Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

pcgamer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 228 posts

Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

#81

Post by madcaptenor »

taude wrote: post #77
lazide wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will often literally just make up the documentation. If you ask for a link, it may hallucinate the link. And unlike a search engine where someone had to previously think of, and then make some page with the fake content on it, it will happily make it up on the fly so you'll end up with a new/unique bit of fake documentation/url! At that point, you would have been way better off just... using a search engine?

how is it hallucinating links? The links are direct links to the webpage that they vectorized or whatever as input to the LLM query. In fact, on almost all LLM responses DuckDuckGo and Google, the links are right there as sited sources that you click on (i know because I'm almost always clicking on the source link to read the original details, and not the made up one

I would imagine links can be hallucinated because the original URLs in the training data get broken up into tokens - so it's not hard to come up with a URL that has the right format (say https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.01234 - which is a real paper but I just made up that URL) and a plausible-sounding title.

Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

#83

Post by coffeefirst »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #79
coffeefirst wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a personal budget app and every so often I try and get the latest model to compare my data against the statements and find any discrepancies. Every time it hallucinates visits to Starbucks. I never go to Starbucks, it’s just a probable finding given the words in the question. This should work. I want it to work. But until it can do this correctly all analysis capabilities should be suspect.

Maybe it's the model you are using. Even a year ago I had success with Claude giving it a photo of my credit card bill and asking it to give me repeating category subtotals, and it flawlessly OCR'd it and wrote a Python program to do as asked, giving me the output. I'd imagine if you asked it to do a comparison to something else it'd also write code to do it, so get it right (and certainly would if you explicity aske…

Maybe. But it’s always Claude. I even tried copying the text in directly to take OCR out of consideration. It still didn’t work very well.

Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

#84

Post by croon »

Gazoche wrote: post #78

Evangelists keep insisting that healthcare is one of the things that AI will revolutionize in the coming years, but I just don't get it. To me it's not even clear what they mean by "AI" in this context (and I'm not convinced it's clear to them either). If they mean "machine learning", then sure there are application in cancer detection and the like, but development there has been moving at a steady pace for decades a…

The most statistically likely output given your diligently described symtoms could still be useful. The prohibitive cost in healthcare in general is likely your time with your doctor. If you could "consult" with a dumb LLM beforehand and give the doctor a couple of different venues to look at that they can then shoot down or further explore could likely save time rather than them having to prod you for exhaustive binary tree exploring.

This from a huge LLM skeptic in general. It doesn't have to be right all the time if it in aggregate saves time doctors can spend diagnosing you.

Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

#85

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

Interesting statement coming from Nadella - almost that AI is a solution looking for a problem, or at least looking for a problem that justifies the cost in terms of the resources (energy, memory chips, fab capacity) it is sucking up, not to mention looming societal disruption.

There obviously are some compelling use cases for "AI", but it's certainly questionable if any of those are really making people's lives any better, especially if you take "AI" to mean LLMs and fake videos, not more bespoke uses like AlphaFold which is not only beneficial, but also not a resource hog.

Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

#86

Post by wosined »

croon wrote: post #84
Gazoche wrote: post #78

Evangelists keep insisting that healthcare is one of the things that AI will revolutionize in the coming years, but I just don't get it. To me it's not even clear what they mean by "AI" in this context (and I'm not convinced it's clear to them either). If they mean "machine learning", then sure there are application in cancer detection and the like, but development there has been moving at a steady pace for decades a…

The most statistically likely output given your diligently described symtoms could still be useful. The prohibitive cost in healthcare in general is likely your time with your doctor. If you could "consult" with a dumb LLM beforehand and give the doctor a couple of different venues to look at that they can then shoot down or further explore could likely save time rather than them having to prod you for exhaustive bin…

Such "AI" has already existed for decades. Look up expert systems.

Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

#87

Post by Gazoche »

croon wrote: post #84
Gazoche wrote: post #78

Evangelists keep insisting that healthcare is one of the things that AI will revolutionize in the coming years, but I just don't get it. To me it's not even clear what they mean by "AI" in this context (and I'm not convinced it's clear to them either). If they mean "machine learning", then sure there are application in cancer detection and the like, but development there has been moving at a steady pace for decades a…

The most statistically likely output given your diligently described symtoms could still be useful. The prohibitive cost in healthcare in general is likely your time with your doctor. If you could "consult" with a dumb LLM beforehand and give the doctor a couple of different venues to look at that they can then shoot down or further explore could likely save time rather than them having to prod you for exhaustive bin…

Sure, but what confidence do you have that what the "dumb" LLM says is worth any salt ? It's no different than aggregating the results of a Reddit search, or perhaps even worse because LLMs lack the intent or common sense filter of a human. It could be combining two contradicting sources in a way that only makes sense statistically, or regurgitate joke answers without understanding context (the infamous "you should eat at least one small rock per day").

Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

#90

Post by agentultra »

cptaj wrote: post #31
agentultra wrote: post #12

> … it amplifies your cognitive abilities… And yet studies show the opposite [0]. [0] https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt...

Study. Not studies. And with very limited methodology.

There’s enough going on to call out Satya here for hyping up a nothing burger. It’s not as world-changing as he makes it sound or else he wouldn’t be imploring people to find a use for it.

His bottom line depends on this bet that everyone is going to depend on AI and pay Microslop rent to use it.

https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?q=cognitive+effects+of+ai+...

Post reply on HN