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Artificial intelligence is losing hype

economist.com

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Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#591

Post by jen729w »

assimpleaspossi wrote: post #553
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…

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…

Every question?

If it’s returning results that were obvious, why were you asking the question?

And I don’t believe that the other ~50% were wrong.

> 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.

This sounds like a valuable service.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#592

Post by meiraleal »

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…

Bad programmers have bad experience using LLMs to code. They then blame the LLM, not themselves.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#593

Post by ghm2180 »

assimpleaspossi wrote: post #553
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…

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…

> The only thing these engines do, for me perhaps, is save some search time.

This. Saving time(or money if you see them as the same) is the whole point actually.

Intelligence is supposed to be in the context of a shared Goal or beliefs. In your case and case of most humans time and money is the context.

Are ant(insect) networks intelligent? Possibly, They do help millions of them communicate quickly. But ants don't have a brain.

Are beings that make decisions without conscious choices intelligent? Possibly, if they could escape death by amazing ability at any instant. But these beings don't have a frontal cortex that can make decisions by rational inquiry.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#594

Post by southernplaces7 »

stevenhuang wrote: post #491
southernplaces7 wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I can put your brain in a vat and stimulate your sensory neurons with a statistical distribution with no actual meaning, and nothing about how your brain works would change either. The LLM and your brain would attempt to interpret meaning with referent from training, and both would be confused at the information-free stimuli. Because during "training" in both cases, the stimuli received from the environment is struc…

> Your LLM on the other hand, has no context in which it shows such a level of cognitive capacity Yes, it will be confused as well, and for all outwards observable signs will fail to make sense of the stimuli, yet it will "aware" of its inability to understand, much like a human brain would. If you doubt that, open a new session and type some random tokens, you will get the answer that it's confused. Any other statem…

You persist in talking nonsense.

>Yes, it will be confused as well, and for all outwards observable signs will fail to make sense of the stimuli, yet it will "aware" of its inability to understand, much like a human brain would.

>If you doubt that, open a new session and type some random tokens, you will get the answer that it's confused.

There is no empirical evidence of any awareness whatsoever in any LLM, at all. Even their most immersed creators don't make such a claim. An LLM itself saying anything about awareness doesn't mean a thing. It's literally designed to mimic in such a way. And you speak of discussions of consciousness being about the philosophical and unanswerable?

At least when talking about human awareness, one applies these ideas to minds that we personally as humans perceive to be aware and self-directed from our own experience (flawed as it is). You're applying the same notion to something that shows no evidence of awareness while then criticizing assumptions of consciousness in a human brain?

Such a sloppy argument indeed does make appeals to authority necessary I suppose.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#595

Post by IAmGraydon »

ChaitanyaSai wrote: post #52

I've trained as a neuroscientist and written a book about consciousness. I've worked in machine learning and built products for over 20 years and now use AI a fair bit in the ed-tech work we do. So I've seen how the field has progressed and also have been able to look at it from a perspective most AI/engineering people don't -- what does this artificial intelligence look like when compared to biological intelligence.…

>I've trained as a neuroscientist

Can you explain what this means? Do you have a degree in neuroscience?

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#596

Post by fragmede »

codexon wrote: post #322
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…

I'm not going to pass any judgement on what is reasonable or unreasonable for LLMs, just pointing out that it makes serious mistakes. Many people here argue that LLMs are able to reason, you can check my post history 3 months ago to see an example of this. And if you have to double check everything, how much time are you really saving? And is this thing really on track to replace programmers any time soon? Absolutely…

I mean, call it dot producting if you don't want to use the word reason, but it takes a bit of multiplying matricies and converting tokens to words to be able to say that if b follows a, it doesn't mean that a follows b, but that not b follows not a (the contrapositive). sure, that's in an unknown amount of textbooks in the training corpus, but at what point does putting down a bunch of axioms and applying them ok each other lead to what you'd actually call reasoning? at some point when a human does it, the human's gone past its training corpus and entered the hallowed realm of reasoning, unless we're able to deliniate clearly where that line is and isn't, and then all agree on it, we're going to keep going in circles about if it can be called reasoning or not.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#597

Post by meiraleal »

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,…

It codes great for me, helps me deliver faster, better tested and more features. It literally saves time and money every day. If you can't do that, maybe, just maybe, you have a you problem. But there are many like you in this thread so you are not alone.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#598

Post by ghm2180 »

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…

Do you find that you accept GitHub copilits line completions like 90% of the time?

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#599

Post by cdelsolar »

DiscourseFan wrote: post #583
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 c…

I don’t think you’ve used LLMs enough. They are revolutionary, every day. As a coder I’m several times more productive than I was before, especially when trying to learn some new library or language.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#600

Post by Havoc »

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.

Phrase the question as a backend problem rather than as a front end problem. Same for lang your asking in. Less JS/TS more Python
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