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Artificial intelligence is losing hype

economist.com

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Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#421

Post by stevenhuang »

cleandreams wrote: post #398

The problem is that current generative AI is not actually intelligent. Yann LeCunn had a great tweet on this: Sometimes, the obvious must be studied so it can be asserted with full confidence: - LLMs can not answer questions whose answers are not in their training set in some form, - they can not solve problems they haven't been trained on, - they can not acquire new skills our knowledge without lots of human help, -…

Yea, LeCunn is kind of a meme.

You're doing yourself and readers a disservice when you quote him without mentioning his conflict of interest.

His research is in analytical approaches to ML hence his bitterness against current LLM techniques and skepticism towards Sutton's Bitter Lesson.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#422

Post by insane_dreamer »

Calavar wrote: post #359
_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…

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…

My experience with CoPilot has been similar. I don't think it's given me a single piece of code that just worked. It always took several back and forth of me telling the "AI" that I need it to do X instead of Y (which was included in the original instructions but ignored).

It seems to work best if I start with something very simple, and then layer on instructions ("now make it do X").

Where I have found it saves me time is in having to look up syntax or "gotchas" which I would otherwise search StackOverflow for. But as far as "writing code" -- it still feels a long way from that.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#423

Post by ChoHag »

slidehero wrote: post #344
meroes wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#424

Post by bruce511 »

mikhmha wrote: post #408
Calavar wrote: post #359

Earlier 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…

I feel the exact same way. I have felt 0 need to use an LLM in my current workflow. If I could explain concisely what my problem is in English - then I would already know the answer. In that case why would I be asking AI the question. And I don't want opinionated answers to subjective questions. Why run that through a filter, I can investigate better myself through links on the internet. By the way - I think AI or ML…

>> If I could explain concisely what my problem is in English - then I would already know the answer. In that case why would I be asking AI the question. And I don't want opinionated answers to subjective questions. Why run that through a filter, I can investigate better myself through links on the internet.

I am an experienced programmer, but I find myself (for the first time) doing a deep-dive in SQL and specifically building code that will run against multiple SQL engines.

I fed my list of engines into AI. As I'm discovering the really weird corners of SQL I asking the AI to compare one db against the other. My prompts are usually no more than 3 or 4 words.

It gives me quick helpful answers highlighting where things are the same and where they are different. I can then follow up in the specific docs if necessary (now that I know the function name.)

Personally I'm somewhat anti-hype, I'll let others rave about "changing the world". But I have found it a useful tool - not so much for "writing my code" but for acting as my tutor as I learn new things. (I'm using it for more than just SQL or computers now.)

I'm not sure it "changes thr economy" - but it can certainly change individual lives. Some jobs will go away. Others might be easier to do. It might make it easier to learn new skills.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#425

Post by keiferski »

asadotzler wrote: post #194
keiferski wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You asked for examples, and I gave you examples. I didn't claim AI revolution was around the corner, I just said I used them in these small ways that clearly will have big impacts in their respective areas. My experience is in no way unique, and yes, I think it's just laziness or ignorance to think otherwise. Or in your case, a kind of zealous hostility as a reaction against hype. I remind you that my initial comment…

a stick for carving in the dirt enables you to create something that didn't exist before. there's nothing special about that stick.

If the stick enables you carve more complex things in a cheaper way than the previous tool, then yes, the stick is special. Unless you’re suggesting that a pencil and the human finger are exactly the same?

This is quite literally the entire history of technology: what was once expensive becomes cheap and then unlocks new developments. Bizarre that I have to point this out when you’re likely reading this comment on a device made of commoditized components that cost a fraction of what they did a couple decades ago.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#426

Post by tkgally »

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.

For some reason, YouTube is not using a very good STT system now. The lack of sentence punctuation is particularly annoying. Transcriptions by Whisper and Gemini 1.5 Pro are much better. From a couple of weeks ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41199567#41201773

I expect that YouTube will up their transcription game soon, too.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#427

Post by jcgrillo »

mhuffman wrote: post #348
crystal_revenge wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 hav…

As an "older dev" who doesn't like AI, the thing that annoys me most is the UX is horrible. It's like arguing in chat with an extremely overconfident junior dev who isn't capable of learning or improving with time and experience. That's just a miserable way to spend time. I'd rather spend that time thinking clearly about the problem, and then writing down the solution (clearly).

If this thing also conferred an actual productivity advantage that would be one thing, and it might motivate me to get past the horrible UX, but I haven't seen any evidence yet.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#428

Post by codexon »

anon291 wrote: post #364
yoyohello13 wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money helps, but doesn’t guarantee breakthroughs.

The sort of transformation needed here seems achievable. There are various roadmaps to success whereas there were not any roadmaps to general language agents just a few years ago.

I don't see how it seems achievable.

Backprop was popularized in 1986. Transformers came out in 2017.

It could be >10-20 years before the next breakthrough comes. Given all the progress so far, these things still don't seem to be learning any logic.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#429

Post by warkdarrior »

corytheboyd wrote: post #230
Flop7331 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2x loc!

I’ve seen copilot spit out garbage dozens of lines long for something I swore must be one or two stdlib functions. Yep, it was, after reading some real documentation and using my brain. It was some NodeJS stuff, which I never work with. Don’t get me wrong, I still find it a helpful tool, but it is not at all a good, seasoned programmer— it is an algorithm predicting the next token based on the current tokens.

> I still find it a helpful tool, but it is not at all a good, seasoned programmer

How quickly the goalposts move! Two years ago it was "AI will never be able to write code", now we're complaining that "AI is not a seasoned programmer". What are we going to be complaining about, two years from now?

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#430

Post by hattmall »

Calavar wrote: post #359
_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…

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…

I've almost gotten GPT-4o to do some accurate regex. Probably 75% of the time it's close enough that I can tweak it and make it work.
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