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Artificial intelligence is losing hype

economist.com

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Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#341

Post by Terr_ »

LtWorf wrote: post #172
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?

> Speech recognition is useful. Now try to mute a video on youtube and understand what's being said from the automatic subtitles. If you do it in english, be aware that it's the best performing language and all others are even worse.

Sometimes speech-to-text machine learning models give very good results, however I think the key is that:

1. It's overwhelmingly more useful than the [no text] it was replacing, particularly for the deaf or if you want to search for keywords in a video.

2. When it fails, it tends to do so in ways that trigger human suspicion and oversight.

Those aren't necessarily true of some of the things people are shoehorning LLMs into these days, which is why I'm a lost more pessimistic about that technology.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#342

Post by m3kw9 »

Hype is relative to your circle, where you are getting your info, and how the algorithm targets you with info that interests you. So yes, the hype is tiring for that Economist journalist, but for many they have not even heard or used it, and then there is everyone in between. As for myself there is hype but tongue seem justified based on how good the LLMs are currently

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#343

Post by skydhash »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #96

AI is not one thing at the moment. We have multiple systems that are being developed in parallel: • text generators • code generators • image generators • video generators • speech generators • sound/music generators • various robotics vision and control systems (often trained in virtual environments) • automated factories / warehouses / fulfillment centers • self-driving cars (trucks/planes/trains/boats/bikes/whatev…

> Self-driving was pretty bad a year ago

The threshold for acceptable self-driving is genuine effort from the automated system to avoid accidents as we can't punish it for bad driving. And I want auditable proof of that.

> Image generators now exceed 99.9% of humans in painting/drawing abilities.

I'm pretty sure the amount of people that can draw is less than that. And they can beat image generators by a mile as those generators are mostly doing automated matte painting. Yes copy-paste is faster than typing, but that's not write a novel.

> Text generators are decent...but I'd say they write better than 90% of humans.

Humans use language to communicate. And while there are bad communicators, I think lots of people are doing ok on that front. Text generators can be perfect syntax-wise, but the intent has to come from someone. And the produced text's quality is proportional to the amount of intent that it produces (that's why corporate language is so bland).

> Video generators are in their infancy - we get decent quality, but absolutely mental imagery.*

See Image Generator section, but in motion.

> Reasoning is the weakest point, in my opinion... If they can figure out reasoning

That's the 1-billion dollar question.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#344

Post by slidehero »

meroes wrote: post #326
slidehero wrote: post #287

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"?

Can you post a question and answer example if it doesn’t violate NDA because I have very little faith this is good for students.

sure

here's an example of a question and explanation which aligns to Australian Curriculum elaboration AC9M9A01_E4 explaining why frac{3^4}{3^4}=1, and 3^{4-4}=3^0

https://chatgpt.com/share/89c26d4f-2d8f-4043-acd7-f1c2be48c2...

to further elaborate why 3^0=1 https://chatgpt.com/share/9ca34c7f-49df-40ba-a9ef-cd21286392...

This is a relatively high level explanation. With proper prompting (which, sorry I don't have on hand right now) the explanation can be tailored to the target year level (Year 9 in this case) with exercises, additional examples and a quiz to test knowledge.

This is just the first example I have on hand and is just barely scratching the surface of what can be done.

The tools I'm building are aligned to the Austrlian Curriculum and as someone with a lot of classroom experience I can tell you that this kind of tailored content, explanations, exercises etc are a literal godsend for teachers regardless of experience level.

Bear in mind that the teacher with a 4 year undergrad in their specialist area and a Masters in teaching can use these initial explanations as a launching pad for generating tailored content for their class and even tailored content for individual students (either higher or lower level depending on student needs). The reason I mention this is because there is a lot of hand-wringing about hallucinations. To which my response is:

- After spending a lot of effort vetting the correctness of responses for a K-12 context hallucinations are not an issue. The training corpus is so saturated with correct data that this is not an issue in practice.

- In the unlikely scenario of hallucination, the response is vetted by a trained teacher who can quickly edit and adjust responses to suit their needs

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#345

Post by m3kw9 »

benreesman wrote: post #200
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 is different” in one fundamental, methodological, epistemological way: we test on the training set now. This has follow-on consequences for a shattering phase transition between “persuasive demo” and “useful product”. We can now make arbitrarily convincing demos that will crash airplanes (“with no survivors!”) on the first try in production. This is institutionalized by the market capitalizations of 7 comp…

There was really one AI winter which is a sample size of 1, saying this time is different is justified based on the exponential improvement over AI 10 years back

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#346

Post by m3kw9 »

_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…

Coding assistance ain’t useful till it has around 50mb of context or whatever the size of 80% of code bases uses

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#347

Post by wokwokwok »

_acco wrote: post #294
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…

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…

So you spend 10 minutes writing a free text description of the test you want; tell it exactly how you want it to write the test, and then 4-5 minutes trying to understand if it did the right thing or not, restart because it did something crazy then a few minutes manually fixing the diff it generated?

MMmm.

I mean, don't get me wrong; this is impressive stuff; but it needs to be an order of magnitude less 'screwing around trying to fix the random crap' for this to be 'wow, amazing!' rather than a technical demonstration.

You could have done this more quickly without using AI.

I have no doubt this is transformative technology, but people using it are choosing to use it; it's not actually better than not using it at this point, as far as I can tell.

It's slower and more error prone.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#348

Post by mhuffman »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #241
WalterSear wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 usele…

>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.

I think this is true and also why you see some "older devs just don't like AI" type comments. AI assistants seem to be great at simple webdev tasks, which also happens to be the type of work that more junior developers do day to day.

I have also found them useful with that and I keep one active for those types of projects because of the speed up, although I still have to keep a close eye on what it wants to inject. They also seem to excel at generating tests if you have already developed the functions.

Then there are more difficult (usually not webdev) projects. In those cases, it really only shines if I need to ask it a question that I would previously have searched on SO or some obscure board for an answer. And even then, it really has to be scrutinized, because if it was simple, I wouldn't be asking the question.

There is def. something there for specific types of development, but it has not "changed my life" or anything like that. It might have if I was just starting out or if I only did webdev type projects.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#349

Post by lambdaba »

_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.

Is there a definite answer on what languages / paradigms LLMs tend to be better at?

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#350

Post by lambdaba »

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 think the non obvious benefit is using LLMs nudge you into putting your thoughts in narrative form and training that ability, something that someone with more experience does subconsciously.
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