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Artificial intelligence is losing hype

economist.com

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Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#581

Post by hnaccount_rng »

jcgrillo wrote: post #427
mhuffman wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think this depend heavily on what type of coding your doing. The more your job could be replaced by copy/pasting from Stack Overflow, the more useful you find coding assistants. I think this is true and also why you see some "older devs just don't like AI" type comments. AI assistants seem to be great at simple webdev tasks, which also happens to be the type of work that more junior developers do day to day. I hav…

As an "older dev" who doesn't like AI, the thing that annoys me most is the UX is horrible. It's like arguing in chat with an extremely overconfident junior dev who isn't capable of learning or improving with time and experience. That's just a miserable way to spend time. I'd rather spend that time thinking clearly about the problem, and then writing down the solution (clearly). If this thing also conferred an actual…

I fear the approach that maximises productivity is a literal one-shot approach: Give the LLM one or two shots at generating a somewhat passable first attempt (including all or at least most of the boilerplate) and then strictly fix up stuff yourself. I recently spend a day attempting to build a relatively simple GUI for a project which _maybe_ contains a couple of days of programming work. It got the gist of the GUI basically in one. And the next two or three prompts then added the buttons I wanted. Most of it even worked

But after that we ran into a kind of loop, where you put my feelings into much better words than I could. If I had stopped after iteration 3, I probably would have finished what I wanted to do in half a day

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#582

Post by philipwhiuk »

theaussiestew wrote: post #310
codexon wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use gpt4o and claude 3.5 while coding every day. The rumors on twitter and reddit are accurate. I constantly run into incorrect answers from the LLMs every day. Just recently I asked whether I needed to reverse the bit shift to mask the upper 24 bits in an IP address on a little endian platform and it incorrectly told me no probably because most of the answers on Google appeared to answer no to similarly phrased qu…

That's probably the best we can do for now with LLMs. Surely it would be unreasonable for LLMs to provide a correct answer when the majority of people on various forums also provide the wrong answer. Some day LLMs will be able to objectively provide truthful statements but we're not there yet. Regardless, that LLMs are competing with longstanding programmers is already an impressive feat, even if they're not 100% cor…

> Regardless, that LLMs are competing with longstanding programmers is already an impressive feat, even if they're not 100% correct.

But they're not. They're a little tool some programmers use to save a small amount of time. They're not replacing programmers.

And there's no evidence they will ever be as good as actual programmers.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#583

Post by DiscourseFan »

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…

We’ll see, but I doubt its because of the election; as another commenter said companies can’t afford to lose that much money by waiting around for months for the right “moment” to release a product. GPT-4o is good, I’ll grant you that, but its fundenmentally the same tech as GPT3.5 and the fundenmental problem, “hallucination,” is not solved, even if there are more capabilities. No matter what, for anything besides code that may or may not be any good, someone has to go through and read the response and make sure its all tight so they don’t fuck up or embarass themselves (and even then, using AI for coding will introduce long term problems since you’ll have to go back through it for debugging anyway). We all, within a month of ChatGPT getting introduced, caught it in a contradiction or just plain error about some topic of specialist knowledge, and realized that its level of expertise on all topics was at that same level. Sam Altman royallly fucked up when he started believing his own bullshit, thinking AGI was on the horizon and all we needed was to waste more resources on compute time and datacenters.

Its done, you can’t make another LLM, all knowledge from here on out is corrupted by them, you can never deliver an epistemic “update.” GPT will become a relic of the 21st century, like a magazine from the 1950s.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#584

Post by adastra22 »

pdimitar wrote: post #523
adastra22 wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We don't have a "real AI" at all. Where's Skynet, where's HAL-9000? Where are the cute robotic butlers from the "I, Robot" movie? You shouldn’t use science fiction as your reference point. It’s like saying “where is my flying car?” (Helicopters exist)

Why shouldn't I? Humans developed this intelligence naturally (as far as we know). Many people claim we're intelligent enough to repeat the process with artificial organisms, and guide it, and perfect it. I want to see it. And btw in the Terminator novelizations it was clearly stated that Skynet was a very good optimization machine but lacked creativity. So it's actually a good benchmark: can we create an intelligent…

Just because someone can tell a convincing story, doesn’t mean reality (once technology catches up) will resemble the devices of that story. Science fiction is fiction, and unconstrained by the annoying restrictions of physical reality.

That’s the point of my flying car comparison. We HAVE flying cars: they’re called helicopters. Because as it turns out there is just no physical way to make a vehicle in the form factor of a car fly, except by rotary wing. But people will still say “where’s my flying car?” because they are hung up on reality resembling science fantasy, as you are.

We have AI. We even already have AGI. It just doesn’t resemble the Terminator, because The Terminator is a made up story disconnected from reality.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#585

Post by philipwhiuk »

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…

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

This collapses as soon as this collapses

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

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#586

Post by tasuki »

pdimitar wrote: post #159
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…

> 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 capability. Very shallow assessment, first of all it's not a generalist at all, it has zero concept of what it's talking about, secondly it gets confused easily unless you order it to keep context in…

> We don't have intelligent machine entities, we have stochastic parrots

What is intelligence? We must have very different definitions!

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#587

Post by oefrha »

magicalhippo wrote: post #446
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 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…

I’m similar: LLM can improve my productivity by 10-20% when I’m working on something familiar, 30-50% when I’m venturing into a popular domain that I’m unfamiliar with.

I just don’t understand where the hell is this magical LLM capable of generating flawless files or even entire projects that many people are talking about. I rarely accept a large block of LLM-generated code without close inspection, and I’ve ended up with a subtle bug that I wouldn’t have written myself at least ~5 times now. Unless you don’t give a shit about code quality, error handling, proper logging, and subtle bugs, you shouldn’t run LLM-generated stuff without painstakingly reading and fixing everything. Or maybe there really is a magical LLM somewhere.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#588

Post by fragmede »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #582
theaussiestew wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's probably the best we can do for now with LLMs. Surely it would be unreasonable for LLMs to provide a correct answer when the majority of people on various forums also provide the wrong answer. Some day LLMs will be able to objectively provide truthful statements but we're not there yet. Regardless, that LLMs are competing with longstanding programmers is already an impressive feat, even if they're not 100% cor…

> Regardless, that LLMs are competing with longstanding programmers is already an impressive feat, even if they're not 100% correct. But they're not. They're a little tool some programmers use to save a small amount of time. They're not replacing programmers. And there's no evidence they will ever be as good as actual programmers.

Thankfully! In the 90' and outsourcing became a thing, programming as a career was over. and then when ChatGPT came out, programming as a career was over again. turns out, programming's not dead quite yet, though time will tell if it ever does.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#589

Post by jokethrowaway »

fragmede wrote: post #566
rcarmo wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Even if it were trained on everything it wouldn't know everything.

You need to do some serious RHLF to get something good out of LLMs

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#590

Post by tasuki »

Jensson wrote: post #190
tasuki wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"AGI" is a nonsense term anyway. Humans don't have "general" intelligence either: our intelligence is specialized to our environment.

Humans is the most general intelligence we know about, so that is why we called it general intelligence, because we have made so many intelligences that are specialized on a specific domain like calculators or chess engines we need a word for something that is as general as humans, because being able to replace humans is a very important goal.

Yes, humans are the most general intelligence we know about. That doesn't say much about how general it is, just highlights our limitations.
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