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Why does AI feel so different?

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Re: Why does AI feel so different?

#51

Post by corentin88 »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #45
ec109685 wrote: post #17

These are poor examples: > Why do I need to know what quarks are, or how steam engines work? Why do I need to know anything about anything? I can just look it up with AI Literally all possible with Google and YouTube.

Go to Google Search and literally ask "How do steam engines work?", and an AI-generated answer is exactly what it will show you, along with a Wikipedia link/excerpt followed by an endless list of links to clickfarms with lede talking about steam engines in general terms to lure you onto their ad-cluttered pages (btw, Duck Duck Go/Bing is just the same). Shouldn't you rather say "go to Wikipedia straight", or push for…

It’s one thing to provide hints of a response (10 blue links) and the response (AI).

Re: Why does AI feel so different?

#52

Post by laserlight »

edg5000 wrote: post #14
JohnKemeny wrote: post #8

The article keeps referring to "AI" as if it's a coherent, agreed-upon thing. It's not. "AI" is a marketing term that's been applied to whatever happens to look impressive at the moment---right now, that's LLMs. There's no settled definition, no unified discipline, and lumping everything from generative text models to actual robotics under the same label just obscures the discussion. If we're talking about LLMs, let'…

I encourage you to try and really lean on LLMs (Claude Code in particular), it's hard to argue that there is no productivity boost. Athropy in "low level" skills is certainly real though. But our ancestors knew how to repair a pair of socks. Due to industrialisation, we just buy new ones and have lost the skills to repair them. Most people may forget how to do many things in programming, but may still intimately unde…

> it's hard to argue that there is no productivity boost

I encourage you to keep up with the literature [0].

[0] https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

Re: Why does AI feel so different?

#53

Post by mykowebhn »

donperignon wrote: post #5

It’s the first revolutionary technology that his first goal is to make money for VC investors instead of really change the world, the perceived benefit for society is just a sub-product of the ponzi scheme behind those VC firms.

100 percent. The same thing happened with the "Internet". It was amazing when it first started getting popular with the first web browsers in the 90s. There was so much potential with it.

Now look what's happened to the Internet.

Re: Why does AI feel so different?

#54

Post by scotty79 »

bamboozled wrote: post #18
edg5000 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I encourage you to try and really lean on LLMs (Claude Code in particular), it's hard to argue that there is no productivity boost. Athropy in "low level" skills is certainly real though. But our ancestors knew how to repair a pair of socks. Due to industrialisation, we just buy new ones and have lost the skills to repair them. Most people may forget how to do many things in programming, but may still intimately unde…

The more you use it and the deeper you go the more you realise its limitations as a useful software engineering tool and more as an autocomplete. Is it useful ? Yes? Am I happy it exists yes ? Is it revolutionary. I doubt it.

Year ago with enough prompting it could write a function for me that did something conceptually simple but tedious.

I tried Windsurf over the last 3 days. It can write complex game mechanics logic in multiple files and refactor code when told to. I can talk to it using language of the domain I just made up and I can talk to it using language that developers use when they talk about the code. It can solve bugs that would take me half an hour to figure out at least. It went from a poor junior to clever junior and half a senior in one year. It's not great at one shot architecting yet, but when told how to architect a thing it can move stuff around to conform with the desired architecture. It creates and modifies SVG's, understands colors and directions. It does all of that blind, without running the code. All it has is compiler (language server really) and linter.

You mention it's an autocomplete. I barely used auto-complete at all. I just told it what to do. I touched the code a little bit only because I wanted to, never because I had to. When I wanted a change to the code, 95% of the time I just told it what change I needed and it made it.

It basically replaces about 1/3 of software team already enabling (and pushing me towards) a role of (tech lead/architect/qa/product owner) and this fraction is rising.

It's not flawless. Sometimes it makes things that don't work on the first try. But you don't always need to revert. It's capable of fixing what it made when told about how the desired behavior differs. And all that without running the program.

I anticipate that further development is going to be letting it run and observe what it built so it's gonna move towards QA role. And the other thing might be slowly learning to differentiate between well architected code and badly architected code but that's probably harder as it requires careful preparation (and creation) of training data. While moving towards QA just requires figuring out how to let it run and inspect stuff. Maybe use the debugger.

Re: Why does AI feel so different?

#55

Post by bgwalter »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #45
ec109685 wrote: post #17

These are poor examples: > Why do I need to know what quarks are, or how steam engines work? Why do I need to know anything about anything? I can just look it up with AI Literally all possible with Google and YouTube.

Go to Google Search and literally ask "How do steam engines work?", and an AI-generated answer is exactly what it will show you, along with a Wikipedia link/excerpt followed by an endless list of links to clickfarms with lede talking about steam engines in general terms to lure you onto their ad-cluttered pages (btw, Duck Duck Go/Bing is just the same). Shouldn't you rather say "go to Wikipedia straight", or push for…

If you are using the local LLM as a sort of Encarta (another software that failed) it might work, as long as you are fine with shallow answers.

Proper research that compares many different pages still requires the regular Google search. Google LLM summaries are pathetic, Perplexity and Grok have to be nudged to the point that I feel I am training them with links obtained by Google.

Re: Why does AI feel so different?

#56

Post by spiderfarmer »

yobbo wrote: post #48
spiderfarmer wrote: post #25

I recently saw a good example of how LLM's can be really useful. A friend of mine, who always found learning difficult, now works as a plumber and installer with his own one-person company. One of his clients is the local community pool. He took over the job from an older man who showed him how everything worked. My friend noticed a lot of inefficient (manual) use of energy and resources, but the previous installer t…

This is an interesting example but it can't be scaled up to have meaningful impact on the level of the economy or society. The effect right now of LLMs is reducing friction for some people with certain problems, but big important problems are already optimised to much higher levels.

I disagree completely.

You seem to believe the venture capital money machine that tells you technology and innovation must always be a major disruptive force and solve big, important problems.

Most problems we encounter in daily life are small. If a technology helps solve them faster, at a lower cost, or in a way that was not possible before, I believe it can scale very well. People just have to get accustomed to it.

For example, I fixed my lawnmower recently with the help of ChatGPT. I could have gone to the dealer or asked my brother for help, but instead it was a quick five minute fix that saved me from bothering anyone or spending time searching through manuals and videos for the answer. It literally couldn't have been fixed faster.

I prefer that over augmented reality goggles and other "Big Ideas".

Re: Why does AI feel so different?

#57

Post by tempodox »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #16

AI feels different because quietly we are all aware, to differing degrees of comfort, that the world around us is collapsing. We see the escalating effects of climate change impacting day-to-day life in ways we were told would only happen in the far future, witnessing genocide become a normal part of the news critique of which can mean serious personal consequences, we're watching the United States transform into Sta…

> And we deeply need to believe something wonderous, whether delightful or terrifying, is also happening. I honestly think AI is largely mass hallucination which is supported by a system that is able to extract tremendous wealth from this hallucination continuing.

+∞. Hardly anyone wants to acknowledge that. Humans never really stopped wanting to believe in miracles and “AI” is the perfect idol.

Re: Why does AI feel so different?

#58

Post by JohnKemeny »

OtherShrezzing wrote: post #21
JohnKemeny wrote: post #8

The article keeps referring to "AI" as if it's a coherent, agreed-upon thing. It's not. "AI" is a marketing term that's been applied to whatever happens to look impressive at the moment---right now, that's LLMs. There's no settled definition, no unified discipline, and lumping everything from generative text models to actual robotics under the same label just obscures the discussion. If we're talking about LLMs, let'…

> There's zero evidence that LLMs have produced a measurable productivity boom I’m not so sure on this one. AlphaFold2, while not quite an LLM, was based on Transformer architecture - and its implementation wasn’t a million miles away from a language model - and it massively improved the rate of protein structure prediction. I think in general you’re correct, that we’re in a bubble, but I think it’s too extreme to sa…

From what I've read, AlphaFold2 is a minor improvement over other solvers, and only in some cases. It makes many more mistakes and misleading results than classic solvers.

But don't take my word for it, it's way outside of my area of research.

Re: Why does AI feel so different?

#59

Post by thunderbong »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #25

I recently saw a good example of how LLM's can be really useful. A friend of mine, who always found learning difficult, now works as a plumber and installer with his own one-person company. One of his clients is the local community pool. He took over the job from an older man who showed him how everything worked. My friend noticed a lot of inefficient (manual) use of energy and resources, but the previous installer t…

Thanks for this.

Lots of people, many amongst us here at HN, are critical of AI and LLMs in general. A lot of it has to do with two things, in my opinion - first, with the amount of money being thrown at it, and second, with the hype around it.

Many technical people, myself included, resent money being thrown at a problem rather than finding a proper solution. And we're especially skeptical of the hype cycle, because we've been through multiple hypes which didn't really live up to their claims.

But despite all that, I find regular people, using ChatGPT and other tools, just like any other online tool. Just like all of us rely on some software to find the time on the other side of the world when we have to schedule meetings, similarly, all these people are using these as tools to increase their capabilities and knowledge without the extra cruft that used to be involved in searching the web.

Additionally, AI is literally approachable by anybody who has an internet connection, and that means anyone with a smartphone. This didn't happen with devices, this didn't happen with Napster, this didn't happen with Bittorrent, and certainly not with Bitcoin. Each of these had some hurdle associated with it - cost of device, connectivity, technical knowhow.

But over the years, all those helped lay the foundation of what AI is being seen as now - as a tool that anybody can use. The more savvy among us are also using it to build their own tools as well.

So, yes, this time it certainly feels different.

Re: Why does AI feel so different?

#60

Post by tannhaeuser »

corentin88 wrote: post #51
tannhaeuser wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go to Google Search and literally ask "How do steam engines work?", and an AI-generated answer is exactly what it will show you, along with a Wikipedia link/excerpt followed by an endless list of links to clickfarms with lede talking about steam engines in general terms to lure you onto their ad-cluttered pages (btw, Duck Duck Go/Bing is just the same). Shouldn't you rather say "go to Wikipedia straight", or push for…

It’s one thing to provide hints of a response (10 blue links) and the response (AI).

Except it's all a show when those link to generated AI slop next to hundreds or even thousands of trackers and ads anyway, most prominently Google Ads and Google Analytics, which is why they're ranking and displaying at the top in the first place.
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