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Artificial intelligence is losing hype

economist.com

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Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#681

Post by staticman2 »

pdimitar wrote: post #669
staticman2 wrote: post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>>very good optimization machine but lacked creativity Inventing a fricken time machine wasn't creative?

I know right? :D That always bothered me as well. In the novelizations it was written that Skynet could not adapt to humans not running away or not vacating territories after they have been defeated. One of the quotes was: "Apparently it underestimated something that it kept analyzing even now: the human willpower." I've read this as Skynet not being able to adapt against guerilla warfare -- the hit-and-run/hide tact…

This is a complete tangent but:

In Terminator 1 Skynet looses because John Conner taught people how to fight the machines, but John Conner only knows this because Kyle Reese taught Sarah Conner how to fight the machines and she taught John Conner. But Kyle Reese only knows this because he was taught by John Conner- so there's no actual source of the information on how to fight the machines, it's a loop with no beginning or end.

I had a philosophy teacher who said this is evidence of divine intervention to destroy Skynet, essentially God told people through John Conner how to win, but a cut scene in Terminator 1 implies Skynet was also created by reverse engineering the chip in the destroyed Terminator- implying there's also no origin of the information on how to create Skynet and it's also an infinite loop.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#682

Post by pdimitar »

staticman2 wrote: post #681
pdimitar wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know right? :D That always bothered me as well. In the novelizations it was written that Skynet could not adapt to humans not running away or not vacating territories after they have been defeated. One of the quotes was: "Apparently it underestimated something that it kept analyzing even now: the human willpower." I've read this as Skynet not being able to adapt against guerilla warfare -- the hit-and-run/hide tact…

This is a complete tangent but: In Terminator 1 Skynet looses because John Conner taught people how to fight the machines, but John Conner only knows this because Kyle Reese taught Sarah Conner how to fight the machines and she taught John Conner. But Kyle Reese only knows this because he was taught by John Conner- so there's no actual source of the information on how to fight the machines, it's a loop with no beginn…

Yeah, these discussions are fascinating but I'd still think it's not very hard to learn how to blow stuff up and sabotage assembly lines, given enough tries.

So it's not exactly an infinite loop IMO, it's more like that the first iteration was more crude and the machines were difficult to kill but then people learned and passed the information along back in time, eventually forming the infinite loop -- it still had a first step though, it didn't come out of nothing.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#683

Post by lz400 »

kaoD wrote: post #563
lz400 wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there's probably truth to that, but I find it's useful at a more micro-level. I don't tell the llm to write an architecture or a big piece. It's more like, I have this data in this shape, I want a function that gives data out that shape and it will spit something pretty good and idiomatic. I read it, understand it and implement it. Need to be careful with blind copy-paste, there are sometimes subtle bugs in the code.…

Yep, that's exactly what I mean by "coding" as opposed to "engineering".

Totally agree with that. It's an aid to lay bricks, doesn't do your job for you.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#684

Post by jeffhuys »

croes wrote: post #549
zaptrem wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not op but my response: Because I am lazy and would like to save the 1-5 minutes it would take me to actually write it. When there are dozens of these small things a day the saved time really adds.

That's why you spend 10 minutes to write the correct prompt?

If it takes you 10 minutes, you're doing it wrong.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#685

Post by LtWorf »

tkgally wrote: post #426
LtWorf wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Speech recognition is useful. Now try to mute a video on youtube and understand what's being said from the automatic subtitles. If you do it in english, be aware that it's the best performing language and all others are even worse.

For some reason, YouTube is not using a very good STT system now. The lack of sentence punctuation is particularly annoying. Transcriptions by Whisper and Gemini 1.5 Pro are much better. From a couple of weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41199567#41201773 I expect that YouTube will up their transcription game soon, too.

I've tried whisper too. I made this: https://codeberg.org/ltworf/srtgen

Basically it's kinda useful to put time tags, but I need to manually fix each and every sentence. Sometimes I need to fix the time tags as well.

I just spoke about youtube because it's more popular and easy to test.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#686

Post by epiccoleman »

inthebin wrote: post #616
dax_ wrote: 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?

I think it's your mindset and how you approach it. E.g. some people are genuinely bad at googling their way to a solution. While some people know exactly how to manipulate the google search due to years of experience debugging problems. Some people will be really good at squeezing out the right output from ChatGPT/Copilot and utilize it to maximum potential, while others simply won't make the connection. Its output d…

> some people know exactly how to manipulate the google search due to years of experience debugging problems

this really rings true for me. especially as a junior, I always thought one of my best skills was that I was good at Googling. I was able to come up with good queries and find some page that would help. Sometimes, a search would be simple enough that you could just grab a line of code right off the page, but most of the time (especially with StackOverflow) the best approach was to read through a few different sources and pick and choose what was useful to the situation, synthesizing a solution. Depending on how complicated the problem was, that process might have occurred in a single step or in multiple iterations.

So I've found LLMs to be a handy tool for making that process quicker. It's rare that the LLM will write the exact code I need - though of course some queries are simple enough to make that possible. But I can sort of prime the conversation in the right direction and get into a state where I can get useful answers to questions. I don't have any particular knowledge on AI that helps me do that, just a kind of general intuition for how to phrase questions and follow-ups to get output that's helpful.

I still have to be the filter - the LLM is happy to bullshit you - but that's not really a sea change from trying to Google around to figure out a problem. LLMs seem like an overall upgrade to that specific process of engineering to me, and that's a pretty useful tool!

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#687

Post by wanderingstan »

barrkel wrote: post #643
arcticbull wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Helping with challenging code problems that would otherwise need hours of searching google or reading the docs. I'm glad this has been working for you -- generally any time I actually have a really difficult problem, ChatGPT just makes up the API I wish existed. Then when I bring it up to ChatGPT, it just apologizes and invents new API.

LLMs aren't good when you drift out of the training distribution. You want to be hitting the meat in the middle and leveraging the LLM to blast through it quickly. That means LLMs are great for scaffolding, prototypes, the v0.1 of new code especially when it's very ordinary logic but using a language or library you're not 100% up to speed on. One project I was on recently was translation: converting a JS library into…

I’ve come to the similar conclusion, and realized that I’m slowly learning how to wield this new tool.

The sweet spot is when you need something and you’re sure it’s possible but just don’t know (or it’s too time consuming) how. E.G. change the css to to X, rewrite this python code in typescript, use the pattern of this code to do Y, etc.

Reminds me of the early days of Google where you had to learn how write a good search query. You learn you need more than a word or two, but don’t write a whole essay, etc.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#688

Post by FrustratedMonky »

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…

"there’s a soft moratorium on showing scary new capability"

Yes. There is also the Hype of the "End of the Hype Cycle". There is Hype that the Hype is ending.

When really, there is something amazing being released weekly.

People are so desensitized that just because we don't have androids walking the streets or suddenly have Blade Runner like space colonies staffed with robots, that somehow AI is over.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#689

Post by lumenwrites »

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.

This comment doesn't deserve the downvotes its getting, the author is right, and I'm having the same experience.

LLM outputs aren't always perfect, but that doesn't stop them from being extremely helpful and massively increasing my productivity.

They help me to get things done with the tech I'm familiar with much faster, get things done with tech I'm unfamiliar with that I wouldn't be able to do before, and they are extremely helpful for learning as well.

Also, I've noticed that using them has made me much more curious. I'm asking so many new questions now, I've had no idea how many things I was casually curious about, but not curious enough to google.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#690

Post by andrew-dc »

throwaway_ab wrote: post #621
Jensson wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you need an LLM if you know what you want it to do? Just write the code rather than wrangling with the LLM, it isn't like writing code take much time when you know what it should do.

I find LLM's great for: - Getting over the blank canvas hurdle, this is great for kick starting a small project and even if the code isn't amazing, it gets my brain to the "start writing code and thinking about algo/data-structures/interesting-problem" rather than being held up at the "Where to begin?" Metaphorically where to place my first stroke, this helps somewhat. - Sometimes LLM has helped when stuck on issues…

Yes, this. I was skeptical and disgusted at a lot of what was being done or promised by using LLMs, but this was because I initially saw a lot of wholesale: "Make thing for me," being hyped or discussed. In practice, I have found them to be good tools for getting going or un-stuck, and use them more like an inspiration engine, or brain kick-starter.
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