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Why does AI feel so different?

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Re: Why does AI feel so different?

#61

Post by bamboozled »

scotty79 wrote: post #54
bamboozled wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more you use it and the deeper you go the more you realise its limitations as a useful software engineering tool and more as an autocomplete. Is it useful ? Yes? Am I happy it exists yes ? Is it revolutionary. I doubt it.

Year ago with enough prompting it could write a function for me that did something conceptually simple but tedious. I tried Windsurf over the last 3 days. It can write complex game mechanics logic in multiple files and refactor code when told to. I can talk to it using language of the domain I just made up and I can talk to it using language that developers use when they talk about the code. It can solve bugs that wo…

Are you familiar with the garnet hype cycle? https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hy...

I'm doing everything you're doing and probably more with Claude code (I 'let it run'). I'd say I too have been through a few of the different phases of the gartner hype cycle now.

As I said it's a good tool, it's far from being an "auto-pilot".

Re: Why does AI feel so different?

#62

Post by mna_ »

eru wrote: post #26
donperignon wrote: post #5

It’s the first revolutionary technology that his first goal is to make money for VC investors instead of really change the world, the perceived benefit for society is just a sub-product of the ponzi scheme behind those VC firms.

The dot-com boom of the late 1990s also had plenty of VC money. Back then and today, you find plenty of true believers, and plenty of people who are in it for the money. Similar, when people financed eg canals and railways or factories in the past, many participants cared about the money. (Or are you saying it's not about the money, but specifically VCs?)

>Similar, when people financed eg canals and railways or factories in the past, many participants cared about the money.

Those things were tangible and their advantages/disadvantages more immediate than something intangible like ``AI''.

Re: Why does AI feel so different?

#63

Post by qweiopqweiop »

eru wrote: post #43
qweiopqweiop wrote: post #3

Replacing our thinking with a few monopolistic tech companies... What could go wrong!

Where's the monopoly (or rather oligopoly) you are talking about? There's many models offered by many companies and labs that are close enough to state of the art. Many of them are completely open source or at least have open weights. You might complain about outsourcing your thinking to a machine, sure. But there's no monopoly nor oligopoly.

Google, currently thought of as the AI leader has shown time and time again they will resort to monopolistic practices.

I really hope open source models are the way, but the fact is the vast majority of day to day usage of LLMs is on models owned by multi-bullion dollar companies.

And even if they're not monopolies, people being influenced by companies to this extent should worry people.

Re: Why does AI feel so different?

#64

Post by mna_ »

eru wrote: post #33
crystal_revenge wrote: post #16

AI feels different because quietly we are all aware, to differing degrees of comfort, that the world around us is collapsing. We see the escalating effects of climate change impacting day-to-day life in ways we were told would only happen in the far future, witnessing genocide become a normal part of the news critique of which can mean serious personal consequences, we're watching the United States transform into Sta…

> AI feels different because quietly we are all aware, to differing degrees of comfort, that the world around us is collapsing. We are living in an unprecedented golden age of peace and prosperity. What collapse are you talking about? Yes, climate change is gonna knock a few percent points off global GDP, but it's not gonna be the end of the world. It's no worse than living in the UK rather than the US in these terms…

>We are living in an unprecedented golden age of peace and prosperity. What collapse are you talking about?

War in Ukraine, Israel-Palestine conflict, the recent India-Pakistan conflict, China rapidly ramping up its military and openly carrying out drills that are clearly designed to be practise runs for a Taiwan takeover, China asserting its presence near the Phillipines militarily, European countries ramping up defense spending, and so on, are clear indicators that the world is not going through a golden age of peace.

Re: Why does AI feel so different?

#65

Post by 334f905d22bc19 »

>It’s a paradigm shift in accessing knowledge

This statement and similar ones along the line have a very bitter taste to me. Someone has to create the knowledge. Someone has to create the actual training data for others to be received in dumbed down and stripped out version through AI. You will always be late to the game when you try to gain knowledge that way. I really really don't understand why people overhype the learning part of AI so much. Yes, it's a neat tool, but in my opinion rather bad for __actual in depth__ learning

Re: Why does AI feel so different?

#66

Post by Kon5ole »

satisfice wrote: post #4

This strikes me as babbling. 70 percent fever dream. To take one example, the author speaks of using AI to chat with his favorite thinkers. Well I have favorite thinkers, so why don’t I chat with AI versions of them? Because I know it’s all fake. Whatever substance there is to chatting with a corpse or corpus is unknowable. So it amounts to playing with dolls. I think for a living. I would LIKE AI to help. But it doe…

>To take one example, the author speaks of using AI to chat with his favorite thinkers.Well I have favorite thinkers, so why don’t I chat with AI versions of them? Because I know it’s all fake.

That's an uncharitable take of what he actually said, he was clearly talking about being able to get information presented as if it was explained by a particular person. The training data contains everything that person ever wrote, so it might be pretty close. Fake sure, but also often correct and presented in a familiar way.

I've often thought that many concepts I struggled with in school came down to the teacher explaining them in ways that was "incompatible" (for lack of a better word) with my way of thinking for that particular concept. Not that I was special, I think every student experiences this from time to time.

Being able to continue asking questions about dinosaurs or atoms or the roman empire long after any human teacher would get tired will help many a curious kid learn faster than they could before.

>I’m left wondering if the only people who value GenAI are those who haven’t experienced the satisfaction of thinking for themselves

I find this take strange - you still have to think but LLM's help you. Googling things or tracking down a breaking change in version 9.2 from 8.7 or why a regexp is not working correctly is not thinking. It's just busywork.

Spreadsheets removed the satisfaction of "carrying the one" with pen and paper and a whole bunch of valued skills lost value - but it turned out fine. Same with going from assembly to C or C to Java. We ended up with more programmers and more software, not less.

I think once the dust settles LLM's will be a similar change, if perhaps much larger in scope.

Re: Why does AI feel so different?

#67

Post by akoboldfrying »

JohnKemeny wrote: post #10
donperignon wrote: post #5

It’s the first revolutionary technology that his first goal is to make money for VC investors instead of really change the world, the perceived benefit for society is just a sub-product of the ponzi scheme behind those VC firms.

Exactly. The tech itself isn't driving the mission --- the funding model is. "AI" right now feels less like the internet in ’95 and more like crypto in 2021: massive hype, vague promises, and any social benefit is incidental to keeping the capital flywheel spinning.

I simply don't agree. I've personally benefited from asking Gemini questions almost every day; I never benefited from crypto, even though I find the mechanisms intriguing and the design beautiful.

It's true that social benefit is incidental to the development of nearly all the big AIs, but that applies to every venture in capitalism.

Re: Why does AI feel so different?

#68

Post by akoboldfrying »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #30
donperignon wrote: post #5

It’s the first revolutionary technology that his first goal is to make money for VC investors instead of really change the world, the perceived benefit for society is just a sub-product of the ponzi scheme behind those VC firms.

> It’s the first revolutionary technology that his first goal is to make money for VC investors instead of really change the world Is that true? Steam technology and factory machinery were created and used to make the pit, mill, and factory owners more money than with human workers. The railway mania in the 1840s was a period where vast sums of money were invested in railway lines and engine technology. https://en.wi…

Exactly. This idea that AI is unique in making its backers money is ridiculous. Everything in capitalism has always worked this way.

Re: Why does AI feel so different?

#69

Post by akoboldfrying »

mykowebhn wrote: post #53
donperignon wrote: post #5

It’s the first revolutionary technology that his first goal is to make money for VC investors instead of really change the world, the perceived benefit for society is just a sub-product of the ponzi scheme behind those VC firms.

100 percent. The same thing happened with the "Internet". It was amazing when it first started getting popular with the first web browsers in the 90s. There was so much potential with it. Now look what's happened to the Internet.

It still can be amazing, more amazing than it was in the 90s. You could make a website this afternoon and host it on your phone. But ~nobody can be bothered, because easier centralised platforms exist.

The problem, if you want to call it that, is purely social/cultural.

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