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Artificial intelligence is losing hype

economist.com

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Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

There are countless existing, human-vetted, designed on special purpose, bodies of work full of material like the stuff your chatgpt just "created". Why not use those?

Also, each of your examples had at least one error, did you not see them?

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Exercises, quizes and explanations are routine enough that good teachers I know can generate them on the spot. Every year there are thousands of graduate teacher looking for tools to help them teach better. >good teachers I know can generate them on the spot Even the best teacher can't create an interactive multiple choice quiz with automatic marking, tailored to a specific class (or even a specific student) on the…

> Even the best teacher can't create an interactive multiple choice quiz with automatic marking, tailored to a specific class (or even a specific student) on the spot.

Neither can "AI" though, so what's the point here?

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#473

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…

Except for number 3, the rest are more often disastrous or insulting to users and those depending on the end products/services of these things. Your reasoning is so bad that i'm almost tempted to think you're spooning out PR-babble astro-turf for some part of the industry. Here's a quick breakdown:

1. content: Nope, except for barrel-bottom content sludge of the kind formerly done by third world spam spinning companies, most decent content creation stays well away from AI except for generating basic content layout templates. I work as a writer and even now, most companies stay well away from using GPT et al for anything they want to be respected as content. Please..

2. Customer service: You've just written a string of PR corporate-speak AI seller bullshit that barely corresponds to reality. People WANT to speak to humans, and except for very basic inquiries, they feel insulted if they're forced into interaction with some idiotic stochastic parrot of an AI for any serious customer support problems. Just imagine some guy trying to handle a major problem with his family's insurance claim or urgently access money that's been frozen in his bank account, and then forced to do these things via the half-baked bullshit funnel that is an AI. If you run a company that forces that upon me for anything serious in customer service, I would get you the fuck out of my life and recommend any friend willing to listen does the same.

3. This is the one area where I'd grant LLMs some major forward space, but even then with a very keen eye to reviewing anything they output for "hallucinations" and outright errors unless you flat out don't care about data or concept accuracy.

4. For reasons related to the above (especially #2) what a categorically terrible, rigid way to screen human beings with possible human qualities that aren't easily visible when examined by some piece of machine learning and its checkbox criteria.

5. Just, Fuck No... I'd run as fast and far as possible from anyone using LLMs to deal with complex legal issues that could involve my eventual imprisonment or lawsuit-induced bankruptcy.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#474
post #460

My employer PoC'd, collaborated with and eventually bought Codeium's solution. I couldn't care less about (any, so also neither about) the LLM hype. Especially didn't bother going to a new web site (ChatGPT), or installing new IDEs etc. I checked Codeium's mycompany-customized landing page: a one-liner vim plug-in installation and copy pasting an auth token. I started typing in the very same editor, very same environ…

I think we need to be very careful making blanket statements about the usefulness of certain LLMs.

In my experience for every task another LLM is excelling and where one was good it might fail for the other task. They can do great things, but it’s not guaranteed and a lot of manual intervention and back and forth is still needed.

We are not at the point where using AI in the company ist just a blanket win for everyone involved. Companies are investing a lot but the return is hard to measure and not always guaranteed.

This is the problem with early technologies, they work sometimes but not guaranteed and we build our expectations on extrapolating their usefulness. We should not judge this technology by the current success rate, but rather by how much impact it will have once we get the success rate to higher and higher levels.

Still, what we can say is that for certain occupations it already helps them reduce their work by 15% (software engineers) and probably even more for some (writers, product owners, office warriors and alike). This is a great achievement in of itself, think how much this will make up in a company as large as MS or Google.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#475
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…

Yes me too! I don't have any stake for finsing LLMs unhelpful, and would love to have a tool to make me more productive.

Would be really interesting if anyone had blog posts on their actual workflow with LLMs, in case there's something I'm doing different.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was skeptical like you, but recently decided to try it out. I wasn't expecting much, and as such I was slightly surprised. For example, just now my NAS stopped working because the boot device went offline. So I got to thinking about writing a simple syslog server. I've never looked at the syslog protocol before, and I've never done any low-level TCP/UDP work in C# yet. So I asked ChatGPT to generate some code[1], a…

Very interesting. A couple of notes here on the C# version. Its using the old format where the Program.cs file has an actual class, whereas as of .NET 6 thats not required. You said barebones, but for any real server you would want to use the generic host https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/extensions/gen... which gets you a lot of the boilerplate and enables you program to be wrapped in a windows or system…

> You said barebones, but for any real server you would want to use the generic host

True, I intentionally said barebones as I wanted a minimal example. I asked it to modify the code to use the generic host, and updated the chat link (so refresh). Keep in mind this is the free ChatGPT, but I still think it did reasonably good. The example compiles as-is, and is very close to functional. I've not used the generic host stuff before either, so again this would save me time searching and piecing together code.

> Finally, parsing can be simplified since ASCII is a proper subset of UTF-8, you can just parse the entire string as UTF-8.

I don't think that would work, because the free-form text message part at the end must contain a BOM if it's UTF-8 encoded, according to the specification. AFAIK you can't have the BOM in the middle of a string.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#477

Earlier 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…

>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.

What an absurd response. Yes, you'd probably cause the human brain to start malfunctioning terribly at the form of consciousness it's well -accustomed to managing within the context of its normal physical substrate and environment. You'd be doing that (and thus degenerating it badly) because you removed it from that ancient context whose workings we still don't well understand.

Your LLM on the other hand, has no context in which it shows such a level of cognitive capacity, higher-order reasoning, self direction and self awareness that we daily see humans to be capable of.

>By the way, pretty sure a neuroscientist with 20 years of ML experience has a deeper understanding of what "meaning" is than you do.

really? An appeal to authority? Many smart, educated people can still fall for utter nonsense and emotional attachment to bad ideas.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#478

As usual, when we see a thread on this topic on HN, the reactions tend to be bimodal: either "Yes, AI has transformed my workflow" (which is where I mostly fall), or "No, it's over-hyped." The latter often comes with an anecdote about how an LLM failed at a relatively simple task. I speculate that this diversity in opinion might be related to whether or not the user is employing a pro-tier LLM. Personally, I've been…

I don't think so, I think it's more about openness. I've noticed older software engineers tend to be more anti-LLM and quick to dismiss. The shortcomings are aplenty, but they don't bother me. The things it can do weren't possible 2 years ago. I'll leverage those and take the bad with the good. Similar experience with Tesla FSD. I know other Tesla owners who tried it a few times and think it's trash because they had…

Your self-driving car is so unreliable you have to manually disable it 10% of the time to stay safe?

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#479
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…

one trick is to let it come up with what it wants (lots of functions, no texture), then run the code, give it the errors until that's fixed. then ask it to inline them, then add the texture, etc.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#480
post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ar…

Stoked you watched, thanks. (Sorry the example isn't the greatest/lacks context. The first video was better, but the mic gain was too high.) You summed up the workflow accurately. Except, I read your first paragraph in a positive light, while I imagine you meant it to be negative. Note the feedback loop you described is the same one as me delegating requirements to someone else (i.e. s/LLM/jr eng). And then reading/e…

> I've written a lot of tests, I think this would have taken 3-4x longer to do by hand. Surely an hour?

It seems to me that the first few are almost complete copy-paste of older tests. You would have got code closer to the final test in the update case with simple copy-paste than what was provided.

The real value is only in the filtered test to choose randomly (btw, I have no idea why that’s beneficial here), and the one which checks that both consumers got the same info. They can be done in a few minutes with the help of the already made insert test, and the original version of the filtered test.

I’m happy that more people can code with this, and it’s great that it makes your coding faster. It makes coding more accessible. However, there are a lot of people who can do this faster without AI, so it’s definitely not for everybody yet.

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