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AI is different

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Re: AI is different

#761

Post by app134 »

dmead wrote: post #699
Zacharias030 wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn’t you say that now, finally, what people call AI combines subsymbolic systems („gradient descent“) with search and with symbolic systems (tool calls)? I had a professor in AI who was only working on symbolic systems such as SAT-solvers, Prolog etc. and the combination of things seems really promising. Oh, and what would be really nice is another level of memory or fast learning ability that goes beyond burning…

I had such a professor as well, but those people used to use the more accurate term "machine learning". There was also wide understanding that those architectures were trying to imitate small bits of what we understood was happening in the brain (see marvin minsky's perceptron etc). The hope was, as I understood it that there would be some breakthrough in neuroscience that would let the computer scientists pick up th…

You asked earlier if you were being overly cynical, and I think the answer to that is "yes"

We are indeed simulating what we find in nature when we create neural networks and transformers, and AI companies are indeed investing heavily in BCI research. ChatGPT can write an original essay better than most of my students. Its also artificial. Is that not artificial intelligence?

Re: AI is different

#762

Post by semi-extrinsic »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #754
gdubs wrote: post #622

AI has been improving at a very rapid pace, which means that a lot of people have really outdated priors. I see this all the time online where people are dismissive about AI in a way that suggests it's been a while since they last checked-in on the capabilities of models. They wrote off the coding ability of ChatGPT on version 3.5, for instance, and have missed all the advancements that have happened since. Or they t…

There's three important beliefs at play in the A(G)I story: 1. When(if) AGI will arrive. It's likely going to be smeared out over a couple months to years, but relative to everything else, it's a historical blip. This really is the most contention belief with the most variability. It is currently predicted to be 8 years[1]. 2. What percentage of jobs will be replaceable with AGI? Current estimates between 80-95% of p…

Your only reference [1] is to a page where anybody in the world can join and vote. It literally means absolutely nothing.

For [2] you have no reference whatsoever. How does AI replace a nurse, a vet, a teacher, a construction worker?

Re: AI is different

#763

Post by libraryofbabel »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #734
loandbehold wrote: post #720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand people who say AI isn't useful for coding. Claude Code improved my productivity 10x. I used to put solid 8 hours a day in my remote software engineering job. Now I finish everything in 2 hours and go play with my kids. And my performance is better than before.

I don't understand people who say this. My knee jerk reaction (which I rein in because it's incredibly rude) is always "wow, that person must really suck at programming then". And I try to hold to the conviction that there's another explanation. For me, the vast, vast majority of the time I try to use it, AI slows my work down, it doesn't speed it up. As a result it's incredibly difficult to understand where these su…

Usually the "10x" improvements come from greenfield projects or at least smaller codebases. Productivity improvements on mature complex codebases are much more modest, more like 1.2x.

If you really in good faith want to understand where people are coming from when they talk about huge productivity gains, then I would recommend installing Claude Code (specifically that tool) and asking it to build some kind of small project from scratch. (The one I tried was a small app to poll a public flight API for planes near my house and plot the positions, along with other metadata. I didn't give it the api schema at all. It was still able to make it work.) This will show you, at least, what these tools are capable of -- and not just on toy apps, but also at small startups doing a lot of greenfield work very quickly.

Most of us aren't doing that kind of work, we work on large mature codebases. AI is much less effective there because it doesn't have all the context we have about the codebase and product. Sometimes it's useful, sometimes not. But to start making that tradeoff I do think it's worth first setting aside skepticism and seeing it at its best, and giving yourself that "wow" moment.

Re: AI is different

#764

Post by IX-103 »

cobbzilla wrote: post #564
zarzavat wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why couldn't an AI do all of that? > And I’d bet that the cyborg writers using AI will outcompete the purely AI ones. In the early days of chess engines there were similar hopes for cyborg chess, whereby a human and engine would team up to be better than an engine alone. What actually happened was that the engines quickly got so good that the expected value of human intervention was negative - the engine crunching so…

no matter what you ask AI to do, it’s going to give you an “average“ answer. Even if you tell it to use a very distinct specific voice and write in a very specific tone, it’s going to give you the “average“ specific voice and tone you’ve asked for. AI is the antithesis of creativity and originality. This gives me hope.

That's mostly true of humans though. They almost always give average answers. That works out because 1) most of the work that needs to be done is repetitive, not new so average answers are okay 2) the solution space that has been explored by humans is not convex, so average answers will still hit unexplored territory most of the time

Re: AI is different

#765

Post by drcode »

itsalotoffun wrote: post #136

> The future may reduce the economic prosperity and push humanity to switch to some different economic system (maybe a better system). Markets don’t want to accept that. [Emphasis added] What a silly premise. Markets don't care . All markets do is express the collective opinion; in the short term as a voting machine, in the long term as a weighing machine. Seeing a real uptick of socio-policital prognostication from…

Markets require property rights, property rights require institutions that are dependent on property-rights holders, so that they have incentives to preserve those property rights. When we get to the point where institutions are more dependent on AIs instead of humans, property rights for humans will become inconvenient.

Re: AI is different

#766

Post by gmm1990 »

ludwik wrote: post #749
cmiles74 wrote: post #742

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO, by placing people with a negative attitude toward AI products under the guise "their priors are outdated" you effectively negate any arguments from those people. That is, because their priors are outdated their counterexamples may be dismissed. That is, indeed, the no true Scotsman!

I don’t see a claim that anyone with a negative attitude toward AI shouldn’t be listened to because it automatically means that they formed their opinion on older models. The claim was simply that there’s a large cohort of people who undervalue the capabilities of language models because they formed their views while evaluating earlier versions.

I wouldn’t think gpt5 is any better than the previous chat gpt. I know it’s a silly example but I was trying to trip it up with the 8.6-8.11 and it got it right .49 but then it said the opposite of 8.6 - 8.12 was -.21.

I just don’t see that much of a difference coding either with Claude 4 or Gemini 2.5 pro. Like they’re all fine but the difference isn’t changing anything in what I use them for. Maybe people are having more success with the agent stuff but in my mind it’s not that different than just forking a GitHub repo that already does what you’re “building” with the agent.

Re: AI is different

#767

Post by jkubicek »

resource0x wrote: post #727
Mars008 wrote: post #707

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is another big and growing group: charlatans (influencers). People who don't know much but make bold statements, select 'proof' cases. Just to get attention. There are many of them on youtube. When you someone on thumbnail making faces this is most likely it.

> There are many of them on youtube. Not as many as on HN. "Influencers" have agendas and the stream of income, or other self-interest. HN always comes off as a monolith, on any subject. Counter-arguments get ignored and downvoted to oblivion.

I’m spending a lot of time on LinkedIn because my team is hiring and, boy oh boy, LinkedIn is terminally infested with AI influencers. It’s a hot mess.

Re: AI is different

#768

Post by forgotTheLast »

jdoliner wrote: post #671
gdubs wrote: post #622

AI has been improving at a very rapid pace, which means that a lot of people have really outdated priors. I see this all the time online where people are dismissive about AI in a way that suggests it's been a while since they last checked-in on the capabilities of models. They wrote off the coding ability of ChatGPT on version 3.5, for instance, and have missed all the advancements that have happened since. Or they t…

I feel like I see these two opposite behaviors. People who formed an opinion about AI from an older model and haven't updated it. And people who have an opinion about what AI will be able to do in the future and refuse to acknowledge that it doesn't do that in the present. And often when the two are arguing it's tricky to tell which is which, because whether or not it does something isn't totally black and white, the…

I.e. people who look at f(now) and assume it'll be like this forever against people who look at f'(now) and assume it'll improve like this forever

Re: AI is different

#769

Post by barrell »

ludwik wrote: post #749
cmiles74 wrote: post #742

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO, by placing people with a negative attitude toward AI products under the guise "their priors are outdated" you effectively negate any arguments from those people. That is, because their priors are outdated their counterexamples may be dismissed. That is, indeed, the no true Scotsman!

I don’t see a claim that anyone with a negative attitude toward AI shouldn’t be listened to because it automatically means that they formed their opinion on older models. The claim was simply that there’s a large cohort of people who undervalue the capabilities of language models because they formed their views while evaluating earlier versions.

Yes but almost definitionally that is everyone who did not find value from LLMs. If you don’t find value from LLMs, you’re not going to use them all the time.

The only people you’re excluding are the people who are forced to use it, and the random sampling of people who happened to try it recently.

So it may have been accidental or indirectly, but yes, no true Scotsman would apply to your statement.

Re: AI is different

#770

Post by mattmanser »

libraryofbabel wrote: post #763
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #734

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand people who say this. My knee jerk reaction (which I rein in because it's incredibly rude) is always "wow, that person must really suck at programming then". And I try to hold to the conviction that there's another explanation. For me, the vast, vast majority of the time I try to use it, AI slows my work down, it doesn't speed it up. As a result it's incredibly difficult to understand where these su…

Usually the "10x" improvements come from greenfield projects or at least smaller codebases. Productivity improvements on mature complex codebases are much more modest, more like 1.2x. If you really in good faith want to understand where people are coming from when they talk about huge productivity gains, then I would recommend installing Claude Code (specifically that tool) and asking it to build some kind of small p…

So, I'm doing that right now. You do get wow moments, but then you rapidly hit the WTF are you doing moments.

One of the first three projects I tried was a spin on a to-do app. The buttons didn't even work when clicked.

Yes, I keep it iterating, give it a puppeteer MCP, etc.

I think you're just misunderstanding how hard it is to make a greenfield project when you have a super-charged stack overflow that AI is.

Greenfield projects aren't hard, what's hard is starting them.

What AI has helped me immensely with is blank page syndrome. I get it to spit out some boilerplate for a SINGLE page, then boom, I have a new greenfield project 95% my own code in a couple of days.

That's the mistake I think you 10x ers are making.

And you're all giddy and excited and are putting in a ton of work without realising you're the one doing the work, not the AI.

And you'll eventually burn out on that.

And those of us who are a bit more skeptical are realising we could have done it on our own, faster, we just wouldn't normally have bothered. I'd have gone done some gardening with that time instead.

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