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AI is different

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Re: AI is different

#791

Post by dmead »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #711
dmead wrote: post #680

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there anything you can tell me that will help me drop the nagging feeling that gradient descent trained models will just never be good? I understand all of what you said, but I can't get over that fact that the term AI is being used for these architectures. It seems like the industry is just trying to do a cool parlor trick in convincing the masses this is somehow AI from science fiction. Maybe I'm being overly cy…

The thing is AI is already "good" for a lot of things. It all depends on your definition of "good" and what you require of an AI model. It can do a lot of things that are generally very effective. High reliability semantic parsing from images is just one thing that modern LLM's are very reliable at.

You're right. I use it for api documentation and showing use cases, especially in languages i don't use often.

but this other attribution people are doing- that it's going to achieve (the marketing term) AGI and everything will be awesome is clearly bullshit.

Re: AI is different

#792

Post by amanaplanacanal »

mdaniel wrote: post #736
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Angela Collier has a hilarious video on tech bros thinking they can be physicists.

Is it this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmJI6qIqURA and, germane to this discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMoz3gSXBcY vibe physics

Yes both of those :)

Re: AI is different

#793

Post by libraryofbabel »

mattmanser wrote: post #770
libraryofbabel wrote: post #763

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Greenf…

I'm not a 10x-er. My job is working on a mature codebase. The results of AI in that situation are mixed, 1.2x if you're lucky.

My recommendation was that it's useful to try the tools on greenfield projects, since they you can see them at their best.

The productivity improvements of AI for greenfield projects are real. It's not all bullshit. It is a huge boost if you're at a small startup trying to find product market fit. If you don't believe that and think it would be faster to do it all manually I don't know what to tell you - go talk to some startup founders, maybe?

Re: AI is different

#794

Post by BobbyTables2 »

I was skeptical of AI for a very long time.

But seeing it in action now makes me seriously question “human intelligence”.

Maybe most of us just aren’t as smart as we think…

Re: AI is different

#795

Post by libraryofbabel »

loandbehold wrote: post #775
libraryofbabel wrote: post #763

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I was able to realize huge productivity gains working on a 20 years old codebase with 2+ million loc, as I mentioned in the sister post. So I disagree that big productivity gains are only on greenfield projects. Realizing productivity gains on mature code based requires more skill and upfront setup. You need to put some work in your claude.md and give Claude tools for accessing necessary data, logs, build process. It…

You should write a blog post on this! We need more discussion of how to get traction on mature codebases and less of the youtube influencers making toy greenfield apps. Of course at a high level it's all going to be "give the model the right context" (in Claude.md etc.) but the devil is in the details.

Re: AI is different

#796

Post by BuckRogers »

ACCount37 wrote: post #409
BuckRogers wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except a car isn’t a human. That’s the mistake Elon Musk made and the same one you’re making here. Not to mention that humans driving with cameras only is absolutely pathetic. The amount of accidents that occur that are completely avoidable doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that all my car needs to be safe and get me to my destination is a couple cameras.

This isn't a "mistake". This is the key problem of getting self-driving to work. Elon Musk is right. You can't cram 20 radars, 50 LIDARs and 100 cameras into a car and declare self-driving solved. No amount of sensors can redeem a piss poor driving AI. Conversely, if you can build an AI that's good enough, then you don't need a lot of sensors. All the data a car needs to drive safely is already there - right in the c…

Multiple things can be true at the same time you realize. Some problems, such as insufficient AI can have a larger effect on safety, but more data to work with as well as train on always wins. You want lidar.

You keep insisting that cameras are good enough, but it’s empirically possible since safe autonomous driving AI has not been achieved yet to say that cameras alone collect enough data.

The minimum setup without lidar would be cameras, radar, ultrasonic, GPS/GNSS + IMU.

Redundancy is key. With lidar, multiple sensors cover each other’s weaknesses. If LiDAR is blinded by fog, radar steps in.

Re: AI is different

#797

Post by research_pie »

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 think one of the issue is also the sheer amount of shilling going on like crypto level

I got a modest tech following and you wouldn’t believe the amount I’m offered to promote the most garbage AI company

Re: AI is different

#798

Post by ansgri »

HellDunkel wrote: post #429

Is it true that current LLMs can find bugs in complex codebases? I mean, they can also find bugs in otherwise perfectly working code

With some luck, yes. I’ve had o3 in cursor successfully diagnose a couple of quite obscure bugs in multithreaded component interactions, on which I’d probably spend a couple of days otherwise.

Re: AI is different

#799

Post by kelseyfrog »

l33tbro wrote: post #786
kelseyfrog wrote: post #784

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretend I'm a farmer in 1850 and I have a belief that the current proportion of jobs in agriculture - 55% of jobs in 1850 would drop to 1.2% in 2022 due to automation and technological advances. Why would hearing "work is central to identity," and "work is the primary social mechanism that distributes status amongst communities," change my mind?

People migrated from the farms to the city. They didn't stop working.

My apologies if you thought I was arguing that a consequence of AGI would be a permanent reduction in the labor force. What I believe is that the baumol effect will take over non-replaceable professions. A very tiny part of our current economy will become the majority of our future economy.

Re: AI is different

#800

Post by lotsoweiners »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #31
yomismoaqui wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't worry about the political leaders, if a sizeable amount of people lose their jobs they will surely ask GPT-10 how to build a guillotine.

The french revolution did not go well for the average french person. Not sure guillotines are the solution we need.

Yeah not guillotines but guns, bombs, and other tools should suffice. Body guards or compounds in Hawaii can help stop a small group but body guards will walk away from the job when thousands of well armed members of an angry mob show up at their employers door.
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