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Artificial intelligence is losing hype

economist.com

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Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#601

Post by pdimitar »

adastra22 wrote: post #584
pdimitar wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fact…

> We even already have AGI.

And this is why, I feel, I can never discuss with the AI fans. They are happy to invent their own fiction while berating popular fiction in the same breath.

No, we really don't have AGI. Feel free to point out some of humanity's pressing problems being trivially solved today with it, please. I'll start: elderly people care, and fully automated logistics.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#602

Post by anonyfox »

The sweet spot of the current LLMs (not whatever the next gen might or might not improve on) for me is similar to suddenly having an army of idiots at my fingertips.

There are a lot of smallish tasks/problems people/systems needs to deal with, some of them even waste notable real engineering capacity, and a highschooler could do manually quite easily by hand.

Example: find out if a text contains an email address, including all kinds of shenanigans people do to mask it (may not be allowd, ... whatever). From a purely coding standpoint, this is a cats-and-mouse game of improving regex solutions in many cases to also find the more sophisticated patterns, but there will always be uncatched/new ways or simply errors that produce false positives. But a highschooler can be given a text and instantly spot the email address (or confirm none is in there).

In order to "solve" these types of small problems, LLMs are pretty much fantastic. It needs to only be reliable enough to produce a structured answer within a few attempts and cheap enough to not be a concern for finance/operations. Thats why for me it makes absolutely sense that the #1 priority for OpenAI since GPT4 has been building smaller/faster/cheaper models. Automators need exactly that, not genius-level AGI.

Also for me I think we're not even scratching the surface still about many tasks can be automated away within the current constraints/flaws of LLMs (hallucination, accuracy, ...). Everyone tries to hype up some super generic powerful future (that usually falls flat after a while), whereas the true value of LLMs is in the many small things where hardcoding solutions is expensive but an intern could do it right away.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#603

Post by koyote »

mns wrote: post #512
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…

Sometime I think there's something wrong with me. I've used copilot, I'm paying for ChatGPT and we're also having the Jetbrains AI, and there's just something so off about all of this. Some basic things are fine, but once you get into specialised things, everything gets just terribly wrong and weird. I can't even put it into words, I see people saying how they are 10x more productive (I'd like to see actual numbers a…

I think there's a vast ocean of different software engineers and the type of code they write on a daily basis, which is why you get such differing views on AI's effectiveness. For me, AI has only ever been useful for very basic tasks and scripts: If I need a quick helper script for something in Python, a language that isn't my daily drier, AI usually gets me there in a couple of prompts. Or maybe I am writing some powershell/bash and forgot the syntax for something and AI is quicker (or has more context) than a web search.

However, my main job is trying to come up with "elegant" architectures for complex business logic that interacts with an existing large code base. AI is just completely out of its depth in such cases due to lack of context but also lack of source material to draw from. Even unit tests only work with the most basic of cases, most of the time the setup is so complex it just produces garbage.

I've also had very little luck getting it to write performant code. I almost have to feed it the techniques or algorithms before it attempts to write such code, and even then it's usually wrong or not as efficient as it could be.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#604

Post by pdimitar »

tasuki wrote: post #586
pdimitar wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

Nobody knows what intelligence actually is. But asking this philosophical question and your discussion opponent not having a clear answer is a very obvious discussion trap and a discussion shut-down and it does NOT immediately follow that your claim -- "we have AI / AGI" -- becomes automatically true. It does not.

And I am pretty sure my own intelligence goes much farther than regurgitating text that I have no clue about (like ChatGPT does not have symbol logic that links words with objects it can "feel" physically or otherwise).

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#605

Post by pdimitar »

keiferski wrote: post #425
asadotzler wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a stick for carving in the dirt enables you to create something that didn't exist before. there's nothing special about that stick.

If the stick enables you carve more complex things in a cheaper way than the previous tool, then yes, the stick is special. Unless you’re suggesting that a pencil and the human finger are exactly the same? This is quite literally the entire history of technology: what was once expensive becomes cheap and then unlocks new developments. Bizarre that I have to point this out when you’re likely reading this comment on a…

> If the stick enables you carve more complex things in a cheaper way than the previous tool, then yes, the stick is special

Yeah it does that, in 2-3 areas, those we need the least -- who cares it can replace artists? We need elder people care! We need automated logistics! And a tons of other things.

"It's just the beginning" yeah yeah, but it's not. It's actually the next AI plateau that the area will need a long time to move on from. Please do quote me on this, I am willing to apologize if I am wrong after 5-10 years.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#606

Post by Havoc »

layer8 wrote: post #249
_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…

Does your work not depend on existing code bases, product architectures and nontrivial domain contexts the LLM knows nothing about? Every thread like this over the past year or so has had comments similar to yours, and it always remains quite vague, or when examples are given, it’s about self-contained tasks that require little contextual knowledge and are confined to widely publicly-documented technologies. What exa…

> What exactly floored your colleague at Microsoft?

Speaking of understand context… They floored him not other way round

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#607

Post by dax_ »

cdelsolar wrote: post #599
DiscourseFan wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you perhaps have some resources on how you use AI assistants for coding (I'm assuming Github Copilot). I've been trying it for the past months, and frankly, it's barely helping me at all. 95% of the time the suggestions are just noise. Maybe as a fast typer it's less useful, I just wonder why my experience is so different than what others are saying. So maybe it's because I'm not using it right?

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#608

Post by ace32229 »

KoolKat23 wrote: post #544
theappsecguy wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dear lord, if someone started relying on LLMs for legal documents, their clients would be royally screwed…

They're currently already relying on overworked, underpaid interns who draft those documents. The lawyer is checking it anyway. Now the lawyer and his intern have time to check it.

I have no idea what type of law you're talking about here, but (given the context of the thread) I can guarantee you major firms working on M&As are most definitely not using underpaid interns to draft those documents. They are overpaid qualified solicitors.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#609

Post by rcarmo »

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…

You don't learn how to program SPI from reading documentation about an LCD controller. You need a lot more context and understand how to string together basic operations, which are quite often not detailed in parts documentation.

I think that you have a serious misunderstanding of the capabilities of LLMs - they cannot reason out relationships among documents that easily. They cannot even tell you what they don't know to finish a given task (and I'm not just talking one-shot here, agent frameworks suffer from the same problem).

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#610

Post by ace32229 »

tasuki wrote: post #590
Jensson wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is a bit like saying Earth isn't big, because there are far larger planets etc. out there. For the average conversation, Earth is "big".
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