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Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

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Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can learn the skills to advance research and fill the roles that help determine what sorts of guard rails there should/could be to ensure it’s used in as helpful a manner as possible.

Any why would I want to work as a prompt engineer? or with AI tech at all? when I trained as a software developer using my brain to solve problems with data structures and algorithms, not prompts. I outright refuse to do such a thing.

Okay!

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#62

There was study that big percentage of university graduates, strugles to comprehend written text. In AI terms: take 20k token paper, feed it to well rested graduate, and they will strugle with basic memory recall, reasoning and comprehension! My laptop performs better than that!

I haven't read the study, but I wonder if one reason comprehension went down was because of over-reliance on AI among students.

Ai is around for a few years. This type of studies goes back decades.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#63
It’s sad that we ended up here. I can’t fathom that young people aren’t excited about technology anymore.

I was young once and naive, and I read a bunch of sci-fi. I could never have imagined having these LLMs or coding agents during my lifetime. Never. It was unthinkable to me that something like this could even happen.

And yet, here we are.

Even if you think it’s just a statistical trick, you should still be blown away.

You should also be optimistic, because that’s what we need young people for. We used to be able to convince young people to get on boats and migrate halfway around the world to die on some godforsaken land. Or get on boats and go fight some ideological war somewhere else (not saying that was a good thing). But now we can’t even get them excited about technology?

What have we done?

People used to have nothing. My grandfather got his first pair of shoes when he was 10 years old. Yet he was more joyful and positive than most people alive today.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#64

The original title says he “got cheers” which is much less ambiguous than the HN title

I wonder if other languages are less ambiguous about this. "Steve Wozniak cheered" makes it sound like he did the cheering. But the practice of removing verbs from headlines makes this more ambiguous. "Car collides with bridge" is not a grammatically correct sentence but a perfectly normal headline. But in this case, "Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI" _is_ a grammatically correct sentence, wh…

>I wonder if other languages are less ambiguous about this.

most are (few others I can speak). Generally, passive voice and past tense do not collide by having the exact same suffix. The fact the headline lacks a verb (when interpret correctly) doesn't help either.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#65
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how Steve Jobs would've reacted to this GenAI boom. He constantly talked about the intersection of Humanities and tech, as well as fostering creativity by pushing people to their limits (for the better or worse), so I don't think he'd be one of those CEOs that's first in line to get rid of human workers as much as possible. Or maybe he would be and I'm just giving him too much credit. On an unrelated note, I…

> I wonder how Steve Jobs would've reacted to this GenAI boom. Steve Jobs really cared about his users, and putting out great products for those users. I imagine he would have loved all the machine learning stuff that Apple has being doing the past few years (stuff like voice noise separation, instant text OCR and photo object isolation). Based on the story about the first iPod being too big, dropping a prototype in…

The problem is natural language is a horrendously bad human-computer interface. Even if they're running nondeterministic software, computers are very precise machines. You wouldn't talk to your lathe or milling machine and expect good things to happen. So why would you have that expectation of a computer? It's ridiculous sci-fi fantasy nonsense.

It's hilarious, when you boil away all the froth and hype, that we've collectively decided that "talk to computer" is somehow worth an entire generation of venture capital and maybe even the whole stock market. It's a dumb idea to begin with. A mouse and keyboard are better.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#66

The original title says he “got cheers” which is much less ambiguous than the HN title

I wonder if other languages are less ambiguous about this. "Steve Wozniak cheered" makes it sound like he did the cheering. But the practice of removing verbs from headlines makes this more ambiguous. "Car collides with bridge" is not a grammatically correct sentence but a perfectly normal headline. But in this case, "Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI" _is_ a grammatically correct sentence, wh…

English isn't ambiguous here either. It's the fault of journalists who have this weird obsession with removing as many words as possible from headlines.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#67
post #52
post #34

Actual intelligence is useless when decision makers send new weekly AI rules to be better employees. It’s race to the bottom. Race to an endless technical debt. Some companies will implode when codebases stop being manageable. The small minority will thrive. But majority not. I see it used in hardware world. Clever dudes without prior experience with software craft working Python scripts, automate tests, control hard…

Companies that use AI well will replace the companies that use AI badly. There is no world in which AI is not used extensively in all employment going forward.

I agree, with the caveat that I don’t think any company is using AI well at the moment, specifically because I think our tooling around AI is woefully inadequate and immature.

Right now the AI marketing paradigm is to create rockstar superusers who can (supposedly) do the job of hundreds of individuals at the speed of light! Which bleeds into the design paradigm, which is trash. I’m bullish on AI that can be used more cooperatively and collectively by a company.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#68
post #52
post #34

Actual intelligence is useless when decision makers send new weekly AI rules to be better employees. It’s race to the bottom. Race to an endless technical debt. Some companies will implode when codebases stop being manageable. The small minority will thrive. But majority not. I see it used in hardware world. Clever dudes without prior experience with software craft working Python scripts, automate tests, control hard…

Companies that use AI well will replace the companies that use AI badly. There is no world in which AI is not used extensively in all employment going forward.

Right now LLMs are heavily subsidized. When that ends, the actual cost of the service may exceed its usefulness for many use cases.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#69
post #33

Unsurprising he'd be cheered for saying what they wanted to hear. But perhaps whether or not his stance is correct, the students needed to hear this. They (we) have to believe human brains still have value and find a way out; for otherwise there'd be no point to try anymore.

Woz is a different kind of geek, appreciates the craft, and can sort out the cruft out of it. AI will be there, but it'll transform. When I say I don't use AI (i.e. LLMs, chat interfaces, agents and "autocomplete") for coding, research and whatnot, people label me as a luddite. The fact is I know how to use them. I test them from time to time. Occasionally these tools help. More often they hinder. "Resistance is futi…

Auto-complete on steroids, is still my favorite analogy for AI. I don't mean that in a negative way either. Autocomplete is very good, but that never stopped me from learning English grammar and spelling.
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