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Artificial intelligence is losing hype

economist.com

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Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#241

Post by crystal_revenge »

WalterSear wrote: post #234
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?

> 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.

> effectively made the jump to coding with AI assistants

I think this depend heavily on what type of coding your doing. The more your job could be replaced by copy/pasting from Stack Overflow, the more useful you find coding assistants.

For that past few years most of the code I've written has been solving fairly niche quantitative problems with novel approaches and I've found AI coding assistants to range from useless to harmful.

But on a recent webdev project, they were much more useful. The vast majority of problems in webdev are fundamentally not unique so a searchable pattern library (which is what an LLM coding assistant basically is) should be pretty effective.

For other areas of software, they're not nearly as useful.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#242

Post by JamesSwift »

sangnoir wrote: post #238
_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.

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.

Right. And in a similar vein, its very easy to replace a lot of low-effort outsourcing / junior-dev assignable tasks. I still need to describe the problem and clean up the answer, but I get the answer immediately and I can re-prompt for it to fix it immediately.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#243

Post by KoolKat23 »

0points wrote: post #105
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.…

> There are hundreds of billions of dollars figuring out how to get to the next level, and it's clear we are close. Are we really now? The smart people I've spoken to on the subject seem to agree the current technology based on LLM are at the end of the road and that there are no breakthrough in sight. So what is your take on the next level?

Define breakthrough, there's plenty of room to scale and optimize without any need for a breakthrough (well my definition of breakthrough). Emergent properties so far have been obtained purely from scaling.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#244

Post by sakopov »

_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 think my general perception is that AI is a great assistant for some occupations like software engineering, but due to its large room for error it's very impractical for majority of business applications that require accuracy. I'm seeing this trend at my company, which operates in the medical field and recently mandated that all engineers use CoPilot. At the same time it's a struggle to see where we can improve our business processes with AI - outside of basic things like transcriptions and spell checking - without getting ourselves into a massive lawsuit.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#245

Post by jdefr89 »

It’s hilarious seeing people getting LLMs to traditional takes traditional discrete algorithms do perfectly already. “Let’s use LLM to do basic arithmetic!” Like, that’s not what they are built for. We want more generalization… So much to unpack here and I’m tired of having to explain these basic things. You will know our models got more powerful if they can do something like solve the ARC challenge, not cramming it with new updated information we know it will already process a certain way…

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#246

Post by nerdjon »

greenthrow wrote: post #233
_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.

I will admit, if I need to do some one off task and write a quick python script to do something I will likely go to Claude or something and write it. I am talking 20-40 lines. I think it's fine for that, it doesn't need a ton of context, it's easy to test, easy to look at and understand, etc.

But outside of that, beyond needing to remember a certain syntax, I have found that any time I tried to use it for anything more complex I am finding myself spending more time going back and forth trying to get code that works than I would have if I had just done it myself in the first place.

If the code works, it just isn't maintainable code if you ask it to do too much. It will just remove entire functionality.

I have seen a situation of someone submitting a PR, very clearly copying a method and sticking it in AI and saying "improve this". It made changes for no good reason and when you ask the person that submitted the PR why they made the change we of course got no answer. (these were not just Linter changes)

Thats concerning, pushing code up that you can't even explain why you did something?

Like you said with the hard work, sure it can churn out code. But you need to have a complete clear picture of what that code needs to look like before you start generating or you will not like the end result.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#248

Post by fragmede »

julienchastang wrote: post #240

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…

You can usually tell that a lot of people just go off rumors they read once off Twitter or reddit or somewhere about hallucinations or doing math, against a weaker model, without every validating what they read online or updating their model of how well latest models work.

Just have to learn to let it go, despite xkcd 386.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#249

Post by layer8 »

_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…

Does your work not depend on existing code bases, product architectures and nontrivial domain contexts the LLM knows nothing about?

Every thread like this over the past year or so has had comments similar to yours, and it always remains quite vague, or when examples are given, it’s about self-contained tasks that require little contextual knowledge and are confined to widely publicly-documented technologies.

What exactly floored your colleague at Microsoft?

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#250

Post by seoulmetro »

edanm wrote: post #148
seoulmetro wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the next big step? What will it do? Why do we need or want it? Surely you have the answer. This means you are sure we are close to automated driving, engineering and hospitality?

> This means you are sure we are close to automated driving [...] We already have "automated driving" in some sense. Some cities have fully autonomous taxi services that have operated for a year or more, iirc.

Nah. We're still not that close. Think of it this way, you turn on an appliance at home and it's what, a 0.0001% chance it will explode in your face? Now automated driving, hospitality etc is all more like a 0.1+% chance something goes wrong still. Huge difference.

I don't really take those taxis as a form of solved automation. It's a nice step though.

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