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Artificial intelligence is losing hype

economist.com

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Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#91

Post by stephenitis »

bamboozled wrote: post #76
langcss wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is now "a tool" not "the tool" for finding information. Perplexity and Phind do a good job and DDG is there for the privacy angle. In addition to LLMs just giving you the answer you need.

How on earths name do you use an LLM to find information ? I just don’t get it. For current events it out of date and it confidently feeds me shit ? I might use them occasionally for a rubber ducky but , replacing Google ? Hm

ChatGPT often googles it for me and gives me a summary

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#92

Post by eesmith »

scubadude wrote: post #35

I'm still waiting for the Virtual Reality from 1996 to change the world. Colour me surprised that AI is being found to be 90% hype.

Also from the 1990s, "intelligent agents". Here's what Don Norman wrote in 1994 at https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/176789.176796 :

> The new crop of intelligent agents are different from the automated devices of earlier eras because of their computational power. They have Turing-machine powers, they take over human tasks, and they interact with people in human-like ways-perhaps with a form of natural language, perhaps with animated graphics or video. Some agents have the potential to form their own goals and intentions. to initiate actions on their own without explicit instruction or guidance, and to offer suggestions to people. Thus, agents might set up schedules, reserve hotel and meeting rooms, arrange transportation, and even outline meeting topics, all without human intervention.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#93

Post by spacemanspiff01 »

randcraw wrote: post #83
ChaitanyaSai wrote: post #52

I've trained as a neuroscientist and written a book about consciousness. I've worked in machine learning and built products for over 20 years and now use AI a fair bit in the ed-tech work we do. So I've seen how the field has progressed and also have been able to look at it from a perspective most AI/engineering people don't -- what does this artificial intelligence look like when compared to biological intelligence.…

I've worked in AI for the past 30 years and have seen enthusiasm as robust as yours go bust before. Just because some kinds of narrow AI have done extraordinarily well -- namely those tasks that recognize patterns using connections between FSMs -- does not mean that same mechanisms will continue to scale up to human-level cognition, much less exceed it any time soon. The breakthroughs where deep AI have excelled -- o…

So I am a neophite in this area, but my thesis for why "this time is different" compared to previous AI bubbles is that this time there exist a bunch of clear products (or paths to products) that work and only require what is currently available in terms of technology.

Coding assistants today are useful, image generation is useful, speach recognition/generation is useful.

All of these can support businesses, even in their current (early) state. Those businesses have value in funding even 1% improvements in engineering/science.

I think that this is different than before, where even in the 80s there were less defined products, amd most everything was a prototype that needed just a bit more research to be commercially viable.

Where as in the past, hopes for the technology waned and funding for research dropped off a cliff, today's stuff is useful now, and so companies will continue to spend some amount on the research side.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#94

Post by manuelmoreale »

BeetleB wrote: post #56
PcChip wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kagi. Kagi replaced Google.

Hard to say they replaced them, when they use Google in their backend...

And they have 30K users and serve 600K queries a day while Google serves some 8.5B a day apparently.

Love Kagi but they’re definitely not replacing Google anytime soon.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#95

Post by bamboozled »

spacemanspiff01 wrote: post #93
randcraw wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked in AI for the past 30 years and have seen enthusiasm as robust as yours go bust before. Just because some kinds of narrow AI have done extraordinarily well -- namely those tasks that recognize patterns using connections between FSMs -- does not mean that same mechanisms will continue to scale up to human-level cognition, much less exceed it any time soon. The breakthroughs where deep AI have excelled -- o…

So I am a neophite in this area, but my thesis for why "this time is different" compared to previous AI bubbles is that this time there exist a bunch of clear products (or paths to products) that work and only require what is currently available in terms of technology. Coding assistants today are useful, image generation is useful, speach recognition/generation is useful. All of these can support businesses, even in…

I don't find coding assistants to be very useful. Image generation was fun for a few weeks. Speech recognition is useful.

Anyway, considering all these things can be done on device, where is the long term business prospect of which you speak?

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#96

Post by bufferoverflow »

AI is not one thing at the moment. We have multiple systems that are being developed in parallel:

• text generators

• code generators

• image generators

• video generators

• speech generators

• sound/music generators

• various robotics vision and control systems (often trained in virtual environments)

• automated factories / warehouses / fulfillment centers

• self-driving cars (trucks/planes/trains/boats/bikes/whatever)

• scientific / reasoning / math AIs

• military AIs

I find all of these categories already have useful AIs. And they are getting better all the time. The progress might slow down here and there, but it keeps on going.

Self-driving was pretty bad a year ago, and now we have Tesla FSD driving uninterrupted for multiple hours in complex city environments.

Image generators now exceed 99.9% of humans in painting/drawing abilities.

Text generators are decent. There are hallucination issues, and they are not creative at the best human level, but I'd say they write better than 90% of humans. When it comes to poetry/lyrics, they all still suck pretty badly.

Video generators are in their infancy - we get decent quality, but absolutely mental imagery.

Reasoning is the weakest point, in my opinion. Current gen models are just not good at reasoning. Sometimes they are brilliant, but then they make very silly mistakes that a 10-year old child wouldn't make. You just can't rely on their logical abilities. I have really high hopes for that area. If they can figure out reasoning, our science research will become a lot more reliable and a lot more fast.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#97

Post by cosmicradiance »

zaptrem wrote: post #84
cosmicradiance wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the current state of AI - do you believe it has "intelligence" or is the underlying system a "prediction machine"? What signs do you see that make you believe that the next level (biological intelligence) is on the horizon?

We are but prediction machines https://www.psy.ox.ac.uk/news/the-brain-is-a-prediction-mach...

Wrong. As per the article - a part of our brain is a prediction machine. A human body is more than the sum of its parts.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#98

Post by lemarchr »

bamboozled wrote: post #86
dartos wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've trained as a neuroscientist and written a book about consciousness This has to do with ML and numerical computing, how?

Well I was being sarcastic. I really dislike it when people have to first convince you that you should trust them. Either make a good argument or don’t.

Argument from authority is a pernicious fallacy, and typically effective too. You were right to call it out. I must admit I overlooked the sarcasm, however.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#99

Post by lelanthran »

lemarchr wrote: post #98
bamboozled wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I was being sarcastic. I really dislike it when people have to first convince you that you should trust them. Either make a good argument or don’t.

Argument from authority is a pernicious fallacy, and typically effective too. You were right to call it out. I must admit I overlooked the sarcasm, however.

> I must admit I overlooked the sarcasm, however.

Don't feel too bad; until I read the next response I was in two minds about whether sarcasm was intended or not.

It's bloody hard to tell, sometimes :-/

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#100

Post by lelanthran »

al_borland wrote: post #51
yieldcrv wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve had a lot of corporate clients this year Large and small, entire development teams are completely unaware of the basics of “prompt engineering” for coding, and corporate has an entirely regressive anti-AI policy that doesnt factor in the existence of locally run language models, and just assumes ChatGPT and cloud based ones digesting trade secrets. People arent interested in seeing what the hype is about, and ar…

I was getting a lot of mixed messaging at my job for 6-12 months. On the one hand, we got an email from high up saying not to use Copilot, or other such tools, as they were trying to figure out the licensing. But at the same time, we had the CIO getting up in front of the company every other month talking about nothing but GenAI, and how if we weren’t using it we were stupid (not in those exact words, but that was th…

> It tells the percentage of reports from each manager using it, and how often suggestions are accepted. It seems like the kind of dashboard someone would make if they were planning to give out bonuses based on Copilot adoption.

That's one result. Another result is, due to "checking how often suggestions are accepted" is to objectively record how much help it is providing.

I assume the sitewide license is costly - this could simply be the company's way of determining if the cost is worth it.

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