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Artificial intelligence is losing hype

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Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#311
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…

I've been using (GitHub) Copilot and ChatGPT since they've been widely available. I started using ChatGPT for coding after 4 came out.

I was an early advocate for Copilot but, honestly, nowadays I really don't find it that useful, compared to GPT-4o via ChatGPT.

ChatGPT not being directly integrated into my editor turns out to be an advantage. The problem with Copilot is it gets in the way. It's too easy to unintentionally insert a line or block completion that isn't what you want, or is out and out garbage, and it's constantly shoving up suggestions as I type, which can be distracting. It's particularly irritating when I'm trying to read or understand a piece of code, or maybe do a refactor, and I leave my caret in one position for half a second too long, and suddenly it's ghost-inserted a block of code as a suggestion that's moved half of what I'm reading down the screen and now I have to find my place again.

Whereas, with ChatGPT being separate, it operates at a much less intrusive cadence, and only responds when I ask it too, which turns out to be much more useful and productive.

I'm seriously considering binning of my Copilot subscription as a result.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why don't robotaxis count?

Because large, money-rich companies and censored usage is not a proving ground. Amazon "trialled" stores that were automated but ended up being humans. Even without the human factor they weren't proof of successful automation of retail.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#313

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"?

Also have teachers in my family. Most of the time is spent adjusting the syllabus schedule and guiding (orally) the stragglers. Exercises, quizes and explanations are routine enough that good teachers I know can generate them on the spot.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They certainly are not providing these services at less than electricity costs. So if you are spending $20 a month on it, they are spending less than that on electricity. It's very low compared to any person in the first world's energy spend.

Actually, they probably are. OpenAI is projected to lose $5 billion this year in ChatGPT costs.

Spend, not lose. And it's mostly on training, not inference.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

>their lives have been basically ruined

a bit dramatic. there has to be an adjustment of teaching/assessing, but nothing that would "ruin" anyone's life.

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

is it spam if it's useful and solves a problem? I don't agree it fits the definition any more.

Teachers are under immense pressure, GPT allows a teacher to generate extension questions for gifted students or differentiate for less capable students, all on the fly. It can create CBT material tailored to a class or even an individual student. It's an extremely useful tool for capable teachers.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#316
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…

[flagged]

Even more negativity towards this comment of mine, than to some of my other ones, as shown by the greater downvotes.

Jeepers creepers! :)

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#317

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.…

You sound like you don't actually understand anything about LLMs and are buying into the hype. They are not cognizant let alone conscious. They don't understand anything. The tokens could be patterns of colored shapes with no actual meaning, only statistical distributions and nothing about how the LLMs work would change.

> The tokens could be patterns of colored shapes with no actual meaning, only statistical distributions and nothing about how the LLMs work would change.

I can put your brain in a vat and stimulate your sensory neurons with a statistical distribution with no actual meaning, and nothing about how your brain works would change either.

The LLM and your brain would attempt to interpret meaning with referent from training, and both would be confused at the information-free stimuli. Because during "training" in both cases, the stimuli received from the environment is structured and meaningful.

So what's your point?

By the way, pretty sure a neuroscientist with 20 years of ML experience has a deeper understanding of what "meaning" is than you do. Not to mention, your response reveals a significant ignorance of unresolved philosophical problems (hard problem of consciousness, what even is meaning) which you then use to incorrectly assume a foregone conclusion that whatever consciousness/meaning/reasoning is, LLMs must not have it.

I'm partial to doubting LLMs as they are now have the magic sauce, but it's more that we don't actually know enough to say otherwise, so why state that we do know?

We can't even say we know our own brains.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#318

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…

I’ve been doing RLHF and adjacent work for 6 months. The model responses across a wide array of subject matter are surface level. Logical reasoning, mathematics, step by step, summarization, extraction, generation. It’s the kind of output the average C student is doing.

We specifically don’t do programming prompts/responses nor advanced college to PHD level stuff, but it’s really mediocre at this level and these subject areas. Programming might be another story, I can’t speak to that.

All I can go off is my experience but it’s not been great. I’m willing to be wrong.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#319
post #268
post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Likely a lack of recently published code. Claude has been trained more recently.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#320
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…

What is different vs. GPT-4o & Copilot?
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