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Please stop the AI confidence theater

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Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#211

Post by wseqyrku »

lowsong wrote: post #172
heresalexandria wrote: post #107

My observation is that a lot of folks still discounting the capabilities or impact of AI either aren't working with frontier intelligence or aren't using it right. While the coding horse has been beat within an inch of its life already, I'd recommend throwing Codex on 5.5 high thinking with Computer Use + auto approve at the next thing you're about to spend 5+ minutes on to start to get a feel for how well it handles…

Why do all arguments from AI boosters boil down to this same cycle: A new model is released, AI fans hail it as huge shift in whatever metrics the AI vendor has gamed this time, and all criticism is shrugged off as "not up to date" and met with "try the new model!" Then, once level heads actually put the claims to the test and find it wanting, criticism is met with "you're just not using it right, you have to learn h…

> AI fans hail it as huge shift in whatever metrics the AI vendor has gamed this time

Hint: Those are not AI fans. (See the top comment for context.)

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#212

Post by tracerbulletx »

AaronAPU wrote: post #195
tracerbulletx wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always curious if people who think like this have ever owned a business and had to convince people to actually give them money for what they do.

I literally do own a business and my profits are held back by the mere fact that I don’t actively try to manipulate people into giving me their money.

Just to be clear I think there is a difference between saying "there are systemic issues in the way some businesses market and sell that sometimes are harmful to the public good, violate ethical and moral boundaries, and we should try to fix perverse incentives and regulate bad behavior" and "marketing is evil and we think it's funny to post videos suggesting they all commit suicide."

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#213

Post by mstaoru »

slopinthebag wrote: post #141
adam_arthur wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is clearly a force multiplier, both negative and positive. The truth is there are prolific developers like Antirez who have built quality new projects at an incredible pace (Dwarfstar 4, Redis features). But as unpopular as it is to say it, in the working world ~80% of developers pre-AI mostly just attended meetings, did a little busywork and committed small patches here and there. Probably around 20% really moved…

Doesn’t it seem a bit odd that such a prolific developer has only managed to produce a PR for a new Redis type, and a olama fork, despite having a 100x productivity booster machine for the last 8 months?

This is a good observation. Antirez is one my favorite authors and software developers. I'm 100% sure he could have made the same Redis PR and ds4 (or something else) without LLMs in about the same time with the same quality or higher.

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#214

Post by overgard »

heresalexandria wrote: post #185
clydethefrog wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you share concrete examples of the outputs that are fueling your excitement?

This was pretty cool, knocking out a problem that the best minds in maths couldn't for 80 years: https://openai.com/index/model-disproves-discrete-geometry-c... Also this is a remarkable (and realistic) evaluation of where these systems are for general work which speaks to both the room to grow as well as the pace: https://www.remotelabor.ai/ For some practical examples of what the leading consumer grade AI can do, E…

The first link is openai, who uh, might be a little biased.

The second link looks lab-sponsored.

The third link is a blog post of a lot of hype and little substance. (I tried fable twice and I was unimpressed)

I'd love to see an example of something someone made that is not affiliated with these corporations.

The thing is, I imagine there ARE examples, AI isn't completely useless, but the amount of signal around this vs the hype noise is out of control. My guess is 99% of what's built with AI is useful to approximately one person. When I hear AI boosters talk it sounds like there's an entire economy of billion dollar corporations I never noticed, and then I usually found out someone got excited because they prompted Claude to make a flight simulator (where the plane flies sideways)

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#215

Post by overgard »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #43
im_down_w_otp wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its zeitgeist appeal has been stuck for like 20 years. The problem with it is that unlike sell-side mortgage fraud, self-driving cars, crypto, and current AI… quantum computing doesn’t have a simple, approachable, mass appeal parlour trick to rally around. Until it gets one, it’s never going to facilitate the scale of grift and graft as the others.

The threat of breaking all encryption has been a slow-burning $1 trillion or more grift for the field over the last 20-30 years. Not that anything has materialized from it. I am somewhat convinced that PQC is primarily being rolled out so that we can all stop funding those clowns (and because lattice-based cryptography is finally ready for prime time).

I don't know if breaking encryption will even matter if we just keep handing over all our data anyway.

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#216

Post by [deleted] »

tavavex wrote: post #117
john_strinlai wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder how most of them sleep at night. i hate marketing . but most everyday, 9-5 in a cubicle marketers are just trying to feed their families and keep a roof over their head. its just a job, it doesnt need to be an identity. or, you know, people can encourage all marketers to commit suicide a la bill hicks. its fun to be edgy sometimes. (edit: i find it so strange that suggesting a tiny bit of empathy for someo…

Of course, they're people. But no one finds themselves in this position unwillingly. At some point in their lives, every one of those people decided to spend years studying for this job, and then to dedicate a third of their lives in service of it. There's other jobs, they didn't have to pick this one. So what was going through their brains? This is the same question as the one I posed earlier - do they think they're…

[deleted]

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#217

Post by mschuster91 »

lstodd wrote: post #203
mschuster91 wrote: post #3

> Marketing, Finance, and HR were spared though, which I find ironic. Oh hell no. A lot of jobs were lost there as well. Marketing got demoted into "just prompt AI" across the board, everyone and their dog built "ingest paper receipts from arbitrary sources into ERP/travel expense programs" (because there still is no standard on "how to transform a paper bill into a QR code"), and HR... "I inserted unreadable white t…

I recommend learning how to splice/fuse fibre. Knowing that you hold gigabits in your hands and only your skill matters is priceless.

Wired my home with fiber (10 GBit/s), I used premade fiber and a LC-LC socket box… no splicing needed, at all.

But yeah it‘s going to be a skill that will be important for datacenters.

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#218

Post by lnrd »

nikanj wrote: post #104
tavavex wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how most of them sleep at night. Do they think they're providing a valuable service? Do they like what they're doing? Do they think of themselves as good people?

They sleep very well, in a fully-paid off house, on a mattress filled with benjamins

Marketing salaries are not high at all

Re: Please stop the AI confidence theater

#219

Post by throw310822 »

lstodd wrote: post #201
throw310822 wrote: post #37

> Show me something truly life changing Does the fact that I barely wrote any lines of code in the past six months while my job has been for the past 20 years (and still is) that of producing code, feels "life changing" enough?

That only means those lines of code were devoid of meaning and arguably were best left unwritten. That your job was meaningless and superficial, that you were an unnecessary burden on society. It is life changing in the sense that suddenly you realise you did not exist for all those years.

Lol. No, I've always put a lot of care in what I made and strove to give people tools that really made them happy. And I still do, steering the AI left and right. But on the other hand yes, seeing the machine fast-forward through most of the reasoning, weighing, understanding, cross-checking, deciding that used to fill hours of my day is... vertiginous. It's real intelligence, and it makes us much less useful and relevant. If your refuge is that whatever the machine can do has never been worth of a human being, you will find yourself soon squeezed in some very narrow corner, and/ or you'll suffer some deep crisis of meaning.
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