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Artificial intelligence is losing hype

economist.com

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Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#301

Post by Loughla »

slidehero wrote: post #266
Loughla wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 save…

Sadly, I think your sales pitch will fall flat. College and University admin aren't technology experts, but are VERY susceptible to flattery from tech sales people. They want to hear about the time and cost savings, regardless of reality.

Also, to be super presumptuous, if you need help with anything with your tool, hit me up. I love working with developers on building realistic use case and workflows.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#302

Post by throwaway984393 »

_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…

[dead]

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#303

Post by washadjeffmad »

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.…

Agreed. This is something I didn't think I'd see in my lifetime, let alone be poised to be able to run locally. The alignment is fortuitous and staggering.

People focused on the products are missing out on the dawn of an epoch. It's a failure of perspective and creativity that's thankfully not universal.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#304

Post by bamboozled »

slidehero wrote: post #287
Nullabillity wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is negative. Because the rest of us are still forced to wade through the endless worthless sludge your ilk produces.

reducing the load on overworked teachers by using GPT to generate exercises, quizes and explanations for students is "endless worthless sludge"?

I have teachers in my family, their lives have been basically ruined by people using ChatGPT-4 to cheat on their assignments. They spend their weekend trying to workout if someone has "actually written" this or not.

So sorry, we're back to spam generator. Even if it's "good spam".

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#305

Post by paretoer »

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 am not a software engineer and these tools allow me to make a giant mess of an app in a weekend that kind of does what I want but I only get that weekend. Once I come back to it after any length of time, since I have no idea what I am doing or what is going on it is impossible to update or add to the app without breaking it.

Now I have all these new ideas but I am back to square one because it just seems easier to start over.

I look forward to more powerful models in the future but I do wonder if it will just mean I can get slightly farther and make an even larger mess of an app in a weekend that I have no way to add to or update without breaking.

The main utility seems like it would be for content creation to pretend I made an app with all these great features as a non-software engineer but conveniently leave out the part about it being impossible to update.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#306

Post by dakshgupta »

novaleaf wrote: post #297
layer8 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

I work at Greptile and agree on all three criticisms. 1) is a bug we haven't been able to fix, 2) has to do with the high cost of re-indexing, we will likely start auto-updating the index when LLM costs come down a little, and 3) has to do with LLM speed. We pushed some changes to cut time-to-first-token by about half but long way to go.

Re: prompt engineering, we have a prompt guide if that helps, was that what you are getting at?

https://docs.greptile.com/prompt-guide

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#307

Post by janalsncm »

parpfish wrote: post #36
mrinfinitiesx wrote: post #3

Good. It's decent for summarizing and giving me bullet points and explaining things like I'm 5, makes it easy to code things that I don't want to code or spend time figuring out how to do with new languages, other than that, I see no real world applications outside of listening to burger king orders and putting them on a screen for people to make them. Simple support requests, and of course making buzzword-esque docu…

Im really hoping that when this hype cycle ends and the next AI winter starts that all the generative stuff gets culled but we still see good work and tech using all the other advances (that would be described as “mere” deep learning). Document embedding from transformers are great and fit into existing search paradigms. Computer vision and image segmentation is at a level I thought impossible 10 years ago. Text to s…

The research never ended. AI money was flooding in, but mostly going directly to Nvidia. If that cash flow turns off there will still be research happening because it was mostly unaffected in the first place.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#308

Post by slidehero »

Loughla wrote: post #301
slidehero wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 save…

Sadly, I think your sales pitch will fall flat. College and University admin aren't technology experts, but are VERY susceptible to flattery from tech sales people. They want to hear about the time and cost savings, regardless of reality. Also, to be super presumptuous, if you need help with anything with your tool, hit me up. I love working with developers on building realistic use case and workflows.

>Sadly, I think your sales pitch will fall flat. College and University admin aren't technology experts

I'm building tools for K-12 (I've been a teacher for 20+ years). There's solid uptake of GPT among teachers and individually they're pretty enthusiastic about anything that will reduce their workload, so I'm hoping it resonates.

>Also, to be super presumptuous, if you need help with anything with your tool, hit me up. I love working with developers on building realistic use case and workflows.

Sure, my details are in my profile, happy to chat.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#309

Post by MaybiusStrip »

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…

I don't think so, I think it's more about openness. I've noticed older software engineers tend to be more anti-LLM and quick to dismiss.

The shortcomings are aplenty, but they don't bother me. The things it can do weren't possible 2 years ago. I'll leverage those and take the bad with the good.

Similar experience with Tesla FSD. I know other Tesla owners who tried it a few times and think it's trash because they had to disengage. I disengage preemptively all the time but the other 90% of my drive being done for me is not something that used to be possible. I tried to give up my subscription because it's expensive and couldn't hold out two days.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#310

Post by theaussiestew »

codexon wrote: post #300
fragmede wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 qu…

That's probably the best we can do for now with LLMs. Surely it would be unreasonable for LLMs to provide a correct answer when the majority of people on various forums also provide the wrong answer. Some day LLMs will be able to objectively provide truthful statements but we're not there yet. Regardless, that LLMs are competing with longstanding programmers is already an impressive feat, even if they're not 100% correct.
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