Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why is AI so slow to spread?

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 189 posts

Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#61

Post by rwmj »

somenameforme wrote: post #20
o11c wrote: post #4

That's a whole lot of twisting to avoid admitting "it usually doesn't work, and even when it does work, it's usually not cost-effective even at the heavily-subsidized prices." Or maybe it's more about refusing to admit that executives are out of touch with concrete reality and are just blindly chasing trends instead.

Another issue, one that you alluded to, is imagine AI actually was reliable. And a company does lay off e.g. 30% of their employees to replace them with AI systems. How long before they get a letter from AI Inc 'Hi, we're increasing prices 500x in order to enhance our offerings and and improve customer satisfaction. Enjoy.' The entire MO of big tech is trying to create a monopoly by the software equivalent of dumping…

You can run a reasonable LLM on a gaming machine (cost under $5000), and that's only going to get better and better with time. The irony here is that VCs are pouring money into businesses with almost no moat at all.

Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#63

Post by fauigerzigerk »

sbt wrote: post #54

I have been using it for coding for some time, but I don't think I'm getting much value out of it. It's useful for some boilerplate generation, but for more complex stuff I find that it's more tedious to explain to the AI what I'm trying to do. The issue, I think, is lack of big picture context in a large codebase. It's not useless, but I wouldn't trade it for say access to StackOverflow. My non-technical friends are…

I used to donate to Wikipedia, but it has been completely overrun by activists pushing their preferred narrative. I don't trust it any more.

I guess it had to happen at some point. If a site is used as ground truth by everyone while being open to contributions, it has to become a magnet and a battleground for groups trying to influence other people.

LLMs don't fix that of course. But at least they are not as much a single point of failure as a specific site can be.

Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#64

Post by mns »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #16
5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #5

reminds me of crypto a bit. most people i know are apathetic or dismissive. when i see normies use it - its to make selfies with celebrities. in 5-10 years AI will everywhere. a massive inequality creator. those who know how to use it and those who can afford the best tools. the biggest danger is dependency on AI. i really see people becoming dumber and dumber as they outsource more basic cognitive functions and deci…

> in 5-10 years AI will everywhere. a massive inequality creator. That is possible, even likely. But AI can also decrease inequality. I'm thinking of how rich people and companies spend millions if not hundreds of millions on legal fees which keep them out of prison. But me, I can't afford a lawyer. Heck I can't even afford a doctor. I can't afford Stanford, Yale nor Harvard. But now I can ask legal advice from AI, w…

> But now I can ask legal advice from AI, which levels that playing field. Everybody who has a computer or smartphone and internet-access can consult an AI lawyer or doctor. AI can be my Harvard. I can start a business and basically rely on AI for handling all the paperwork and basic business decisions, and also most recurring business tasks. At least that's the direction we are going I believe.

We had a discussion in a group chat with some friends about some random sports stuff and one of my friends used ChatGPT to ask for some fact about a random thing. It was completely wrong, but sounded so real. All you had to do was to go on wikipedia or on a website of the sports entity we were discussing to see the real fact. Now considering that it just hallucinated some random facts that are on Wikipedia and on the website of an entity, what are the chances that the legal advice you will get will be real and not some random hallucination?

Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#65

Post by rwmj »

snek_case wrote: post #3

The reality might just be that most technology is slow to spread? But it also depends on what you mean by slow. The name ChatGPT became part of popular culture extremely quickly.

ChatGPT seems to be widely used as a search engine. No wonder Google panicked. ChatGPT isn't very accurate, but Google had been going downhill for years as well, so nothing lost there I guess.

Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#66

Post by csa »

crinkly wrote: post #33

Among non-technical friends, after the initial wow factor, even limited expectations were not met. Then it was tainted by the fact that everyone is promoting it as a human replacement technology which is then a tangible threat to their existence. That leads to not just lack of adoption but active sabotage. And then there’s the large body of people who just haven’t noticed it at all because they don’t give a shit. Stu…

> Among non-technical friends, after the initial wow factor, even limited expectations were not met.

Indeed. I think that current AI tech needs quite a bit of scaffolding in order for the full benefits to be felt by non-tech people.

> Then it was tainted by the fact that everyone is promoting it as a human replacement technology

Yeah. This is a bad move. AI is a human force multiplier (exponentializer?).

> which is then a tangible threat to their existence

This will almost certainly be a very real threat to AI adoption in various orgs over the next few years.

All it takes is a neo-Luddite in a gatekeeper position, and high-value AI use cases will get booted to the curb.

Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#67

Post by sbt »

jmtulloss wrote: post #32
markbao wrote: post #19

There was an article on HN a few days back on how it’s very hard to convey all the context in your head about a codebase to solve a problem, and that’s partly why it’s actually hard to use AI for non-trivial implementations. That’s not just limited to code. I don’t use AI for most of my product work because it doesn’t know any of the nuances of our product, and just like doing code review for AI is boring and tedious…

It’s likely that the models don’t need to get much smarter, but rather the ux for providing needed context needs to improve drastically. This is a problem that we’ve worked on for decades with humans, but only single digit years for AI. It will get better and that tediousness will lessen (but isn’t “alignment” always tedious?)

> ...context needs to improve drastically.

Yes, drastically. This means I'll have to wear Zuck's glasses I think, because the AI currently doesn't know what was discussed at the coffee machine or what management is planning to do with new features. It's like a speed typing goblin living in an isolated basement, always out of the loop.

Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#69

Post by the_duke »

Just on the coding side, tools like Claude Code/Codex can be incredibly powerful, but a lot of things need to be in place for it to work well:

* A "best practices" repository: clean code architecture and separation of concerns, well tested, very well-documented

* You need to know the code base very well to efficiently judge if what the AI wrote is sensible

* You need to take the time to write a thorough task description, like you would for a junior dev, with hints for what code files to look at , the goals, implementation hints, different parts of the code to analyse first, etc

* You need to clean up code and correct bad results manually to keep the code maintaineable

This amounts to a very different workflow that is a lot less fun and engaging for most developers. (write tasks, review, correct mistakes)

In domains like CRUD apps / frontend, where the complexity of changes is usually low, and there are great patterns to learn from for the LLM, they can provide a massive productivity boost if used right.

But this results in a style of work that is a lot less engaging for most developers.

Re: Why is AI so slow to spread?

#70

Post by crinkly »

csa wrote: post #66
crinkly wrote: post #33

Among non-technical friends, after the initial wow factor, even limited expectations were not met. Then it was tainted by the fact that everyone is promoting it as a human replacement technology which is then a tangible threat to their existence. That leads to not just lack of adoption but active sabotage. And then there’s the large body of people who just haven’t noticed it at all because they don’t give a shit. Stu…

> Among non-technical friends, after the initial wow factor, even limited expectations were not met. Indeed. I think that current AI tech needs quite a bit of scaffolding in order for the full benefits to be felt by non-tech people. > Then it was tainted by the fact that everyone is promoting it as a human replacement technology Yeah. This is a bad move. AI is a human force multiplier (exponentializer?). > which is t…

Anything that is realistically a force multiplier is a person divider. At that point I would expect people to resist it.

That is assuming that it is really a force multiplier which is not totally evident at this point.

Post reply on HN