Artificial intelligence is losing hype • Hacker News Board

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#611

Post by kombookcha » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 10:38 AM UTC

philipwhiuk wrote: post #585

DebtDeflation wrote: post #569

Things that are coming to an end: - Startups whose entire business model is to just provide a wrapper around OpenAI's API. - Social Media "AI Influencers" and their mindless "7 Ways To Become A Millionaire With ChatGPT" videos. - Non-technical pundits claiming we are 1-2 years from AGI (and AGI talk in general). - The stock market assigning insane valuations to any company that claims to somehow be "doing AI". Things…

> - Forward looking companies in all industries using AI both to add capabilities to their products and to drive efficiencies in internal processes. This collapses as soon as this collapses > - The stock market assigning insane valuations to any company that claims to somehow be "doing AI".

I can't wait. There are so many pointless or directly insulting AI 'features' around now, and they suck. LinkedIn trying to write my messages for me. Outlook is trying to write my emails. Instagram has a deeply cursed AI button to "make it funnier".

I hope the stock market will give all of these people an atomic wedgie for creating the most pointless garbage to ever pass before human eyes.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#612

Post by sebstefan » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 10:41 AM UTC

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.

It's nice that everybody is trying to help with the way you're prompting but just use Bing Copilot or Phind for this, not ChatGPT

It'll generate a bunch of queries to Google (well, "to Bing" I guess in that case) based on your question, read the results for you, base its answer on the results and provide you with sources that you can check if it used anything from that webpage.

I only use ChatGPT for documentation when I have no idea where I'm going at all, and I need a lay of the land on best practices and the way forward.

For specifics, Bing Copilot. Essentially a true semantic web search

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#613

Post by adastra22 » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 10:43 AM UTC

pdimitar wrote: post #601

adastra22 wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m not an “AI fan.” But anyway.

Artificial. General. Intelligence.

The term, as originally defined, is for programs which are man-made (Artificial), able to efficiently solve problems (Intelligence), including novel problem domains outside those considered in its creation (General). Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI. That’s literally all AGI means, and ChatGPT absolutely fits the bill.

What you describe is ASI, or artificial super intelligence. In the late 90’s, 00’s, and early 10’s, a weird subgroup of AI nerds got it into their head that merely making an AGI (even a primitive one) would cause a self-recursion improvement loop and create ASI in short order. They then started saying “achieve AGI” as a stand in for “emergence of ASI” as the two were intricately linked in their mind.

In reality the whole notion of AGI->ASI auto-FOOM has been experimentally discredited, but the confusion over terminology remains.

Furthermore, the very idea of ASI can’t be taken for granted. A machine that trivially solves humanity’s pressing problems makes nice sci-fi, but there is absolutely no evidence to presume such a machine could actually exist.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#614

Post by sgt101 » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 10:45 AM UTC

delusional wrote: post #551

13of40 wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a movie that came out in 2001 called "Artificial Intelligence", at a time when we were still figuring out how things like search engines and the online economy were going to work. It had a scene where the main characters went to a city and visited a pay-per-question AI oracle. It was very artistically done, but it really revealed (in hindsight) how naive we were about how "online" was going to turn out. Whe…

> When I look at the kinds of AI projects I have visibility into, there's a parallel where the public are expecting a centralized, all knowing, general purpose AI I don't think this is entirely fair to "the public". Media was stuffed with AI company CEOs claiming that AGI was just around the corner. Nvidia, OpenAI and Musk, Zuckerberg, and others were positively starry eyed at how, soon, we'd all be just a GPU matmul…

maybe there's a term confusion here - GenAI has come to mean Generative AI (LLM's, Diffusion models..) rather than General-AI. People call that AIG, now people also talk about AIS which I take to mean "human level on a narrow domain only" while AIG is "generally intelligent at roughly human level".

My personal belief is that AIS is not a real thing (in the sense I wrote above) because narrow domain competence is tightly coupled to general domain competence . Even very autistic people that are functional in some domain actually have a staggering range of competences that we tend to ignore because we expect them in humans. I think machines will be similar.

Anyway, AIG or AIS is not round the corner at all. But that doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of value to be had from generative AI in the near future or now. Will this be a small fraction of the value from Web1.0 and Web2.0? Will it be approximately the same? Will it be a multiple? I think that's the question. I think it's clear that assistants for software engineers are somewhat valuable now (evidence: I get value out of them) how valuable? Well, more than stackexchange, less than a good editor. That's still alot, for me. I won't pay for it though...

And this points to the killer issue: there isn't a good way to monetize this. There isn't a good way to monetize the web, so we got adverts (a bad way). What will be the equivalent for LLM's? We just don't know right now. Interestingly there seems to be very little focus on this! Instead folks are studying the second order value. Using this "free thing" we can drive productivity... or quality... increase opportunities... create a new business?

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#615

Post by District5524 » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 10:48 AM UTC

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 suggest we do not repeat the myth and urban legend that LLMs are good for legal document review. I had a couple of real use cases used for real clients who were hyped about LLMs to be used for document review and trying to save salary, for Engish language documents. We've found Kira, Luminance and similar due diligence project management stuff as useful being a timesaver if done right. But not LLMs. Due to longer context windows, it is possible to ask LLMs the usual hazy questions that people ask in a due diligence review (many of which can be answered dozens of different ways by human lawyers). Is there a most favoured nation provision in the contract, is there a financial cap limiting the liability of the seller or the buyer, governing law etc. Considering risks of uploading such documents into ChatGPT, you are stuck with Copilot M365 etc. or some outrageously expensive "legal specific" LLMs that I cannot test. Just to be curious with Copilot I've asked five rather simple questions for three different agreements (where we had the golden answer), and the results were quite unequal, but mostly useless - in one contract, it incorrectly reported for all questions that these cannot be answered based on the contract (while the answers were clearly included in the document), in an another, two questions were answered correctly, two questions not answered precisely (just governing law being US instead of the correct answer being Michigan, even after reprompting to give the state level answer, not "USA") and hallucinated one answer incorrectly. In the third one, three answeres were hallucinated incorrectly, answered one correctly and one provision was not found. Of course, it's better to have a LEGAL specific benchmark for this, but 75% hallucination in complex questions is not something that helps your workflow (https://hai.stanford.edu/news/hallucinating-law-legal-mistak...) I don't recommend at least LLMs to anyone for legal document reviews, even for the English language.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#616

Post by inthebin » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 10:49 AM UTC

dax_ wrote: post #607

cdelsolar wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think it's your mindset and how you approach it. E.g. some people are genuinely bad at googling their way to a solution. While some people know exactly how to manipulate the google search due to years of experience debugging problems. Some people will be really good at squeezing out the right output from ChatGPT/Copilot and utilize it to maximum potential, while others simply won't make the connection.

Its output depends on your input.

E.g. say you have an API swagger documentation and you want to generate a Typescript type definition using that data, you just copy paste the docs into a comment above the type, and copilot auto fills your Typescript type definition even adding ? for properties which are not required.

If you define clearly the goal of a function in a JSDoc comment, you can implement very complex functions. E.g. you define it in steps, and in the function line out each step. This also helps your own thinking. With GPT 4o you can even draw diagrams in e.g. excalidraw or take screenshots of the issues in your UI to complement your question relating to that code.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#617

Post by stevenjgarner » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 10:50 AM UTC

ghm2180 wrote: post #593

assimpleaspossi wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

> But ants don't have a brain.

Ants have a brain, albeit a small one - some 250,000 nerve cells vs 100 billion neurons in the human brain [1]

It is somewhat like saying an Intel 4004 is not really a microprocessor as it only has 2,300 transistors vs an Apple M4 with 28 billion transistors.

[1] https://www.smorescience.com/do-ants-have-brains/

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#618

Post by yawboakye » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 10:53 AM UTC

> artificial intelligence is losing hype.

among which audience? is the hype necessary for further development? we attained much, if not all, of the recent achievements without hype. if anything, i'm strongly in favor of ai losing all the hype so that our researchers can focus on what's necessary, not what will win the loudest applause from so fickle a crowd. i'd be worried if ai was attracting less researchers than, say, two or three years ago. that doesn't seem to be the case.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#619

Post by zarzavat » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 10:55 AM UTC

dax_ wrote: post #607

cdelsolar wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What language do you use?

If you can beat copilot in a typing race then you’re probably well within your comfort zone. It works best when working on things that you’re less confident at - typing speed doesn’t matter when you have to stop to think.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#620

Post by throwaway_ab » Wed, Aug 21, 2024, 10:56 AM UTC

Jensson wrote: post #507

chromanoid wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you provide code examples? In my experience the more specific you get with your problem the more specific are the provided solutions (probably a "natural" occurence in LLMs). Hallucianted APIs are sometimes a problem for me, but then I just specify which API to use.

Why do you need an LLM if you know what you want it to do? Just write the code rather than wrangling with the LLM, it isn't like writing code take much time when you know what it should do.

I find LLM's great for:

- Getting over the blank canvas hurdle, this is great for kick starting a small project and even if the code isn't amazing, it gets my brain to the "start writing code and thinking about algo/data-structures/interesting-problem" rather than being held up at the "Where to begin?" Metaphorically where to place my first stroke, this helps somewhat.

- Sometimes LLM has helped when stuck on issues but this is hit and miss, more specifically it will often show a solution that jogs my brain and gets me there, "oh yeah of course" however I've noticed I'm more in than state when tired and need sleep, so the LLM might let me push a bit longer making up for tired brain. However this is more harmful to be honest without the LLM I go to sleep and then magically like brains do solve 4 hours of issues in 20 minutes after waking up.

So LLM might be helping in ways that actually indicate you should sleep as brain is slooooowwwwing down