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I have a masters degree in math/physics, and 10+ years of being a SWE in strong tech companies. I have come to rely on these models (Claude > oai tho) daily. I

I have a masters degree in math/physics, and 10+ years of being a SWE in strong tech companies. I have come to rely on these models (Claude > oai tho) daily. It is insane how helpful it is, it can answer some questions at phd level, most questions at a basic level. It can write code better than most devs I know when prompted correctly... I'm not saying its AGI, but diminishing it to a simple "chat bot" seems foolish to me. It's at least worth studying, and we should be happy they care rather than just ship it?

ernesto95 2y ago
Interesting that the results can be so different for different people. I have yet to get a single good response (in my research area) for anything slightly more complicated than what a quick google search would reveal. I agree that it’s great for generating quick functioning code though.
- shadowmanif 2y ago
  I think the human variable is that you need to know enough to be able to ask the right questions about a subject while not knowing enough about the subject to learn something from the answers. Because of this, I would assume it is better for people who have interest with more breadth than depth and less impressive to those who have interest that are narrow but very deep. It seems obvious to me the polymath gains much more from language models than the single minded subject expert trying to dig the deepest hole. Also, the single minded subject expert is randomly at the mercy of what is in the training data much more in a way than the polymath when all the use is summed up.
- planb 2y ago
  > I have yet to get a single good response (in my research area) for anything slightly more complicated than what a quick google search would reveal. Even then, with search enabled it's ways quicker than a "quick" google search and you don't have to manually skip all the blog-spam.
  - getnormality 2y ago
    Google search was great when it came out too. I wonder what 25 years of enshittification will do to LLM services.
    - kshacker 2y ago
      Enshittification happened but look at how life changed since 1999 (25 years as you mentioned). Songs in your palm, search in your palm, maps in your palm or car dashboard, live traffic rerouting, track your kids plane from home before leaving for airport, book tickets without calling someone. WhatsApp connected more people than anything. Of course there are scams and online indoctrination not denying that. Maybe each service degraded from its original nice view but there is an overall enhancement of our ability to do things. Hopefully the same happens over next 25 years. A few bad things but a lot of good things.
      - ssl-3 2y ago
        I think I had most or all of that functionality in 2009, with Android 2.0 on the OG Motorola Droid. What has Google done for me lately?
    - ALittleLight 2y ago
      But also what new tools will emerge to supplant LLMs as they are supplanting Google? And how good will open source (weights) LLMs be?
    - hackernewds 2y ago
      absurd, the claim that Google search was better 25 years ago than today. that's vastly trivializing the amount of volume and scale that Google needs to process
- amarcheschi 2y ago
  I'm using it to aide in writing pytorch code and God if it's awful except for the basic things. It's a bit more useful in discussing how to do things rather than actually doing them though, I'll give you that
  - astrange 2y ago
    Claude is much better at coding and generally smarter; try it instead. o1-preview was less intelligent than 4o when I tried it, better at multi-step reasoning but worse at "intuition". Don't know about o1.
    - interstice 2y ago
      o1 seems to have some crazy context length / awareness going on compared to current 3.5 Sonnet from playing around it just now. I'm not having to 'remind' it of initial requirements etc nearly as much.
      - astrange 2y ago
        I gave it a try and o1 is better than I was expecting. In particular the writing style is a lot lighter on "GPTisms". It's not very willing to show you its thought process though, the summaries of it seem to skip a lot more than in the preview.
- mmmore 2y ago
  Have you used the best models (i.e. ones you paid for)? And what area? I've found they struggle with obscure stuff so I'm not doubting you just trying to understand the current limitations.
- TiredOfLife 2y ago
  How do you get Google search to give useful results? Often for me the first 20 results have absolutely nothing to do with fhe search query.
- eikenberry 2y ago
  My guess is that it has more to do with the person than the AI.
  - IshKebab 2y ago
    It has a huge amount to do with the subject you're asking it about. His research area could be something very niche with very little info on the open web. Not surprising it would give bad answers. It does exponentially better on subjects that are very present on the web, like common programming tasks.
- richardw 2y ago
  Try turn search on in ChatGPT and see if it picks up the online references? I've seen it hit a few references and then get back to me with info summarised from multiple. That's pretty useful. Obviously your case might be different, if it's not as smart at retrieval.
- kshacker 2y ago
  I have the $20 version, I fed it code form a personal project, and it did a commendable job of critiquing it, giving me alternate solutions and then iterating on those solutions. Not something you can do with Google. For example, ok, I like your code but can you change this part to do this. And it says ok boss and does it. But over multiple days, it loses context. I am hoping to use the 200$ version to complete my personal project over the Christmas holidays. Instead of me spending a week, I maybe will spend 2 days with chatgpt and get a better version than I initially hoped to.
  - blharr 2y ago
    For code review maybe, it's pretty useful. Even with the $20 version I've lost days of work because it's told me ideas/given me solutions that are flat out wrong or misleading but sound reasonable, so I don't know if they're really that effective though.
sixothree 2y ago
The comments in this thread all seem so short sighted. I'm having a hard time understanding this aspect of it. Maybe these are not real people acting in good faith? People are dismissive and not understanding that we very much plan to "hook these things up" and give them access to terminals and APIs. These very much seem to be valid questions being asked.
- mmmore 2y ago
  Not only do we very much plan to, we already do!
- refulgentis 2y ago
  HN is honestly pretty poor on AI commentary, and this post is a new low. Here, at least, I think there must be a large contributing factor of confusion about what a "system card" shows. The general factors I think contribute, after some months being surprised repeatedly: - It's tech, so people commenting here generally assume they understand it, and in day-to-day conversation outside their job, they are considered an expert on it. - It's a hot topic, so people commenting here have thought a lot about it, and thus aren't likely to question their premises when faced with a contradiction. (c.f. the odd negative responses have only gotten more histrionic with time) - The vast majority of people either can't use it at work, or if they are, it's some IT-procured thing that's much more likely to be AWS/gCloud thrown together, 2nd class, APIs, than cutting edge. - Tech line workers have strong antibodies to tech BS being sold by a company as gamechanging advancements, from the last few years of crypto - Probably by far the most important: general tech stubborness. About 1/3 to 1/2 of us believe we know the exact requirements for Good Code, and observing AI doing anything other than that just confirms it's bad. - Writing meta-commentary like this, or trying to find a way to politely communicate "you don't actually know what you're talking about just because you know what an API is and you tried ChatGPT.app for 5 minutes", are confrontational, declasse, and arguably deservedly downvoted. So you don't have any rhetorical devices that can disrupt any of the above factors.
  - verteu 2y ago
    Personally I am cynical because in my experience @ FAANG, "AI safety" is mainly about mitigating PR risk for the company, rather than any actual harm.
dang 2y ago
(this comment was originally a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42331323 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42331323)
Palomides 2y ago
can you give an example of a prompt and response you find impressive?
- nichochar 2y ago
  try the thing i'm building, it will build a website for you from a simple prompt: https://srcbook.com https://srcbook.com
consumer451 2y ago
I am curious if you have played with Claude-based agent tools like Windsurf IDE at all, and if you find that interesting. I am a product-ish guy, who has a basic understanding of SQL, Django, React, Typescript, etc.. and suddenly I'm like an MVP v0.1 a week, all by myself. Do folks at your level find things like Cline, Cursor, and Windsurf useful at all? Windsurf IDE (Sonnet) blows my mind.
- nichochar 2y ago
  I am building https://srcbook.com https://srcbook.com which is in this category but focused on webapps. It's unreal what the AI can do tbh.
  - blharr 2y ago
    It's impressive. I want to be a doubter and say I feel like it just shows what you can do with tailwind/typescript in getting a nice UI out, but it really would be genuinely useful for some cases. The problem I have with it is that how do you get out of a corner with it? Once I start having problems with the application -- I asked it to generate a search engine for different websites, but one of the API endpoints wasn't working. It kept trying over and over again but failed to get it working. It's - like other attempts I've had with AI - more frustrating to work with. It'll say "I fixed this" and then have a problem where it created more problems with what it's fixing. I thought it finally worked 100% but it just made it look better by breaking something else without actually fixing the issue. Admittedly, it took what might have been a day's work into a couple hours, but now I have a chunk of code that I don't understand and will be deliberately harder to understand than if I wrote it myself. It still feels like I'm trying to coax an intern into working a project, rather than having an application that actually does the work for me.
- hackernewds 2y ago
  why windsurf as opposed to something mainstream like vs or cursor? unless there's some conflict of interest
  - 2y ago

ernesto95 2y ago

Interesting that the results can be so different for different people. I have yet to get a single good response (in my research area) for anything slightly more complicated than what a quick google search would reveal. I agree that it’s great for generating quick functioning code though.

shadowmanif 2y ago
I think the human variable is that you need to know enough to be able to ask the right questions about a subject while not knowing enough about the subject to learn something from the answers. Because of this, I would assume it is better for people who have interest with more breadth than depth and less impressive to those who have interest that are narrow but very deep. It seems obvious to me the polymath gains much more from language models than the single minded subject expert trying to dig the deepest hole. Also, the single minded subject expert is randomly at the mercy of what is in the training data much more in a way than the polymath when all the use is summed up.
planb 2y ago
> I have yet to get a single good response (in my research area) for anything slightly more complicated than what a quick google search would reveal. Even then, with search enabled it's ways quicker than a "quick" google search and you don't have to manually skip all the blog-spam.
- getnormality 2y ago
  Google search was great when it came out too. I wonder what 25 years of enshittification will do to LLM services.
  - kshacker 2y ago
    Enshittification happened but look at how life changed since 1999 (25 years as you mentioned). Songs in your palm, search in your palm, maps in your palm or car dashboard, live traffic rerouting, track your kids plane from home before leaving for airport, book tickets without calling someone. WhatsApp connected more people than anything. Of course there are scams and online indoctrination not denying that. Maybe each service degraded from its original nice view but there is an overall enhancement of our ability to do things. Hopefully the same happens over next 25 years. A few bad things but a lot of good things.
    - ssl-3 2y ago
      I think I had most or all of that functionality in 2009, with Android 2.0 on the OG Motorola Droid. What has Google done for me lately?
  - ALittleLight 2y ago
    But also what new tools will emerge to supplant LLMs as they are supplanting Google? And how good will open source (weights) LLMs be?
  - hackernewds 2y ago
    absurd, the claim that Google search was better 25 years ago than today. that's vastly trivializing the amount of volume and scale that Google needs to process
amarcheschi 2y ago
I'm using it to aide in writing pytorch code and God if it's awful except for the basic things. It's a bit more useful in discussing how to do things rather than actually doing them though, I'll give you that
- astrange 2y ago
  Claude is much better at coding and generally smarter; try it instead. o1-preview was less intelligent than 4o when I tried it, better at multi-step reasoning but worse at "intuition". Don't know about o1.
  - interstice 2y ago
    o1 seems to have some crazy context length / awareness going on compared to current 3.5 Sonnet from playing around it just now. I'm not having to 'remind' it of initial requirements etc nearly as much.
    - astrange 2y ago
      I gave it a try and o1 is better than I was expecting. In particular the writing style is a lot lighter on "GPTisms". It's not very willing to show you its thought process though, the summaries of it seem to skip a lot more than in the preview.
mmmore 2y ago
Have you used the best models (i.e. ones you paid for)? And what area? I've found they struggle with obscure stuff so I'm not doubting you just trying to understand the current limitations.
TiredOfLife 2y ago
How do you get Google search to give useful results? Often for me the first 20 results have absolutely nothing to do with fhe search query.
eikenberry 2y ago
My guess is that it has more to do with the person than the AI.
- IshKebab 2y ago
  It has a huge amount to do with the subject you're asking it about. His research area could be something very niche with very little info on the open web. Not surprising it would give bad answers. It does exponentially better on subjects that are very present on the web, like common programming tasks.
richardw 2y ago
Try turn search on in ChatGPT and see if it picks up the online references? I've seen it hit a few references and then get back to me with info summarised from multiple. That's pretty useful. Obviously your case might be different, if it's not as smart at retrieval.
kshacker 2y ago
I have the $20 version, I fed it code form a personal project, and it did a commendable job of critiquing it, giving me alternate solutions and then iterating on those solutions. Not something you can do with Google. For example, ok, I like your code but can you change this part to do this. And it says ok boss and does it. But over multiple days, it loses context. I am hoping to use the 200$ version to complete my personal project over the Christmas holidays. Instead of me spending a week, I maybe will spend 2 days with chatgpt and get a better version than I initially hoped to.
- blharr 2y ago
  For code review maybe, it's pretty useful. Even with the $20 version I've lost days of work because it's told me ideas/given me solutions that are flat out wrong or misleading but sound reasonable, so I don't know if they're really that effective though.

sixothree 2y ago

The comments in this thread all seem so short sighted. I'm having a hard time understanding this aspect of it. Maybe these are not real people acting in good faith? People are dismissive and not understanding that we very much plan to "hook these things up" and give them access to terminals and APIs. These very much seem to be valid questions being asked.

mmmore 2y ago
Not only do we very much plan to, we already do!
refulgentis 2y ago
HN is honestly pretty poor on AI commentary, and this post is a new low. Here, at least, I think there must be a large contributing factor of confusion about what a "system card" shows. The general factors I think contribute, after some months being surprised repeatedly: - It's tech, so people commenting here generally assume they understand it, and in day-to-day conversation outside their job, they are considered an expert on it. - It's a hot topic, so people commenting here have thought a lot about it, and thus aren't likely to question their premises when faced with a contradiction. (c.f. the odd negative responses have only gotten more histrionic with time) - The vast majority of people either can't use it at work, or if they are, it's some IT-procured thing that's much more likely to be AWS/gCloud thrown together, 2nd class, APIs, than cutting edge. - Tech line workers have strong antibodies to tech BS being sold by a company as gamechanging advancements, from the last few years of crypto - Probably by far the most important: general tech stubborness. About 1/3 to 1/2 of us believe we know the exact requirements for Good Code, and observing AI doing anything other than that just confirms it's bad. - Writing meta-commentary like this, or trying to find a way to politely communicate "you don't actually know what you're talking about just because you know what an API is and you tried ChatGPT.app for 5 minutes", are confrontational, declasse, and arguably deservedly downvoted. So you don't have any rhetorical devices that can disrupt any of the above factors.
- verteu 2y ago
  Personally I am cynical because in my experience @ FAANG, "AI safety" is mainly about mitigating PR risk for the company, rather than any actual harm.

dang 2y ago

(this comment was originally a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42331323 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42331323)

Palomides 2y ago

can you give an example of a prompt and response you find impressive?

nichochar 2y ago
try the thing i'm building, it will build a website for you from a simple prompt: https://srcbook.com https://srcbook.com

consumer451 2y ago

I am curious if you have played with Claude-based agent tools like Windsurf IDE at all, and if you find that interesting. I am a product-ish guy, who has a basic understanding of SQL, Django, React, Typescript, etc.. and suddenly I'm like an MVP v0.1 a week, all by myself. Do folks at your level find things like Cline, Cursor, and Windsurf useful at all? Windsurf IDE (Sonnet) blows my mind.

nichochar 2y ago
I am building https://srcbook.com https://srcbook.com which is in this category but focused on webapps. It's unreal what the AI can do tbh.
- blharr 2y ago
  It's impressive. I want to be a doubter and say I feel like it just shows what you can do with tailwind/typescript in getting a nice UI out, but it really would be genuinely useful for some cases. The problem I have with it is that how do you get out of a corner with it? Once I start having problems with the application -- I asked it to generate a search engine for different websites, but one of the API endpoints wasn't working. It kept trying over and over again but failed to get it working. It's - like other attempts I've had with AI - more frustrating to work with. It'll say "I fixed this" and then have a problem where it created more problems with what it's fixing. I thought it finally worked 100% but it just made it look better by breaking something else without actually fixing the issue. Admittedly, it took what might have been a day's work into a couple hours, but now I have a chunk of code that I don't understand and will be deliberately harder to understand than if I wrote it myself. It still feels like I'm trying to coax an intern into working a project, rather than having an application that actually does the work for me.
hackernewds 2y ago
why windsurf as opposed to something mainstream like vs or cursor? unless there's some conflict of interest
- 2y ago