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Artificial intelligence is losing hype
291–300 of 814 posts
Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype
#292I'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 am yet to see any reasoned argument for why it is far more difficult and will take far longer. For language models specifically, they are trained on data and have historically been improved by increasing the size of the model (by number of parameters) and by the amount and/or quality of training data. We are basically out of new, non-synthetic text to train models on and it’s extremely hard work to come up with n…
>We are basically out of new, non-synthetic text to train models
this is not even remotely true.
There is an astronomical amount of data siloed by publishers, professional journals etc. that is yet to be tapped.
OpenAI is making inroads by making deals with these content owners for access to all that juicy data.
Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype
#293Earlier 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…
Software engineering doesn't require accuracy?
I was implying that AI can be useful in software engineering because hallucinations are expected and actively addressed by engineers. It's less of an issue in comparison to automating strategic business decisions by what is essentially a "black box" and not knowing if it hallucinated data in order to arrive at its decision.
Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype
#294AI (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 exa…
Context is the most challenging bit. FWIW, the codebases I'm working on are still small enough to where I rarely need to include more than 12 files into context. And I find as I make the context bigger beyond that, results degrade significantly.
So I don't know how this would go in a much larger codebase.
What floored him was simply how much of my programming I was doing with an LLM / how little I write line-by-line (vs edit line-by-line).
If you're really curious, I recorded some work for a friend. The first video has terrible audio, unfortunately. This second one I think gives a very realistic demonstration – you'll see the model struggle a bit at the beginning:
Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
- We don't have a "real AI" at all. Where's Skynet, where's HAL-9000? Where are the cute robotic butlers from the "I, Robot" movie? - Simple interpolation of the progress is exactly the problem here. Look at the historical graphs of AI funding and tell me with a straight face that we absolutely must use simple interpolation. - Nope, human-level intelligence is not even close. It remains as nebulous and out of reach a…
To be fair, I’ve talked to a lot of people who cannot consistently perform at the mistral-12b level. I think we expect AGI to be much smarter than the average joe, and free of occasional stupidity. What we’ve got is an 85IQ generalist with unreliable savant capabilities, that can also talk to a million people at the same time without getting distracted. I don’t see how that isn’t absolutely a fundamental shift in cap…
I don't think they'll use LLM's for customer service.
But it's a building block. And when used well it may be possible to get to zero hallucinations and good accuracy in question answering for limited domains - like the call center.
Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype
#296As 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…
I'm using the latest top paid models, gpt4o and claude 3.5.
They work when there's a lot of examples on github or google, but once you get into something that doesn't have a lot of examples like closed source code or rarely used libraries, it will start hallucinating and even mixing up different API versions to create a mess that doesn't work at all.
I don't believe LLMs will get any better than this without a new major breakthrough, but this is already better than using Google search.
Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype
#297AI (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 exa…
I think that Greptile is on the right track. I made a repo containing the c# source code for the godot game engine, and it's "how to do X", where X is some obscure technical feature (like how to create a collision query using the godot internal physics api) is much better than all the other ai solutions which use general training data.
However there are some very frustrating limitations to greptle, so severe that I basically only use it to ask implementation questions on existing codebases, not for anything like general R&D: 1) answers are limited to about 150 lines. 2) it doesn't re-analyze a repo after you link it in a conversation (you need to start a new conversation, and re-link the repo, then wait 20+ min for it to parse your code) 3) it is very slow (maybe 30 seconds to answer a question) 4) there's no prompt engineering
I think it's a bit strange that no other ai solution lets you ask questions about existing codebases. I hope that will be more widespread soon.
Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That’s a different discussion. I’m disputing the claim that AI can make you a 2x dev when it seems like it’s mostly beneficial when you don’t know what you’re doing.
Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype
#299I 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…
If the SQL took you an hour to just clean up and you're an expert that is some pretty complex SQL. I could understand how it could get it wrong.
Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype
#300As 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.
I use gpt4o and claude 3.5 while coding every day. The rumors on twitter and reddit are accurate.
I constantly run into incorrect answers from the LLMs every day. Just recently I asked whether I needed to reverse the bit shift to mask the upper 24 bits in an IP address on a little endian platform and it incorrectly told me no probably because most of the answers on Google appeared to answer no to similarly phrased questions.