Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Artificial intelligence is losing hype

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 814 posts

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#261

Post by andreilys »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #218
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…

> this time there exist a bunch of clear products Really? I work in AI and my biggest concern is that I don't see any real products coming out of this space. I work closer to the models, and people in this specific area are making progress, but when I look at what's being done down stream I see nothing , save demos that don't scale beyond a few examples. > in the 80s there were less defined products, amd most everyth…

1. Content Generation:

LLMs can be used to generate high-quality, human-like content such as articles, blog posts, social media posts, and even short stories. Businesses can leverage this capability to save time and resources on content creation, and improve the consistency and quality of their online presence.

2. Customer Service and Support:

LLMs can be integrated into chatbots and virtual assistants to provide fast, accurate, and personalized responses to customer inquiries. This can help businesses improve their customer experience, reduce the workload on human customer service representatives, and provide 24/7 support.

3. Summarization and Insights:

LLMs can be used to analyze large volumes of text data, such as reports, research papers, or customer feedback, and generate concise summaries and insights. This can be valuable for businesses in fields like market research, financial analysis, or strategic planning.

4. HR Candidate Screening:

Use case: Using LLMs to assess job applicant resumes, cover letters, and interview responses to identify the most qualified candidates. Example: A large retailer integrating an LLM-based recruiting assistant to help sift through hundreds of applications for entry-level roles.

5. Legal Document Review:

Use case: Employing LLMs to rapidly scan through large volumes of legal contracts, case files, and regulatory documents to identify key terms, risks, and relevant information. Example: A corporate law firm deploying an LLM tool to streamline the due diligence process for mergers and acquisitions.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#262

Post by mypalmike »

psb217 wrote: post #201
hnfong wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point bringing up the ELIZA argument is basically bad faith gaslighting… Finding bugs in some models doesn’t mean you have a point about intelligence. If somebody could apply a similar argument to dismiss human intelligence, you don’t have a point. And here it goes: the most advanced human intelligence can’t reliably multiply large numbers or recall digits of Pi. Obviously humans are dumber than pocket calcul…

Your counterargument is invalid. The most advanced human intelligence invented (or discovered) concepts like multiplication, pi, etc., and created tools to work around the ways in which these concepts aren't well handled by their biological substrate. When machine intelligences start inventing biological tools to overcome the limits of their silicon existence, you'll have a point.

Designing biological tools is not a commonly accepted bar for AGI.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#263

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

#264

Post by janalsncm »

“AI” never existed, at least AGI never did. AI that works is called machine learning and it’s not going away because it actually drives revenue at many companies. But the people who are working on that were working on it before blockchain and they’ll be working on it long after the next hype cycle runs out of steam. Unlike grifting, actual expertise takes time.

I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I have a ton of schadenfreude for the AI maximalists (see: Leopold Aschenbrenner and the $1 trillion cluster that will never be), hype men (LinkedIn gurus and Twitter “technologists” that post threads with the thread emoji regurgitating listicles) or grifters (see: Rabbit R1 and the LAM vaporware).

On the other hand, I’m worried about another AI winter. We don’t need more people figuring out how to make bigger models, we need more fundamental research on low-resource contexts. Transformers are really just a trick to be able to ingest the whole internet. But there are many times where we don’t have a whole internet worth of data. The failure of LLMs on ARC is a pretty clear indication we’re not there yet (although I wouldn’t consider ARC sufficient either).

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#265

Post by Nullabillity »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #218
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…

> this time there exist a bunch of clear products Really? I work in AI and my biggest concern is that I don't see any real products coming out of this space. I work closer to the models, and people in this specific area are making progress, but when I look at what's being done down stream I see nothing , save demos that don't scale beyond a few examples. > in the 80s there were less defined products, amd most everyth…

Calling LLMs autocompleters is an insult to autocompleters.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#266

Post by slidehero »

Loughla wrote: post #251
sakopov wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's useful for analyzing data, but only if it can be verified. We use it (higher education) to glance at data trends that may need further exploration. So it's a fancy pivot table, I guess. Most software vendors are selling their version of AI as hallucination free though. So that's terrifying.

>Most software vendors are selling their version of AI as hallucination free though.

It definitely has that Tesla Autopolit feel to it, where the marketing is ... enthusiastic, while the onus to "use the tool responsibly" is left up to the end user.

I'm building a persentation/teaching tool for teachers and trying to not sweep the halicination angle under the rug. My marketing angle is that the AI is a huge time saver, but the classroom teacher is the subject expert and they need to review the output. At the end of the day, it's still much more time efficient for an expert to review the content than it is to produce it from scratch which is a huge win.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#267

Post by theappsecguy »

andreilys wrote: post #261
crystal_revenge wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this time there exist a bunch of clear products Really? I work in AI and my biggest concern is that I don't see any real products coming out of this space. I work closer to the models, and people in this specific area are making progress, but when I look at what's being done down stream I see nothing , save demos that don't scale beyond a few examples. > in the 80s there were less defined products, amd most everyth…

1. Content Generation: LLMs can be used to generate high-quality, human-like content such as articles, blog posts, social media posts, and even short stories. Businesses can leverage this capability to save time and resources on content creation, and improve the consistency and quality of their online presence. 2. Customer Service and Support: LLMs can be integrated into chatbots and virtual assistants to provide fas…

Dear lord, if someone started relying on LLMs for legal documents, their clients would be royally screwed…

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#268

Post by nojs »

_acco wrote: post #222
pembrook wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my experience ChatGPT seems particularly bad at Elixir, presumably because there is a comparative lack of published code and discussion about it.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#269

Post by Nullabillity »

andreilys wrote: post #261
crystal_revenge wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this time there exist a bunch of clear products Really? I work in AI and my biggest concern is that I don't see any real products coming out of this space. I work closer to the models, and people in this specific area are making progress, but when I look at what's being done down stream I see nothing , save demos that don't scale beyond a few examples. > in the 80s there were less defined products, amd most everyth…

1. Content Generation: LLMs can be used to generate high-quality, human-like content such as articles, blog posts, social media posts, and even short stories. Businesses can leverage this capability to save time and resources on content creation, and improve the consistency and quality of their online presence. 2. Customer Service and Support: LLMs can be integrated into chatbots and virtual assistants to provide fas…

> 1. Content Generation:

Spam isn't a feature. See also, this whole message that could just have been the headlines.

> 2. Customer Service and Support:

So… less clear than the website and not empowered to do anything (beyond ruining your reputation) because even you don't trust it?

> 3. Summarization and Insights:

See 1, spam isn't a feature. This is just trying to undo the damage from that (and failing).

> 4. HR Candidate Screening:

> 5. Legal Document Review:

If it's worth doing, it's worth doing well.

Post reply on HN