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Artificial intelligence is losing hype

economist.com

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Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#541

Post by drogus »

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 have a similar experience, but I still use LLMs, just a bit differently. I pretty much never ask it to generate complex code. I also rarely ask for definitions or facts, cause of the tendency to generate garbage answers. What I use it for is usually tedious stuff that is easy to do, but would take me more time to type, rather than ask the LLM.

For example:

* I need a simple bash script for file manipulation or some simple tasks like setting up a project (example: download a secret from AWS SSM, check if an executable exist, if it doesn't write instructions on how to install it on most popular systems etc)

* I need a simple HTTP API, nothing fancy, maybe some simple database usage, maybe running some commands, simple error handling

* I need a YAML file for Kubernetes. I say what I need and usually, it gets most of it right

* I want an Ansible task for some simple thing. Ansible is quite verbose, so it's often saving me time

* I have a Kubernetes YAML file, but I want to manage it in terraform - I'll then ask to convert YAML to a terraform entry (and in general converting between formats is nice, cause even if you have only a piece of what you want to convert, LLMs will most of the time get it right)

* Surprisingly, it often gets openssl and ffmpeg commands right - something I always have to google anyway, especially openssl certificates generation or manipulation

* Giving it a function I wrote and writing test samples after providing a list of what it should test (and asking if it can come up with more, but sadly it rarely does generate anything useful on top of what I suggest)

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#542

Post by tinco »

smt88 wrote: post #372
anon291 wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that these problems will follow the same growth trajectory as every other tech bug. In other words, they will go away eventually. But the Rubicon is still crossed. There is a general purpose computer system that understands human language and can write real sounding human language. That's a sea change.

> will follow the same growth trajectory as every other tech bug What you're referring to isn't a bug. It's inherent to the way LLMs work. It can't "go away" in an LLM model because... > understands human language ...they don't. They are prediction machines. They don't "understand" anything.

Prediction without understanding is just extrapolation. I think you're just extrapolating your prediction on the abilities of future LLM based prediction machines.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#543

Post by jowdones »

ummonk wrote: post #13

Whether and to what extent AI can be monetized is an open question. But there's no question that LLMs are already seeing extensive use in everyday office work and already making large improvements to productivity.

Guys vomiting such blank statements as ummonk deserve to be beaten with a wet cloth.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#544

Post by KoolKat23 »

theappsecguy wrote: post #267
andreilys wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Content Generation: LLMs can be used to generate high-quality, human-like content such as articles, blog posts, social media posts, and even short stories. Businesses can leverage this capability to save time and resources on content creation, and improve the consistency and quality of their online presence. 2. Customer Service and Support: LLMs can be integrated into chatbots and virtual assistants to provide fas…

Dear lord, if someone started relying on LLMs for legal documents, their clients would be royally screwed…

They're currently already relying on overworked, underpaid interns who draft those documents. The lawyer is checking it anyway. Now the lawyer and his intern have time to check it.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#545

Post by jononor »

InDubioProRubio wrote: post #516
dvh wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

And unlike Stack Overflow, which is available to everyone online and has an open content license, the IP the users of the ChatGPT style services is entirely proprietary to the company. I am not interested in feeding their machine with my brainpower. On the other hand, I happily contribute to Stack Overflow, and open source software+hardware. I do not think I will integrate LLM into my engineering workflow until there is a good service/solution which builds up the commons. The huge companies already have way too much influence over key aspects of knowledge-based society.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#546

Post by KoolKat23 »

southernplaces7 wrote: post #473
andreilys wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Content Generation: LLMs can be used to generate high-quality, human-like content such as articles, blog posts, social media posts, and even short stories. Businesses can leverage this capability to save time and resources on content creation, and improve the consistency and quality of their online presence. 2. Customer Service and Support: LLMs can be integrated into chatbots and virtual assistants to provide fas…

Except for number 3, the rest are more often disastrous or insulting to users and those depending on the end products/services of these things. Your reasoning is so bad that i'm almost tempted to think you're spooning out PR-babble astro-turf for some part of the industry. Here's a quick breakdown: 1. content: Nope, except for barrel-bottom content sludge of the kind formerly done by third world spam spinning compani…

2.I think you overestimate the caliber of query received in most call centres. Even when it comes to private banks (for those who've been successful in life), the query is most often something small like holding their hand and telling them to press the "login" button.

Also these all tend to have an option where you simply ask it and it will redirect you to a person.

Those agents deal with the same queries all day, despite what you think your problem likely isn't special, in most cases may as well start calling the agents "stochastic parrots" too while you're at it.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#547

Post by wsc981 »

fsiefken wrote: post #522
wsc981 wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For LOVR (Lua based 3D/VR framework), I found these LLMs pretty much useless, both ChatGPT and Claude. Seems all is trained on old APIs, so it takes quite a bit of effort to make any suggestions work with newest LOVR version.

I wonder if quality would improve if one would upload the latest LOVR documentation and uploaded LOVR codebases using the newest version and instruct it properly?

The docs are available online. I don't know how often models are "re-trained".

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#548

Post by anonzzzies »

rcarmo wrote: post #534
anonzzzies wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but every time I try I find it borderline impossible to get functional code even for pretty straightforward prompts. I work in 9 different projects now and I would say that around 80% of functional code comes from Sonnet (like GP) for these projects. These are not (all) trivial either; there is a very niche (for banking) key/value store written in Go for instance which has a lot of edge cases etc, all the plumbing…

I'd like to see that 3D editor. It's a highly non-trivial thing to do properly.

It was a few hours work so it was not 'done properly', but the point was, it is working code and, as I know nothing about 3d or game programming, I didn't do any of it. People here claim it (current LLMs) cannot produce working code for entire software's without a human doing a lot of it; it clearly can and for non trivial stuff. I would say the real point is ; it cannot do complete code for non trivial programs without human doing most of the coding IF the person prompting is not an experienced coder. I am, so I can review the generated code, prompt in English what it should change and then it works. It is often faster to write code instead of that (so the thing blurbs 100% working code but with 20% wrong/bugs which I fix as a human) but in domains I know nothing about, English is faster for me.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#549

Post by croes »

zaptrem wrote: post #539
Jensson wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not op but my response: Because I am lazy and would like to save the 1-5 minutes it would take me to actually write it. When there are dozens of these small things a day the saved time really adds.

That's why you spend 10 minutes to write the correct prompt?

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#550

Post by skriticos2 »

arcticbull wrote: post #486
aussieguy1234 wrote: post #469

If anything, i'm getting more hyped up over time. Here are the things i've used LLMs for, with success in all areas as a solo technical founder. Business Advice including marketing, reaching out to investors, understanding SAFE notes (follow up questions after watching the Y Combinator videos), customer interview design. All of which, as an engineer, I had never done before. Create SQL queries for all kinds of busine…

> 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.

I found that ChatGPT needs to be rained in with the prompts, and then it does a very impressive job. E.g. you can create a function prototype (with input and output expectations) and in the body tell the logic you are thinking about in meta-code. Then tell it to write the actual code. It's also good if you want to immerse yourself into a new programming language and outline what kind of program you want, and expect the results to be different from what you throught, but insightful.

Now if you throw larger context or more obscure interface expectations at it, it'll start to discard code and hallucinate.

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