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Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

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Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#501

Post by cadamsdotcom »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #418
rco8786 wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why shouldn’t we judge a company’s capabilities against what their CEOs claim them to be capable of?

Oh, we absolutely should, but I'm saying that the reason the messaging is so discordant when compared with the capabilities is that the messaging isn't aimed at the people who are able to evaluate the capabilities.

You're right. The audience isn't the same. Unfortunately the parent commenters are also right - executives hyping AI are (currently) lying.

It is about as unethical as it gets.

But, our current iteration of capitalism is highly financialized and underinvested in the value of engineering. Stock prices come before truth.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#502

Post by sexy_seedbox »

nirui wrote: post #494

I recently, meaning hours ago, had this delightful experience watching the Eric of Google, which everybody love, including he's extra curricular girl friend and wife, talking about AI. He seemed to believe AI is under-hyped after tried it out himself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id4YRO7G0wE He also said in the video: > I brought a rocket company because it was like interesting. And it's an area that I'm not an ex…

> it's an area that I'm not an expert in

> idiots like Eric

Now imagine Google working with US military putting Gemini into a fleet of autonomous military drones with machine guns.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#503

Post by disqard »

Qem wrote: post #289
mieubrisse wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was looking for exactly this comment. Everybody's gloating, "Wow look how dumb AI is! Haha, schadenfreude!" but this seems like just a natural part of the evolution process to me. It's going to look stupid... until the point it doesn't. And my money's on, "This will eventually be a solved problem."

> It's going to look stupid... until the point it doesn't. And my money's on, "This will eventually be a solved problem." AI can remain stupid longer than you can remain solvent.

Haha, I like your take!

My variation was:

"Leadership can stay irrational longer than you can stay employed"

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#504

Post by disqard »

grewsome wrote: post #269
mieubrisse wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was looking for exactly this comment. Everybody's gloating, "Wow look how dumb AI is! Haha, schadenfreude!" but this seems like just a natural part of the evolution process to me. It's going to look stupid... until the point it doesn't. And my money's on, "This will eventually be a solved problem."

Sometimes the last 10% takes 90% of the time. It'll be interesting to see how this pans out, and whether it will eventually get to something that could be considered a solved problem. I'm not so sure they'll get there. If the solved problem is defined as a sub-standard but low cost, then I wouldn't bet against that. A solution better than that though, I don't think I'd put my money on that.

You just inspired a thought:

What if the goalpost is shifted backwards, to the 90% mark (instead of demanding that AI get to 100%)?

* Big corps could redefine "good enough" as "what the SotA AI can do" and call it good.

* They could then layoff even more employees, since the AI would be, by definition, Good Enough.

(This isn't too far-fetched, IMO, seeing how we're seeing calls for copyright violation to be classified as legal-when-we-do-it)

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#505

Post by davidgerard »

hnthrow90348765 wrote: post #237
abxyz wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author of that comment, an employee of Microsoft, goes on to say: > It is my opinion that anyone not at least thinking about benefiting from such tools will be left behind. The read here is: Microsoft is so abuzz with excitement/panic about AI taking all software engineering jobs that Microsoft employees are jumping on board with Microsoft's AI push out of a fear of "being left behind". That's not the confidence…

TBF they are dogfooding this (good) but it's just not going well

"eating our own dogshit"

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#506

Post by throwanem »

98codes wrote: post #375
dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This gives me flashbacks to when my big corporate former employer outsourced a bunch of work offshore. An outsourced contractor was tasked with a very simple job as their first task - update a single dependency, which required just a bump of the version and no code changes - after three days of them seemingly struggling to even understand what they were asked to do, inability to clone the repo, failure to install the…

Makes me wonder if the pattern will continue to follow, and we start to find certain agents—maybe due to config, maybe due to the training codebase and the codebase they're pointed at—that will become the single one out of the group we can rely on. Give instructions, get good code back. That's the dream, though I think the pieces that need to fall into place for particular cases will prevent reaching that top quality…

Yeah, this is what we used to call "hiring." People who think it can ever come with guarantees make incompetent and tiresome clients.

I can't wait for the first AI agent programmer to realize this and start turning down jobs working for garbage people...or exploiting them at scale for pennies each, in a labor version of the "salami slicing" scheme. I don't mean humans using AI to do this, which of course has been at scale for years. I mean the first agent to discover a job prioritization heuristic on its own which leads to the same result.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#507

Post by rasz »

nyarlathotep_ wrote: post #475
marmakoide wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hot take : the whole LLM craze is fed by a delusion. LLM are good at mimicking human language, capturing some semantics on the way. With a large enough training set, the amount of semantic captured covers a large fraction of what the average human knows. This gives the illusion of intelligence, and the humans extrapolates on LLM capabilities, like actual coding. Because large amounts of code from textbooks and what n…

I think the bubble is already a bit past peak. My sophisticated sentiment analysis (talking to co-workers other professional programmers and IT workers, HN and Reddit comments) seems to indicate a shift--there's a lot less storybook "Ay Eye is gonna take over the world" talk and a lot more distrust and even disdain than you'd see even 6 months ago. Moves like this will not go over well.

AI proponents would say you are witnessing third stage of 'First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win'

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#508

Post by latentsea »

ryandrake wrote: post #391
mrweasel wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're probably correct: "Our developers a very happy with CoPilot. They now spend 50% of their time interacting with our AI offerings, either via VSCode, Github or Clippy." No need to specify why they are interact with it, all engagement is good engagement.

By this measurement, a slower compiler is better than a faster one, because developers are using it for more of their time. Totally bonkers, Microsoft!

When your identity is tied to that being a success, you will find a way to make it so, because it feels much worse to have your identity challenged at a fundamental level than it does to have people grumpy with you for acting in a way that allows you to preserve your identity.

Most corporate BS comes down to this.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#509

Post by rasz »

xeonmc wrote: post #435
mock-possum wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t think he’s having fun getting laid a ton for playing with computers?

I don’t imagine getting laid with computers are particularly enjoyable for humans.

You havent met Gwendolyn bot.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#510

Post by rasz »

baalimago wrote: post #64

Well, the coding agent is pretty much a junior dev at the moment. The seniors are teaching it. Give it a 100k PRs with senior developer feedback and it'll improve just like you'd anticipate a junior would. There is no way that FANG aren't using the comments by the seniors as training data for their next version. It's a long-term play to have pricey senior developers argue with an llm

@Grok is this true?
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