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Artificial intelligence is losing hype

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Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#651
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…

I feel like currently the group feeling the most impact from Claude is frontend devs as tools like v0.dev, Claude etc. can almost create frontend from API schema (I've tested only page per page) which is great. It's probably because there's examples on the internet and that's why it works well.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#652
post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you’re suggesting all innovation/new functionality releases are paused because US has elections coming up? I find that hard to believe.

"no no, it's not that the technology has reached it's current limits and these companies are bleeding money, they're just withholding their newest releases not to spook the normies!"

Here's an experiment you can try, go to https://www.udio.com/home and grab a free account which comes with more than enough credits to do this. Use a free chat LLM like Claude 3.5 Sonnet or ChatGPT 4o to workshop some lyrics that you like, just try a few generations and ask it to rewrite parts you don't like until you have something that you don't find too cringe. Then go back over to Udio, go to the create tab turn on the Manual Mode toggle and type in only 3 or 4 comma separated tags that describe the genre you like keep them very basic like Progressive Rock, Hip Hop, 1995, Male Vocalist or whatever you don't need to combine genres these are just examples of tags. Then under the Lyrics section choose Custom and paste in just the chorus or a single verse from the lyrics you generated and then click Create. It'll create two samples for you to listen to, if you don't like either of them then just click Create again to get another two but normally it doesn't take too many tries to get something that sounds pretty good. After you have one you like then click on the ... menu next to the song title and click Extend, you can add sections before or after and you just have to add the corresponding verse from the lyrics you generated or choose Instrumental if you want a guitar solo or something. You'll wind up with something pretty good if you really listen to each sample and choose the best one.

Music generation is one of the easiest ways to "spook the normies" since most people are completely unaware of the current SOTA. Anyone with a good ear and access to these tools can create a listenable song that sounds like it's been professionally produced. Anyone with a good ear and competence with a DAW and these tools can produce a high quality song. Someone who is already a professional can create incredible results in a fraction of the time it would normally take with zero budget.

One of the main limitations of generative AI at the moment is the interface, Udio's could certainly be improved but I think they have something good here with the extend feature allowing you to steer the creation. Developing the key UI features that allow you to control the inputs to generative models is an area where huge advancements can be made that can dramatically improve the quality of the generated output. We've only just scratched the surface here and even if the technology has reached its current limits, which I strongly believe it hasn't since there are a lot of things that have been shown to work but haven't been productized yet, we could still see steady month over month improvements based on better tooling built around them alone.

Text generation has gone from markov chain babblers to indistinguishable from human written.

Image generation has gone from acid trip uncanny valley to photorealistic.

Audio generation has gone from 1930's AM radio quality to crystal clear.

Video generation is currently in fugue dream state but is rapidly improving.

3D is early stages.

???? is next but I'm guessing it'll be things like CAD STL models, electronic circuits, and other physics based modelling outputs.

The ride's not over yet.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using the latest top paid models, gpt4o and claude 3.5. They work when there's a lot of examples on github or google, but once you get into something that doesn't have a lot of examples like closed source code or rarely used libraries, it will start hallucinating and even mixing up different API versions to create a mess that doesn't work at all. I don't believe LLMs will get any better than this without a new ma…

> don't believe LLMs will get any better than this without a new major breakthrough, but this is already better than using Google search I mean .. every single org is invested in that research right now

True, if by "every single org" you mean "maybe a dozen orgs". All that the vast majority of companies is doing is figuring out how to run an existing LLM or API thereof and shipping an RAG integration button for their application.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#654

This should really be retitled to “The AI investment bubble is losing hype.” LLMs as they exist today will slowly work their way into new products and use cases. They are an important new capability and one that will change how we do certain tasks. But as to the hype, we are in a brief pause before the election where no company wants to release anything that would hit the news cycle in a bad way and cause knee-jerk l…

So you’re suggesting all innovation/new functionality releases are paused because US has elections coming up? I find that hard to believe.

Yes, I do think it’s plausible. You’re talking Microsoft and Google. Two companies with extremely close ties to the US government. And Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic. It doesn’t take a conspiracy if the folks with majority stake in these companies are all friends and handshake agree over a steak dinner just off Capitol Hill. We live in a world where price fixing is a regular occurrence, and this is not so different.

I think we will see a very nice boost in capability within 6 months of the election. I don’t personally believe all the apocalyptic AGI predictions, but I do think that AI will continue to feed a nice growth curve in IT investment and productivity growth, similar to the last few decades of IT investment.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#655

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.

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

No but I can work 2-3 hours a day (WFH) while delivering results that my boss is very happy with. I would prefer to be paid 3 times as much and working 8 hours a day, but I'm ok with this too.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Developer productivity doesn't map very directly to compensation. If one engineer is 10x as productive as another, they're lucky if they get 2x the compensation.

The 10x engineer will just start their own company.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#658
post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I use C# for the most part, sometimes PowerShell. But I can certainly see how it's more useful when I don't know much of the API yet. Then it would be a lot of googling which the AI assistant could avoid.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And we know LLMs have none of these. Go ahead and cite your sources. For every study claiming that LLMs lack these qualities, there are others that support and reinforce the connectionist model of how knowledge is encoded, and with other parallels to the human brain. So... it's inconclusive. It's bizarre why you so strongly insist otherwise when it's clear you are not informed. > The point of my colored shape examp…

We know LLMs don't have those things prima facia because they fail at all of them constantly. We also know how they work, they are token predicters. That is all they are and all they can do. What can be accomplished with that is pretty cool, but humans love to imagine there is more going on when there isn't. Just like with Eliza. If you don't understand how your attempt to apply my colored shape analogy to a human br…

And if you don't see how the example with the human brain throws a wrench in your analogy, it would explain why you'd think it as nonsensical, as it's exactly of relevance.

> We also know how they work, they are token predicters. That is all they are and all they can do

Ah there it is, you've betrayed a deep lack of understanding in all relevant disciplines (neuroscience, cognition, information theory) required to even appreciate the many errors you've made here.

You sure understand the subject matter and have nothing possibly to learn. Enjoy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve seen copilot spit out garbage dozens of lines long for something I swore must be one or two stdlib functions. Yep, it was, after reading some real documentation and using my brain. It was some NodeJS stuff, which I never work with. Don’t get me wrong, I still find it a helpful tool, but it is not at all a good, seasoned programmer— it is an algorithm predicting the next token based on the current tokens.

> I still find it a helpful tool, but it is not at all a good, seasoned programmer How quickly the goalposts move! Two years ago it was "AI will never be able to write code", now we're complaining that "AI is not a seasoned programmer". What are we going to be complaining about, two years from now?

> Two years ago it was "AI will never be able to write code"

GitHub Copilot was released nearly three years ago.

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