tendency for AI language models to confabulate, which means they may confidently generate a false output that is stated as being factual.
"Confabulate" is precisely the correct term; I don't know how we ended up settling on "hallucinate".
AI agent technology likely isn’t ready for the kind of high-stakes autonomous business work Microsoft is promising. It's unbelievable to me that tech leaders lack the insight to recognize this. So how to explain the current AI mania being widely promoted? I think the best fit explanation is simple con artistry. They know the product is fundamentally flawed and won't perform as being promised. But the money to be made…
People think that because AI cannot replace a senior dev, it's a worthless con. Meanwhile, pretty much every single person in my life is using LLMs almost daily . Guys, these things are not going away, and people will pay more money to use them in future. Even my mom asks ChatGPT to make a baking applet with a picture she uploads of the recipe, that creates a simple checklist for adding ingredients (she forgets ingre…
Quite the strawman. There are many points between “worthless” and “worth 100s of billions to trillions of investment”.
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You’re correct, you need to learn how to use it. But for some reason HN has an extremely strong anti-AI sentiment, unless it’s about fundamental research. At this point, I consider these AI tools to be an invaluable asset to my work in the same way that search engines are. It’s integrated into my work. But it takes practice on how to use it correctly.
> for some reason HN has an extremely strong anti-AI sentiment It's because I've used it and it doesn't come even close to delivering the value that its advocates claim it does. Nothing mysterious about it.
Alternatively, you are referring to the latter group and, uh, sorry.
It's almost a revenge of the engineers. The big players' path to "success" has been to slap together some co-pilot loaded with enterprise bloat and try to compete with startups that solve the same problems in a much cleaner way. Meanwhile, they believed the market was already theirs—so their logic became: fire the engineers, buy more GPUs. I have mixed feelings about this. I've interviewed several people who were aff…
How mediocre are we talking about here? (I’m curious)
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I broadly agree. They package "copilot" in a way that constantly gets in your way. The one time I thought it could be useful, in diagnosing why two Azure services seemingly couldn't talk to each other, it was completely useless. I had more success describing the problem in vague terms to a different LLM, than an AI supposedly plugged into the Azure organisation that could supposedly directly query information.
"They package "copilot" in a way that constantly gets in your way." And when you try to make it something useful, the response is usually "I can't do that"
I can't do that.
that's the one use case where LLM is helpful!
A bit tangential and pedantic, but: > At the heart of the problem is the tendency for AI language models to confabulate, which means they may confidently generate a false output that is stated as being factual. "Confabulate" is precisely the correct term; I don't know how we ended up settling on "hallucinate".
Uh, TIL. This is wildly different to the Spanish meaning, confabular means to plot something bad (as in a conspiracy).
Which is a weird evolution in both languages, as the Latin root seems to mean simply “talking together”.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’re correct, you need to learn how to use it. But for some reason HN has an extremely strong anti-AI sentiment, unless it’s about fundamental research. At this point, I consider these AI tools to be an invaluable asset to my work in the same way that search engines are. It’s integrated into my work. But it takes practice on how to use it correctly.
There is no scenario where AI is a net benefit. There are three possibilities: 1. AI does things we can already do but cheaper and worse. This is the current state of affairs. Things are mostly the same except for the flood of slop driving out quality. My life is moderately worse. 2. Total victory of capital over labor. This is what the proponents are aiming for. It's disastrous for the >99% of the population who wil…
Even if they want to do it for no reason, they'll still be happier if their friends and family are alive and happy, which recurses about 6 times before everybody on the planet is alive and happy.
AI agent technology likely isn’t ready for the kind of high-stakes autonomous business work Microsoft is promising. It's unbelievable to me that tech leaders lack the insight to recognize this. So how to explain the current AI mania being widely promoted? I think the best fit explanation is simple con artistry. They know the product is fundamentally flawed and won't perform as being promised. But the money to be made…
People think that because AI cannot replace a senior dev, it's a worthless con. Meanwhile, pretty much every single person in my life is using LLMs almost daily . Guys, these things are not going away, and people will pay more money to use them in future. Even my mom asks ChatGPT to make a baking applet with a picture she uploads of the recipe, that creates a simple checklist for adding ingredients (she forgets ingre…
Anyone who has had the pleasure of being forced to migrate to their new Fabric product can tell you why sales are low. It's terrible not just because it's a rushed buggy pile of garbage they want people to Alpha test on users but because of the "AI First" design they are forcing into it. They hide so much of what's happening in the background it is hard to feel like you can trust any of it. Like agentic "thinking" mo…
Every new Microsoft product is like this. It all has that janky, slapped together at the last minute feeling.
The kind of code AI writes is the kind of code Microsoft has always written.
AI agent technology likely isn’t ready for the kind of high-stakes autonomous business work Microsoft is promising. It's unbelievable to me that tech leaders lack the insight to recognize this. So how to explain the current AI mania being widely promoted? I think the best fit explanation is simple con artistry. They know the product is fundamentally flawed and won't perform as being promised. But the money to be made…
(Vista wasn't the only one; Windows ME never even made it to semi-usable, and no-one even remembers that Windows 8 _existed_.)
Microsoft has _never_, as far as I know, been a company to be particularly concerned about product quality. The copilot stuff may be unusually bad, but it's not that aberrant for MS.