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Artificial intelligence is losing hype

economist.com

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Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#631

Post by throwthrowuknow »

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?

Copilot is just an autocomplete tool, it doesn’t have much support for multiturn prompting so it’s best used when you know exactly what code you want and just want it done quickly like implementing a well defined function to satisfy an interface or refactoring existing code to match an example you’ve already written out or prefilling boilerplate on a new file. For more complex work you need to use a chat interface where you can actually discuss the proposed changes with the model and edit and fork the conversation if necessary.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#633

Post by vladimirralev »

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 have the same experience. I have my own benchmark, I take a relatively complex project like FreeSWITCH on github, which is part of the training set for all coding LLMs anyway so they should know it and I ask the AI to code small snippets, tests, suggestions and fixes to see how well it understands the codebase and the architecture.

I just tried the latest Cursor + Sonnet and it failed in every task. The problem is that there is no way to understand the code without either complete understanding of the domain and the intents or running it in some context.

Telecom and media domains in particular are well documented in specs and studied in forum discussions. I am sure they are part of the training data, because I can get most answers if asked directly. So far the LLMs fail to reason about anything useful for me.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#634

Post by jazzyjackson »

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.

Are you making several times as much money?

IME LLMs are great at giving you the experience of learning, in the same way sugar gives you the experience of nourishment

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#635

Post by jazzyjackson »

jen729w wrote: post #591
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…

Every question? If it’s returning results that were obvious, why were you asking the question? And I don’t believe that the other ~50% were wrong. > The only thing these engines do, for me perhaps, is save some search time so I don't have to click around on a lot of sites to scroll for some semblance of an answer to verify. This sounds like a valuable service.

IME they basically rephrase the information I've put into it, rarely adding anything I didn't already imply I knew by my formulation of the question

Something to keep in mind is that gambling rules apply: if enough people flip coins, there is always someone experiencing a winning streak and someone experiencing a losing streak and majority that gets a mixed bag of roughly breaking even (mediocre usefulness and a waste of time)

my first week of using GPT4 every day I experienced great answer after great answer, and I was convinced the world would change in a matter of months, that natural language translation was now a solved problem etc etc

But my luck changed, and now I get some good answers and some idiotic answers, so it's mostly not worth my time. Some people never get a good answer in their few dice rolls before writing off the technology

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#636

Post by jazzyjackson »

meiraleal wrote: post #592
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…

Bad programmers have bad experience using LLMs to code. They then blame the LLM, not themselves.

It's more like an ouija board, it only works if you believe and phrase your input as if you expect a competent answer

I know great programmers who approached it with skepticism and the bot responds be being worthy of skepticism

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#637

Post by dkrich »

slidehero wrote: post #505
dkrich wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s call it for what it is- taking poorly organized existing information and making it organized and interactive. “Here are some sharepoint locations, site Maps, and wikis. Now regurgitate this info to me as if you are a friendly call center agent.” Pretty cool but not much more than pushing existing data around. True AI I think is being able to learn some baseline of skills and then through experience and feedback…

>taking poorly organized existing information and making it organized and interactive. Which is extremely valuable! >Pretty cool but not much more than pushing existing data around. Don't underestimate how valuable it is for teachers to do exactly that. Taking existing information, making it digestable, presenting it in new and interseting ways is a teacher's bread and butter.

It’s valuable for use cases where the problem is “I don’t know the answer to this question and don’t know where to find it.” That’s not in and of itself a multibillion dollar business when the alternative doesn’t cost that much in the grand scheme of things (asking someone for help or looking for the answer).

Are you suggesting a chatbot is a suitable replacement for a teacher?

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#638

Post by zarzavat »

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 don’t use ChatGPT or chat AI for coding, at least not often. It does help me get unstuck on occasion, but most of the time the context switch is too much of a productivity sink.

However, I use copilot autocomplete consistently. That makes me much more productive. It’s just really good autocomplete.

As an experienced developer I’d put my productivity improvement at 2-3x. It’s huge but not 10x. I’m limited by my decision speed, I need to decide what I want the code to do, AI can’t help with that - it can only do the “how”.

Far from introducing more bugs, using Copilot frees some mental cycles for me to be more aware of the code I’m writing.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#639

Post by pixelsort »

meiraleal wrote: post #592
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…

Bad programmers have bad experience using LLMs to code. They then blame the LLM, not themselves.

Most of it is mediocre creativity and a low willingness to adapt their prompting patterns for an optimal ratio of effort to output quality. Most people who don't understand yet expect LLMs to read their minds when they would better of orienting themselves as student who have zero experiencing developing the arsenal strategies that elicit productivity gains.

They haven't developed any intuition into which kinds of questions are worth prompting, which kinds of context are effective, or even which kinds of limitations apply to which models.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#640

Post by jazzyjackson »

meiraleal wrote: post #597
huhkerrf wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the same way. Anytime someone says they don't find LLMs all that useful, the exact same comments come out: "They clearly aren't using the right model!" "It's obvious they don't know how to prompt, or they would see the value." "Maybe it can't do that today, but GPT-5 is just around the corner." I feel more and more that people have just decided that this is a technology that will do everything you can imagine,…

It codes great for me, helps me deliver faster, better tested and more features. It literally saves time and money every day. If you can't do that, maybe, just maybe, you have a you problem. But there are many like you in this thread so you are not alone.

The worst part about LLMs is this attitude it's giving to people who get a few helpful answers in a row

You're like a gambling addict who thinks he's smarter than everyone else

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