Live data from Hacker News

Artificial intelligence is losing hype

economist.com

211–220 of 814 posts

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked in AI for the past 30 years and have seen enthusiasm as robust as yours go bust before. Just because some kinds of narrow AI have done extraordinarily well -- namely those tasks that recognize patterns using connections between FSMs -- does not mean that same mechanisms will continue to scale up to human-level cognition, much less exceed it any time soon. The breakthroughs where deep AI have excelled -- o…

I have been using Chat-GPT has a full time expert and I can unequivocally tell you that its a transformative piece of technology. The technology isn't hyped.

I agree as this is also my personal experience. But I also see the usage of ChatGPT is falling down fast from 1.8 billion visitors to 260 million last month [1].

I am probably through some ETF an investor in MS, so I do hope the openai API usage is showing a more stable and upward trend.

[1]: https://explodingtopics.com/blog/chatgpt-users

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#212
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've trained as a neuroscientist and written a book about consciousness This has to do with ML and numerical computing, how?

Well I was being sarcastic. I really dislike it when people have to first convince you that you should trust them. Either make a good argument or don’t.

> I really dislike it when people have to first convince you that you should trust them.

> Either make a good argument or don’t.

Human beings can't evaulate the truth of things based only on the argument. Persuasive liars, cons, and incompetents are a very known phenomenon. Most of human history we misunderstood nature and many other things because we relied on 'good arguments'. Not that we need it, but research shows that human intuition about the truth of something isn't good without expertise.

When I need medical advice, I get it from someone who has convinced me that they have expertise; I don't look for 'good arguments' that persuade me, because I don't know what I'm talking about.

I have expertise in other things. In those fields, I could easily persuade people without it of just about anything. (I don't; I'm not a sociopath.) I imagine anyone with professional expertise who reads this can do the same.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#213
post #207

AI (specifically Claude Sonnet via Cursor) has completely transformed my workflow. It's changed my job description as a programmer. (And I've been doing this for 13y – no greenhorn!) This wasn't the case with GPT-4/o. This capability is very new. When I spoke to a colleague at Microsoft about these changes, they were floored. Microsoft has made themselves synonymous with AI, yet their company is barely even leveragin…

How did it "change your job description"?

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#214
post #82

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.…

>We've run the 4-minute mile. >We are in for radical non-linear change. We aren't running miles much quicker than 4 mins though. The last record was 3m:43s set by Hicham El Guerrouj in 1999.

While this is true, I think you’re not appreciating the metaphor.

Humankind tried to break the 4 minute mile for hundreds of years - since measuring distance and time became accurate enough to be sure of both in the mid-18th century, at least - and failed.

In May 1954, Roger Bannister managed it. By late June it was done again by a different runner. Within 20 years the record was under 3:45, and today there are some runners who have achieved it more than 100 times and nearly 1800 runners who have done it at all.

Impossible for hundred of years, and then somebody did it, and people stopped thinking it was impossible and started doing it themselves. That’s the metaphor: sometimes we think of barriers that are really mental, not real.

I’m not sure that applies here either, but the point is not that progress is continuously exponential, but that once a barrier is conquered, we take on a perspective as if the barrier were never real in the first place. Powered flight went through this. Computing hardware too. It’s not an entirely foolish notion.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#215
post #210
post #207

AI (specifically Claude Sonnet via Cursor) has completely transformed my workflow. It's changed my job description as a programmer. (And I've been doing this for 13y – no greenhorn!) This wasn't the case with GPT-4/o. This capability is very new. When I spoke to a colleague at Microsoft about these changes, they were floored. Microsoft has made themselves synonymous with AI, yet their company is barely even leveragin…

What do you see as your biggest wins using Claude?

It helps me stay in flow by keeping me one layer up.

In pair programming, it's ideal to have a driver (hands on keyboard) and a navigator (planning, direction).

Claude can act as the driver most of the time so I can stay at the navigator level.

This is so helpful, as it's easy as programmers to get sucked into implementation details or low-level minutiae that's just not important.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#216
post #207

AI (specifically Claude Sonnet via Cursor) has completely transformed my workflow. It's changed my job description as a programmer. (And I've been doing this for 13y – no greenhorn!) This wasn't the case with GPT-4/o. This capability is very new. When I spoke to a colleague at Microsoft about these changes, they were floored. Microsoft has made themselves synonymous with AI, yet their company is barely even leveragin…

How did it "change your job description"?

As I mentioned in a sibling comment, I now "pair program" all day. Instead of being the driver and navigator all day, I can mostly sit "one layer up" in the navigator seat.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#217
post #207

AI (specifically Claude Sonnet via Cursor) has completely transformed my workflow. It's changed my job description as a programmer. (And I've been doing this for 13y – no greenhorn!) This wasn't the case with GPT-4/o. This capability is very new. When I spoke to a colleague at Microsoft about these changes, they were floored. Microsoft has made themselves synonymous with AI, yet their company is barely even leveragin…

I see so many people hyping Claude Sonnet + Cursor on Twitter/X, yet in real world usage, I find it no better than GitHub Copilot (presumably GPT 4o) + VScode.

Cursor offers some super marginal UX improvements over the latter (being that it’s a fork of VScode), since it allows you to switch models. But Claude and GPT have been interchangeable at least for my workflows, so I’m not sure the hype is really deserved.

I can only imagine the excitement comes from the fact that cursor has a full-fat free trial, and maybe most people have never bothered paying for copilot?

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked in AI for the past 30 years and have seen enthusiasm as robust as yours go bust before. Just because some kinds of narrow AI have done extraordinarily well -- namely those tasks that recognize patterns using connections between FSMs -- does not mean that same mechanisms will continue to scale up to human-level cognition, much less exceed it any time soon. The breakthroughs where deep AI have excelled -- o…

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…

> this time there exist a bunch of clear products

Really? I work in AI and my biggest concern is that I don't see any real products coming out of this space. I work closer to the models, and people in this specific area are making progress, but when I look at what's being done down stream I see nothing, save demos that don't scale beyond a few examples.

> in the 80s there were less defined products, amd most everything was a prototype that needed just a bit more research to be commercially viable.

This is literally all I see right now. There's some really fun hobbyist stuff happening in the image gen area that I think is here to stay, but LLMs haven't broken out of the "autocomplete on steroids" use cases.

> today's stuff is useful now

Can you give me examples of 5, non-coding assistant, profitable use cases for LLMs that aren't still in the "needed just a bit more research to be commercially viable" stage?

I love working in AI, think the technology is amazing, and do think there are some under exploited (though less exciting) use cases, but all I see if big promises with under delivery. I would love to be proven wrong.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#219
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did it "change your job description"?

As I mentioned in a sibling comment, I now "pair program" all day. Instead of being the driver and navigator all day, I can mostly sit "one layer up" in the navigator seat.

Do you feel yourself becoming disconnected from your skills? I used gpt extensively at one stage and I felt very rusty getting my hands dirty in code again.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#220
post #207

AI (specifically Claude Sonnet via Cursor) has completely transformed my workflow. It's changed my job description as a programmer. (And I've been doing this for 13y – no greenhorn!) This wasn't the case with GPT-4/o. This capability is very new. When I spoke to a colleague at Microsoft about these changes, they were floored. Microsoft has made themselves synonymous with AI, yet their company is barely even leveragin…

> yet their company is barely even leveraging it

...do you not see the obnoxious CoPilot(TM) buttons and ads everywhere? It's even infected the Azure Portal - and every time I use it to answer a genuine question I have I get factually-incorrect responses (granted, I don't ask it trivial or introductory-level questions...).

Post reply on HN