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

My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

fly.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 1001 posts

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#91

Post by kulahan »

retrac wrote: post #3

Machine translation and speech recognition. The state of the art for these is a multi-modal language model. I'm hearing impaired veering on deaf, and I use this technology all day every day. I wanted to watch an old TV series from the 1980s. There are no subtitles available. So I fed the show into a language model (Whisper) and now I have passable subtitles that allow me to watch the show. Am I the only one who remem…

Translation seems like the ideal application. It seems as though an LLM would truly have no issues integrating societal concepts, obscure references, pop culture, and more, and be able to compare it across culture to find a most-perfect translation. Even if it has to spit out three versions to perfectly communicate, it’s still leaps and bounds ahead of traditional translators already.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#92

Post by timewizard »

> You’ll only notice this happening if you watch the chain of thought log your agent generates. Don’t.

"You're nuts!" says the guy with his head intentionally buried in the sand. Also way to tell me your business model is a joke without telling me your business model is a joke. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#93

Post by jsnell »

mjburgess wrote: post #77

Can we get a video of a workday conducted by these people? Unless there's a significant sense of what people are working on, and how LLMs are helping -- there's no point engaging -- there's no detail here. Sure, if your job is to turn out tweaks to a wordpress theme, presumably that's now 10x faster. If its to work on a new in-house electric motor in C for some machine, presumably that's almost entirely unaffected. N…

Not exactly what you're asking for, but https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44159166 from today is not a junior web programmer working through the backlog, and the commit history contains all the prompts.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#94

Post by ghc »

guywithahat wrote: post #28

I develop space-borne systems, so I can't use the best LLM's for ITAR/etc reasons, but this article really makes me feel like I'm missing out. This line in particular makes me wonder if my skills are becoming obsolete for general private industry: > People coding with LLMs today use agents. Agents get to poke around your codebase on their own. They author files directly. They run tools. They compile code, run tests,…

> while people working on DoD contracts will be typing things into vim like a fool

Forget LLMs, try getting Pandas approved. Heck I was told by some AF engineers they were banned from opening Chrome Dev Tools by their security office.

FWIW I think the LLM situation is changing quite fast and they're appearing in some of our contracts. Azure-provided ones, of course.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#95

Post by BeetleB »

retrac wrote: post #3

Machine translation and speech recognition. The state of the art for these is a multi-modal language model. I'm hearing impaired veering on deaf, and I use this technology all day every day. I wanted to watch an old TV series from the 1980s. There are no subtitles available. So I fed the show into a language model (Whisper) and now I have passable subtitles that allow me to watch the show. Am I the only one who remem…

> Machine translation and speech recognition.

Yes, yes and yes!

I tried speech recognition many times over the years (Dragon, etc). Initially they all were "Wow!", but they simply were not good enough to use. 95% accuracy is not good enough.

Now I use Whisper to record my voice, and have it get passed to an LLM for cleanup. The LLM contribution is what finally made this feasible.

It's not perfect. I still have to correct things. But only about a tenth of the time I used to. When I'm transcribing notes for myself, I'm at the point I don't even bother verifying the output. Small errors are OK for my own notes.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#96

Post by ceejayoz »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #71

This happened with the introduction of smartphones too. Every slashdot post had a haughty and upvoted ‘why would i want such a thing!!!’. It was obviously huge. You could see it taking off. Yet a lot of people proudly displayed ignorance and backed each other up on it to the point that discussion around the topic was often drowned out by the opposition to change. Now today it takes minutes of playing with ai coding a…

Sometimes it works that way.

Sometimes it’s more like NFTs.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#97

Post by d--b »

Yeah, and it’s progressing so fast. Singularity is definitely on the table.

Whoever says otherwise should read their own comments from 2 years ago and see how wrong they were about where AI is today.

Not saying singularity will happen for sure, but is it a possibility? Hell yeah.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#98

Post by bawolff »

Sometimes i feel like people who really like AI have a very different experience programming then i do.

They are constantly talking about AI doing all the tedious boilerplate bullshit. Don't get me wrong, some of my code is that too and its not fun. However the pro-AI people talk as if 80% of your day is dealing with that. For me its simply a rare enough occurence that the value proposition isn't that big. If that is the killer app of AI, it just doesn't sound that exciting to me.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#99

Post by ezst »

pie_flavor wrote: post #46

I have one very specific retort to the 'you are still responsible' point. High school kids write lots of notes. The notes frequently never get read, but the performance is worse without them: the act of writing them embeds them into your head. I allegedly know how to use a debugger, but I haven't in years: but for a number I could count on my fingers, nearly every bug report I have gotten I know exactly down to the l…

> The codebase is always new. Everything must be investigated carefully.

That's dreadful. Not only is familiarity with the code not valued, it is impossible to build for your own sake/sanity.

Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#100

Post by kulahan »

capnrefsmmat wrote: post #90

The argument seems to be that for an expert programmer, who is capable of reading and understanding AI agent code output and merging it into a codebase, AI agents are great. Question: If everyone uses AI to code, how does someone become an expert capable of carefully reading and understanding code and acting as an editor to an AI? The expert skills needed to be an editor -- reading code, understanding its implication…

> If everyone uses AI to code, how does someone become an expert

The same way they do now that most code is being copied/integrated from StackOverflow.

Post reply on HN