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Artificial intelligence is losing hype

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Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#551
post #524

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…

There was a movie that came out in 2001 called "Artificial Intelligence", at a time when we were still figuring out how things like search engines and the online economy were going to work. It had a scene where the main characters went to a city and visited a pay-per-question AI oracle. It was very artistically done, but it really revealed (in hindsight) how naive we were about how "online" was going to turn out. Whe…

> When I look at the kinds of AI projects I have visibility into, there's a parallel where the public are expecting a centralized, all knowing, general purpose AI

I don't think this is entirely fair to "the public". Media was stuffed with AI company CEOs claiming that AGI was just around the corner. Nvidia, OpenAI and Musk, Zuckerberg, and others were positively starry eyed at how, soon, we'd all be just a GPU matmul away from intelligence. "The public" has seen these eye watering amounts of money shifting around, and they imply that it must mean something.

The entire system has been acting as if GenAI was right around the corner.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#552
post #537

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…

> The consensus on HN seems to be that you can be pretty productive with LLMs as coding assistants If you define "productive" as writing a simple CRUD web application that your 13-year-old cousin could write between two gaming sessions, then you'll consider LLMs as sacred monsters. Snake oil vendors always had great appeal over people who didn't know better.

That’s very literally “productive “.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#553

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…

fwiw, here's my results.

Every question I've asked of chatGPT, meta and Gemini have returned results that were either obvious or wrong. Pointing out how wrong the answers returned got the obvious, "I apologize" response which returned an obvious answer.

I consider all these AI engines to be interactive search engines where the results need to be double checked. The only thing these engines do, for me perhaps, is save some search time so I don't have to click around on a lot of sites to scroll for some semblance of an answer to verify.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#554
This should really be retitled to “The AI investment bubble is losing hype.” LLMs as they exist today will slowly work their way into new products and use cases. They are an important new capability and one that will change how we do certain tasks.

But as to the hype, we are in a brief pause before the election where no company wants to release anything that would hit the news cycle in a bad way and cause knee-jerk legislation. Are there new architectures and capabilities waiting? Likely some. Sora showed state of the art video generation, OpenAI has demoed an impressive voice mode, and Anthropic has teased that Opus 3.5 will be even more capable. OpenAI also clearly has some gas in the tank as they have focused on releasing small models such as GPT-4o and 4o mini. And many have been musing about agents and methods to improve system 2 like reasoning.

So while there’s a soft moratorium on showing scary new capability there is still evidence of progress being made behind-the-scenes. But what will a state of the art model look like when all of these techniques have been scaled up on brand new exascale data centers?

It might not be AGI, but I think it will at least be enough for the next hype Investment bubble.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was skeptical like you, but recently decided to try it out. I wasn't expecting much, and as such I was slightly surprised. For example, just now my NAS stopped working because the boot device went offline. So I got to thinking about writing a simple syslog server. I've never looked at the syslog protocol before, and I've never done any low-level TCP/UDP work in C# yet. So I asked ChatGPT to generate some code[1], a…

This is what the AI is great at - the topics might be obscure to you but they are not that obscure in general, so the AI has had a lot of training data. I've also assembled a Kubernetes cluster overnight, despite not knowing much about Kubernetes before, and I ran the kubectl files ChatGPT made for me past some devops folks, and it passed the smell test. I consider much of coding to be a magic spellcasting tutorial -…

> the topics might be obscure to you but they are not the obscure in general

Exactly, it's a very nice alternative to searching the web and discovering new stuff.

> most microcontrollers don't have FPUs, and the performance is awful on 8-bit AVRs.

I used to think like you. But then I realized the Atmega 328p is running at 16 MHz, so even hundreds of . As you can see here[1], it can do 94k double-precision FLOPS, more than enough for simple sketches like this. This jives with the benchmarks I did several years ago.

Sure if I was writing some tight control loop or similar I wouldn't use floating point.

[1]: https://kreier.github.io/benchmark/LinpackDP/

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#556
post #531
post #290

AI is a very strange thing where 2 seemingly smart coders use it and one comes out thinking it's obviously revolutionary and the other one thinking it's a waste of time and where 2 seemingly smart journalists use it and one thinks AGI and the end of the world is nigh and the other one thinks the market will crash when the hype dies over. I think part of it is due to the politically and internet-induced death of nuanc…

> AI is a very strange thing where 2 seemingly smart coders use it and one comes out thinking it's obviously revolutionary and the other one thinking it's a waste of time My take on this is that those 2 developers are often working on very different tasks. If you're a very smart coder working in a large codebase with tons of domain knowledge you'll find it's useless. If you're a very smart coder working in a consulta…

there's probably truth to that, but I find it's useful at a more micro-level. I don't tell the llm to write an architecture or a big piece. It's more like, I have this data in this shape, I want a function that gives data out that shape and it will spit something pretty good and idiomatic. I read it, understand it and implement it. Need to be careful with blind copy-paste, there are sometimes subtle bugs in the code.

It's specially useful when learning new frameworks, languages, etc. To me this is all applicable regardless of domain as the micro-level patterns tend to be variations of things that have been seen. I suspect if you try to load it with a lot of very specific high level domain logic, there are more chances of taking the llm out of its comfort zone.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#557

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…

fwiw, here's my results. Every question I've asked of chatGPT, meta and Gemini have returned results that were either obvious or wrong. Pointing out how wrong the answers returned got the obvious, "I apologize" response which returned an obvious answer. I consider all these AI engines to be interactive search engines where the results need to be double checked. The only thing these engines do, for me perhaps, is save…

[deleted]

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#558

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,…

[deleted]

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#559

This should really be retitled to “The AI investment bubble is losing hype.” LLMs as they exist today will slowly work their way into new products and use cases. They are an important new capability and one that will change how we do certain tasks. But as to the hype, we are in a brief pause before the election where no company wants to release anything that would hit the news cycle in a bad way and cause knee-jerk l…

So you’re suggesting all innovation/new functionality releases are paused because US has elections coming up? I find that hard to believe.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong. As per the article - a part of our brain is a prediction machine. A human body is more than the sum of its parts.

> A human body is more than the sum of its parts. What does this mean, precisely? How is a human body (or plant, or insect, or reptile/bird/mammal) body ever "more than" it's constituent parts? Wouldn't that violate a conservation law?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
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