Live data from Hacker News

Artificial intelligence is losing hype

economist.com

501–510 of 814 posts

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

>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

Which all takes valuable time us teachers are extremely short on.

I've been a classroom teacher for more than 20 years, I know how painful it is to piece together a hodge podge of resourecs to put together lessons. Yes the information is out there, but a one click option to gather this into a cohesive unit for me saves me valuable time.

>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?

Which is exactly what GPT is amazing at.Brainstorming, rewriting, suggesting new angles of approach is GPTs main stength!

>Explanations are even harder.

Prompting GPT to give useful answers is part of the art of using these new tools. Ask GPT to speak in a different voice, take on a persona or target a differnt age group and you'll be amazed at what it can output.

> I find out almost daily that explanations which worked fine in last year, don't work any more

Exactly! Reframing your own point of view is hard work, GPT can be an invaluable assistant in this area.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#502

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'm using the latest top paid models, gpt4o and claude 3.5. They work when there's a lot of examples on github or google, but once you get into something that doesn't have a lot of examples like closed source code or rarely used libraries, it will start hallucinating and even mixing up different API versions to create a mess that doesn't work at all. I don't believe LLMs will get any better than this without a new ma…

I had the same problem with using the latest neo4j API and Sonnet 3.5 -- except it wasn't really a problem. I just created a project where I explain that its knowledge on neo4j is outdated and to instead use an API reference and changelog that I add to the project.

It's not magic, you need to think what you would need in a similar situation and then provide that to the LLM. It definitely does suffer from severe overconfidence, though -- if you were to think of it as a person.

Also, you need to break up your project into manageable portions and provide context to the other portions (without providing the entirety of them) for it to effectively work on the portion you want to work on.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#503
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…

Where LLM shine is as a faster alternative to Google and Stack overflow. "How do I reverse an array in language X?". This will give you the right answer in seconds without having to click through garbage.

Especially if it's a question that's hard to Google, like "I remember there is more than one way to split an array in this language, list them". This saves me minutes every day.

But it's especially helpful if you are working on projects outside your own domain where you are a newbie.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#505
post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Let’s call it for what it is- taking poorly organized existing information and making it organized and interactive. “Here are some sharepoint locations, site Maps, and wikis. Now regurgitate this info to me as if you are a friendly call center agent.” Pretty cool but not much more than pushing existing data around. True AI I think is being able to learn some baseline of skills and then through experience and feedback…

>taking poorly organized existing information and making it organized and interactive.

Which is extremely valuable!

>Pretty cool but not much more than pushing existing data around.

Don't underestimate how valuable it is for teachers to do exactly that. Taking existing information, making it digestable, presenting it in new and interseting ways is a teacher's bread and butter.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#506
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…

Gpt seems to have gotten worse, Claude is the new hotness.

But, I agree with your sentiment that asking it to do stuff like that often doesn’t work. I’ve found that what it _can_ do is stuff like “here’s a Model object, write a query to fetch it with the schema I told you about ages ago”. It might not give perfect results, but I know how to write that query and it’s faster to edit Claude’s output than it is to write it from scratch.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#507

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.

Why do you need an LLM if you know what you want it to do? Just write the code rather than wrangling with the LLM, it isn't like writing code take much time when you know what it should do.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#509
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…

> 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.

Same, it can't even fix an xcode memory leak bug in a simple app. It will keep trying and breaking it non-stop. Garbage

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#510

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…

Where LLM shine is as a faster alternative to Google and Stack overflow. "How do I reverse an array in language X?". This will give you the right answer in seconds without having to click through garbage. Especially if it's a question that's hard to Google, like "I remember there is more than one way to split an array in this language, list them". This saves me minutes every day. But it's especially helpful if you ar…

> This saves me minutes every day.

That is very believable, the people who say it made them super productive is a bit less believable.

Post reply on HN