I feel like a lot of people hate AI
Everyone in Seattle hates AI
631–640 of 1001 posts
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#632Earlier quoted context omitted.
My friends at Google are some of the most negative about the potential of AI to improve software development. I was always surprised by this and assumed internally at Google would be one of the first places to adopt these.
I've generally found an inverse correlation between "understands AI" and "exuberance for AI". I'm the only person at my current company who has had experience at multiple AI companies (the rest have never worked on it in a production environment, one of our projects is literally something I got paid to deliver customers at another startup), has written professionally about the topic, and worked directly with some big…
Personally, I don't understand how LLMs work. I know some ML math and certainly could learn, and probably will, soon.
But my opinions about what LLMs can do are based on... what LLMs can do. What I can see them doing. With my eyes.
The right answer to the question "What can LLMs do?" is... looking... at what LLMs can do.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#633Earlier quoted context omitted.
The big problem is AI is amazing at doing the rote boilerplate stuff that generally wasn't a problem to begin with, but if you were to point a codebot at your trouble ticket system and tell it to go fix the issues it will be hopeless. Once your system gets complex enough the AI effectiveness drops off rapidly and you as the engineer have to spend more and more time babysitting every step to make sure it doesn't go of…
I think the 90/90 rule comes into play. We all know Tom Cargill quote (even if we’ve never seen it attributed): The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time. It feels like a gigantic win when it carves through that first 90%… like, “wow, I’m almost done and I just started!” . A…
The other problem is that if you didn't actually write the first 90% then the second 90% becomes 2x harder since you have to figure out wtf is actually going on.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#634Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No one HAS to use AI. Well… That's no longer true, is it? My partner (IT analyst) works for a company owned by a multinational big corporation, and she got told during a meeting with her manager that use of AI is going to become mandatory next year. That's going to be a thing across the board. And have you called a large company for any reason lately? Could be your telco provider, your bank, public transport compan…
> My partner (IT analyst) works for a company owned by a multinational big corporation, and she got told during a meeting with her manager that use of AI is going to become mandatory next year. That's going to be a thing across the board. My multinational big corporation employer has reporting about how much each employee uses AI, with a naughty list of employees who aren't meeting their quota of AI usage.
> My multinational big corporation employer has reporting about how much each employee uses AI, with a naughty list of employees who aren't meeting their quota of AI usage.
“Why don’t you just make the minimum 37 pieces of flAIr?”
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#635Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've generally found an inverse correlation between "understands AI" and "exuberance for AI". I'm the only person at my current company who has had experience at multiple AI companies (the rest have never worked on it in a production environment, one of our projects is literally something I got paid to deliver customers at another startup), has written professionally about the topic, and worked directly with some big…
I think there is a correlation between when you can you expect from something when I know their internals vs someone that doesn’t know but is not like who knows internals is much much better. Example: many people created websites without a clue of how they really work. And got millions of people on it. Or had crazy ideas to do things with them. At the same time there are devs that know how internals work but can’t ge…
I think this is more about mechanistic understanding vs fundamental insight kind of situation. The linear algebra picture is currently very mechanistic since it only tells us what the computations are. There are research groups trying to go beyond that but the insight from these efforts are currently very limited.
However, the probabilistic view is very much clearer. You can have many explorable insights, both potentially true and false, by jıst understanding the loss functions, what the model is sampling from, what is the marginal or conditional distributions are and so on. Generative AI models are beautiful at that level. It is truly mind blowing that in 2025, we are able to sample from the megapixel image distributions conditioned on the NLP text prompts.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#636Ex-Google here; there are many people both current and past-Google that feel the same way as the composite coworker in the linked post. I haven't escaped this mindset myself. I'm convinced there are a small number of places where LLMs make truly effective tools (see: generation of "must be plausible, need not be accurate" data, e.g. concept art or crowd animations in movies), a large number of places where LLMs make…
The thing that changed my view on LLMs was solo traveling for 6 months after leaving Microsoft. There were a lot of points on the trip where I was in a lot of trouble (severe food sickness, stolen items, missed flights) where I don't know how I would have solved those problems without chatGPT helping.
That's pretty sad tbh
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#637Earlier quoted context omitted.
Extremely uncharitable reading. Plausibly they were in a foreign country where they didn't speak any of the language and didn't know how anything worked. This kind of situation was never easy for anyone.
I have been in situations where either I or someone in my party was sick and needed medical care in a foreign country where I didn't speak the language. In all cases I used my brain to figure out a solution quickly without the aid of CharGPT, and the trip continued on. This falls in the category of life skills or maybe just "adulting." Sure, maybe ChatGPT can be considered a life skill, but you need others compiled i…
What a strange thing to say.. ChatGPT is not a skill, its just a tool. It helps much faster and better than google searching. Why the fuss about it?
Would you say the same to someone using Google?
"Sure, maybe Google can be considered a life skill, but you need others compiled into your brain to fall back on when it fails. If Google is the only skill you have, what do you do if your phone gets stolen?"
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#638Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is one of the most depressing things I have ever read on Hacker News. You claim to have become so de-actualized as a human being that you cannot fulfill the most basic items of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (food, health, personal security, shelter, transportation) without the aid of an LLM.
I saw a post on Reddit the other day where the user was posting screenshots from ChatGPT about how they were using ChatGPT as a “Human OS” and outsourcing all decisions and information to ChatGPT. It made me queasy.
god forbid you outsource easy things to technology - that's how humanity has been progressing since forever. but sure, throw away your calculator and do it by hand if that makes you feel any better.
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#639Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing that changed my view on LLMs was solo traveling for 6 months after leaving Microsoft. There were a lot of points on the trip where I was in a lot of trouble (severe food sickness, stolen items, missed flights) where I don't know how I would have solved those problems without chatGPT helping.
This is one of the most depressing things I have ever read on Hacker News. You claim to have become so de-actualized as a human being that you cannot fulfill the most basic items of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (food, health, personal security, shelter, transportation) without the aid of an LLM.
Your post is actually one of the most patronising things I have read. The person just used ChatGPT like Google to solve their problems and your reply is about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs?
Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI
#640Is this a sophisticated ad?