Live data from Hacker News

Artificial intelligence is losing hype

economist.com

701–710 of 814 posts

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#701
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?

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 p…

> this will tell you what instruction is encoded, what it does and even how to cajole your toolchain into providing that same information.

or it will hallucinate something that's completely wrong but you won't notice it

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A good programmer isn't necessarily also good at business to run his own company. AI can help with that.

We'd all be millionaires if AI could actually help with that, but then if everyone is a millionaire then nobody is. Current AI is still at the state of recommending people jump off the golden gate bridge if they feel sad or telling them to change their blinker fluid.

You're right. And that's why I wonder how a developer can claim to get a 300% increase in productivity from AI results.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#703

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.

> I don’t think you’ve used LLMs enough. They are revolutionary, every day.

How much is "enough"? Neither myself nor my coworkers have found LLMs to be all that useful in our work. Almost everybody has stopped bothering with them these days.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Good luck telling a bunch of programmers that their skills are legitimately under threat. No one wants to hear that. Especially when you are living a top 10% lifestyle on the back of being good at communicating to computers. There is an old documentary of the final days of typesetters for newspapers. These were the (very skilled) people who rapidly put each individual carved steel character block into the printing fr…

> I do think those juicy salaries and compensation packages will.

I think that's inevitable with or without LLMs in the mix. I also think the industry as a whole will be better for it.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#705

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…

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.

GPUs are easily and irreparably broken by overheating, so GPU compute is something that's high maintenance. It won't stick around like a building or a bridge.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wast…

Well, time to run it locally then :) Check out ollama.com. llama 3.1 is pretty crazy, especially if you can run the 405B one. Otherwise, use Mistral/Mixtral or something similar.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#707

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We'd all be millionaires if AI could actually help with that, but then if everyone is a millionaire then nobody is. Current AI is still at the state of recommending people jump off the golden gate bridge if they feel sad or telling them to change their blinker fluid.

You're right. And that's why I wonder how a developer can claim to get a 300% increase in productivity from AI results.

You can easily get 300% productivity improvements if you're using a completely new language but still have enough programming background in order to refine the prompts to get what you want, or if you're debugging an issue and the LLM points you in the right way saving you hours of googling and slamming your head against the wall.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#708
post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me llm is faster stackoverflow without fear of my question being closed. I know the first answer will not be what I want. I know that I will have to refractor it to suit my style. I know it will be full of subtle bugs. Oh and I expect it to be free, I ain't paying for this just like I wasn't paying for stackoverflow. Finally I hope than in few years I will be able to just "sudo apt-get install llm llm-javascript…

You are paying, the same way you paid for stack overflow.. you become part of the process, ask follow up questions, deepening the knowledge of the system. The same applies to AI. The old learning material is gone, your interaction is now the new learning material and ground truth. PS: Hourly rates for sw engineers: Range:€11 - €213 - so one hour on stackoverflow, searching and sub-querying resolving problems costs yo…

You know you can just turn off "Improve the model for everyone" in the settings, right?

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are paying, the same way you paid for stack overflow.. you become part of the process, ask follow up questions, deepening the knowledge of the system. The same applies to AI. The old learning material is gone, your interaction is now the new learning material and ground truth. PS: Hourly rates for sw engineers: Range:€11 - €213 - so one hour on stackoverflow, searching and sub-querying resolving problems costs yo…

And unlike Stack Overflow, which is available to everyone online and has an open content license, the IP the users of the ChatGPT style services is entirely proprietary to the company. I am not interested in feeding their machine with my brainpower. On the other hand, I happily contribute to Stack Overflow, and open source software+hardware. I do not think I will integrate LLM into my engineering workflow until there…

Turn it off in the settings, then... Come on.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck telling a bunch of programmers that their skills are legitimately under threat. No one wants to hear that. Especially when you are living a top 10% lifestyle on the back of being good at communicating to computers. There is an old documentary of the final days of typesetters for newspapers. These were the (very skilled) people who rapidly put each individual carved steel character block into the printing fr…

> I do think those juicy salaries and compensation packages will. I think that's inevitable with or without LLMs in the mix. I also think the industry as a whole will be better for it.

Horses before the automobile
Post reply on HN