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Why does AI feel so different?

blog.nilenso.com

81–90 of 105 posts

Re: Why does AI feel so different?

#81

I recently saw a good example of how LLM's can be really useful. A friend of mine, who always found learning difficult, now works as a plumber and installer with his own one-person company. One of his clients is the local community pool. He took over the job from an older man who showed him how everything worked. My friend noticed a lot of inefficient (manual) use of energy and resources, but the previous installer t…

Thanks for this. Lots of people, many amongst us here at HN, are critical of AI and LLMs in general. A lot of it has to do with two things, in my opinion - first, with the amount of money being thrown at it, and second, with the hype around it. Many technical people, myself included, resent money being thrown at a problem rather than finding a proper solution. And we're especially skeptical of the hype cycle, because…

So it works as an advanced search engine. Sometimes, for simpler things.

Do you want that in every device or a lot of them, in every home, every service, for super cheap?

What's the paradigm being shifted here?

Re: Why does AI feel so different?

#82

AI feels different because quietly we are all aware, to differing degrees of comfort, that the world around us is collapsing. We see the escalating effects of climate change impacting day-to-day life in ways we were told would only happen in the far future, witnessing genocide become a normal part of the news critique of which can mean serious personal consequences, we're watching the United States transform into Sta…

China manages to have long term planning. The only planning Trump and co do is planning how to line their own pockets.

A good, albeit controversial, argument in favour of monarchy I’ve heard recently is that a monarch has to plan ahead for decades, if not centuries, to ensure them and their dynasty can keep ruling over a prosperous country.

A democratic politician only has to care about the next 4 years, at best; if any issue requires long-term planning, all you can do is hope it fixes itself.

Re: Why does AI feel so different?

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you familiar with the garnet hype cycle? https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hy... I'm doing everything you're doing and probably more with Claude code (I 'let it run'). I'd say I too have been through a few of the different phases of the gartner hype cycle now. As I said it's a good tool, it's far from being an "auto-pilot".

I don't care about the hype. If you put me in a cave for last 5 years and today gave me Windsurf and told me nothing beyond that a machine does that, I wouldn't believe you. All of it was literally science fiction 5 years ago. This literally replaces a person that I would have to hire to pursue my ideas.

Ok I guess that's where we differ, I don't really find it to be science fiction, the more I use it the system, the more I understand that magic of it, what it's going to do, and I've learned that to get good results, you absolutely have to drive it like almost every other tool.

I guess if anyone went into a cave and came out for 5 years things would be like science fiction. FPV drones on the battlefield would be another example...

As I said earlier, not downplaying it, really just warning you that if you lean to heavy on it without guiding it quite precisely, you will get burned, properly.

All good, we have different opinions.

Re: Why does AI feel so different?

#85

It’s the first revolutionary technology that his first goal is to make money for VC investors instead of really change the world, the perceived benefit for society is just a sub-product of the ponzi scheme behind those VC firms.

[deleted]

Re: Why does AI feel so different?

#87
post #75

It’s the first revolutionary technology that his first goal is to make money for VC investors instead of really change the world, the perceived benefit for society is just a sub-product of the ponzi scheme behind those VC firms.

Not even a revolutionary technology, it's just goind to speed up web searching for those who can't and be a hindrance for those who already do.

That is a great description of it, at least right now.

Re: Why does AI feel so different?

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't care about the hype. If you put me in a cave for last 5 years and today gave me Windsurf and told me nothing beyond that a machine does that, I wouldn't believe you. All of it was literally science fiction 5 years ago. This literally replaces a person that I would have to hire to pursue my ideas.

Ok I guess that's where we differ, I don't really find it to be science fiction, the more I use it the system, the more I understand that magic of it, what it's going to do, and I've learned that to get good results, you absolutely have to drive it like almost every other tool. I guess if anyone went into a cave and came out for 5 years things would be like science fiction. FPV drones on the battlefield would be anot…

FPV drones on the battlefield were absolutely obvious. The only strange thing about it was, and still is, that powerful armies of the biggest players were "nah, I'll pass" on this obvious application. Wedding photographer figured out that you can hit people with drones. Farmers figured out they can carry and release significant payloads. Yet for some reason, generals seen them as toys and preferred to stick with their bombs and artillery shells costing order of magnitude more. We needed a war and soldiers on the contact line to basically start doing this obvious thing out of necessity and demanding supply from commanders.

Computers being able to keep the conversation going about complex topic like development of a computer program were 5 years ago farther away than fusion energy. Perpetually 30 to 100 years away.

Sure, for the best results you need to guide it because without it you'll get some program but not a good program. If you don't help it to control the complexity of the code with sensible architecture it will paint itself into a corner. But a junior developer would also do that if you just piled up requirements and never steered his output.

I agree with you that it's a tool. But more like a combine harvester, that you still need to drive, for now, than a hammer. Already more like a CNC machine than a power drill. And still getting better.

Everyone can have their own opinion on this. But I think next 5 years will change those opinions.

For me it is at least as magical as cell phones. When I was a kid the peek of wireless personal communication was walkie-talkie with a very limited range. The idea that you could cram enough electronics, RF stuff and a battery in a small enough package and route the calls globally with vast networks of two way communication stations seemed absolutely ludicrous. I haven't even seen SMD element before I had my first cellphone and I picked apart a lot of electronics. Then it happened. It was the kind of technology that got me completely surprised, like LLMs. I remember not being that shocked because I was young and was expecting new things. I was reading a lot of SF and there instant wireless communication was everywhere. But after 4 decades of basically no progress in the machines that do anything that resembles thinking this innovation caught me off guard completely. I would be less surprised if we already had fusion reactors providing most of our electricity.

On a more practical note, do you switch a lot the models that you use? I can't really tell them apart because I haven't worked with them all that much but I heard good things about GPT5 and when I used it it was very good (but others, like Claude or swt-1 were great too).

Re: Why does AI feel so different?

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for this. Lots of people, many amongst us here at HN, are critical of AI and LLMs in general. A lot of it has to do with two things, in my opinion - first, with the amount of money being thrown at it, and second, with the hype around it. Many technical people, myself included, resent money being thrown at a problem rather than finding a proper solution. And we're especially skeptical of the hype cycle, because…

So it works as an advanced search engine. Sometimes, for simpler things. Do you want that in every device or a lot of them, in every home, every service, for super cheap? What's the paradigm being shifted here?

Don’t you realize how disingenuous you sound calling AI an “advanced search engine”?

That’s like saying. “So a car is just a better horse, what’s the paradigm being shifted here?”

Re: Why does AI feel so different?

#90

The article keeps referring to "AI" as if it's a coherent, agreed-upon thing. It's not. "AI" is a marketing term that's been applied to whatever happens to look impressive at the moment---right now, that's LLMs. There's no settled definition, no unified discipline, and lumping everything from generative text models to actual robotics under the same label just obscures the discussion. If we're talking about LLMs, let'…

"AI" is a marketing term...

It's also been a coherent academic discipline since at least Turing's 1950 paper introducing the Turing test and with a history going back well beyond that.

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