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Artificial intelligence is losing hype

economist.com

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Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#51

Post by al_borland »

yieldcrv wrote: post #24
ianbutler wrote: post #7

This supposed “cycle” has been crazy it’s been about 1.5 years since gpt4 came out, which is really the first generally capable model. I think a lot of this “cycle” is media’s wishful thinking. Humans, especially humans in large bureaucracies, just don't move this quickly. Enterprises have barely had time to dip their toes in. For what it’s worth hype doesn’t mean sustainability anyway. If all the jokers go onto a ne…

I’ve had a lot of corporate clients this year Large and small, entire development teams are completely unaware of the basics of “prompt engineering” for coding, and corporate has an entirely regressive anti-AI policy that doesnt factor in the existence of locally run language models, and just assumes ChatGPT and cloud based ones digesting trade secrets. People arent interested in seeing what the hype is about, and ar…

I was getting a lot of mixed messaging at my job for 6-12 months.

On the one hand, we got an email from high up saying not to use Copilot, or other such tools, as they were trying to figure out the licensing. But at the same time, we had the CIO getting up in front of the company every other month talking about nothing but GenAI, and how if we weren’t using it we were stupid (not in those exact words, but that was the general vibe, uncontrolled AI hype).

We were left sitting there saying, “what do you want from us? Do as you say or do as you do?”

Eventually they signed the deal with MS and we got Copilot, which then seemed forced on us. There is even a dashboard out there for it, listing all people using it, their manager, rolling all the way up to the CEO. It tells the percentage of reports from each manager using it, and how often suggestions are accepted. It seems like the kind of dashboard someone would make if they were planning to give out bonuses based on Copilot adoption.

I’ve gotten regular surveys about it as well, to ask how I was using it. I mostly don’t, due to the implementation in VS Code. I might use it a few times per month at best.

Maybe that would be different if the rollout wasn’t so awkward, or the VS Code extension was more configurable.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#52

Post by ChaitanyaSai »

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. And I must say I am absolutely astonished people don't see this as opening the flood-gates to staggeringly powerful artificial intelligence. We've run the 4-minute mile. There are hundreds of billions of dollars figuring out how to get to the next level, and it's clear we are close. Forget what the current models are doing, it is what the next big leap (most likely with some new architecture change) will bring.

In focusing on intelligence we forget that it's most likely a much easier challenge than decentralized cheap autonomy, which is what took the planet 4 billion years to figure out. Once that was done, intelligence as we recognize it took an eye-blink. Just like with powered-flight we don't need bioliogical intelligence to transform the world. Artificial intelligence that guzzles electricity, is brittle, has blind spots, but still capable of 1000 times more than the best among us is going to be here within the next decade. It's not here yet, no doubt, but I am yet to see any reasoned argument for why it is far more difficult and will take far longer. We are in for radical non-linear change.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#53

Post by el_benhameen »

djaouen wrote: post #26
h_tbob wrote: post #15

To be honest, I was surprised by ChatGPT. I didn’t think we were close. We are running out of textual data now to train on… so now they have switched to VIDEO. Geez now they can train on all the VIDEOS on the internet. And when they finally get bots working, they will have limitless streams of TACTILE data… Writing it off as the next fad seems fun. But to be honest, I was shocked by what openai did the first time. So…

How are you using AI to double your coding productivity? Are you using ChatGPT, or Claude, or GitHub Copilot? I am an AI-skeptic, so I am curious here. Thanks!

I’m not the OP and I wouldn’t say that AI has doubled my productivity, but the latest Claude models in particular have made me less of a skeptic than I was a few months ago.

I’m an experienced backend dev who’s been working on some Vue frontend projects, and it’s significantly accelerated my ability to learn the complexities of e.g. Vue’s reactivity model. I can ask a complex question that involves several niche concepts and get a response that correctly synthesizes those concepts. I spent an hour the other night trying to understand a bug in a component to no avail; once I understood the problem well enough to explain it in a few sentences, Claude diagnosed the issue and explained it with more clarity than the documentation and various stack overflow answers.

My default is no longer to assume that the model has a coin flip’s chance of producing bs. I still verify and treat answers with a certain degree of skepticism, but I now reach for it as my first tool rather than a last resort or a gimmick.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#54

Post by LarsDu88 »

yieldcrv wrote: post #24
ianbutler wrote: post #7

This supposed “cycle” has been crazy it’s been about 1.5 years since gpt4 came out, which is really the first generally capable model. I think a lot of this “cycle” is media’s wishful thinking. Humans, especially humans in large bureaucracies, just don't move this quickly. Enterprises have barely had time to dip their toes in. For what it’s worth hype doesn’t mean sustainability anyway. If all the jokers go onto a ne…

I’ve had a lot of corporate clients this year Large and small, entire development teams are completely unaware of the basics of “prompt engineering” for coding, and corporate has an entirely regressive anti-AI policy that doesnt factor in the existence of locally run language models, and just assumes ChatGPT and cloud based ones digesting trade secrets. People arent interested in seeing what the hype is about, and ar…

You absolutely do not need to be getting Microsoft copilot licenses:

Open weight and open source models can be hosted on your own hardware nowadays, and its incredibly easy.

https://dublog.net/blog/open-weight-copilots/

You can even use something like RayServe + VLLM to host on a big chonky machine for a small team if you're concerned about data exfiltration.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#55

Post by bawolff »

h_tbob wrote: post #15

To be honest, I was surprised by ChatGPT. I didn’t think we were close. We are running out of textual data now to train on… so now they have switched to VIDEO. Geez now they can train on all the VIDEOS on the internet. And when they finally get bots working, they will have limitless streams of TACTILE data… Writing it off as the next fad seems fun. But to be honest, I was shocked by what openai did the first time. So…

I think all this can be true, and we are still in a massive AI bubble that may pop at any moment.

ChatGPT truly is impressive. Nonetheless, i still think most companies integrating "AI" into their products is buzzword bs that is all going to collapse in on itself.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#57

Post by juanani »

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.…

[dead]

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#59

Post by CuriouslyC »

CooCooCaCha wrote: post #43
icholy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seriously I am a 2x coder compared to what I was because of this. You probably shouldn't advertise that.

I am highly skeptical that a competent coder sees a 2x boost.

You shouldn't be. For code bases where context is mostly local they destroy human throughput by comparison. They only fall down hard when used in spaghetti dumpster fire codebases where you have to paste the contents of 6+ files into context or the code crosses a multiple service boundaries to do anything.

A competent engineer architects their systems to make their tools as effective as possible, so maybe your idea of competent is "first order" and you need higher order conception of a good software engineer.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#60

Post by plastic-enjoyer »

technick wrote: post #37

I was out at Defcon this year and it was all about AI this, AI that, AI will solve the worlds problems, AI will catch all threats, blah blah blah blah...

I was at a UX / Usability conference and it was basically the same. Everyone talked about AI here and AI there, but no one had an actual usecase or idea how to incorporate AI in a purposeful way. I can genuinely understand, why people feel that AI is a fad.
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