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Artificial intelligence is losing hype

economist.com

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Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#771

Post by martin82 »

arcticbull wrote: post #486
aussieguy1234 wrote: post #469

If anything, i'm getting more hyped up over time. Here are the things i've used LLMs for, with success in all areas as a solo technical founder. Business Advice including marketing, reaching out to investors, understanding SAFE notes (follow up questions after watching the Y Combinator videos), customer interview design. All of which, as an engineer, I had never done before. Create SQL queries for all kinds of busine…

> 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.

That's actually an awesome feature!

It means that you are working on something that no one else has ever done before...

...or you aren't able to describe your problem correctly.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#772

Post by ummonk »

j-a-a-p wrote: post #224
ummonk wrote: post #13

Whether and to what extent AI can be monetized is an open question. But there's no question that LLMs are already seeing extensive use in everyday office work and already making large improvements to productivity.

The article suggests the contrary: 4.8% use in US companies, down from 5.4%. (I would wish I would have gotten these numbers, but for a tech company founded in 2015 these are not remarkable).

Most of the other 95% of companies that say they aren’t using AI to produce goods or services will still have many employees who’re using LLM services for help drafting emails, documents, reports, etc.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#773

Post by ummonk »

hatefulmoron wrote: post #20
ummonk wrote: post #13

Whether and to what extent AI can be monetized is an open question. But there's no question that LLMs are already seeing extensive use in everyday office work and already making large improvements to productivity.

> But there's no question that LLMs are already seeing extensive use in everyday office work and already making large improvements to productivity. Are you referencing something specific here, or is there something you can link to? To be honest the only significant 'disruption' I've seen for LLMs so far has been cheating on homework assignments. I'd be happy to read something if you have it.

It’s purely anecdotal on my part but I have an ever increasing proportion of nontechnical acquaintances telling me how they discovered they can use ChatGPT to save large amounts of time drafting emails, writing reports, etc. (something which is a major part of work duties for many average office workers).

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#774

Post by mewpmewp2 »

zarzavat wrote: post #619
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?

What language do you use? If you can beat copilot in a typing race then you’re probably well within your comfort zone. It works best when working on things that you’re less confident at - typing speed doesn’t matter when you have to stop to think.

I do 120wpm, but still copilot outpaces me, and it is not just typing, it is the little things I don't have to think about. Of course I know how to do all of it, but it still takes some mental energy to come up with algorithms and code. It takes less energy to verify what copilot output at least to me.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#775

Post by mewpmewp2 »

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…

At least for now it seems more like a multiplier that wouldn't reduce the amount of work out there, possibly even increase demand in certain cases as digitisation becomes easier so projects that weren't worth to do before will be now and more complicated usecases will open up as well.

So same programmer with the same 8h of workday will be able to output more value.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#776

Post by CLiED »

Calavar wrote: post #359
_acco wrote: post #207

AI (specifically Claude Sonnet via Cursor) has completely transformed my workflow. It's changed my job description as a programmer. (And I've been doing this for 13y – no greenhorn!) This wasn't the case with GPT-4/o. This capability is very new. When I spoke to a colleague at Microsoft about these changes, they were floored. Microsoft has made themselves synonymous with AI, yet their company is barely even leveragin…

I feel like I'm living in a different universe sometimes. The consensus on HN seems to be that you can be pretty productive with LLMs as coding assistants, but every time I try I find it borderline impossible to get functional code even for pretty straightforward prompts. I decided to fire up GPT-4o again today to see if maybe things have gotten better over the past few months. I asked GPT to write code to render a t…

If your productivity is near-null, LLMs can make you 100x more productive.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#777

Post by andyjda »

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 see this pattern a lot, and I find it telling:

- someone claims that Gen AI is overhyped

- someone responds with a Gen AI-enabled service that is

    1) really impressive

    2) is currently offered pretty much for free

    3) doesn't have that many tangible benefits.
There's many technologies for which it's very easy to answer "how does it improve life of an average person": the desktop, the internet, the iPhone. I don't think Udio is anything like these. Long-term, how profitable do you expect a Udio-like application to be? Who would pay money to use this service?

It's just hard to imagine how you can turn this technology into a valuable product. Which isn't to say it's impossible: gen-AI is definitely quite capable and people are learning how to integrate it into products that can turn a profit. But @futureshock's point was that it is the AI investment bubble that's losing hype, and I think that's inevitable: people are realizing there are many issues with a technology that is super impressive but hard to productize.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#778

Post by fuzztester »

xenic wrote: post #661
fuzztester wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>when they replied almost immediately after with a video of the relevant workflow Wow. Such wrong claims. I had already replied to you in a sibling comment, refuting your points, but will give one more proof (not that I really need to): _acco, the top level commenter relevant to this discussion, commented at some time, say x. layer8 commented, replying to _acco, 7 hours ago (as can be seen on the page at the time of…

2 hours in a discussion forum, where the discussion spans days or sometimes weeks is certainly an ”almost immediate” response. Perception of time is subjective.

Err ... you realize that your argument just shot itself in both left feet?

I just love it (not!, but it happens every now and then) when HN users display ignorance of basic logic, on a site for techies, yet.

I could use your own argument against you:

>is certainly an ”almost immediate” response

>Perception of time is subjective.

So, you use "certainly", and then "subjective", just after it, in the same argument about the same topic?

Brilliant. Do you not realize that by your last sentence above, you make my own case for me?

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#779

Post by ziml77 »

torginus wrote: post #532
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…

Absolutely the same for me. Whenever I encounter a problem I'm pretty sure nobody else has encountered before (or has not written about it at least), ChatGPT writes complete nonsense. On stuff that's a bit obscure, but not really (like your Vulkan example), ChatGPT tends to write 60-95% correct code, that's flawed in the exact ways a noob wouldn't be able to fix. In this case, nicking code from Github seems to fix th…

> Then comes the licensing issue. Often, when searching for an obscure topic, the code ChatGPT generates is very close to what's found on Github, but said code often comes with a non-permissive license, unlike what the AI generates.

I think this is a feature for a lot of people. ChatGPT can launder code so they don't have to care about licenses.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#780

Post by fuzztester »

andrewflnr wrote: post #691
fuzztester wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>when they replied almost immediately after with a video of the relevant workflow Wow. Such wrong claims. I had already replied to you in a sibling comment, refuting your points, but will give one more proof (not that I really need to): _acco, the top level commenter relevant to this discussion, commented at some time, say x. layer8 commented, replying to _acco, 7 hours ago (as can be seen on the page at the time of…

I meant immediately after your reply. At the time I posted, your and acco_'s replies to layer8 both showed as "3 hours" ago. Now they both show as "13 hours ago". Really, I'm being generous in assuming they didn't reply before you. Ed: ah, since the time I wrote this comment, your respective comments are now at 14 and 13 hours. Congrats on your <1hr lead.

By god, andrewflnr. Very "nice". /s. See point 4 below.

You just showed that you are inaccurate, pompous and fake, all of that, in one single comment of yours, above. How? I'll tell you:

1. inaccurate: That commenter's username (the one who started this subthread) is _acco, not acco_ as you wrote above.

Check that in their comment, or here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=_acco

I was careful to check the spelling before mentioning their name, unlike you, even when I referred to them earlier. The fact that you cannot even get the position of an underscore in a name, correct, seems to indicate that you are sloppy. which leads me to my next point.

2. pompous:

You said:

>Really, I'm being generous in assuming they didn't reply before you.

This is the pompous bit. Generous? Laughable.

I neither need not want your generosity. If anything, I prefer objectivity, and that people give others the benefit of the doubt, instead of assuming bad intentions by them: I had actually checked for a second comment by _acco (in reply to layer8) just before I wrote my comment to layer8, the one that got all of you in a tizzy. But you not only got the times wrong (see your edit, and point 3 below), but also assumed bad faith on my part.

3. fake.

You first said above that both those replies to layer8 showed as 13 hours ago, then edited your comment to say 14 and 13 hours. It shows that you don't use your brains. The feature of software showing time deltas in the form of "hours ago" or "days ago", versus an exact time stamp, is pretty old by now. It dates back to Web 2.0 or earlier, maybe it was started by some Web 2 startups or by Google.

If you think you are so clever as to criticize me without proof, or say that you are generous in your assumptions about me, you should have been equally clever or generous about the time delta point above, and so realized that I could have replied to layer8 before _acco, which was indeed the case. Obviously I cannot prove it, but the fact that I got _acco's name correct, while you did not, lends credence to my statement. It shows that I took care while writing my comment.

4. So you are fake because you don't bother to think before bad-mouthing others, and even more fake because you did not apply (to yourself) your own made-up "rule" in this other comment of yours, where you criticized my comment as being neither smart nor nice, so not of value:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41310460

I should not have had to write such a long comment to refute your silly and false allegations, and I will not always do that, but decided to do it this time, to make the point.

And, wow: you managed to pack 3 blunders (being inaccurate, pompous and fake) into a comment of just a few lines. That's neither smart not nice. Instead, it's toxic.

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