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Is it a bubble?

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Re: Is it a bubble?

#431

Post by roenxi »

gregoryl wrote: post #426
roenxi wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compared to the average human? Yes. Most people are distressingly bad at empathy to the point where just repeating what they just heard back to an interlocutor in a stressful situation could be considered an advanced technique. The average standard of empathy isn't that far away from someone who sees beatings as a legitimate form of communication. Humans suck at empathy, especially outside a tight in-group. But even…

Truly, you need to spend time with literally anyone other than the people you currently engage with.

If you object to HN you didn't have to create an account. And I still reckon even a sycophantic AI would still have managed more empathy in its response. They tend to be a bit wordy and attempt to actually engage with the substance of what people say too.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#432

Post by yunwal »

palmotea wrote: post #330
yunwal wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re still allowed to reason about the generated output. If it’s not what you want you can even reject it and write it yourself!

>> One important reason people like to write code is that it has well-defined semantics, allowing to reason about it and predict its outcome with high precision. Likewise for changes that one makes to code. LLM prompting is the diametrical opposite of that. > You’re still allowed to reason about the generated output. If it’s not what you want you can even reject it and write it yourself! You missed the key point. You…

For many things you can though. If I ask an LLM to create an alert in terraform that triggers when 10% of requests fail over a 5 minute period and sends an email to some address, with the html on the email looking a certain way, it will do exactly the same as if I looked at the documentation, and figured out all of the fields 1 by 1. It’s just how it works when there’s one obvious way to do things. I know software devs love to romanticize about our jobs but I don’t know a single dev who writes 90% meaningful code. There’s always boilerplate. There’s always fussing with syntax you’re not quite familiar with. And I’m happy to have an AI do it

Re: Is it a bubble?

#433

Post by Yizahi »

tim333 wrote: post #413
dmurvihill wrote: post #340

This says it all: > I haven’t met anyone who doesn’t believe artificial intelligence has the potential to be one of the biggest technological developments of all time, reshaping both daily life and the global economy. You’re trying to weigh in on this topic and you didn’t even _talk_ to a bear?

You can be a bear and still think AI will be big one day. It's quite plausible that LLMs will remain limited and we don't find anything better for decades and the stocks crash. But saying AI will never be a big thing is just unrealistic.

I think we should split definition somehow, between what LLMs can do today (or next few years) with how big a thing this particular capability can be (a derivative of the capability). And then what some future AI could do and with how big a thing that future capability could be.

I regularly see people who distinguish between current and future capabilities, but then still lump societal impact (how big a thing could be) into one projection.

The key bubble question is - if that future AI is sufficiently far away (for example if there will be a gap, a new "AI winter" for a few decades), then does this current capability justify the capital expenditures, and if not then by how much?

Re: Is it a bubble?

#434

Post by ACCount37 »

roenxi wrote: post #415
Planktonne wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you should consider carefully whether AI is actually better at these things (especially any one given model at all of them), or if your ability to judge quality in these areas is flawed/limited.

So? Do I not count as a benchmark of basic intelligent now? I've got a bunch of tests and whatnot that suggest I'm a reasonably above average at thinking. There is this fascinating trend where people would rather bump humans out of the naturally intelligent category rather than admit AIs are actually already at an AGI standard. If we're looking for intelligent conversation AI is definitely above average. Above-averag…

A major weak point for AIs is long term tasks and agentic behavior. Which is, as it turns out, its own realm of behavior that's hard to learn from text data, and also somewhat separate from g - the raw intelligence component.

An average human still has LLMs beat there, which might be distorting people's perceptions. But task length horizon is going up, so that moat holding isn't a given at all.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#435

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

sbuttgereit wrote: post #185
sethammons wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At $WORK, we have a bot that integrates with Slack that sets up minor PRs. Adjusting tf, updating endpoints, adding simple handlers. It does pretty well. Also in a case of just prose to code, Claude wrote up a concurrent data migration utility in Go. When I reviewed it, it wasn't managing goroutines or waitgroups well, and the whole thing was a buggy mess and could not be gracefully killed. I would have written it fa…

I think your experience matches well with mine. There are certain workloads and use cases where these tools really do well and legitimately save time; these tend to be more concise tasks and well defined with good context from which to draw from. The wrong tasking and the results can be pretty bad and a time sink. I think the difficulty is exercising the judgement to know where that productive boundary sits. That's m…

I find ChatGPT excellent for writing scripts in obscure scripting languages - AppleScript, Adobe Cloud products, IntelliJ plugin development, LibreOffice, and others.

All of these have a non-trivial learning curve and/or poor and patchy docs.

I could master all of these the hard way, but it would be a huge and not very productive time sink. It's much easier to tell a machine what I want and iterate with error reports if it doesn't solve my problem immediately.

So is this AGI? It's not self-training. But it is smart enough to search docs and examples and pull them together into code that solves a problem. It clearly "knows" far more than I do in this particular domain, and works much faster.

So I am very clearly getting real value from it. And there's a multiplier effect, because it's now possible to imagine automating processes that weren't possible before, and glue together custom franken-workflows that link supposedly incompatible systems and save huge amounts of time.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#436

Post by Yizahi »

thenaturalist wrote: post #357
lm28469 wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"My technosolutionist bubble says it's not a bubble, trust me bro"

„Just XYZ more billion, bro, and then we’re gonna have AGI! For real bro, pleaseeee!“

"Sam Altman, a man best known for needing a few more billions at any given moment." (c) HN best-of-2025 :)

Re: Is it a bubble?

#437

Post by plastic-enjoyer »

roenxi wrote: post #404
obruchez wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's difficult to know what people really believe, especially after only a few minutes of discussion, but I would say most people I talk to don't believe AGI is even possible. And they probably think their life won't be changed much by LLMs, AI, etc.

I haven't heard a good argument for why AGI isn't already here. It has average humans beat and seems generally to be better-than-novice in any given field that requires intelligence. They play Go, they write music, they've read Shakespeare, they are better at empathy and conversation than most. What more are we asking AI to do? And can a normal human do it?

> they are better at empathy and conversation than most

Imagine the conversations this guy must have with people IRL lol

Re: Is it a bubble?

#438

Post by roenxi »

lynx97 wrote: post #428
roenxi wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compared to the average human? Yes. Most people are distressingly bad at empathy to the point where just repeating what they just heard back to an interlocutor in a stressful situation could be considered an advanced technique. The average standard of empathy isn't that far away from someone who sees beatings as a legitimate form of communication. Humans suck at empathy, especially outside a tight in-group. But even…

I am sorry for you. You must surround yourself with a lot of awful people. That is pretty sad to read. Get out of whatever you are stuck in, it can't be good for you.

The stats are something like 1 in 10 people experience domestic violence. Unless someone takes a vow of silence and goes to live in the wilderness there is no way to avoid awful people. They're just people.

The average standard is not high. Although I suppose an argument could be made that wife-beaters are actually just evil rather than being low-empathy but I think the point is still clear enough.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#439

Post by anematode »

nadermx wrote: post #194

I am shocked at the discourse over this. I'm either ahead of the curve or behind; but its undeniable that AI can and does write most the code. Not trivial, if you spend some time and dig deep into simple appearing web apps like https://microphonetest.com or https://internetspeed.my you'd be amazed at how fast they went from mvp to full feature. Trivial to think anyone could pull off something like that in hours.

I want to believe that this is satire

Re: Is it a bubble?

#440

Post by encyclopedism »

hagbarth wrote: post #369
simianwords wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you so sure it is not capable of cognition?

Ah yes, proving a negative. What makes you sure a stone is not capable of cognition?

An LLM is an algorithm. You can obtain the same result as a SOTA LLM via pen and paper it will take a lot of long laborious effort. That's ONE reason why LLM's do not have cognition.

Also they don't reason, or think or any of the other myriad nonsense attributed to LLM's. I hate the platitudes given to LLM's it's at PHD level. It's now able to answer math olympiad questions. It answers them by statistical pattern recognition!

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