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Artificial intelligence is losing hype

economist.com

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Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#571

Post by greg_V »

dubcanada wrote: post #559
futureshock wrote: post #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 l…

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

"no no, it's not that the technology has reached it's current limits and these companies are bleeding money, they're just withholding their newest releases not to spook the normies!"

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#572

Post by richardw »

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 stop it from coding, just ask it to brainstorm with me on a design or plan. After a few iterations it knows what I want and then I ask it for specific outputs. Or I code those myself, or some combination.

I’ve found that it’s sometimes amazing and sometimes wastes a lot of my time. A few times it’s really come up with a good insight I hadn’t considered because the conversation has woken up some non-obvious combination. I use ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and one or two IDE tools.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#573

Post by fragmede »

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…

what did it do when you told it all of those things? was it able to fix the problems when you pointed them out? did you give it one prompt and expect perfect code out on the first try? is that how you code? all your code complies and runs flawlessly first try? I'm jealous. it usually takes me a bunch of passes before I get things right.

here's a chat for a uc and LCD chip that I picked at random (and got the name wrong for) (and didn't want raspberry pi code for so it stopped it short on that response)

https://chatgpt.com/share/2004ac32-b08b-43d7-b762-91543d656a...

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#574

Post by IAmGraydon »

futureshock wrote: post #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 l…

I think we found the guy with NVDA calls.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#575

Post by fragmede »

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,…

I mean when the people saying it doesn't work for them, would kill them to give links to the chats on ChatGPT.com so everyone can see the prompts used? when they do, it's a different conversation. like the number of R's in strawberry, or 9.11 - 9.2. When the complaints are generic with no links, the responses are similarly generic, because both sides just biases that they're right and the other side is the one that's wrong.

I welcome people picking apart chats that I link to. it's not that I believe that LLMs are magic and refuse to adjust my model of how good these things are and aren't, but when people don't give specific evidence is hard to actually move the conversation forwards.

because yeah, these things are plenty stupid and have to be tricked into doing things sometimes (which is stupid, but here we are). they're also pretty amazing but like any hammer, not everything is a nail.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#576

Post by ksynwa »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #569

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…

At the core of it, the high valuations were not a product of the potential LLMs had in assisting and enhancing individuals' works, rather because there was a hope that LLMs could replace some varieties of human labourers wholesale, thereby cutting labour costs which are often the highest expenditure of many companies. This has not materialised. I have seen more stories of PR nightmares out of attempting this than those with good endings. But maybe that is because of the sensationalist nature of news media itself.

Either way if it is indeed a bubble that will burst at some point, it doesn't bode well for the tech industry. With the mass layoffs, which are ongoing, seems like there won't be enough jobs for everyone.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#577

Post by rldjbpin »

while this field is now paying my bills, i am lowkey happy to see this notion in the mainstream.

> “An alarming number of technology trends are flashes in the pan.”

this has been a trend that seems to keep on recurring but does not stop from the tech bros from pushing the marketing beyond the realities.

raising money in the name of the future will give you similar results as self-driving cars or vr. the potential is crazy, but it is not going to make you double your money in a couple financial years. this should help serious initiatives find better-aligned investors.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#578

Post by jeffalyanak »

jacobsimon wrote: post #519
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.

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?”

No, it's like saying "why take a cab where you have to provide the driver so much guidance on driving as to be equal or greater than the effort of driving yourself."

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#579

Post by philipwhiuk »

jacobsimon wrote: post #519
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.

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?”

It's such a poor comparison it's ridiculous. A better analogy is "why take a cab if you know where you want to go and provide the car and instructions on how to drive"

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#580

Post by philipwhiuk »

dogcomplex wrote: post #499
julienchastang wrote: post #240

As usual, when we see a thread on this topic on HN, the reactions tend to be bimodal: either "Yes, AI has transformed my workflow" (which is where I mostly fall), or "No, it's over-hyped." The latter often comes with an anecdote about how an LLM failed at a relatively simple task. I speculate that this diversity in opinion might be related to whether or not the user is employing a pro-tier LLM. Personally, I've been…

To be fair there is a certain level of blindly-pragmatic "so AI can help me with programming - so what! It takes just as long to converse with it as for me to code it myself" - which is mostly true. But I think those people fail to grok the sheer ridiculous power of what they're saying - that these tools are close enough they're nearly at parity. Sure, the error-correcting architectures aren't sufficient yet for them…

We do grok it. We also think they've reached the apex of the technology and have seen no evidence they'll close the hallucination gap.
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