Honestly. I am enjoying it. From Dave will replace you, to this is not working well in 6 months. A new record.
Logically, everyone around me forgot that I patiently explained the limits of stochastic parrots and the false hope on synthetic data.
If we lived in the remotely responsible place, some people would have their heads rolling down the stairs.
The psychological damage over workforce from AI hype is comparable only with the negative effect of social networks on the society. :)
Artificial intelligence is losing hype
381–390 of 814 posts
Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype
#382I'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've worked in AI for the past 30 years and have seen enthusiasm as robust as yours go bust before. Just because some kinds of narrow AI have done extraordinarily well -- namely those tasks that recognize patterns using connections between FSMs -- does not mean that same mechanisms will continue to scale up to human-level cognition, much less exceed it any time soon. The breakthroughs where deep AI have excelled -- o…
For readers' edification, would you mind making a strong hypothetical argument for why this time it actually is different, from an expert's perspective?
Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 stu…
> a bit dramatic. there has to be an adjustment of teaching/assessing, but nothing that would "ruin" anyone's life. If you don't have the power to just change your mind about what the entire curriculum and/or assessment context is, it can be a workload increase of dozens of hours per week or more. If you do have the power, and do want to change your entire curriculum, it's hundreds of hours one-time. "Lives basically…
>Whether or not it's useful has nothing to do with whether or not it's spam.
I think it has a lot to do with it. I can't see how generating educational content for the purpose of enhancing student outcomes with content reviewed by expert teachers can fall under the category of spam.
>As for your hypothesis, I've had interactions where it did a good job of generating alternative activities/exercises, and interactions where it strenuously and lengthily kept suggesting absolute garbage.
I like to present concrete examples of what I would consider to be useful content for a k-12 teacher.
Here's a very quick example that I whipped up
https://chatgpt.com/share/ec0927bc-0407-478b-b8e5-47aabb52d2...
This would align with Year 9 Maths for the Australian Curriculum.
This is an extremely valuable tool for
- A graduate teacher struggling to keep up with creating resources for new classes
- An experienced teacher moving to a new subject area or year level
Bear in mind that the GPT output is not necessarily intended to be used verbatim. A qualified specialist teacher with often times 6 years of study (4 year undergrad + 2 yr Masters) is the expert in the room who presumably will review the output, adjust, elaborate etc.
As a launching pad for tailored content for a gifted student, or lower level, differentiated content for a struggling student the GPT response is absolutely phenomenal. Unbelievably good.
I've used Maths as an example, however it's also very good at giving topic overviews across the Australian Curriculum.
Here's one for: elements of poetry:structure and forms
https://chatgpt.com/share/979a33e5-0d2d-4213-af14-408385ed39...
Again, an amazing introduction to the topic (I can't remember the exact curriculum outcome it's aligned to) which gives the teacher a structured intro which can then be spun off into exercises, activities or deep dives into the sub topics.
> I've had situations where I got a good suggestion or two or three, in a list of ten or twenty
This is a result of poor prompting. I'm working with very structured, detailed curriculum documents and the output across subject areas is just unbelievably good.
This is all for a K-12 context.
Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you give some examples of the tasks you did manage to offload successfully?
- Emotional regulation. I suffer from a mostly manageable anxiety disorder but there are times I get overwhelmed. I have an agent setup to focus on principles of Stoicism and its amazing how quickly I can get back on track just by having a short chat with it about how I'm feeling. - Personalised learning. I wanted to understand LLM's at foundational technical level. Often I'll understand 90% of an explanation but the…
> I have an agent setup to focus on principles of Stoicism and its amazing how quickly I can get back on track just by having a short chat with it about how I'm feeling.
This sounds super useful. Can you please elaborate on the setup?
Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype
#385I'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.…
The potential rewards are so great that you might be overestimating the odds this will come about. Even lottery skeptics might buy a lottery ticket if the prize is a billion dollars.
Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like I'm living in a different universe sometimes. The consensus on HN seems to be that you can be pretty productive with LLMs as coding assistants, but every time I try I find it borderline impossible to get functional code even for pretty straightforward prompts. I decided to fire up GPT-4o again today to see if maybe things have gotten better over the past few months. I asked GPT to write code to render a t…
Yeah, these people claiming AI has been a transformative experience are just full of sh*t. I ask various models questions all the time because it's often better than googling, but all of them make a lot silly mistakes. Frequently, it can be a bit of a process to get useful results.
... Or they just honestly have a different experience than you
Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype
#387AI (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 feel like I'm living in a different universe sometimes. The consensus on HN seems to be that you can be pretty productive with LLMs as coding assistants, but every time I try I find it borderline impossible to get functional code even for pretty straightforward prompts. I decided to fire up GPT-4o again today to see if maybe things have gotten better over the past few months. I asked GPT to write code to render a t…
Chat gpt has helped me with some complex sql queries. I had to correct it a couple of times but in the end it worked.
Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype
#388AI (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…
How much do you end up paying for Claude + Cursor? I’m assuming cursor uses Claude api
Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like I'm living in a different universe sometimes. The consensus on HN seems to be that you can be pretty productive with LLMs as coding assistants, but every time I try I find it borderline impossible to get functional code even for pretty straightforward prompts. I decided to fire up GPT-4o again today to see if maybe things have gotten better over the past few months. I asked GPT to write code to render a t…
Try deepseek coder
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Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Your response is nonsense. We don't know how consciousness arises from matter but we do have significant understandings about knowledge, reasoning, modeling, visualization, object permanence, etc. etc. that are significant parts of how the human mind works. And we know LLMs have none of these.
The point of my colored shape example is that it is an illusion that there is anything resembling a mind inside an LLM. I thought that was obvious enough I didn't need to explain it further than I did.
As far as the original commenter's credentials; there's lots of people who should know better but buy into hype and nonsense.