7 ms·

AI-first – We're just 6 months away from AGI

23 points by rednafi 1y ago

29athrowaway 1y ago
No, we are not. Pretrained models do not learn from their prompts. Their state is volatile.
- cnity 1y ago
  Read the article: it is criticizing the claim.
  - 29athrowaway 1y ago
    Me too.
- Flemlo 1y ago
  We do the same thing. We have long term memory and short term. Context is short term. The still long and expensive training phase embeds the long term memory.
  - queenkjuul 1y ago
    What we do may be analogous but absolutely not the same
    - Flemlo 1y ago
      Yes if course after all ML and LLM are not made out of brain. But do I really have to say colloquial?
  - AnimalMuppet 1y ago
    Hmm, interesting. One of the problems programmers have is loading a problem into working memory. It can take an hour. An interruption, a phone call, or a meeting can mean that you have to start over (or, if not completely over, you still have to redo part of it). This is a standard programmer complaint about interruptions. It's interesting that LLMs may have a similar issue.
  - 29athrowaway 1y ago
    We do not do the same thing. Right now inference doesn't cascade into training. In biology, inference and training are not so decoupled.
creesch 1y ago
Did you drop that ";-)" from the title because you want to showcase how few people actually read articles posted on HN and just respond to titles. Or did you not read further yourself and didn't even notice it? :P
- rednafi 1y ago
  Yeah I dropped it thinking HN might not allow it :)
  - creesch 1y ago
    Oef, well that is surely going to influence how people interact (or skip) the article.
- throwaway314155 1y ago
  Probably got automatically trimmed off by HN's title-fixer thing.
  - creesch 1y ago
    Either way, it removes an important bit of context. Without the it, it seems exactly like one of those over the top hyped claims the article is critical about. It's going to be interesting what sort of comments this will draw in then.
- keybored 1y ago
  > because you want to showcase how few people actually read articles posted on HN and just respond to titles. Making a misleading title in order to bait responses would be clickbait. People responding to a title that assertively states something is not some amazing gotcha. Although in this case it must be what the sibling comment said about HN stripping the smiley.
- Kiro 1y ago
  I think the article is way more bullish on AI than what the ";-)" and you imply.
FranzFerdiNaN 1y ago
Wonder how many people are only going to read the headline, because it isnt claiming that AGI is coming in 6 months at all.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- nottorp 1y ago
  I just thought "AGI will be coming in 6 months every month from now on, until the peddlers run out of suckers^H^H^H investors. And of course I skipped the article.
  - creesch 1y ago
    Not saying that you should read the article, but for some context the actual title as ";-)" at the end. Which for some reason is removed here, that should give you a clue that it actually isn't making such claims.
fennecfoxy 1y ago
Revontulet is my favourite myth. The fire fox of the northern lights. There's lots of great stories and animations of the myth, like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN5goxeTfjc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN5goxeTfjc
- rednafi 1y ago
  My favourite kind of bikeshedding :D
mrweasel 1y ago
That's pretty much my take. LLMs aren't a bad idea, they are useful, in certain fields, but they aren't living up to the sales pitch and they are to expensive to run. My personal take is that the whole chat based interface is a mistake. I have no better solution, but for anything beyond a halluciating search engine, it's not really the way we need to interact with AI. In my mind we're 6 months away from one of the biggest crashes in tech history.
- Flemlo 1y ago
  The AI hype also made voice to text and text to voice a lot better. It's not just chat. But I really enjoy the Claude or chatgpt chat UI. I'm not sure what your problem with that UI is tbh? I don't think there will be any crash soon. I'm hoping for lower prices but I can't imagine not having these tools available anymore. I'm also waiting for better and cheaper support for local development and inferencing. I'm waiting left and right for a lot of smaller things. Like cheaper Claude, Hardware LLM chips, secure integration of my bank account and other personal data. More capacity for the beta projects of coding agents.
  - rvnx 1y ago
    It would feel like a regression to not have access to such tools, models like Claude are really useful on a day-to-day basis (not only for programming, but for any question you have in life where you would typically use Google and read yourself a lot of information). We don't need AGI to have increased productivity and benefits. If it would be _that_ useless, half a billion people wouldn't use such tools every week (and this is not even counting Chinese users). I think many hate LLMs because they realize that it starts to eat their bread and butter and are already taking their job and find it difficult to accept. Investors are over-paying, because they are betting on companies that can be outpaced by others, but the technology itself is here to stay and grow, until it can do more and more tasks that are done by humans. It doesn't mean that LLMs and other AI tools are going to run completely alone anytime soon (maybe with cars first ?), but eventually it could be. What will be the world in 10 or 20 years from now ?
  - mrweasel 1y ago
Flemlo 1y ago
Don't compare Bitcoin and the Meta verse with ai. Millions of people use LLMs daily. Veo 3 just came out. People get fired due to LLMs and GenAI replacing them. Google uses ai code for years in the background. Playing around with cursor for a few days is way to naive to be able to determine the current situation with coding and ai
- mrweasel 1y ago
  > People get fired due to LLMs and GenAI replacing them. Serious question: Are they? Or are they being fired and AI is used at the excuse? We saw Klarna layoff customer services staff and that didn't work. LLMs couldn't do their job. Some programmers are being fired, but my feeling is that generative AI is more of a convenient excuse. Is anyone actually being fired because an LLM did their job better, or where their job already in danger and AI just gave the companies an easy way out?
  - rsynnott 1y ago
    Yeah, it’s largely this. If a company wants to lay people off, AI magic is a better way to sell that to investors than “we’re not doing enough business to need all these people” or “we’re going to invest less in product development” or whatever. Those are bad things.
dgb23 1y ago
> For a good 12 hours, over the course of 1 1/2 days, I tried to prompt it such that it yields what we needed. Eventually, I noticed that my prompts converged more and more to be almost the code I wanted. After still not getting a working result, I ended up implementing it myself in less than 30 minutes. This is very common. We need a name for this phenomenon. Any analogies/metaphors? I generated (huh!) some suggestions and the funniest one seems to be: > Just One More Prompt Syndrome (JOMPS) But I assume there's a better one that describes or hints at the irony that describing precisely what a program should be doing _is_ programming.
- rvnx 1y ago
  Could be that some people are not familiar with the limitations of LLMs and what to expect from them, and could benefit from learning how to properly do prompting, before outright rejecting them. The LLMs are sometimes frustrating, but over time you learn how to drive them properly, exactly like when you learn how to use the right keywords on Google. Also, considering he is a free user, the author might be using one the default models ("auto" -> o4-mini or gpt-4o, rarely Claude Sonnet/Opus 3) in Cursor -> Both of them are rather weak, especially with the automatic context splitting that Cursor does to save money Claude Code + Opus 4 would likely yield better results here.
  - rednafi 1y ago
    > Also, considering he is a free user, the author might be using one the default models ("auto" -> o4-mini or gpt-4o, rarely Claude Sonnet/Opus 3) in Cursor I wonder where you got the free user info.
    - rvnx 1y ago
      Possibly, though the context strongly suggests someone discovering Cursor. It's also possible that someone shared their account with him and that could explain the "30-minute thinking time" (the free slow requests).
  - Chinjut 1y ago
    Just use the right prompt. Just use the right model. Just roll the dice correctly.
sircasss 1y ago
[dead]
rednafi 1y ago
Not saying people should read the article, but it's a short one and hides some nuanced points behind an ambiguous title. Probably intentional. I liked how it showed plenty of examples of scaleups getting egg-faced after overpromising AI capabilities. LLMs are useful, but still too costly to run and too error-prone to be let loose on anything mission-critical. I use these tools daily, but that doesn't mean I want AI rammed down my throat at every turn. A few of my favorite tech authors and OSS contributors have gone full AI-parrot mode lately. Everything they post is either "how they use AI," "how amazing it is," or "how much it sucks." I think a bunch of us have had enough and just want to move on. But try saying anything even slightly critical about AI, or about how the big companies are forcing it into everything in the name of “progress,” and suddenly you're a Luddite. I'm just glad more folks in the trenches are tired of the noise too and are starting to call it out.
onion2k 1y ago
Google didn’t make books obsolete. I don't think anyone expected it to make all books obsolete, but you'd struggle to buy an encyclopaedia that isn't for kids these days.
6510 1y ago
I gave copilot a screenshot of my work schedule 3 times. The first time it extracted the data flawlessly and organized it the way I asked. The second time it did everything wrong until I talked it though the process in tiny steps. The 3rd time I've asked it to repeat the same steps for the new schedule and it got it wrong just like the initial second attempt. I then tried to talk it though the process step by step and it got everything wrong!? With each step it messed up things it got right the step before. It eventually asked me to upload the image again. I suppose I could upload the image to a table to json website and provide copilot with the json but the point was to make things easier. In my mind there is nothing complicated about the structure of a table but if I ask copilot to merely extract the text from a row starting with some text it goes insane. Optical character recognition is an idea from 1870 and they had working implementations 50 years ago. I read a bunch of comments online about models getting progressively worse but my experience was over the span of a few weeks. Would they be doctoring with the quality to make newer models look even better?

23 points by rednafi 1y ago

29athrowaway 1y ago

No, we are not. Pretrained models do not learn from their prompts. Their state is volatile.

cnity 1y ago
Read the article: it is criticizing the claim.
- 29athrowaway 1y ago
  Me too.
Flemlo 1y ago
We do the same thing. We have long term memory and short term. Context is short term. The still long and expensive training phase embeds the long term memory.
- queenkjuul 1y ago
  What we do may be analogous but absolutely not the same
  - Flemlo 1y ago
    Yes if course after all ML and LLM are not made out of brain. But do I really have to say colloquial?
- AnimalMuppet 1y ago
  Hmm, interesting. One of the problems programmers have is loading a problem into working memory. It can take an hour. An interruption, a phone call, or a meeting can mean that you have to start over (or, if not completely over, you still have to redo part of it). This is a standard programmer complaint about interruptions. It's interesting that LLMs may have a similar issue.
- 29athrowaway 1y ago
  We do not do the same thing. Right now inference doesn't cascade into training. In biology, inference and training are not so decoupled.

creesch 1y ago

Did you drop that ";-)" from the title because you want to showcase how few people actually read articles posted on HN and just respond to titles. Or did you not read further yourself and didn't even notice it? :P

rednafi 1y ago
Yeah I dropped it thinking HN might not allow it :)
- creesch 1y ago
  Oef, well that is surely going to influence how people interact (or skip) the article.
throwaway314155 1y ago
Probably got automatically trimmed off by HN's title-fixer thing.
- creesch 1y ago
  Either way, it removes an important bit of context. Without the it, it seems exactly like one of those over the top hyped claims the article is critical about. It's going to be interesting what sort of comments this will draw in then.
keybored 1y ago
> because you want to showcase how few people actually read articles posted on HN and just respond to titles. Making a misleading title in order to bait responses would be clickbait. People responding to a title that assertively states something is not some amazing gotcha. Although in this case it must be what the sibling comment said about HN stripping the smiley.
Kiro 1y ago
I think the article is way more bullish on AI than what the ";-)" and you imply.

FranzFerdiNaN 1y ago

Wonder how many people are only going to read the headline, because it isnt claiming that AGI is coming in 6 months at all.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
nottorp 1y ago
I just thought "AGI will be coming in 6 months every month from now on, until the peddlers run out of suckers^H^H^H investors. And of course I skipped the article.
- creesch 1y ago
  Not saying that you should read the article, but for some context the actual title as ";-)" at the end. Which for some reason is removed here, that should give you a clue that it actually isn't making such claims.

fennecfoxy 1y ago

Revontulet is my favourite myth. The fire fox of the northern lights. There's lots of great stories and animations of the myth, like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN5goxeTfjc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN5goxeTfjc

rednafi 1y ago
My favourite kind of bikeshedding :D

mrweasel 1y ago

That's pretty much my take. LLMs aren't a bad idea, they are useful, in certain fields, but they aren't living up to the sales pitch and they are to expensive to run. My personal take is that the whole chat based interface is a mistake. I have no better solution, but for anything beyond a halluciating search engine, it's not really the way we need to interact with AI. In my mind we're 6 months away from one of the biggest crashes in tech history.

Flemlo 1y ago
The AI hype also made voice to text and text to voice a lot better. It's not just chat. But I really enjoy the Claude or chatgpt chat UI. I'm not sure what your problem with that UI is tbh? I don't think there will be any crash soon. I'm hoping for lower prices but I can't imagine not having these tools available anymore. I'm also waiting for better and cheaper support for local development and inferencing. I'm waiting left and right for a lot of smaller things. Like cheaper Claude, Hardware LLM chips, secure integration of my bank account and other personal data. More capacity for the beta projects of coding agents.
- rvnx 1y ago
  It would feel like a regression to not have access to such tools, models like Claude are really useful on a day-to-day basis (not only for programming, but for any question you have in life where you would typically use Google and read yourself a lot of information). We don't need AGI to have increased productivity and benefits. If it would be _that_ useless, half a billion people wouldn't use such tools every week (and this is not even counting Chinese users). I think many hate LLMs because they realize that it starts to eat their bread and butter and are already taking their job and find it difficult to accept. Investors are over-paying, because they are betting on companies that can be outpaced by others, but the technology itself is here to stay and grow, until it can do more and more tasks that are done by humans. It doesn't mean that LLMs and other AI tools are going to run completely alone anytime soon (maybe with cars first ?), but eventually it could be. What will be the world in 10 or 20 years from now ?
- mrweasel 1y ago

Flemlo 1y ago

Don't compare Bitcoin and the Meta verse with ai. Millions of people use LLMs daily. Veo 3 just came out. People get fired due to LLMs and GenAI replacing them. Google uses ai code for years in the background. Playing around with cursor for a few days is way to naive to be able to determine the current situation with coding and ai

mrweasel 1y ago
> People get fired due to LLMs and GenAI replacing them. Serious question: Are they? Or are they being fired and AI is used at the excuse? We saw Klarna layoff customer services staff and that didn't work. LLMs couldn't do their job. Some programmers are being fired, but my feeling is that generative AI is more of a convenient excuse. Is anyone actually being fired because an LLM did their job better, or where their job already in danger and AI just gave the companies an easy way out?
- rsynnott 1y ago
  Yeah, it’s largely this. If a company wants to lay people off, AI magic is a better way to sell that to investors than “we’re not doing enough business to need all these people” or “we’re going to invest less in product development” or whatever. Those are bad things.

dgb23 1y ago

> For a good 12 hours, over the course of 1 1/2 days, I tried to prompt it such that it yields what we needed. Eventually, I noticed that my prompts converged more and more to be almost the code I wanted. After still not getting a working result, I ended up implementing it myself in less than 30 minutes. This is very common. We need a name for this phenomenon. Any analogies/metaphors? I generated (huh!) some suggestions and the funniest one seems to be: > Just One More Prompt Syndrome (JOMPS) But I assume there's a better one that describes or hints at the irony that describing precisely what a program should be doing _is_ programming.

rvnx 1y ago
Could be that some people are not familiar with the limitations of LLMs and what to expect from them, and could benefit from learning how to properly do prompting, before outright rejecting them. The LLMs are sometimes frustrating, but over time you learn how to drive them properly, exactly like when you learn how to use the right keywords on Google. Also, considering he is a free user, the author might be using one the default models ("auto" -> o4-mini or gpt-4o, rarely Claude Sonnet/Opus 3) in Cursor -> Both of them are rather weak, especially with the automatic context splitting that Cursor does to save money Claude Code + Opus 4 would likely yield better results here.
- rednafi 1y ago
  > Also, considering he is a free user, the author might be using one the default models ("auto" -> o4-mini or gpt-4o, rarely Claude Sonnet/Opus 3) in Cursor I wonder where you got the free user info.
  - rvnx 1y ago
    Possibly, though the context strongly suggests someone discovering Cursor. It's also possible that someone shared their account with him and that could explain the "30-minute thinking time" (the free slow requests).
- Chinjut 1y ago
  Just use the right prompt. Just use the right model. Just roll the dice correctly.

sircasss 1y ago

[dead]

rednafi 1y ago

Not saying people should read the article, but it's a short one and hides some nuanced points behind an ambiguous title. Probably intentional. I liked how it showed plenty of examples of scaleups getting egg-faced after overpromising AI capabilities. LLMs are useful, but still too costly to run and too error-prone to be let loose on anything mission-critical. I use these tools daily, but that doesn't mean I want AI rammed down my throat at every turn. A few of my favorite tech authors and OSS contributors have gone full AI-parrot mode lately. Everything they post is either "how they use AI," "how amazing it is," or "how much it sucks." I think a bunch of us have had enough and just want to move on. But try saying anything even slightly critical about AI, or about how the big companies are forcing it into everything in the name of “progress,” and suddenly you're a Luddite. I'm just glad more folks in the trenches are tired of the noise too and are starting to call it out.

onion2k 1y ago

Google didn’t make books obsolete. I don't think anyone expected it to make all books obsolete, but you'd struggle to buy an encyclopaedia that isn't for kids these days.

6510 1y ago

I gave copilot a screenshot of my work schedule 3 times. The first time it extracted the data flawlessly and organized it the way I asked. The second time it did everything wrong until I talked it though the process in tiny steps. The 3rd time I've asked it to repeat the same steps for the new schedule and it got it wrong just like the initial second attempt. I then tried to talk it though the process step by step and it got everything wrong!? With each step it messed up things it got right the step before. It eventually asked me to upload the image again. I suppose I could upload the image to a table to json website and provide copilot with the json but the point was to make things easier. In my mind there is nothing complicated about the structure of a table but if I ask copilot to merely extract the text from a row starting with some text it goes insane. Optical character recognition is an idea from 1870 and they had working implementations 50 years ago. I read a bunch of comments online about models getting progressively worse but my experience was over the span of a few weeks. Would they be doctoring with the quality to make newer models look even better?