Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Artificial intelligence is losing hype

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

671–680 of 814 posts

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#671

Post by staticman2 »

slidehero wrote: post #292
dartos wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am yet to see any reasoned argument for why it is far more difficult and will take far longer. For language models specifically, they are trained on data and have historically been improved by increasing the size of the model (by number of parameters) and by the amount and/or quality of training data. We are basically out of new, non-synthetic text to train models on and it’s extremely hard work to come up with n…

>We are basically out of new, non-synthetic text to train models this is not even remotely true. There is an astronomical amount of data siloed by publishers, professional journals etc. that is yet to be tapped. OpenAI is making inroads by making deals with these content owners for access to all that juicy data.

>>>There is an astronomical amount of data siloed by publishers, professional journals etc. that is yet to be tapped.

You seem to think these models haven't already been trained on pirated versions of this content, for some reason.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#672

Post by Rinzler89 »

amelius wrote: post #657
barrkel wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A good programmer isn't necessarily also good at business to run his own company.

Sure, you have your John Carmaks' or Antirezs' of the industry who are 10x programmers and also successful founders but those guys are 1 in a million.

But your usual 10x engineer you'll meet is the guy who knows the ins and outs of all running systems at work giving him the ability to debug and solve issues 10x quicker than the rest, knowledge which is highly specific to the products of that company and is often non-transferrable and also not useful at entrepreneurship.

Becoming the 10x engineer at a company usually means pigeonholing yourself in the deep inner workings of the products, which may or may not be useful later. If that stack is highly custom or proprietary it might work in your favor making you the 10x guy virtually unfireable being able to set your own demands since only you can solve the issues, or might backfire against you at a round of layoffs as your knowledge of that specific niche has little demand elsewhere.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#673

Post by dragandj »

throwaway4aday wrote: post #652
greg_V wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

I've tried Udio when it appeared, and, while it is spectacularly fascinating from the technical perspective, and can even generate songs that "sound" OK, it is still as cringe as cringe can be.

Do you have an example of any song that gained any traction among human audience? Not a Billboard hit, just something that people outside the techbubble accepted as a good song?

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#674

Post by ardaoweo »

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.

They are revolutionary for use cases where hallucinated / wrong / unreliable output is easy and cheap to detect & fix, and where there's enough training data. That's why it fits programming so well - if you get bad code, you just throw it away, or modify it until it works. That's why it work for generic stock images too - if you get bad image, you modify the prompt, generate another one and see if it's better.

But many jobs are not like that. Imagine an AI nurse giving bad health advice on phone. Somebody might die. Or AI salesman making promises that are against company policy? Company is likely to be held legally liable, and may lose significant money.

Due to legal reasons, my company couldn't enable full LLM generative capabilities on chatbot we use, because we would be legally responsible for anything it generates. Instead, LLM is simply used to determine which of the pre-determined answers may fit the query the best, which it indeed does well when more traditional technologies fail. But that's not revolutionary, just an improvement. I suspect there are many barriers like that, which hinder its usage in many fields, even if it could work most of the time.

So, nearly all use cases I can think of now will still require a human in the loop, simply because of the unreliability. That way it can be a productivity booster, but not a replacement.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#675

Post by hobs »

koyote wrote: post #603
mns wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think there's a vast ocean of different software engineers and the type of code they write on a daily basis, which is why you get such differing views on AI's effectiveness. For me, AI has only ever been useful for very basic tasks and scripts: If I need a quick helper script for something in Python, a language that isn't my daily drier, AI usually gets me there in a couple of prompts. Or maybe I am writing some po…

Indeed, if you need a lot of boilerplate that's pretty similar to existing commonly available code, you're set. However...

That code is probably buggy, slow, poorly architected, very verbose, and has logical issues where the examples and your needs dont exact match.

Generally, the longer the snippet you want your LLM to generate, the more likely its going to go off the rails.

I think for some positions this can get you 90% of the code done. For me this usually means I can get started very fast on a new problem, but the last remaining "10%" actually takes significantly longer and more effort to integrate because I dont understand the other 90% off the top :)

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#676

Post by jajko »

futureshock wrote: post #554

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…

Nope. I couldn't care less about some elections (I care about global consequences, but no point wasting time & energy now, when it comes it comes). Thats US theater to focus population on that freak show you guys made out of election process, rather than on actually important stuff and concrete policies or actions.

What people, including me, are massively fed up is all the companies (I mean ALL) jumping on AI bandwagon in a beautiful show of how FOMO works and how even CEOs/shareholders are not immune to basic instincts. Literal hammer looking desperately for nails. Very few companies have amazing or potentially amazing products, rest not so much.

I absolutely don't want every effin' thing infused with some AI, since it will be used to 1) monitor my usage or me directly for advertising / credit & insurance scoring purposes, absolutely 0 doubt there; and 2) it may stop working once wifi is down, product is deprecated or company changes its policy (Sonos anyone?). Internet of Things hate v2.0.

I hate this primitive AI fashion wave, negative added value in most cases, 0 in the rest, yet users have to foot the bill. Seeing some minor industry crash due to unfulfilled expectations is just logical in such case.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#677

Post by Agentus »

DiscourseFan wrote: post #583
futureshock wrote: post #554

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…

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…

even if the datacenter increase was a waste because the potential of LLMs never pan out relative to the massive investment, i think the flood of gpu and compute will definitely enable whatever could benefit from it. The next better AI application will be very thankful that gpu compute is abundant.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#678

Post by myrmidon »

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?

It is very helpful in providing highly specific "boilerplate" in languages/environments you are not very familiar with.

The text interface can also be useful for skipping across complex documentation and/or learning. Example: you can ask GPT-4 to "decode 0xdf 0xf8 0x44 0xd0 (thumb 2 assembly for arm cortex-m)" => this will tell you what instruction is encoded, what it does and even how to cajole your toolchain into providing that same information.

If you are an experienced developer already, with a clear goal and understanding, LLMs tend to be less helpful in my experience (the same way that a mentor you could ask random bullshit would be more useful to a junior than a senior dev)

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#679

Post by ilaksh »

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?

Take a look at aider-chat or zed. zed just released new AI features. Had a blog post about it yesterday I think.

Also you can look into cursor.

There are actually quite a few tools.

I have my own agent framework in progress which has many plugins with different commands. Including reading directories, tree, read and write files, run commands, read spreadsheets. So I can tell it to read all the Python in a module directory, run a test script and compare the output to a spreadsheet tab. Then ask it to come up with ideas for making the Python code match the spreadsheet better, and have it update the code and rerun the tests iteratively until its satisfied.

If I am honest about that particular process last night, I am going to have to go over the spreadsheet to some degree manually today, because neither gpt-4o nor Claude 3.5 Sonnet was able to get the numbers to match exactly.

It's a somewhat complicated spreadsheet which I don't know anything about the domain and am just grudgingly learning. I think the agent got me 95% of the way through the task.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#680

Post by SoftTalker »

throwaway4aday wrote: post #652
greg_V wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

The ride to what? The place where human musicians can't earn a living because they can't live on less than what it costs to have an AI regurgitate the melodic patterns, chord progressions, and other music theory it has learned? This benefits who, exactly? It's a race to the bottom. Who is going to pay anything for music that can be generated basically for free? Who is going to go to a concert or festival to listen to a computer? Who is going to buy merchandise? Are the hardware, models, and algorithms used going to capture the public interest like the personalities and abilities of the musicians in a band? Will anyone be a "fan" of this kind of music? Will there be an AI Freddie Mercury, Elton John, Prince, or Taylor Swift?
Post reply on HN