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Artificial intelligence is losing hype

economist.com

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Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#481

Post by kombookcha »

huhkerrf wrote: post #434
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 same way. Anytime someone says they don't find LLMs all that useful, the exact same comments come out: "They clearly aren't using the right model!" "It's obvious they don't know how to prompt, or they would see the value." "Maybe it can't do that today, but GPT-5 is just around the corner." I feel more and more that people have just decided that this is a technology that will do everything you can imagine,…

I'm with you. Every time I've used LLMs in my work, I've ended up using more time tidying up after the robot than it would have taken to just do the work myself from the start. I can believe that there are some tasks that it can do very fast, but my experience is that if you're using it for anything that matters, you can't trust it enough to let it do it on its own, and so you just end up doing the work twice.

It's like having an unusually fast-but-clumsy intern, except interns learn the ropes fast and understand context.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#482

Post by tippytippytango »

_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…

BigCos won't let their employees use these tools to write code because you can't let code leak off prem. To keep from falling behind I use it on my weekend projects. I sense no urgency to remedy this inside, but I'm not sure how these tools would help with millions of lines of legacy code. They are awesome for creating new things or editing small things where you can build up context easily.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#483

Post by obscurette »

slidehero wrote: post #275
Nullabillity wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. Content Generation: Spam isn't a feature. See also, this whole message that could just have been the headlines. > 2. Customer Service and Support: So… less clear than the website and not empowered to do anything (beyond ruining your reputation) because even you don't trust it? > 3. Summarization and Insights: See 1, spam isn't a feature. This is just trying to undo the damage from that (and failing). > 4. HR Can…

This seems unecessarily negative to me. >Content Generation I'm working on AI tools for teachers and I can confidently say that GPT is just unbelievably good at generating explanations, exercises, quizes etc. The onus to review the output is on the teacher obviously, but given they're the subject matter experts, a review is quick and takes a fraction of the time that it would take to otherwise create this content fro…

As a teacher - I have no shortage of exercises, quizes etc. Internet is full of this kind of stuff and I have no trouble finding more than I ever need. 95% of my time an mental capacity in this situation goes for deciding what makes sense in my particular pedagogical context? What wording works best for my particular students? Explanations are even harder. I find out almost daily that explanations which worked fine in last year, don't work any more and I have to find a new way, because previous knowledge, words they use and know etc of new students are different again.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#484

Post by fuzztester »

andrewflnr wrote: post #400
fuzztester wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even more negativity towards this comment of mine, than to some of my other ones, as shown by the greater downvotes. Jeepers creep ers! :)

Not-so-subtly mocking the top-level for not replying "yet", when they replied almost immediately after with a video of the relevant workflow, was not a move that made you look smart or nice.

>when they replied almost immediately after with a video of the relevant workflow

Wow. Such wrong claims.

I had already replied to you in a sibling comment, refuting your points, but will give one more proof (not that I really need to):

_acco, the top level commenter relevant to this discussion, commented at some time, say x.

layer8 commented, replying to _acco, 7 hours ago (as can be seen on the page at the time of my writing this comment, i.e. right now).

I then replied to layer8, 6 hours ago.

_acco replied back to layer8 5 hours ago.

All this is visible right now on the page; and if people check it a few hours later, the relative time deltas will remain the same, obviously. (But not if they check after 24 hours, in which case all comments will show as one day ago.)

So there was a 1 hour gap between layer8's comment and mine, and a 2 hour gap between layer8's comment and _acco's reply.

If you think 2 hours is the same as "almost immediately", as you said above, I have nothing more to say to you, except that our perceptions of time are highly different.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#485

Post by mnky9800n »

tomjen3 wrote: post #463
magicalhippo wrote: post #446

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…

This is a perfect example of the llm producing an answer that a novice finds useful and an expert takes issue with.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#486

Post by arcticbull »

aussieguy1234 wrote: post #469

If anything, i'm getting more hyped up over time. Here are the things i've used LLMs for, with success in all areas as a solo technical founder. Business Advice including marketing, reaching out to investors, understanding SAFE notes (follow up questions after watching the Y Combinator videos), customer interview design. All of which, as an engineer, I had never done before. Create SQL queries for all kinds of busine…

> Helping with challenging code problems that would otherwise need hours of searching google or reading the docs.

I'm glad this has been working for you -- generally any time I actually have a really difficult problem, ChatGPT just makes up the API I wish existed. Then when I bring it up to ChatGPT, it just apologizes and invents new API.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#487

Post by chromanoid »

arcticbull wrote: post #486
aussieguy1234 wrote: post #469

If anything, i'm getting more hyped up over time. Here are the things i've used LLMs for, with success in all areas as a solo technical founder. Business Advice including marketing, reaching out to investors, understanding SAFE notes (follow up questions after watching the Y Combinator videos), customer interview design. All of which, as an engineer, I had never done before. Create SQL queries for all kinds of busine…

> Helping with challenging code problems that would otherwise need hours of searching google or reading the docs. I'm glad this has been working for you -- generally any time I actually have a really difficult problem, ChatGPT just makes up the API I wish existed. Then when I bring it up to ChatGPT, it just apologizes and invents new API.

Do you provide code examples? In my experience the more specific you get with your problem the more specific are the provided solutions (probably a "natural" occurence in LLMs). Hallucianted APIs are sometimes a problem for me, but then I just specify which API to use.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#488

Post by dogcomplex »

ChaitanyaSai wrote: post #52

I'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.…

Fascinating background - would love to pick your brain on how you see current LLMs/ML comparing to neuroscience. What do you see that's missing still, if anything?

If I had to bet, I would start with:

- Error-correcting specialized architectures for increasing signal-to-noise (as far as I can tell these are what everyone is racing to build this year, and should be doable with just conventional programming systems wrapping LLMs)

- Improved energy efficiency (as yes, human brains are currently much more efficient! But - there are also simple architecture improvements (both software and hardware) that are looking to save 100x. Specialized ASIC ternary chips using 1999's tech should be here quite soon, a lot more efficient in price and energy.)

- No Backwards-propagation. (As yes, the brain does seem to do it all with forward-propagation only. Though this is possible and promising in neural networks like the Forward-Forward algorithm too, they haven't been trained to the same scales as backprop-heavy transformers (and likely have a lower performance in terms of noise/accuracy). Though if I'm not mistaken, the brain does have forward-backward loops, but the signals go through separate neurons for each direction (rather than reusing one) - if so that's close to backprop by itself, but probably imposes a tradeoff as the same signal can't be perfectly reproduced backwards, yet it can perhaps be enhanced to be just the most relevant information by the separate specialized neuron. I'm obviously mostly ignorant of the neuroscience here but halfway-knowledgeable on the ML theory haha

But yes, I completely agree - the flood gates are already open. This is a few architecture quibbles away from an absolute deluge of artificial intelligence that will dwarf (drown?) anything we've known. Good point on decentralized cheap autonomy - the real accomplishment of life. Intelligence, as it appears, is just a fairly generous phenomenon where any autonomous process continually improves its signal-to-noise ratio... many ways to accomplish that one! Looking forward to seeing LLMs powered by ant colonies and slime molds, though I suspect by then there will be far more interesting and terrifying realities unlocked.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#489

Post by maxglute »

_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'm a dummy with very rudimentary script kiddie tier skills, and Claude has helped me do a bunch of personal projects that would normally take months of research and stackoverflow begging in a few days. For me the hype is real, but maybe not trillions $$$ worth of value real.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#490

Post by brailsafe »

chromanoid wrote: post #487
arcticbull wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Helping with challenging code problems that would otherwise need hours of searching google or reading the docs. I'm glad this has been working for you -- generally any time I actually have a really difficult problem, ChatGPT just makes up the API I wish existed. Then when I bring it up to ChatGPT, it just apologizes and invents new API.

Do you provide code examples? In my experience the more specific you get with your problem the more specific are the provided solutions (probably a "natural" occurence in LLMs). Hallucianted APIs are sometimes a problem for me, but then I just specify which API to use.

Seems like you're just saying if you solve the problem on your own then whatever the LLM produces isn't an issue
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