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Artificial intelligence is losing hype

economist.com

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Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#231

Post by omnee »

I just asked Google's Gemini the following question:

Q: How many N's are there in Normation?

A: There is one N in the word "Normation"

Note that the answer is the same when asked n's instead of N's.

And this is but one example of many simple cases demonstrating that these model are indeed not reasoning in a similar manner to humans. However, the outputs are useful enough that I myself use Claude and GPT-4o for some work, but with full awareness that I must review the outputs in cases where factual accuracy is required.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#232

Post by [deleted] »

bamboozled wrote: post #70
phito wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I am yet to see any reasoned argument for why it is far more difficult and will take far longer I am yet to see any reasoned argument for why it is easy to build real AI and that it will come fast. As you said, AI has been there for decades and stagnated for pretty much the whole time. We've just had a big leap, but nothing says (except BS hype) that we're not in for a long plateau again.

Well he gave you a list of credentials of why you should believe him. Isn’t that enough ?

[deleted]

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#233

Post by greenthrow »

_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…

Software engineer for multiple decades here. None of the AI assistants have made any major change to my job. They are useful tools when it's time to write code like many useful tools before them. But the hard work of being a senior+ software engineer comes before you start typing.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#234

Post by WalterSear »

bamboozled wrote: post #95
spacemanspiff01 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't find coding assistants to be very useful. Image generation was fun for a few weeks. Speech recognition is useful. Anyway, considering all these things can be done on device, where is the long term business prospect of which you speak?

> I don't find coding assistants to be very useful.

I've come to notice a correlation between contemporary AI optimism and having effectively made the jump to coding with AI assistants.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#235

Post by KoolKat23 »

LtWorf wrote: post #172
bamboozled wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't find coding assistants to be very useful. Image generation was fun for a few weeks. Speech recognition is useful. Anyway, considering all these things can be done on device, where is the long term business prospect of which you speak?

> Speech recognition is useful. Now try to mute a video on youtube and understand what's being said from the automatic subtitles. If you do it in english, be aware that it's the best performing language and all others are even worse.

Just today, I received a note from a gas technician, part handwritten, for the life of me I couldn't make out what he was saying, I asked ChatGPT and it surprisingly understood, rereading the original note I'm very sure it was correct.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#236

Post by surfingdino »

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.…

What are you talking about? What autonomy? Try the latest Gemini Pro 1.5 and ask it for the list of ten places to visit in Spain. Then ask it for the Google Maps URLs for those places. It will make up URLs that point to nowhere. This os of zero value for personal or business use. I have dozens of examples of such crappy outcomes from all "latest", "most powerful" products. AI is smoke and mirrors. It is being sold as a very expensive solution to a non-existent problem and is not getting any better in the future. Some wish AI had someone like Steve Jobs to properly market it, but even Steve Jobs could not make a crappy product sell. The whole premise of AI goes against what generations of users were told--computers always give correct answers and given the same input parameters return the same output. By extension, we were also taught that GIGO (Garbage-In, Garbage-Out) is what we can blame when we are not happy with the results computers generate. AI peddlers want us to believe in and pay for VIGO (Value-In, Garbage-Out) and I'm sorry but there is not a valid business model where such tools are required.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#237

Post by Chirono »

omnee wrote: post #231

I just asked Google's Gemini the following question: Q: How many N's are there in Normation? A: There is one N in the word "Normation" Note that the answer is the same when asked n's instead of N's. And this is but one example of many simple cases demonstrating that these model are indeed not reasoning in a similar manner to humans. However, the outputs are useful enough that I myself use Claude and GPT-4o for some w…

This is just an artefact of tokenisation though. The model simply isn’t ever shown the letters that make up words, unless they are spelled out explicitly. It sees tokens representing groups of words. This is a little like saying a human isn’t intelligent because they couldn’t answer your question that you asked in an ultrasonic wavelength. If you’d like to learn more this video is a great resource: https://youtu.be/zduSFxRajkE?si=LvpXbeSyJRFBJFuj

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#238

Post by sangnoir »

_acco wrote: post #216
candiddevmike wrote: post #213

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.

How is this a change in job description? It may be a failure of imagination on my part, but it sounds like you're still doing what you have always done - you've changed the how.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#239

Post by matteoraso »

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 don't know anything about neuroscience, but is there anything in the brain even remotely like the transformer architecture? It can do a lot of things, but I don't think that it's capable of emulating human intelligence.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#240

Post by julienchastang »

As usual, when we see a thread on this topic on HN, the reactions tend to be bimodal: either "Yes, AI has transformed my workflow" (which is where I mostly fall), or "No, it's over-hyped." The latter often comes with an anecdote about how an LLM failed at a relatively simple task. I speculate that this diversity in opinion might be related to whether or not the user is employing a pro-tier LLM. Personally, I've been very impressed by ChatGPT-4 across a wide range of tasks, from debugging K8s logs to coding and ideation. I also wonder if some of the negative reactions stem from bad luck with an initial "first contact" with an LLM, where the results fell flat for any number of reasons (e.g., poor prompting), leading the user to conclude that it's not worth their time.
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