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AI is stifling new tech adoption?

vale.rocks

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Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?

#51

Post by throwawaymaths »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #20

I think if you specify a technology in your prompt, any LLM should use that technology in its response. If you don't specify a technology, and that is an important consideration in the answer, it should clarify and ask about technology choices, and if you don't know, it can make a recommendation. LLMs should not have hard-wired preferences through providers' prompt structure. And while LLMs are stochastic parrots, an…

> I think if you specify a technology in your prompt, any LLM should use that technology in its response. If you don't specify a technology, and that is an important consideration in the answer, it should clarify and ask about technology choices, and if you don't know, it can make a recommendation.

I'm sure we'd all love that but this pipe dream is simply incompatible with the way LLMs work.

orchestration/deployment/agent networks may be able to do that, but that's basically impossible for the LLM itself.

Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?

#52

Post by onion2k »

lab14 wrote: post #47
Schiendelman wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The healthcare diagnosis one may be wrong. For existing known diagnoses, (or at least the sliver of diagnoses in this one study), AI can beat doctors - and doctors don't like listening when it challenges them, so it will disrupt them badly as people learn they can provide data from tests directly to AI agents. Sure, this doesn't replace new diagnoses, but the vaaaast majority of failures to diagnose are for existing…

I think OP was referring to the case where new illnesses that are not part of the training set are never going to be diagnosed by AI.

It's only a problem if hospitals replace doctors with AI. If they employ AI as well then outcomes will improve. Using AI to find the ones AI can identify means doctors have more time to focus on the ones that AI can't find.

Of course, that's not what's going to happen. :/

Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?

#53

Post by killjoywashere »

kaonwarb wrote: post #46
killjoywashere wrote: post #30

Pathologists as a specialty has been grousing about this for several years, at least since 2021 when the College of American Pathologists established the AI Committee. As a trivial example: any trained model deployed will necessarily be behind any new classification of tumors. This makes it harder to push the science and clinical diagnosis of cancer forward. The entire music community has been complaining about how o…

I doubt it is easier to retrain a large, dispersed group of humans on a new classification of tumors than it is to retrain a model on the same.

Not if they're trained to work through the problem each time they encounter it and stay up with their clinical training. The day the new classification drops many have already heard about it.

You also assume that all the models in use will in fact be retrained.

Generally, this position flies in the face of lived experience. AI is in fact stifling adoption of new things across many industries.

Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?

#54

Post by mtkd »

Sonnet + Tailwind is something of a force multiplier though -- backend engineers now have a fast/reliable way of making frontend changes that are understandable and without relying on someone else -- you can even give 4o a whiteboard drawing of a layout and get the tailwind back in seconds

On the wider points, I do think it is reducing time coders are thinking about strategic situation as they're too busy advancing smaller tactical areas which AI is great at assisting -- and agree there is a recency issue looming, once these models have heavy weightings baked in, how does new knowledge get to the front quickly -- where is that new knowledge now people don't use Stackoverflow?

Maybe Grok becomes important purely because it has access to developers and researchers talking in realtime even if they are not posting code there

I worry the speed that this is happening results in younger developers not spending weeks or months thinking about something -- so they get some kind of code ADHD and never develop the skills to take on the big picture stuff later which could be quite a way off AI taking on

Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?

#55

Post by soared »

delichon wrote: post #32

Working in Zed I'm full of joy when I see how well Claude can help me code. But when I ask Claude about how to use Zed it's worse than useless, because it's training data is old compared to Zed, and it freely hallucinates answers. So for that I switch over to Perplexity calling OpenAI and get far better answers. I don't know if it's more recent training or RAG, but OpenAI knows about recent Zed github issues where Cl…

I tried uses chatgpt 4o to write a simple website that used the chagpt api. It always generated code for their deprecated API. I’d paste the error about using old calls, and it would recognize its error and.. generate old calls again.

Couldn’t ever use it owns api.

Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?

#56

Post by 9rx »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #8

As the saying goes: while (React.isPopular) { React.isPopular = true } It's actually quite sad because there are objectively better models both for performance and memory including Preact, Svelte, Vue, and of course vanilla.

But equally impressive that the Javascript community has actually managed to continue to use a single framework for more than five minutes without jumping to the next.

Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?

#57

Post by moyix »

One thing that is interesting is that this was anticipated by the OpenAI Codex paper (which led to GitHub Copilot) all the way back in 2021:

> Users might be more inclined to accept the Codex answer under the assumption that the package it suggests is the one with which Codex will be more helpful. As a result, certain players might become more entrenched in the package market and Codex might not be aware of new packages developed after the training data was originally gathered. Further, for already existing packages, the model may make suggestions for deprecated methods. This could increase open-source developers’ incentive to maintain backward compatibility, which could pose challenges given that open-source projects are often under-resourced (Eghbal, 2020; Trinkenreich et al., 2021).

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.03374 (Appendix H.4)

Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?

#58

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

>Consider a developer working with a cutting-edge JavaScript framework released just months ago. When they turn to AI coding assistants for help, they find these tools unable to provide meaningful guidance because their training data predates the framework’s release. [... This] incentivises them to use something [older].

That sounds great to me, actually. A world where e.g. Django and React are considered as obvious choices for backend and frontend as git is for version control sounds like a world where high quality web apps become much cheaper to build.

Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?

#59

Post by fsndz »

killjoywashere wrote: post #30

Pathologists as a specialty has been grousing about this for several years, at least since 2021 when the College of American Pathologists established the AI Committee. As a trivial example: any trained model deployed will necessarily be behind any new classification of tumors. This makes it harder to push the science and clinical diagnosis of cancer forward. The entire music community has been complaining about how o…

I think a one year gap in adoption of new tech is not that bad. Isn't it better to always go for the mature tech first ? The real change will come from the fact that because of AI, compute will be so cheap in the coming years: https://medium.com/thoughts-on-machine-learning/a-future-of-...

Re: AI is stifling new tech adoption?

#60

Post by jleask »

The underlying tech choice only matters at the moment because as software developers we are used to that choice being important. We see it as important because we currently are the ones that have to use it.

As more and more software is generated and the prompt becomes how we define software rather than code i.e. we shift up an abstraction level, how it is implemented will become less and less interesting to people. In the same way that product owners now do not care about technology, they just want a working solution that meets their requirements. Similarly I don't care how the assembly language produced by a compiler looks most of the time.

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