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A new AI winter is coming?

taranis.ie

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Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#231

Post by bloppe »

singularity2001 wrote: post #220
bloppe wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing the point of "AI winter". It's not about how good the products are now. It's about how quickly the products are improving and creating the potential for profit. That's what drives investment. 3 things we know about the AI revolution in 2025: - LLMs are amazing, but they have reached a plateau. AGI is not within reach. - LLM investment has sacrificed many hundreds of billions of dollars, much of…

>> "LLMs have reached a plateau." you should look at benchmarks such as ARC which went from "needs 10 years, currently at 0%" to almost solved within the least year. Also there is a revolution happening in math which the layman might be missing.

I don't care about the benchmarks. I care about how helpful coding agents are for my work. And I can barely tell the difference between the models this year and the models last year. Everyone's raving about Opus but I bet about 50% of people would be able to identify it in a blind test against Sonnet.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#232

Post by swalsh »

beachtaxidriver wrote: post #93
swalsh wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard disagree, I'm in the process of deploying several AI solutions in Healthcare. We have a process a nurse usually spends about an hour on, and costs $40-$70 depending on if they are offshore and a few other factors. Our AI can match it at a few dollars often less. A nuse still reviews the output, but its way less time. The economics of those tokens is great. We have another solution that just finds money, $10-$30…

It's true, but do you really trust the AI generated + Nurse Review output more than Organic Nurse generated? In my experience, management types use the fact that AI generated + Nurse Review is faster to push a higher quota of forms generated per hour. Eventually, from fatigue or boredom, the human in the loop just ends up being a rubber stamper. Would you trust this with your own or your children's life? The human in…

I trust it alot, in our tests the times a human nurse picked up on something the AI missed are pretty rare. The times the AI found something the nurse missed are common, almost the majority.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#233

Post by kunley »

frotaur wrote: post #35
gishh wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> something fundamental has changed that enables a computer to pretty effectively understand natural language. You understand how the tech works right? It's statistics and tokens. The computer understands nothing. Creating "understanding" would be a breakthrough. Edit: I wasn't trying to be a jerk. I sincerely wasn't. I don't "understand" how LLMs "understand" anything. I'd be super pumped to learn that bit. I don't…

It astonishes me how people can make categorical judgements on things as hard to define as 'understanding'. I would say that, except for the observable and testable performance, what else can you say about understanding? It is a fact that LLMs are getting better at many tasks. From their performance, they seem to have an understanding of say python. The mechanistic way this understanding arises is different than huma…

How do you know what kind of "understanding" a python has? Why python and not a lizard? Or a bird? What method do you use for evaluating this? Does a typical python do what you tell your ai agent to do?...

C'mon, this comparison seems to be very, very unscientific. No offense...

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#234

Post by johnfn »

svaha1728 wrote: post #144
johnfn wrote: post #124

I’m fascinated by people who say that LLMs have failed in practice. Last week, when I was on PTO, I used AI to to a full redesign of a music community website I run. I touched about 40k lines of code in a week. The redesign is shipped and everyone is using it. AI let me go about 5-10x faster than if I would have done this by hand. (In fact, I have tried doing this in the past, so I really do have an apples to apples…

On a music blog, yes! Now go try to rewrite the firmware for your car.

It's not a blog - it's a community website, so significantly more complex (running competitions, uploading tracks, moderation, etc, etc, etc).

I don't understand the car firmware non-sequitur. I've already seen productivity gains in this domain. Why do I need to also prove them in another one? They are already demonstrated. It's like me saying "I can get places faster in a car than on foot" and you're saying "yeah but you can't get to the moon."

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#235

Post by kunley »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #44

Zero citations, random speculations. Random blogpost versus the most rapidly adopted technology in history...

This statement strikes me... but not the way you intended.

We should say: most rapidly adopted ... speculation.

Because this is what it is: not a technology, but speculation.

Hint: technology has repeatable results.

QED ;)

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#236

Post by bloppe »

saltcured wrote: post #195
bloppe wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing the point of "AI winter". It's not about how good the products are now. It's about how quickly the products are improving and creating the potential for profit. That's what drives investment. 3 things we know about the AI revolution in 2025: - LLMs are amazing, but they have reached a plateau. AGI is not within reach. - LLM investment has sacrificed many hundreds of billions of dollars, much of…

Many technologies plateau, but we don't say they all have winters. Terrestrial radio winter? Television winter? Automobile winter? Air travel winter? Nuclear power comes close in terms of its tarnished image and reluctance to reinvest. I personally believe contemporary AI is over-hyped, but I cannot say with confidence that it is going to lead to a similar winter as the last time. It seems like today's products satis…

I think it's easy to talk past one another on this subject. To be sure, I love Claude code. I wish I could pay for several years in advance at today's prices.

But the consumer's is not the important perspective for the AI hype cycle. It's the investors' perspective. I'm going to guess that well over a trillion dollars has gone into "AI", including the major labs and all the little "agents for XYZ" startups popping up every day. From the investors' perspective, that better pay off several times over in profit, not revenue, in the next few years. Prices will go up, but competition is fierce and nobody will be able to command a high margin. How are they going to make trillions in profit with razor thin margins?

This will make the very mention of "AI" toxic for most investors sooner than later.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#237

Post by subw00f »

swalsh wrote: post #232
beachtaxidriver wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true, but do you really trust the AI generated + Nurse Review output more than Organic Nurse generated? In my experience, management types use the fact that AI generated + Nurse Review is faster to push a higher quota of forms generated per hour. Eventually, from fatigue or boredom, the human in the loop just ends up being a rubber stamper. Would you trust this with your own or your children's life? The human in…

I trust it alot, in our tests the times a human nurse picked up on something the AI missed are pretty rare. The times the AI found something the nurse missed are common, almost the majority.

I believe the question was: would you trust it with your kids life? Or your own?

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#238

Post by parineum »

kakapo5672 wrote: post #158
johnfn wrote: post #124

I’m fascinated by people who say that LLMs have failed in practice. Last week, when I was on PTO, I used AI to to a full redesign of a music community website I run. I touched about 40k lines of code in a week. The redesign is shipped and everyone is using it. AI let me go about 5-10x faster than if I would have done this by hand. (In fact, I have tried doing this in the past, so I really do have an apples to apples…

Yes, and I've had similar results. I'm easily 10x times more productive with AI, and I'm seeing the same in my professional network. The power of AI is so clear and obvious, that I'm astonished so many folks remain in vigorous denial. So when I read articles like this, I too am fascinated by the motivations and psychology of the author. What is going on there? The closest analogue I can think of is Climate Change den…

Half of the value equation is cost which is still coming to you with a VC discount. Would you be 10x productive if you were spending your salary on tokens?

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#239

Post by octoberfranklin »

bunderbunder wrote: post #214

I've run into what I think might be an even bigger problem with the "just keep reading/outputting the next token" design: there's no going backwards. This means that LLMs don't do well with input where text that comes later in the input alters how text that came earlier should be interpreted. Which is really quite common in practice. Humans like to do things where you start with a dump of information, and then ask qu…

No, that's not how a Transformer works.

It gets the entire input all at once. Then it generates the output one token at a time.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#240

Post by Jensson »

LatencyKills wrote: post #209
6510 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before one may begin to understand something one must first be able to estimate the level of certainty. Our robot friends, while really helpful and polite, seem to be lacking in that department. They actually think the things we've written on the internet, in books, academic papers, court documents, newspapers, etc are actually true. Where the humans aren't omniscient it fills the blanks with nonsense.

> Where the humans aren't omniscient it fills the blanks with nonsense As do most humans. People lie. People make things up to look smart. People fervently believe things that are easily disproved. Some people are willfully ignorant, anti-science, anti-education, etc. The problem isn't the transformer architecture... it is the humans who advertise capabilities that are not there yet.

> As do most humans. People lie. People make things up to look smart.

The main difference is that people know when they lie and make things up to look smart, LLM doesn't.

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