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I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

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Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#621

Post by _heimdall »

0xpgm wrote: post #606
thisisit wrote: post #526

Recently I had a request come through to allow finance analysts to vibe code their apps. During a discussion one of the finance managers let the cat out of the bag. Turns out our CFO had met fellow CFOs at a get together. They talked about how each of them were using AI. Our CFO was lagging behind and felt that we need to "accelerate" our usage of AI. He wants to push it just because he lost a bragging contest.

Things like this make me realize the software engineering 'industry' is not a real industry. There are people who write important software that the world runs on, but they do it outside the 'industry'. A real industry should be responsive to events of nature, or at least the market, not vibes.

Oh its well within industry norms for leaders to make decisions based on dick measuring contests.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#622

Post by fg137 »

ActorNightly wrote: post #450
fg137 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is a newer AI going to "clean up" dropped databases, compromised computers or leaked personal data? (None of above is theoretical)

I really am surprised that people on a heavy CS themed forum still have trouble grasping this. Imagine the year is 1995, C exists, but some guy out there is working on essentially what modern Python is. He says to you "check out this language, you can just import stuff, and use it and dynamically modify anything at run time". You can probably come up with hundreds of arguments about things that could go wrong, like m…

What's your point?

I think you have some serious misunderstanding here.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#624

Post by killerstorm »

impulser_ wrote: post #48

I'm pretty sure he's talking about companies and people outsourcing their decision making and thinking to AI and not really about using AI itself. I don't think using AI to write code is AI psychosis or bad at all, but if you just prompt the AI and believe what it tell you then you have AI psychosis. You see this a lot with financial people and VC on twitter. They literally post screenshots of ChatGPT as their thinki…

What is "thinking"?

LLMs can do advanced math and coding, which involves logic, so they are definitely capable of using logic. Which is what most people call reasoning.

So "LLMs are incapable of reasoning, they are just pattern matchers" is wrong. A lot of logic _is_ pattern matching, BTW. Like, syllogisms - deductive reasoning - do you think LLMs are incapable of that?

The thing you're referring to is that LLMs are trained to produce an answer which a human would like, i.e. they aim to produce plausible rather than correct answers.

So it's not so much a mental deficit as a different goal. Trusting LLM blindly is definitely dangerous, but dismissing it as useless for anything by code is rather wrong.

Pattern matching is hardly what distinguishes human from LLM - if you ask somebody a question about policy, for examples, chances are they'd just recite something they heard somewhere, never really thinking about it from first principles.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#625

Post by adam_patarino »

impulser_ wrote: post #48

I'm pretty sure he's talking about companies and people outsourcing their decision making and thinking to AI and not really about using AI itself. I don't think using AI to write code is AI psychosis or bad at all, but if you just prompt the AI and believe what it tell you then you have AI psychosis. You see this a lot with financial people and VC on twitter. They literally post screenshots of ChatGPT as their thinki…

I’ve been talking to a lot of engineers about how they use AI in their day to day and it’s dramatically different than what you see from the hypers.

The vast majority use one agent at a time and careful step through code. The main benefit they report is often about researching the codebase and possible solutions.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#626

Post by Hendrikto »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #179
impulser_ wrote: post #48

I'm pretty sure he's talking about companies and people outsourcing their decision making and thinking to AI and not really about using AI itself. I don't think using AI to write code is AI psychosis or bad at all, but if you just prompt the AI and believe what it tell you then you have AI psychosis. You see this a lot with financial people and VC on twitter. They literally post screenshots of ChatGPT as their thinki…

I agree with you, except it isn't even good at writing code. Almost every time that you get an LLM to write a bunch of code for you, it has mistakes in it. The logic isn't right, the API calls aren't right, the syntax isn't right (!). That problem hasn't yet been fixed and it looks as though it never will be. That means that every line of code it generates, you have to review, because even if 95% of the code is corre…

LLMs are good at producing code that seems plausible at first glance and appears to work, but it never really does. And when trying to fix things, you discover 7 slightly different ad hoc implementations of the same thing, with their own weird edge cases and behaviors. And you likely miss 4 more. There is no intention or coherence behind any of it.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#628

Post by flir »

djhn wrote: post #557
suzzer99 wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve had to do a ton of SQL stuff lately, which I haven’t really worked with since the late 90s. ChatGPT has been a godsend, not just for me, but for our only coworker who knows SQL well, whom I’d probably be bugging several times a day at my wits’ end. But no one cares about those kinds of productivity gains. Just the ones that will completely replace us.

I find SQL and data(bases) in general to be LLM’s Achilles’ heel. Databases are rarely under version control, so the training data only has one half of the knowledge. My comments are more in the context of OLAP queries and other non-normalised data often queried via SQL. I train non-LLM transformer models on (older and rarer) datasets, and automating the ingestion of sprawling datasets with hundreds of columns, often…

That's interesting - SQL is one of the places I find them the strongest - I think there must be an insane amount of training data out there for SQL. But mostly I'm asking them for ad hoc report queries. Nobody cares if they're bad SQL, they just want to know how many signups there were in March that didn't tick the marketing box. Sounds like you're pushing their capabilities a lot further than I am though - I just want to perform arbitarily complex queries on 3NF data.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#629

Post by kilroy123 »

epolanski wrote: post #565

My biggest grief, among many, is that the field is just no longer enjoyable to work in. I cannot deny the impact of AI for my daily tasks at this point. But I just don't enjoy the field anymore. With increased productivity, also coming from my stellar coworkers, it feels like we're rat racing who outputs more. The quality is good, and having very strong rails at language and implementation level, strong hygiene, etc…

I felt this way before LLMs hit the scene.

I'm trying so hard to pivot away because of this.

Re: I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis

#630

Post by flir »

skydhash wrote: post #458
suzzer99 wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve had to do a ton of SQL stuff lately, which I haven’t really worked with since the late 90s. ChatGPT has been a godsend, not just for me, but for our only coworker who knows SQL well, whom I’d probably be bugging several times a day at my wits’ end. But no one cares about those kinds of productivity gains. Just the ones that will completely replace us.

I'm always amazed by those comments. Why couldn't you buy a book on SQL[0], and spend a week on it? Or just go over to YouTube for a refresher? [0]: Like https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/sql-queries-for/9780134...

SQL is (was?) one of my strongest skills, I enjoy it a lot, and I still reach for the LLM. It's just faster than me, and when it goes wrong (rarely) I can correct it in plain English.
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