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Artificial intelligence is losing hype

economist.com

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Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#561

Post by torginus »

magicalhippo wrote: post #555
torginus wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Still it does not sit right with me - it might work, but figuring out the math with fixed point is not that hard, just requires some sitting down and thinking about it.

It's like I have some light fixtures in my attic that are connected with wires twisted together and covered with electrical tape - they certainly work and have done for a decade, but its still not right and I wouldn't recommend anyone do it this way.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#562

Post by pdimitar »

petra wrote: post #295
K0balt wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, I’ve talked to a lot of people who cannot consistently perform at the mistral-12b level. I think we expect AGI to be much smarter than the average joe, and free of occasional stupidity. What we’ve got is an 85IQ generalist with unreliable savant capabilities, that can also talk to a million people at the same time without getting distracted. I don’t see how that isn’t absolutely a fundamental shift in cap…

I don't think they'll use LLM's for customer service. But it's a building block. And when used well it may be possible to get to zero hallucinations and good accuracy in question answering for limited domains - like the call center.

If the current LLMs manage to achieve even only that it would be an enormous win. Alas they still have not.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#563

Post by kaoD »

lz400 wrote: post #556
kaoD wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

Yep, that's exactly what I mean by "coding" as opposed to "engineering".

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#564

Post by ruszki »

h_tbob wrote: post #131
CooCooCaCha wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am highly skeptical that a competent coder sees a 2x boost.

I am a competent coder. I have been a coder since I was in middle school. I know at least 10 languages, and I could write my own from scratch. I know c++ dart golang java html css javascript typescript lua react vue angular angularjs c# swift sql in various dialects including mysql and postgres, and have worked professionally in all these regards. I love to challenge myself. In fact, if I done something before, I fin…

> I know at least 10 languages

This statement would have been a huge red flag for me, if I had interviewed you. Don't get me wrong, you could use and program in 10 languages. Maybe you can be proficient in many at different times of your life. But know them at once? No.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#565

Post by bambax »

mikhmha wrote: post #408
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 exact same way. I have felt 0 need to use an LLM in my current workflow. If I could explain concisely what my problem is in English - then I would already know the answer. In that case why would I be asking AI the question. And I don't want opinionated answers to subjective questions. Why run that through a filter, I can investigate better myself through links on the internet. By the way - I think AI or ML…

I think llms are useful when you're trying to write something in a language you don't know well; then it speeds up the part where you need to check for simple idiosyncrasies.

If you don't know the language at all it's dangerous because you may not understand the proposed program (and of course if you're an expert you don't need it at all).

But llms won't help to find solutions to a general, still unspecified problem.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#566

Post by fragmede »

rcarmo wrote: post #529
arcticbull wrote: post #486

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.

Has to be something pretty generic. I'm trying to write a little C program that talks to an LCD display via the SPI bus--something I did before a few times, but not with this particular display and MCU. There is no LLM that can even begin to reason this out since they've been mostly trained on web dev content.

is there no documentation about that uc and LCD controller? I'd assume they've been trained on every html, pdf, and video tutorial out there, as well as the pdfs of all of those chip's datasheets, and example microcontroller C code out there in the form of vendor documentation. sure that's maybe less than the amount of html web app tutorials but if we assume it's been fed all of the vendor's documentation about an uc and their library documentation as well, the ones it would fail on are undocumented chips out of china that have no data sheets (which make for a very fun project to reverse engineer, mind you), or something very new. Even without that though, it's still able to dot product (not going to call it "reasoning") its way to at least hallucinate code to talk to an LCD controller chip via SPI for a uc is never even heard of, so I can't agree with "even begin to reason this out".

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#567

Post by krfrewH »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #158
pdimitar wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They only fall down hard when used in spaghetti dumpster fire codebases where you have to paste the contents of 6+ files into context or the code crosses a multiple service boundaries to do anything. So humans do better than them in at least 80% of all code everywhere, if not 95% even? Cool, good to know. Care to provide some examples to back your otherwise extraordinary claim btw?

You sure seem invested in hating AI, what's your problem brother?

You are stealing and laundering my open source code and take the credit, that is the problem.

Fortunately, as pdimitar pointed out, so far it is an ineffective scam that mostly produces LoC.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#568

Post by ryanjshaw »

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 gave GPT two small twists so it's not a simple case of copy/paste

Why? I see it like querying a database of human knowledge. I wouldn't expect a SQL database to infer information it's never seen before, why would I expect an LLM to do so?

I use it where I know a solution exists but I'm stumped on the syntax or how to implement it in an unfamiliar environment, or I want to know what could have caused a bug based on others' experience etc.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#569

Post by DebtDeflation »

Things that are coming to an end:

- Startups whose entire business model is to just provide a wrapper around OpenAI's API.

- Social Media "AI Influencers" and their mindless "7 Ways To Become A Millionaire With ChatGPT" videos.

- Non-technical pundits claiming we are 1-2 years from AGI (and AGI talk in general).

- The stock market assigning insane valuations to any company that claims to somehow be "doing AI".

Things that are NOT coming to an end:

- Ongoing R&D in AI (and not just LLMs).

- Companies at the frontier of AI (OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, Google, Meta) releasing ever more capable models and tooling around those models.

- Forward looking companies in all industries using AI both to add capabilities to their products and to drive efficiencies in internal processes.

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