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Artificial intelligence is losing hype

economist.com

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Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#221

Post by ben_w »

tasuki wrote: post #127
randcraw wrote: post #83

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…

"AGI" is a nonsense term anyway. Humans don't have "general" intelligence either: our intelligence is specialized to our environment.

"AGI" means many different things to many different people: to me any AI which is general is an AGI so GPT-3.5 counts; to OpenAI it has to be economically transformative to count; to some commentators here it has to be superhuman to count.

I think that none of the initials are boolean; things can be degrees of artificial, degrees of general, and degrees of intelligent.

I think most would assert that humans count as a "general" intelligence, even if they disagree about most of the other things I've put in this comment.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#222

Post by _acco »

pembrook wrote: post #217
_acco wrote: 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 c…

Hmm, I've definitely always used paid copilot models.

Perhaps it's my language of choice (Elixir)? Claude absolutely nails it, rarely gives me code with compilation errors, seems to know and leverage the standard library very well, idiomatic. Not the same with GPTs.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#223

Post by minkles »

gennarro wrote: post #199

I tried to do some AI database clean up this weekend - simple stuff like zip lookup and standardizing spacing, and caps - and ChatGPT managed to screw it ip over and over. It’s the sort of thing there a little error means the answer is totally wrong so I spent an hour refining the query and then addressing edge cases etc. I could have just done it all in excel in less with less chance of random (hard to catch) errors…

Similar experience.

In fields I have less experience with it seems feasible. In fields I am an expert in, I know it's dangerous. That makes me worry about the applicability of the former and people's critical evaluation ability of the whole idea.

I err on the side of "run away".

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#224

Post by j-a-a-p »

ummonk wrote: post #13

Whether and to what extent AI can be monetized is an open question. But there's no question that LLMs are already seeing extensive use in everyday office work and already making large improvements to productivity.

The article suggests the contrary: 4.8% use in US companies, down from 5.4%. (I would wish I would have gotten these numbers, but for a tech company founded in 2015 these are not remarkable).

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#225

Post by _acco »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #220
_acco wrote: 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...).

I said leveraging, not hawking!

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#226

Post by octodog »

CooCooCaCha wrote: post #183
h_tbob wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a competent coder. I have been a coder since I was in middle school. I know at least 10 languages, and I could write my own from scratch. I know c++ dart golang java html css javascript typescript lua react vue angular angularjs c# swift sql in various dialects including mysql and postgres, and have worked professionally in all these regards. I love to challenge myself. In fact, if I done something before, I fin…

That kinda proves my point. You find it useful when you’re doing something outside your core competencies.

I don't see the problem here. What's wrong with that? Tools are supposed to make your life easier.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#227

Post by _acco »

seanthemon wrote: post #219
_acco wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't. But that's probably because I'm very opinionated about the implementation details, so I'm scrutinizing and tweaking its output a lot.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#228

Post by KoolKat23 »

randcraw wrote: post #83
ChaitanyaSai wrote: post #52

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.…

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…

All Kahneman's system 2 thinking is just slow deliberate thinking. And these models do indeed have this characteristic to an extent, as evidenced with chain of thought reasoning.

You can see this in action with multiplication. Much like humans when asked to guess the answer, they'll get it wrong, unless they know the answer from rote learning multiplication tables, this System-1 thinking. In many cases when asked they can reason further and solve it, by breaking it down and solving it step by step, much like a human, this is system-2 thinking.

In my opinion, it seems nearly everything is there for it it to take the next leap in intelligence, it's just putting it all together.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#229

Post by ben_w »

floppiplopp wrote: post #109
ChaitanyaSai wrote: post #52

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.…

When Weizenbaum demonstrated Eliza to his colleagues, some thought there was an intelligent consciousness at the heart of it. Few even continued to believe this after they were shown the source code, which they were able to read and understand. Human consciousness is full of biases and the most advanced AI cannot reliably determine which of two floats is bigger or even solve really simple logic puzzles for little kid…

> the most advanced AI cannot reliably determine which of two floats is bigger

Some of the most advanced AI are tool users and can both write and crucially also execute python, and embed the output in their responses.

> or even solve really simple logic puzzles for little kids.

As given in a recent discussion: https://chatgpt.com/share/ee013797-a55c-4685-8f2b-87f1b455b4...

(Custom instructions, in case you're surprised by the opening of the response).

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#230

Post by corytheboyd »

Flop7331 wrote: post #154
icholy wrote: 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.

2x loc!

I’ve seen copilot spit out garbage dozens of lines long for something I swore must be one or two stdlib functions. Yep, it was, after reading some real documentation and using my brain. It was some NodeJS stuff, which I never work with. Don’t get me wrong, I still find it a helpful tool, but it is not at all a good, seasoned programmer— it is an algorithm predicting the next token based on the current tokens.
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