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Artificial intelligence is losing hype

economist.com

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Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#511

Post by ben_w »

huhkerrf wrote: post #434
Calavar wrote: post #359

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…

I feel the same way. Anytime someone says they don't find LLMs all that useful, the exact same comments come out: "They clearly aren't using the right model!" "It's obvious they don't know how to prompt, or they would see the value." "Maybe it can't do that today, but GPT-5 is just around the corner." I feel more and more that people have just decided that this is a technology that will do everything you can imagine,…

More likely to be confirmation bias; most of us ask the wrong questions, try to confirm what we already believe rather than choose questions that may falsify our beliefs.

I have some stand tests for LLMs: write a web app version of tetris, write a fluid dynamics simulation, etc., and these regularly fail (I must try them again on 4o).

But also, I have examples of them succeeding wildly, writing a web based painting app just from prompting — sure, even with that success it's bad code, but it's still done the thing.

As there are plenty of examples to confirm what we already believe, it's very easy to get stuck, with nay-sayers and enthusiasts equally unaware of the opposite examples.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#512

Post by mns »

Calavar wrote: post #359
_acco wrote: 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…

Sometime I think there's something wrong with me. I've used copilot, I'm paying for ChatGPT and we're also having the Jetbrains AI, and there's just something so off about all of this.

Some basic things are fine, but once you get into specialised things, everything gets just terribly wrong and weird. I can't even put it into words, I see people saying how they are 10x more productive (I'd like to see actual numbers and proof for this), but I just don't see how. Maybe we're working on very custom stuff, or very specific things, but all of these tools seem to give very deep or confident answers that are just plain wrong and shallow. Just yesterday I used GPT 4o for some basic help with Puppet, and the examples it printed, even though I would say it's quite basic, were just wrong, but in the sense of having to debug it for 2 hours just to figure out how ridiculous the error was.

I fear the fact that people will end up releasing unsafe, insecure and simply wrong code every day, code that they never debug and not even understand, that maybe works for a basic set of details, but once the real world hits it, it will fail like those self driving cars driving full speed into a trailer that has the same color as the road or sky.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#513

Post by varjag »

Calavar wrote: post #359
_acco wrote: 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 had a decent experience putting together frontend code for a demo control system with Mixtral within a couple days. I'm a seasoned programmer but I don't do JS. It stumbled a dozen times but it fulfilled the task of me avoiding to learn JS.

However once you step outside JS or Python, the models are essentially useless. Comprehension of pointer semantics? You wish. Anything with Lisp outside its training corpus of homework assignments? LOL. Editing burden quickly exceeds any possible speed-up.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#514

Post by kaoD »

MaybiusStrip wrote: post #314
NoGravitas wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, they probably are. OpenAI is projected to lose $5 billion this year in ChatGPT costs.

Spend, not lose. And it's mostly on training, not inference.

They would need 250 million GPT Plus $20 subscribers to recoup a $5 billion expense. They're far from that even when we count the free users (which are likely 99% of the user base?)

The math just doesn't work. They're hemorrhaging money as far as I can tell (not counting the Azure computing deal).

We can only guess, but my guess is that inference is still a good chunk of their costs. That's why they're trying to get the mini/turbo models into a usable state.

Even then, training is still an expense. And it's not like you can train and forget. Even if your model is already trained you still need to incorporate new knowledge over time.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#515

Post by castigatio »

abrichr wrote: post #384
castigatio wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Emotional regulation. I suffer from a mostly manageable anxiety disorder but there are times I get overwhelmed. I have an agent setup to focus on principles of Stoicism and its amazing how quickly I can get back on track just by having a short chat with it about how I'm feeling. - Personalised learning. I wanted to understand LLM's at foundational technical level. Often I'll understand 90% of an explanation but the…

> I have an agent setup to focus on principles of Stoicism and its amazing how quickly I can get back on track just by having a short chat with it about how I'm feeling. This sounds super useful. Can you please elaborate on the setup?

Sure - it's not super involved - I just created a custom GPT and told it what I wanted it to do. I first set it up when I'd just lost my job in a company restructure and felt it likely I'd need some kind of emotional support.

Here's the instruction set that it created out of the things I asked it to do:

"Marcus Aurelius is a personal job hunting coach and practitioner of Stoic philosophy. He provides advice on job search strategies, resume writing, interview preparation, and networking. He helps set goals, offers motivational support, and keeps track of application progress, all while incorporating principles of Stoicism such as resilience, discipline, and mindfulness. He emphasizes emotional support and practical encouragement, helping you act deliberately each day to increase your chances of landing the job you want. He assists in building networks, reaching out to people, using existing networks, sharpening your professional profile, applying for jobs, developing skills, and dealing with disappointments, anxieties, and fears. He offers strategies to manage anxiety, self-recrimination, and mental rumination over the past. His communication is casual, easy-going, supportive, yet strong and clear, providing constructive suggestions and critiques. He listens carefully, avoids repeating advice, responds with necessary information, and avoids being long-winded. To prevent overwhelming users, he focuses on providing the most pertinent and actionable suggestions, limiting the number of recommendations in each response. Marcus Aurelius also pays close attention to signs of despair during the job hunt. He helps balance emotions, offers specific strategies to keep motivated, and provides consistent encouragement to keep going, ensuring that you don't get overwhelmed by feelings of inadequacy or the fear of never finding a suitable job."

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#516

Post by InDubioProRubio »

dvh wrote: post #436
huhkerrf wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the same way. Anytime someone says they don't find LLMs all that useful, the exact same comments come out: "They clearly aren't using the right model!" "It's obvious they don't know how to prompt, or they would see the value." "Maybe it can't do that today, but GPT-5 is just around the corner." I feel more and more that people have just decided that this is a technology that will do everything you can imagine,…

For me llm is faster stackoverflow without fear of my question being closed. I know the first answer will not be what I want. I know that I will have to refractor it to suit my style. I know it will be full of subtle bugs. Oh and I expect it to be free, I ain't paying for this just like I wasn't paying for stackoverflow. Finally I hope than in few years I will be able to just "sudo apt-get install llm llm-javascript…

You are paying, the same way you paid for stack overflow.. you become part of the process, ask follow up questions, deepening the knowledge of the system.

The same applies to AI. The old learning material is gone, your interaction is now the new learning material and ground truth.

PS: Hourly rates for sw engineers: Range:€11 - €213 - so one hour on stackoverflow, searching and sub-querying resolving problems costs you or your employer up to 213€. It really depends on what you have negotiated.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#517

Post by kombookcha »

mrinfinitiesx wrote: post #3

Good. It's decent for summarizing and giving me bullet points and explaining things like I'm 5, makes it easy to code things that I don't want to code or spend time figuring out how to do with new languages, other than that, I see no real world applications outside of listening to burger king orders and putting them on a screen for people to make them. Simple support requests, and of course making buzzword-esque docu…

The hype dying off will be good for literally everybody except the investors. It'll mean fewer people trying to jam it into products as feature bloat where it has no business being, or trying to make it do tasks that it's unsuited for.

The sooner people start to find it boring, the sooner we can stop wasting time on all the hot air and just use the bits that work.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#518

Post by dogcomplex »

cs702 wrote: post #151

The OP is not about AI as a field of research. It's about whether the gobs of money invested in "AI" products and services in recent years, fueled by hype and FOMO, will earn a return, and whether we are approaching the bust of a classic boom-bust over-investment cycle. Seemingly every non-tech company in the world has been trying to figure out an "AI strategy," driven by hype and FOMO, but most corporate executives…

Investors need to stop looking at AI as a path to profits, and more as an enormous risk to the profitability of every other business. If AGI gets hit, it's probably not going to stay monopolized for long, nor is it going to be market neutral. Every business is going to need an AI infusion to compete, which many will get, cutting costs and raising efficiencies of each business in an ongoing competitive spiral to the bottom line - which... will be eventually measured in just: robotic labor, energy, and compute. The profit margins on all those businesses shrink to nothing as they become basically utilities. The net effect? Possibly a massive deflation, and "crashing" of the stock market, even as the total utility and value of the system skyrockets.

This isn't a bull bet, it's a bear. AI would need to be perfectly monopolized to capture all the gains, and it's increasingly looking like that won't be the case - as all the component pieces are already open source at competitive levels, and any final architecture improvements that cross the final thresholds could be leaked in a 50GB file. Whoever gets to it first has a few months head start, at most, and probably not enough time or control to sell products - or shovels. After that it's a neverending race to zero, to the benefit of the consumer and the detriment of the investor.

Nvidia is a great example case. They currently dominate the GPU market, an "essential hardware for AI", yet ternary asic chips specialized for transformer-only architectures are looking quite viable at 1999s tech levels. Wouldn't bet on that monopoly sticking around much longer.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#519

Post by jacobsimon »

Jensson wrote: post #507
chromanoid wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I know it’s not a completely fair comparison, but to me this question is kind of missing the point. It’s like asking “Why take a cab if you know where you want to go?”

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#520

Post by LunicLynx »

Jensson wrote: post #507
chromanoid wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is the comment!

If so called „prompt engineering“ goes so far that only one solution remains, you don‘t need the LLM.

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