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Artificial intelligence is losing hype

economist.com

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Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#721

Post by wiether »

epiccoleman wrote: post #686
inthebin wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

Keep in mind that Google's results are also much worse than they used to be.

I'm using both Kagi & LLM; depending on my need, I'll prefer one or the other.

Maybe I can access the same result with a LLM, but all the conversation/guidance required is time-consuming than just refining a search query and browsing through the first three results.

After all the answer is rarely exactly available somewhere. Reading people's questions/replies will provide a clues to find the actual answer I was looking for.

I have yet been able to achieve this result through a LLM.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#722

Post by greenthrow »

stevenhuang wrote: post #659
greenthrow wrote: post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ev…

I'm aware of the theories that LLM maximalists love to point to over and over that tries to make it seem like LLMs are more like human brains than they are. These theories are interesting in the context of actual minds but you far over extend their usefulness and application by trying to apply them to LLMs.

We know as a hard fact that LLMs do not understand anything. They have no capacity to "understand". The constant, intractible failure modes that they continuously exhibit are clear byproducts of this fact. By continuing to cling to the absurd idea that there is more going on than token prediction you make yourself look like the people who kept insisting there was more going on with past generation chat bots even after being shown the source code.

I have understood all along why you attempt to extend my colored shape example to the brain, but your basis for this is complete nonsense. Because a) we do not have the actual understanding of the brain to do this and b) it's competely beside the point, becuase we know that minds do arise from the brain. My whole point is an LLM is an illusion of a mind which is effective because it outputs words, which we are so hard wired to associate with other minds, expecially when they seem to "make sense" to us. If instead of words you use something nonsensical like colored shapes with no underlying meaning, this illusion of the mind goes away and you can see an LLM for whst it is.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#723

Post by selimthegrim »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #693
lumenwrites wrote: post #689

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…

What’s the title of the documentary?

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#724

Post by meiraleal »

sillyfluke wrote: post #711
meiraleal wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It codes great for me, helps me deliver faster, better tested and more features. It literally saves time and money every day. If you can't do that, maybe, just maybe, you have a you problem. But there are many like you in this thread so you are not alone.

Can you state your domain and programming language for clarity?

JS/React and SAP/Hybris at work, vanillaJS for side projects. Ecommerce and general web/app development

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#725

Post by delusional »

sgt101 wrote: post #614
delusional wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I look at the kinds of AI projects I have visibility into, there's a parallel where the public are expecting a centralized, all knowing, general purpose AI I don't think this is entirely fair to "the public". Media was stuffed with AI company CEOs claiming that AGI was just around the corner. Nvidia, OpenAI and Musk, Zuckerberg, and others were positively starry eyed at how, soon, we'd all be just a GPU matmul…

maybe there's a term confusion here - GenAI has come to mean Generative AI (LLM's, Diffusion models..) rather than General-AI. People call that AIG, now people also talk about AIS which I take to mean "human level on a narrow domain only" while AIG is "generally intelligent at roughly human level". My personal belief is that AIS is not a real thing (in the sense I wrote above) because narrow domain competence is tigh…

I was definitely confusing the terms. I was thinking of AGI, but i remembered that the G was for general, and GenAI "felt" right (probably because it's used in a similar enough context).

Replace all the instances of GenAI with AGI in my post.

It's an interesting observation that the economics aren't there yet. I think it's generally assumed that if we find something valuable, we can probably figure out how to monetize it. That's not necessarily true though. In the same but opposite vein, it doesn't necessarily need to be useful to stick around. It's possible AI is forever going to be useless (in objective terms, maybe it will make people less efficient) but find a monetization strategy that keeps it around (maybe it makes people feel good).

A ton of the technology economy isn't really based on objective metrics of usefulness. Microsoft isn't the biggest because they're the most useful. We don't look to the quality of windows to understand if people will buy the next version. We don't look at the google search results as an indicator of google's profitability.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#726

Post by grogenaut »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #161
grogenaut wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

could you provide some examples, code or repos and questions where it does a good job for you (question can also just be completion). Obviously you're having really good experiences with the tools that other aren't having. I'd definitely appreciate that over a lot of assurances taht I'm doing it wrong with my spaghetti code.

Try these: Take a SQL schema, and ask AI to generate crud endpoints for the schema, then sit down and code it by yourself. Then try generating client side actions and state management for those endpoints. Time yourself, and compare how long it takes you. Even if you're fast and you cut and paste from template work and quickly hand edit, the AI will be done and on a smoke break before you're even a quarter of the way…

Thank you. That was a lot more informative than the argument you were having. And it's now obvious to me the value you're getting and a few areas that would work for me that I'll try. I'm not slapping out crud apps day to day, but can see how I could accelerate myself.

I appreciate it.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#727

Post by grogenaut »

Jensson wrote: post #191
CuriouslyC wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try these: Take a SQL schema, and ask AI to generate crud endpoints for the schema, then sit down and code it by yourself. Then try generating client side actions and state management for those endpoints. Time yourself, and compare how long it takes you. Even if you're fast and you cut and paste from template work and quickly hand edit, the AI will be done and on a smoke break before you're even a quarter of the way…

Those things are a tiny part of the work though and are all about generating boilerplate code. Tons of boilerplate code isn't the hallmark of a great codebase, I don't think many programmers spends more than 10% of their time writing boilerplate code, unless they work at a very dysfunctional org. It is true it is faster than humans at some tasks, but the remaining tasks were most of the time, you can't gain more than…

What's your point? The other person is speeding themself up, and it works for them. What's the appropriate bar for speedups. What would be enough to satisfy you? What problems do you have that AI isn't speeding up that you still feel aren't worth spending your brain on?maybe list them and see if the other people has thoughts on how to go about it?

Things don't move forward by saying it can't be done or belittle others accomplishments.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#728

Post by anon291 »

smt88 wrote: post #372
anon291 wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that these problems will follow the same growth trajectory as every other tech bug. In other words, they will go away eventually. But the Rubicon is still crossed. There is a general purpose computer system that understands human language and can write real sounding human language. That's a sea change.

> will follow the same growth trajectory as every other tech bug What you're referring to isn't a bug. It's inherent to the way LLMs work. It can't "go away" in an LLM model because... > understands human language ...they don't. They are prediction machines. They don't "understand" anything.

> What you're referring to isn't a bug. It's inherent to the way LLMs work. It can't "go away" in an LLM model because...

The 'bug' presented above is a simple case of not understanding correctly. Larger models, models with MOE, models with truth guages, better selection functions, etc will make this better in the future.

> ...they don't. They are prediction machines. They don't "understand" anything.

Implementation detail.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#729

Post by throwaway4aday »

dragandj wrote: post #673
throwaway4aday wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Have you tried the latest model? It's night and day.

Edit:

There's obviously still skill involved in creating a good song, it's not like you can just click one button and get a perfect hit. I outlined the simplest process in my first comment and specifically said you could create a "listenable" song, it's not going to be great but it probably rivals some of the slop you often hear on the radio. If you're a skilled music producer you can absolutely create something good especially now with access to the stemmed components of the songs. It's going to be a half manual process where you first generate enough to capture the feeling of the song and then download and make edits or add samples, upload and extend or remix and repeat.

If you're looking for links and don't care to peruse the trending section they have several samples on the announcement page https://www.udio.com/blog/introducing-v1-5

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#730

Post by TillE »

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…

> my main job is trying to come up with "elegant" architectures for complex business logic that interacts with an existing large code base

Right, that's surely the main job of nearly every experienced developer. It's really cool that LLMs can generate code for isolated tasks, but they can barely even begin to do the hard work, and that seems very unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.

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