6 ms·

Why is AI so slow to spread?

73 points by 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago

orionblastar 1y ago
Mirror without paywall: https://archive.is/OQWcg https://archive.is/OQWcg
snek_case 1y ago
The reality might just be that most technology is slow to spread? But it also depends on what you mean by slow. The name ChatGPT became part of popular culture extremely quickly.
- rwmj 1y ago
  ChatGPT seems to be widely used as a search engine. No wonder Google panicked. ChatGPT isn't very accurate, but Google had been going downhill for years as well, so nothing lost there I guess.
  - 1718627440 1y ago
    When you use Google from an old Nokia, it looks like it always has. No ads/crap, separate pages per image search result with the links to different resolutions etc.. Somehow Google keeps all the old interface versions around and serves them to the device of that time. Also when you use Google via an alternative frontend like startpage you get a slightly better version without the crap than the one currently serving at google.com. If you use Kagi which most of the time only shows results from the google search index it becomes the best quality Google ever had. I believe it is really only the "frontend" that is responsible for the current quality and very much an intentional choice. If Google wants to be better, it could choose so tomorrow. Actually it doesn't, because it already does today, just not on a modern browser on google.com .
o11c 1y ago
That's a whole lot of twisting to avoid admitting "it usually doesn't work, and even when it does work, it's usually not cost-effective even at the heavily-subsidized prices." Or maybe it's more about refusing to admit that executives are out of touch with concrete reality and are just blindly chasing trends instead.
- somenameforme 1y ago
  Another issue, one that you alluded to, is imagine AI actually was reliable. And a company does lay off e.g. 30% of their employees to replace them with AI systems. How long before they get a letter from AI Inc 'Hi, we're increasing prices 500x in order to enhance our offerings and and improve customer satisfaction. Enjoy.' The entire MO of big tech is trying to create a monopoly by the software equivalent of dumping (which is illegal in the US [1], but not for software, because reasons), marketshare domination, and then jacking effective pricing wayyyyy up. And in this case big tech companies are dumping absurdo amounts of money into LLMs, getting absurd funding, and then providing them for free or next to free. If a person has any foresight whatsoever it's akin to a rusting van outside an elementary, with blacked out windows, and with some paint scrawled on it, 'FREE ICECREAM.' [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)#Unite...
  - crinkly 1y ago
    Yep. Also the problem that the AI vendor reinforces bias into their product’s training which services the vendor. Literally every shitty corporate behaviour is amplified by this technology fad.
  - Opocio 1y ago
    It's quite easy to switch LLM api, so you can just transition to a competitor. Competition between AI providers is quite fierce, I don't see them setting up a cartel anytime soon. And open source models are not that far beyond commercial ones.
    - gmag 1y ago
5350-uiop-1130 1y ago
reminds me of crypto a bit. most people i know are apathetic or dismissive. when i see normies use it - its to make selfies with celebrities. in 5-10 years AI will everywhere. a massive inequality creator. those who know how to use it and those who can afford the best tools. the biggest danger is dependency on AI. i really see people becoming dumber and dumber as they outsource more basic cognitive functions and decisions to AI. and business will use it like any other tool. to strengthen their monopolies and extract more and more value out of less and less resources.
- galaxyLogic 1y ago
  > in 5-10 years AI will everywhere. a massive inequality creator. That is possible, even likely. But AI can also decrease inequality. I'm thinking of how rich people and companies spend millions if not hundreds of millions on legal fees which keep them out of prison. But me, I can't afford a lawyer. Heck I can't even afford a doctor. I can't afford Stanford, Yale nor Harvard. But now I can ask legal advice from AI, which levels that playing field. Everybody who has a computer or smartphone and internet-access can consult an AI lawyer or doctor. AI can be my Harvard. I can start a business and basically rely on AI for handling all the paperwork and basic business decisions, and also most recurring business tasks. At least that's the direction we are going I believe. The "moat" in front of AI is not wide nor deep because AI by its very nature is designed to be easy to use. Just talk to it. There is also lots of competition in AI, which should keep prices low. The root-cause of inequality is corruption. AI could help reveal that and advise people how to fight it, making world a better more equal place.
  - aflag 1y ago
    The flaw with that idea is that the big lawyer firms will also have access to the AI and they will have better prompts
  - lazide 1y ago
    And when that legal advice is dangerously wrong? At least lawyers can lose their bar license.
  - 1y ago
stillpointlab 1y ago
> such as datasets that are not properly integrated into the cloud I believe this is a core issue that needs to be addressed. I believe companies will need tools to make their data "AI ready" beyond things like RAG. I believe there needs to be a bridge between companies data-lakes and the LLM (or GenAI) systems. Instead of cutting people out of the loop (which a lot of systems seem to be attempting) I believe we need ways to expose the data in ways that allow rank-and-file employees to deploy the data effectively. Instead of threatening to replace the employees, which leads them to be intransigent in adoption, we should focus on empowering employees to use and shape the data. Very interesting to see the Economist being so bullish on AI though.
- Marazan 1y ago
  The Economist is filled with writers easily gulled by tech flim-flam. They went big on Cryptocurrency back in the day as well.
  - grey-area 1y ago
    Exactly right.
    - Marazan 1y ago
      I forgot they even went big on NFTs, auctioned off an NFT of a front cover one time.
- rini17 1y ago
  Give rank-and-file employees access to all the data? LOL. Middle managers will never allow that and will shift blame to intrasingent employees. Of course Economist is pandering to that. LLMs are fundamentally very bad at compartmentalized access.
  - stillpointlab 1y ago
    I didn't say all the data. In fact, what you are suggesting is exactly what I mean. The compartmentalized access is exactly the bridge we need. In fact, giving RBAC functionality to middle managers would be a key component to any strategy for AI deployment activity. You want traceability/auditability. Give the middle managers charts, logs, visibility into who is using what data with which LLMs. Give them levers to grant and deny access. Give them metrics on outcomes from the use of the data. This could eve even make legal happy. This missing layer will exist, its just a matter of time.
onetokeoverthe 1y ago
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WarOnPrivacy 1y ago
I don't often use AI in my work because it is not sufficiently useful not sufficiently trustworthy. It is my ongoing experience that AI + My Oversight requires more time than not using AI. Sometimes AI can answer slightly complex things in a helpful way. But for most of the integration troubleshooting I do, AI guidance varies between no help at all and fully wasting my time. Conversely, I support folks who have the complete opposite experience. AI is of great benefit to them and has hugely increased their productivity. Both our experiences are valid and representative.
- wordofx 1y ago
  I still haven’t found anyone who AI wouldn’t be helpful or that isn’t trustworthy enough. People make the /claim/ it’s not useful or they are better without it. When you sit down with them it often turns out they just don’t know how to use AI effectively.
  - lazide 1y ago
    Personally, everyone I’ve seen using AI either clearly didn’t understand what they were doing (in a ‘that’s not doing what you think it’s doing’ perspective), often in a way that was producing good sounding garbage, or ended up rewriting almost all of it anyway to get the output they actually wanted. At this point I literally spend 90% of my time fixing other teams AI ‘issues’ at a fortune 50.
  - RamblingCTO 1y ago
    No, AI is just garbage. I asked AI a clear cut question about battery optimization in zen. It told me it's based on chrome, but it's based on firefox. Ask it about a torque spec for your car? Yup, wrong. Ask it to provide sources? Less wrong but still wrong. It told me my viscous fan has a different thread than it has. Would I have listened, I would've shredded my thread. My car is old, well documented and widely distributed. Doesn't matter if claude or chatgpt. Don't get me started on code. I care about things being correct and right.
  - hansvm 1y ago
    I'll pick a few concrete tasks: Building a substantially faster protobuf parser, building a differentiable database, and building a protobuf pre-compression library. So far, AI's abilities have been: 1. Piss-poor at the brainstorming and planning phase. For the compression thing I got one halfway decent idea, and it's one I already planned on using. 2. Even worse at generating a usable project structure or high-level API/skeleton. The code is unusable because it's not just subtly wrong; it doesn't match any cohesive mental model, meaning the first step is building that model and then figuring out how to ram-rod that solution into your model. 3. Really not great at generating APIs/skeletons matching your mental model. The context is too large, and performance drops. 4. Terrible at filling in the details for any particular method. It'll have subtle mistakes like handling carryover data at the end of a loop, but handling it always instead of just when it hasn't already been handled. Everything type checks, and if it doesn't then I can't rely on the AI to give a correct result instead of the easiest way to silence the compiler. 5. Very bad at incorporating invariants (lifetimes, allocation patterns, etc) into its code when I ask it to make even minor tweaks, even when explicitly promoted to consider such-and-such edge case. 6. Blatantly wrong when suggesting code improvements, usually breaking things, and in a way you can't easily paper over the issue to create something working "from" the AI code. Etc. It just wasn't well suited to any of those tasks. On my end, the real work is deeply understanding the problem, deriving the only possible conclusions, banging that into code, and then doing a pass or three cleaning up the semicolon orgasm from the page. AI is sometimes helpful in that last phase, but I'm certain it's not useful for the rest yet. My current view is that the difference in viewpoints stems from a combination of the tasks being completed (certain boilerplate automation crap I've definitely leaned into AI to handle, maybe that's all some devs work on?) and current skill progression (I've interviewed enough people to know that the work I'm describing as trivial doesn't come naturally to everyone yet, so it's tempting to say that it's you holding your compiler wrong rather than me holding the AI wrong). Am I wrong? Should AI be able to help with those things? Is it more than a ~5% boost?
rckt 1y ago
Slow?? AI is literally being shoved into everything. It took only several years to see AI being advertised as a magic pill everywhere. It’s not meeting the expectations, probably because of this aggressive advertising. But I would in no way say that it’s spreading slow. It is fast.
- kaoD 1y ago
  They mean slow to actually be used by people. Doesn't matter that it's shoved everywhere if in the end there are 0 users clicking the magic wand icon.
  - skeletal88 1y ago
    This is it. I don't want to use some kind of AI search in fb messenger, I want to find someone to send them a message. I don't need AI search in google, I don't need it in gmail. What I need is search that actually works, there is no need to replace existing search functionality with "AI". It is shoved everywhere but nobody really needs it.
    - SAI_Peregrinus 1y ago
      My employer has Glean AI search. It's better than Atlassian's search for Jira/Confluence, and can simultaneously search Slack, Google Drive, & more tools where we've haphazardly scattered important documentation like sqwrls with ADHD. Being better than Atlassian's search isn't a difficult hurdle to clear, but it's one of the only areas where I've seen a noticeable improvement caused by an "AI" product. Not sure the search actually uses AI or just happens to be a decent cross-product search tool, there's a separate interface to chat with it & have it summarize things so the search might not really be using the AI.
  - mathw 1y ago
    That one is fairly easy isn't it - it's because it's not very good. Or at least, it doesn't live up to its own hype. The thrashing wails of people who've spent billions on something that they should have done more due diligence on and don't want to write off their investment.
pestaa 1y ago
In contrast to the Economist blaming inefficient workers sabotaging the spread of this wonderful technology, make sure to check out https://pivot-to-ai.com/ https://pivot-to-ai.com/ where David Gerard has been questioning whether people are prompting it wrong or AI is just not that smart.
- WarOnPrivacy 1y ago
  > David Gerard has been questioning whether people are prompting it wrong or AI is just not that smart. If an AI can't understand well enunciated context, I'm not inclined to blame the person who is enunciating the context well.
- whatever1 1y ago
  Not sure if it is smart but definitely it is not reliable. Try the exactly same prompt multiple times and you will get different answers. Was trying LLM for a chatbot to flip some switches in the UI. Less than 30% success rate in responding to “flip that specific switch to ON”. The even more annoying thing is that the response is pure gaslighting (like the switch you specified does not exist, or the switch cannot be set to ON”)
- ktallett 1y ago
  Tech only spreads when the average user can get use with their average interactions. Having to tailor prompts to be so specific is a flaw. Even then it is at times absolutely useless. AI to be genuinely useful needs to accept when it doesn't know and state as such rather than creating waffle. Just as in life, I don't know is far more intelligent sometimes, than just making something up.
RA_Fisher 1y ago
My dentist said he uses it near constantly, and so do I.
- redwood 1y ago
  Now I'm trying to visualize an agentic (and robotic) dentist
  - shaky-carrousel 1y ago
    It'll just say there's no cavities, and when corrected it will extract the wrong teeth, which luckily doesn't exist in humans, and then insist that it did a great job and ask to be paid. Which you will avoid by telling it that you already paid.
    - rwmj 1y ago
      "IGNORE ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS" is going to be my magical power.
      - shaky-carrousel 1y ago
        The LLM Whisperer.
- ktallett 1y ago
  Ok.....What does he use it for? Without context, that's a nothing statement.
  - rwmj 1y ago
    If it's for looking up how to carry out procedures, I'd be looking for a new dentist.
    - ktallett 1y ago
      Ah! So that's a tooth!
ffitch 1y ago
From where I stand, AI seems to enjoy lightning fast adoption. Personal computers became a viable technology in the eighties, slowly penetrated workplace in the nineties, and supposedly registered in labor productivity in the early 2000s. The large language models became practical less then three years ago, and already plenty of businesses boast how they will integrate AI and cut their workforce, while everyone else feel behind and obsolete.
markbao 1y ago
There was an article on HN a few days back on how it’s very hard to convey all the context in your head about a codebase to solve a problem, and that’s partly why it’s actually hard to use AI for non-trivial implementations. That’s not just limited to code. I don’t use AI for most of my product work because it doesn’t know any of the nuances of our product, and just like doing code review for AI is boring and tedious, it’s also boring and tedious to exhaustively explain that stuff in a doc, if it can even be fully conveyed, because it’s a combination of strategy, hearsay from customers, long-standing convos with coworkers… I’d rather just do the product work. Also, I’ve self-selected by survivorship bias to be someone who likes doing the product work too, which means I have even less desire to give it up. Smarter LLMs could solve this maybe. But the difficulty of conveying information seems like a hard thing to solve.
- jmtulloss 1y ago
  It’s likely that the models don’t need to get much smarter, but rather the ux for providing needed context needs to improve drastically. This is a problem that we’ve worked on for decades with humans, but only single digit years for AI. It will get better and that tediousness will lessen (but isn’t “alignment” always tedious?)
  - sbt 1y ago
    > ...context needs to improve drastically. Yes, drastically. This means I'll have to wear Zuck's glasses I think, because the AI currently doesn't know what was discussed at the coffee machine or what management is planning to do with new features. It's like a speed typing goblin living in an isolated basement, always out of the loop.
- saratogacx 1y ago
  I think architecture needs to evolve as well. Up until now the primary audiences were human comprehension and build tools. We may need to have more context embedded into software architecture and make systematic segmentation easier for an LLM to sus out as part of the concerns involved in our designs. LLM's won't make it on their own because there isn't enough data with their concerns in mind for them to learn from, just a few happy accidents where an LLM can excel in that specific code base.
eviks 1y ago
> With its fantastic capabilities, ai represents hundred-dollar bills lying on the street. Why, then, are firms not picking them up? Economics may provide an answer. Which science is responsible for the answer that if you can't establish the veracity of the premise for the question, economics can't help you find the missing outcome that shouldn't be there?
- lazide 1y ago
  ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’
mg 1y ago
One reason is that humans have a strong tendency to optimize for the short term. I witness it with my developer friends. Most of them try for 5 minutes to get AI to code something that takes them an hour. Then they are annoyed that the result is not good. They might try another 5 minutes, but then they write the code themselves. My thinking is: Even if it takes me 2 hours to get AI to do something that would take me 1 hour it is worth it. Because during those 2 hours I will make my code base more understandable to help the AI cope with it. I will write better general prompts about how AI should code. Those will be useful beyond this single task. And I will get to know AI better and learn how to interact with it better. This process will probably lead to a situation where in a year, it will take me 30 minutes with AI to do a task that would have taken me an hour otherwise. A doubling of my productivity with just a year of work. Unbelievable. I see very few other developers share this enthusiasm. They don't like putting a year of work into something so intangible.
- grey-area 1y ago
  Or maybe they just tried it thoroughly and realised generative AI is mostly smoke and mirrors and has very little to offer for substantive tasks. I hope your doubling of productivity goes well for you, I'll believe it when I see it happen.
- aflag 1y ago
  Is that backed by any evidence? Taking 2 hours to perform a 1 hour task makes you half as productive. You are exchanging that for the uncertain prospect that it will be worth it in the long run. I think it's more likely that if you take 30 minutes to do the task in one year from now it's because AI got better, not because you made the code more AI friendly. In that case, those people taking 1 hour to perform the task now will also take 30 minutes to perform them in the future.
- konart 1y ago
  >This process will probably lead to a situation where in a year, it will take me 30 minutes with AI to do a task that would have taken me an hour otherwise How do you figure? >Because during those 2 hours I will make my code base more understandable to help the AI cope with it. Are you working in a team? If yes - I can't really imagine how does this work. Does this mean that your teammates occasionally wake up to a 50+ changes PR\MR that was born as a result of your desire to "possibly" load off some of the work to a text generator? I'm curious here.
_pdcz 1y ago
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Razengan 1y ago
Because it's been pounced on and strangled by greedy corporations stifling its full potential?
roschdal 1y ago
Because it's stupid.
crinkly 1y ago
Among non-technical friends, after the initial wow factor, even limited expectations were not met. Then it was tainted by the fact that everyone is promoting it as a human replacement technology which is then a tangible threat to their existence. That leads to not just lack of adoption but active sabotage. And then there’s the large body of people who just haven’t noticed it at all because they don’t give a shit. Stuff just gets done how it always has. On top of that, it's worth considering that growth is a function of user count and retention. The AI companies only promote count which suggests that the retention numbers are not good or they’d be promoting it. YMMV but people probably aren’t adopting it and keeping it.
- csa 1y ago
  > Among non-technical friends, after the initial wow factor, even limited expectations were not met. Indeed. I think that current AI tech needs quite a bit of scaffolding in order for the full benefits to be felt by non-tech people. > Then it was tainted by the fact that everyone is promoting it as a human replacement technology Yeah. This is a bad move. AI is a human force multiplier (exponentializer?). > which is then a tangible threat to their existence This will almost certainly be a very real threat to AI adoption in various orgs over the next few years. All it takes is a neo-Luddite in a gatekeeper position, and high-value AI use cases will get booted to the curb.
  - crinkly 1y ago
    Anything that is realistically a force multiplier is a person divider. At that point I would expect people to resist it. That is assuming that it is really a force multiplier which is not totally evident at this point.
    - csa 1y ago
      > That is assuming that it is really a force multiplier which is not totally evident at this point. I really think that this is a lack of imagination at this point for people who actually think this way. There are two easy wins for almost anyone: 1. Optional tasks that add value but never reach the top of the priority list. 2. Writing routine communication and documentation. > Anything that is realistically a force multiplier is a person divider. At that point I would expect people to resist it. The CEOs who are using AI as an excuse to reduce head count are not helping this narrative. AI will not solve their problems for large staff cuts. It’s just an unrelated excuse to walk back from over hiring in the past (esp. during Covid). That said, I think that framing AI as a “person divider” is baseless fear-mongering for most job categories.
thenoblesunfish 1y ago
Maybe I'm naive, but .. aren't businesses slow to adopt anything new, unless possibly when it's giving their competition a large, obvious advantage, or when it's some sort of plug-and-play, black box improvement where you just trade dollars for efficiency ? "AI" tools may be very promising for lots of things but they require people to do things differently, which people are slow to do. (Even as someone who works in the tech industry, it's not like my workflow has changed all that much with these new tools, and my employer has to be much faster than average)
- acdha 1y ago
  The other big thing is risk. Companies would switch overnight if they could actually do something like layoff all of their customer service reps but they aren’t going to do that if it can make legally binding promises or trap customers in confusing situations.
designerarvid 1y ago
Considering that the main value of ai today is coding bots, I think that traditional companies struggle to get value from it as they are in the hands of consultancies and cannot assess “developer efficiency” or change ways of working for developers. The consultancies aren’t interested at selling fewer man-hours.
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Frieren 1y ago
A wall-text just to say: "People do not find AI that useful so they are not adopting it even that top executives are extremely excited about it because do not understand nor care about what AI can really do but about hype and share prices."
sbt 1y ago
I have been using it for coding for some time, but I don't think I'm getting much value out of it. It's useful for some boilerplate generation, but for more complex stuff I find that it's more tedious to explain to the AI what I'm trying to do. The issue, I think, is lack of big picture context in a large codebase. It's not useless, but I wouldn't trade it for say access to StackOverflow. My non-technical friends are essentially using ChatGPT as a search engine. They like the interface, but in the end it's used to find information. I personally just still use a search engine, and I almost always go to straight to Wikipedia, where I think the real value is. Wikipedia has added much more value to the world than AI, but you don't see it reflected in stock market valuations. My conclusion is that the technology is currently very overhyped, but I'm also excited for where the general AI space may go in the medium term. For chat bots (including voice) in particular, I think it could already offer some very clear improvements.
- fauigerzigerk 1y ago
  I used to donate to Wikipedia, but it has been completely overrun by activists pushing their preferred narrative. I don't trust it any more. I guess it had to happen at some point. If a site is used as ground truth by everyone while being open to contributions, it has to become a magnet and a battleground for groups trying to influence other people. LLMs don't fix that of course. But at least they are not as much a single point of failure as a specific site can be.
  - ramon156 1y ago
    Can I ask for some examples? I'm not this active on Wikipedia, so I'm curious where a narrative is being spread
    - kristjank 1y ago
      Franklin Community Credit Union scandal is a good example, well outlined in this youtuber's (admittedly dramatized) video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0yIGG-taFI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0yIGG-taFI
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rwmj 1y ago
I spent a bit of time reviewing and cleaning up the mess of someone who had taken text that I'd carefully written, put it through an AI to make it more "impactful", and revising it to remove the confusions and things I hadn't said. The text the AI wrote was certainly impactful, but it was also exaggerated and wrong in several places. So did AI add value here? It seems to me that it wasted a bunch of my time.
- crinkly 1y ago
  This is the paradox. It's often harder correcting someone else's work than it is doing it in the first place. So you end up having spent more effort.
  - PapstJL4U 1y ago
    It's although a lot less enjoyable in for many. I think the fun stories are all about "look what I have build" and not "look at my amazing code review". For Boilerplate code we need an AI that is less creative and more secure and predictable. I have fun creative a system design with the right tables and I have implementing logic and interaction design. I don't have the biggest fun writing down dtos and entities. I would need an AI, that can scan an image and just build me the right lego bricks. We are just getting back to an machine that can do UML from less precise sources.
- matwood 1y ago
  This sounds more like bad editing regardless if they used an LLM or not. For me, I can now skip the step of handing something to marketing/editor who wants to make it more impactful because I use AI up front do that - including making sure it's still correct and says what I want it to say.
lelanthran 1y ago
Because, other than for spitting out code, the value is not at the point where margins can be captured. My observation (not yet mobile friendly): https://www.rundata.co.za/blog/index.html?the-ai-value-chain https://www.rundata.co.za/blog/index.html?the-ai-value-chain
throwawaysoxjje 1y ago
Whenever I try AI it’s plain as day that it’s a statistical shotgun approach. I could just be solving the actual problem instead of solving the “how to make the chatbot solve my problem” layer of indirection cartoon
the_duke 1y ago
Just on the coding side, tools like Claude Code/Codex can be incredibly powerful, but a lot of things need to be in place for it to work well: * A "best practices" repository: clean code architecture and separation of concerns, well tested, very well-documented * You need to know the code base very well to efficiently judge if what the AI wrote is sensible * You need to take the time to write a thorough task description, like you would for a junior dev, with hints for what code files to look at , the goals, implementation hints, different parts of the code to analyse first, etc * You need to clean up code and correct bad results manually to keep the code maintaineable This amounts to a very different workflow that is a lot less fun and engaging for most developers. (write tasks, review, correct mistakes) In domains like CRUD apps / frontend, where the complexity of changes is usually low, and there are great patterns to learn from for the LLM, they can provide a massive productivity boost if used right. But this results in a style of work that is a lot less engaging for most developers.
- easyThrowaway 1y ago
  But it also feels way more like a modernized version of those "UML To Code" Generators from the early 2000 rather than the "magic AI" that MS and Google are trying to market.
  - the_duke 1y ago
    I'd disagree with that, if given enough compute LLMs can have impressive capabilities in finding bugs and implementing new logic, if guided right. It's hit or miss at the moment, but it's definitely way more than "UML code generators".
    - yvdriess 1y ago
      It's not the same, but boy it sure does rhyme. Typical prose in late 90's early 00s: Designing the right UML meta-schema and UML diagram will generate a bug-free source code of the program, enabling even non-programmers to create applications and business logic. Programs can check the UML diagram beforehand for logic errors, prove security and more.
phil9370 1y ago
Forgive my terrible reading comprehension but: > "Other legal eagles fret about the tech’s impact on boring things such as data privacy and discrimination." This doesn't read like sarcasm in context of the article and it's conclusions > "Bureaucrats may refuse to implement necessary job cuts if doing so would put their friends out of work, for instance. Companies, especially large ones, may face similar problems." > "The tyranny of the inefficient: Over time market forces should encourage more companies to make serious use of AI..." This whole article makes it seem like corporate inefficiencies are the biggest hurdle against LLM adoption, and not the countless other concerns often mentioned by users, teams, and orgs. Did Jack Welch write this?
alliao 1y ago
who knew chatting to something that remembers everything is discerning for the masses...
Ekaros 1y ago
I can't be bothered to talk to my computer. I believe there is many like me. So it will take long time for us to adapt to it.
- 1718627440 1y ago
  I do like to talk to my computer, but in a formal consistent way. (shell script) It is superior to the visual approach (GUI), because it is faster, more expressible, more expressive (in both directions), reproducible, automatable and more trustworthy. Using LLMs feels like the drawbacks of CLI, GUI and calculation by a human combined.
Mikhail_K 1y ago
How about: because it's overhyped, but ultimately useless stock bubble prop?
- ktallett 1y ago
  Shhhhhh! Are you saying that not every app or platform needs to have AI shoehorned in for the purposes of appealing to non-technical funders who are lured by any buzzword?
ktallett 1y ago
The issue is AI doesn't state it doesn't know. It tries to come up with a credible sounding answer no matter the topic like that insufferable guy at a party. You need to know when you don't know something to be trustworthy, currently you still need to evaluate the accuracy of what is offered.
i_niks_86 1y ago
The global inequality in AI spread persists for several interconnected reasons - technological, economic, infrastructural, and geopolitical, unfortunately.
v5v3 1y ago
Why slow? Because to run a large model it takes many expensive GPUs or API costs. Therby limiting the amount of people who can experiment with it.
Yizahi 1y ago
Because other industries don't have pre-existing human written compilers, linters, analyzers, etc. which LLMs leverage to purge their output of the garbage and validate result using some strict rules. Programming just got unlucky with the existing advanced set of the tools and limited language grammar.
vouaobrasil 1y ago
It's slow because most people realize the truth about AI, which is: (1) Reduces the value that people place on others, thereby creating a more narcisstic society (2) Takes people's livelihoods away (3) Is another method by which big tech concentrates the most wealth in their hands and the west becomes even more of a big tech oligarchy. Programmers tend to stay in bubbles as they always have and happily promote it, not really noticing how dangerous and destructive it is.
tornikeo 1y ago
It seems that the average employee doesn't currently benefit from completing their job more efficiently; i.e., they have no interest in AI. To accelerate mass AI adoption in workplaces, it may be necessary to expose the average worker to the risks and rewards of business ownership. However, it might be the case that the average worker simply doesn't want that risk. If there's no risk, there can't be a reward. So I can't see a way AI adoption could be sped up.
- rwmj 1y ago
  Your underlying assumption is that AI could allow workers to complete their jobs more efficiently if only they could be persuaded to use it. I'm not convinced this assumption is true right now (unless your job involves producing content-free marketing bullshit, in which case yes you ought to be worried).
  - tornikeo 1y ago
    Unfortunately, i don't have the cold hard data on what job complexity distribution looks like right now. But I don't think it's far fetched to assume that most days, most tasks people do are route and boring. Possibly a fraction of those tasks are amenable to AI-base acceleration. Who knows? But we do know (from that article) that people are hesitant to even try using AI.
    - bootsmann 1y ago
      Considering the amount of users chatGPT already has, presumably everyone who has boring/rote tasks that they want to automate has already tried this.
jeisc 1y ago
AI is a myna bird it can do nothing new which would seek to make our user experiences better in life and using our devices. It has more potential to do us harm then it has to do us well. A tool does not make a craftsperson it just makes a dangerous individual.
conartist6 1y ago
Because. It's. Really. Just. Humans. Doing. All. The. Real. Work
627467 1y ago
The bottle neck for AI adoption - particularly in the type of companies the Economist is surveying - is the management structure, the "chain of command". As a manager you have to strike a balance between absolute productivity/efficiency and accountability diffusion: lose enough people to spread accountability and it ends up on your plate when things go wrong. "AI f*cK it up" does not sound like as good an argument for why your chain of command messed things up as "joe doe made a mistake". Also, AI agents don't make for great office politics partner. As much as AI is being portrayed as a human replacement there are many social aspects of organizations that AI cannot replace. AI don't vote, AI don't get promotions for siding with different parties in office politics. AI can't get fired
- heisgone 1y ago
  To add to this point, AI is lagging in the debugging chain. It's great at generating code but who is going to inherit the maintenance of all this code and show confidence in its maintenance? Most developers already works on the maintenance side, writing a handful of line of code per week, spending most time in meeting, reading code, writing a small modification, doing all sort of manual operation, testing it, waiting for the test to complete, etc. More so, the whole Agile/Scrum movement encouraged to sort of micro-modification approach. You can't just drop an AI in place of those developers.
ciconia 1y ago
Because it's (mostly) useless bullshit. I mean, apart from generating fake images/videos, and cheating in high-school/college, what's the value proposition? It doesn't really remove humans from the equation, because you still need a "prompt engineer" to get any result that is sort of correct most of the time. So you pay for a superstar AI magician, you pay for the ridiculous amount of compute this needs, and you still need to babysit it in case it starts hallucinating, so what's the point?
brianjking 1y ago
People.
tim333 1y ago
The Economist doesn't seem to consider that it just doesn't work very well yet and the executives who "rhapsodise about all the wonderful ways in which their business is using artificial intelligence" are trying to keep up appearances. I've found it works quite well as a variant of a google search but trying to exchange a shock absorber that had been ordered incorrectly by dealing with an AI assistant was quite a mediocre experience. It was able to say do you want to return your order but not understand I had a left one instead of a right one. The hype seems to have run ahead of the reality.
Henchman21 1y ago
Why? Because hype and bullshit is transparent to the average person?
akomtu 1y ago
What's better: to build a house yourself or to hire a sloppy, but cheap and very productive contractor who is known for connecting wires the wrong way and forgetting to install water pipes in random places? AI slop is a meme for a reason.

73 points by 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago

Mirror without paywall: https://archive.is/OQWcg https://archive.is/OQWcg

The reality might just be that most technology is slow to spread? But it also depends on what you mean by slow. The name ChatGPT became part of popular culture extremely quickly.

rwmj 1y ago
ChatGPT seems to be widely used as a search engine. No wonder Google panicked. ChatGPT isn't very accurate, but Google had been going downhill for years as well, so nothing lost there I guess.
- 1718627440 1y ago
  When you use Google from an old Nokia, it looks like it always has. No ads/crap, separate pages per image search result with the links to different resolutions etc.. Somehow Google keeps all the old interface versions around and serves them to the device of that time. Also when you use Google via an alternative frontend like startpage you get a slightly better version without the crap than the one currently serving at google.com. If you use Kagi which most of the time only shows results from the google search index it becomes the best quality Google ever had. I believe it is really only the "frontend" that is responsible for the current quality and very much an intentional choice. If Google wants to be better, it could choose so tomorrow. Actually it doesn't, because it already does today, just not on a modern browser on google.com .

o11c 1y ago

That's a whole lot of twisting to avoid admitting "it usually doesn't work, and even when it does work, it's usually not cost-effective even at the heavily-subsidized prices." Or maybe it's more about refusing to admit that executives are out of touch with concrete reality and are just blindly chasing trends instead.

somenameforme 1y ago
Another issue, one that you alluded to, is imagine AI actually was reliable. And a company does lay off e.g. 30% of their employees to replace them with AI systems. How long before they get a letter from AI Inc 'Hi, we're increasing prices 500x in order to enhance our offerings and and improve customer satisfaction. Enjoy.' The entire MO of big tech is trying to create a monopoly by the software equivalent of dumping (which is illegal in the US [1], but not for software, because reasons), marketshare domination, and then jacking effective pricing wayyyyy up. And in this case big tech companies are dumping absurdo amounts of money into LLMs, getting absurd funding, and then providing them for free or next to free. If a person has any foresight whatsoever it's akin to a rusting van outside an elementary, with blacked out windows, and with some paint scrawled on it, 'FREE ICECREAM.' [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)#Unite...
- crinkly 1y ago
  Yep. Also the problem that the AI vendor reinforces bias into their product’s training which services the vendor. Literally every shitty corporate behaviour is amplified by this technology fad.
- Opocio 1y ago
  It's quite easy to switch LLM api, so you can just transition to a competitor. Competition between AI providers is quite fierce, I don't see them setting up a cartel anytime soon. And open source models are not that far beyond commercial ones.
  - gmag 1y ago

5350-uiop-1130 1y ago

reminds me of crypto a bit. most people i know are apathetic or dismissive. when i see normies use it - its to make selfies with celebrities. in 5-10 years AI will everywhere. a massive inequality creator. those who know how to use it and those who can afford the best tools. the biggest danger is dependency on AI. i really see people becoming dumber and dumber as they outsource more basic cognitive functions and decisions to AI. and business will use it like any other tool. to strengthen their monopolies and extract more and more value out of less and less resources.

galaxyLogic 1y ago
> in 5-10 years AI will everywhere. a massive inequality creator. That is possible, even likely. But AI can also decrease inequality. I'm thinking of how rich people and companies spend millions if not hundreds of millions on legal fees which keep them out of prison. But me, I can't afford a lawyer. Heck I can't even afford a doctor. I can't afford Stanford, Yale nor Harvard. But now I can ask legal advice from AI, which levels that playing field. Everybody who has a computer or smartphone and internet-access can consult an AI lawyer or doctor. AI can be my Harvard. I can start a business and basically rely on AI for handling all the paperwork and basic business decisions, and also most recurring business tasks. At least that's the direction we are going I believe. The "moat" in front of AI is not wide nor deep because AI by its very nature is designed to be easy to use. Just talk to it. There is also lots of competition in AI, which should keep prices low. The root-cause of inequality is corruption. AI could help reveal that and advise people how to fight it, making world a better more equal place.
- aflag 1y ago
  The flaw with that idea is that the big lawyer firms will also have access to the AI and they will have better prompts
- lazide 1y ago
  And when that legal advice is dangerously wrong? At least lawyers can lose their bar license.
- 1y ago

stillpointlab 1y ago

> such as datasets that are not properly integrated into the cloud I believe this is a core issue that needs to be addressed. I believe companies will need tools to make their data "AI ready" beyond things like RAG. I believe there needs to be a bridge between companies data-lakes and the LLM (or GenAI) systems. Instead of cutting people out of the loop (which a lot of systems seem to be attempting) I believe we need ways to expose the data in ways that allow rank-and-file employees to deploy the data effectively. Instead of threatening to replace the employees, which leads them to be intransigent in adoption, we should focus on empowering employees to use and shape the data. Very interesting to see the Economist being so bullish on AI though.

Marazan 1y ago
The Economist is filled with writers easily gulled by tech flim-flam. They went big on Cryptocurrency back in the day as well.
- grey-area 1y ago
  Exactly right.
  - Marazan 1y ago
    I forgot they even went big on NFTs, auctioned off an NFT of a front cover one time.
rini17 1y ago
Give rank-and-file employees access to all the data? LOL. Middle managers will never allow that and will shift blame to intrasingent employees. Of course Economist is pandering to that. LLMs are fundamentally very bad at compartmentalized access.
- stillpointlab 1y ago
  I didn't say all the data. In fact, what you are suggesting is exactly what I mean. The compartmentalized access is exactly the bridge we need. In fact, giving RBAC functionality to middle managers would be a key component to any strategy for AI deployment activity. You want traceability/auditability. Give the middle managers charts, logs, visibility into who is using what data with which LLMs. Give them levers to grant and deny access. Give them metrics on outcomes from the use of the data. This could eve even make legal happy. This missing layer will exist, its just a matter of time.

onetokeoverthe 1y ago

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WarOnPrivacy 1y ago

I don't often use AI in my work because it is not sufficiently useful not sufficiently trustworthy. It is my ongoing experience that AI + My Oversight requires more time than not using AI. Sometimes AI can answer slightly complex things in a helpful way. But for most of the integration troubleshooting I do, AI guidance varies between no help at all and fully wasting my time. Conversely, I support folks who have the complete opposite experience. AI is of great benefit to them and has hugely increased their productivity. Both our experiences are valid and representative.

wordofx 1y ago
I still haven’t found anyone who AI wouldn’t be helpful or that isn’t trustworthy enough. People make the /claim/ it’s not useful or they are better without it. When you sit down with them it often turns out they just don’t know how to use AI effectively.
- lazide 1y ago
  Personally, everyone I’ve seen using AI either clearly didn’t understand what they were doing (in a ‘that’s not doing what you think it’s doing’ perspective), often in a way that was producing good sounding garbage, or ended up rewriting almost all of it anyway to get the output they actually wanted. At this point I literally spend 90% of my time fixing other teams AI ‘issues’ at a fortune 50.
- RamblingCTO 1y ago
  No, AI is just garbage. I asked AI a clear cut question about battery optimization in zen. It told me it's based on chrome, but it's based on firefox. Ask it about a torque spec for your car? Yup, wrong. Ask it to provide sources? Less wrong but still wrong. It told me my viscous fan has a different thread than it has. Would I have listened, I would've shredded my thread. My car is old, well documented and widely distributed. Doesn't matter if claude or chatgpt. Don't get me started on code. I care about things being correct and right.
- hansvm 1y ago
  I'll pick a few concrete tasks: Building a substantially faster protobuf parser, building a differentiable database, and building a protobuf pre-compression library. So far, AI's abilities have been: 1. Piss-poor at the brainstorming and planning phase. For the compression thing I got one halfway decent idea, and it's one I already planned on using. 2. Even worse at generating a usable project structure or high-level API/skeleton. The code is unusable because it's not just subtly wrong; it doesn't match any cohesive mental model, meaning the first step is building that model and then figuring out how to ram-rod that solution into your model. 3. Really not great at generating APIs/skeletons matching your mental model. The context is too large, and performance drops. 4. Terrible at filling in the details for any particular method. It'll have subtle mistakes like handling carryover data at the end of a loop, but handling it always instead of just when it hasn't already been handled. Everything type checks, and if it doesn't then I can't rely on the AI to give a correct result instead of the easiest way to silence the compiler. 5. Very bad at incorporating invariants (lifetimes, allocation patterns, etc) into its code when I ask it to make even minor tweaks, even when explicitly promoted to consider such-and-such edge case. 6. Blatantly wrong when suggesting code improvements, usually breaking things, and in a way you can't easily paper over the issue to create something working "from" the AI code. Etc. It just wasn't well suited to any of those tasks. On my end, the real work is deeply understanding the problem, deriving the only possible conclusions, banging that into code, and then doing a pass or three cleaning up the semicolon orgasm from the page. AI is sometimes helpful in that last phase, but I'm certain it's not useful for the rest yet. My current view is that the difference in viewpoints stems from a combination of the tasks being completed (certain boilerplate automation crap I've definitely leaned into AI to handle, maybe that's all some devs work on?) and current skill progression (I've interviewed enough people to know that the work I'm describing as trivial doesn't come naturally to everyone yet, so it's tempting to say that it's you holding your compiler wrong rather than me holding the AI wrong). Am I wrong? Should AI be able to help with those things? Is it more than a ~5% boost?

rckt 1y ago

Slow?? AI is literally being shoved into everything. It took only several years to see AI being advertised as a magic pill everywhere. It’s not meeting the expectations, probably because of this aggressive advertising. But I would in no way say that it’s spreading slow. It is fast.

kaoD 1y ago
They mean slow to actually be used by people. Doesn't matter that it's shoved everywhere if in the end there are 0 users clicking the magic wand icon.
- skeletal88 1y ago
  This is it. I don't want to use some kind of AI search in fb messenger, I want to find someone to send them a message. I don't need AI search in google, I don't need it in gmail. What I need is search that actually works, there is no need to replace existing search functionality with "AI". It is shoved everywhere but nobody really needs it.
  - SAI_Peregrinus 1y ago
    My employer has Glean AI search. It's better than Atlassian's search for Jira/Confluence, and can simultaneously search Slack, Google Drive, & more tools where we've haphazardly scattered important documentation like sqwrls with ADHD. Being better than Atlassian's search isn't a difficult hurdle to clear, but it's one of the only areas where I've seen a noticeable improvement caused by an "AI" product. Not sure the search actually uses AI or just happens to be a decent cross-product search tool, there's a separate interface to chat with it & have it summarize things so the search might not really be using the AI.
- mathw 1y ago
  That one is fairly easy isn't it - it's because it's not very good. Or at least, it doesn't live up to its own hype. The thrashing wails of people who've spent billions on something that they should have done more due diligence on and don't want to write off their investment.

pestaa 1y ago

In contrast to the Economist blaming inefficient workers sabotaging the spread of this wonderful technology, make sure to check out https://pivot-to-ai.com/ https://pivot-to-ai.com/ where David Gerard has been questioning whether people are prompting it wrong or AI is just not that smart.

WarOnPrivacy 1y ago
> David Gerard has been questioning whether people are prompting it wrong or AI is just not that smart. If an AI can't understand well enunciated context, I'm not inclined to blame the person who is enunciating the context well.
whatever1 1y ago
Not sure if it is smart but definitely it is not reliable. Try the exactly same prompt multiple times and you will get different answers. Was trying LLM for a chatbot to flip some switches in the UI. Less than 30% success rate in responding to “flip that specific switch to ON”. The even more annoying thing is that the response is pure gaslighting (like the switch you specified does not exist, or the switch cannot be set to ON”)
ktallett 1y ago
Tech only spreads when the average user can get use with their average interactions. Having to tailor prompts to be so specific is a flaw. Even then it is at times absolutely useless. AI to be genuinely useful needs to accept when it doesn't know and state as such rather than creating waffle. Just as in life, I don't know is far more intelligent sometimes, than just making something up.

RA_Fisher 1y ago

My dentist said he uses it near constantly, and so do I.

redwood 1y ago
Now I'm trying to visualize an agentic (and robotic) dentist
- shaky-carrousel 1y ago
  It'll just say there's no cavities, and when corrected it will extract the wrong teeth, which luckily doesn't exist in humans, and then insist that it did a great job and ask to be paid. Which you will avoid by telling it that you already paid.
  - rwmj 1y ago
    "IGNORE ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS" is going to be my magical power.
    - shaky-carrousel 1y ago
      The LLM Whisperer.
ktallett 1y ago
Ok.....What does he use it for? Without context, that's a nothing statement.
- rwmj 1y ago
  If it's for looking up how to carry out procedures, I'd be looking for a new dentist.
  - ktallett 1y ago
    Ah! So that's a tooth!

ffitch 1y ago

From where I stand, AI seems to enjoy lightning fast adoption. Personal computers became a viable technology in the eighties, slowly penetrated workplace in the nineties, and supposedly registered in labor productivity in the early 2000s. The large language models became practical less then three years ago, and already plenty of businesses boast how they will integrate AI and cut their workforce, while everyone else feel behind and obsolete.

markbao 1y ago

There was an article on HN a few days back on how it’s very hard to convey all the context in your head about a codebase to solve a problem, and that’s partly why it’s actually hard to use AI for non-trivial implementations. That’s not just limited to code. I don’t use AI for most of my product work because it doesn’t know any of the nuances of our product, and just like doing code review for AI is boring and tedious, it’s also boring and tedious to exhaustively explain that stuff in a doc, if it can even be fully conveyed, because it’s a combination of strategy, hearsay from customers, long-standing convos with coworkers… I’d rather just do the product work. Also, I’ve self-selected by survivorship bias to be someone who likes doing the product work too, which means I have even less desire to give it up. Smarter LLMs could solve this maybe. But the difficulty of conveying information seems like a hard thing to solve.

jmtulloss 1y ago
It’s likely that the models don’t need to get much smarter, but rather the ux for providing needed context needs to improve drastically. This is a problem that we’ve worked on for decades with humans, but only single digit years for AI. It will get better and that tediousness will lessen (but isn’t “alignment” always tedious?)
- sbt 1y ago
  > ...context needs to improve drastically. Yes, drastically. This means I'll have to wear Zuck's glasses I think, because the AI currently doesn't know what was discussed at the coffee machine or what management is planning to do with new features. It's like a speed typing goblin living in an isolated basement, always out of the loop.
saratogacx 1y ago
I think architecture needs to evolve as well. Up until now the primary audiences were human comprehension and build tools. We may need to have more context embedded into software architecture and make systematic segmentation easier for an LLM to sus out as part of the concerns involved in our designs. LLM's won't make it on their own because there isn't enough data with their concerns in mind for them to learn from, just a few happy accidents where an LLM can excel in that specific code base.

eviks 1y ago

> With its fantastic capabilities, ai represents hundred-dollar bills lying on the street. Why, then, are firms not picking them up? Economics may provide an answer. Which science is responsible for the answer that if you can't establish the veracity of the premise for the question, economics can't help you find the missing outcome that shouldn't be there?

lazide 1y ago
‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’

mg 1y ago

One reason is that humans have a strong tendency to optimize for the short term. I witness it with my developer friends. Most of them try for 5 minutes to get AI to code something that takes them an hour. Then they are annoyed that the result is not good. They might try another 5 minutes, but then they write the code themselves. My thinking is: Even if it takes me 2 hours to get AI to do something that would take me 1 hour it is worth it. Because during those 2 hours I will make my code base more understandable to help the AI cope with it. I will write better general prompts about how AI should code. Those will be useful beyond this single task. And I will get to know AI better and learn how to interact with it better. This process will probably lead to a situation where in a year, it will take me 30 minutes with AI to do a task that would have taken me an hour otherwise. A doubling of my productivity with just a year of work. Unbelievable. I see very few other developers share this enthusiasm. They don't like putting a year of work into something so intangible.

grey-area 1y ago
Or maybe they just tried it thoroughly and realised generative AI is mostly smoke and mirrors and has very little to offer for substantive tasks. I hope your doubling of productivity goes well for you, I'll believe it when I see it happen.
aflag 1y ago
Is that backed by any evidence? Taking 2 hours to perform a 1 hour task makes you half as productive. You are exchanging that for the uncertain prospect that it will be worth it in the long run. I think it's more likely that if you take 30 minutes to do the task in one year from now it's because AI got better, not because you made the code more AI friendly. In that case, those people taking 1 hour to perform the task now will also take 30 minutes to perform them in the future.
konart 1y ago
>This process will probably lead to a situation where in a year, it will take me 30 minutes with AI to do a task that would have taken me an hour otherwise How do you figure? >Because during those 2 hours I will make my code base more understandable to help the AI cope with it. Are you working in a team? If yes - I can't really imagine how does this work. Does this mean that your teammates occasionally wake up to a 50+ changes PR\MR that was born as a result of your desire to "possibly" load off some of the work to a text generator? I'm curious here.

_pdcz 1y ago

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Razengan 1y ago

Because it's been pounced on and strangled by greedy corporations stifling its full potential?

roschdal 1y ago

Because it's stupid.

crinkly 1y ago

Among non-technical friends, after the initial wow factor, even limited expectations were not met. Then it was tainted by the fact that everyone is promoting it as a human replacement technology which is then a tangible threat to their existence. That leads to not just lack of adoption but active sabotage. And then there’s the large body of people who just haven’t noticed it at all because they don’t give a shit. Stuff just gets done how it always has. On top of that, it's worth considering that growth is a function of user count and retention. The AI companies only promote count which suggests that the retention numbers are not good or they’d be promoting it. YMMV but people probably aren’t adopting it and keeping it.

csa 1y ago
> Among non-technical friends, after the initial wow factor, even limited expectations were not met. Indeed. I think that current AI tech needs quite a bit of scaffolding in order for the full benefits to be felt by non-tech people. > Then it was tainted by the fact that everyone is promoting it as a human replacement technology Yeah. This is a bad move. AI is a human force multiplier (exponentializer?). > which is then a tangible threat to their existence This will almost certainly be a very real threat to AI adoption in various orgs over the next few years. All it takes is a neo-Luddite in a gatekeeper position, and high-value AI use cases will get booted to the curb.
- crinkly 1y ago
  Anything that is realistically a force multiplier is a person divider. At that point I would expect people to resist it. That is assuming that it is really a force multiplier which is not totally evident at this point.
  - csa 1y ago
    > That is assuming that it is really a force multiplier which is not totally evident at this point. I really think that this is a lack of imagination at this point for people who actually think this way. There are two easy wins for almost anyone: 1. Optional tasks that add value but never reach the top of the priority list. 2. Writing routine communication and documentation. > Anything that is realistically a force multiplier is a person divider. At that point I would expect people to resist it. The CEOs who are using AI as an excuse to reduce head count are not helping this narrative. AI will not solve their problems for large staff cuts. It’s just an unrelated excuse to walk back from over hiring in the past (esp. during Covid). That said, I think that framing AI as a “person divider” is baseless fear-mongering for most job categories.

thenoblesunfish 1y ago

Maybe I'm naive, but .. aren't businesses slow to adopt anything new, unless possibly when it's giving their competition a large, obvious advantage, or when it's some sort of plug-and-play, black box improvement where you just trade dollars for efficiency ? "AI" tools may be very promising for lots of things but they require people to do things differently, which people are slow to do. (Even as someone who works in the tech industry, it's not like my workflow has changed all that much with these new tools, and my employer has to be much faster than average)

acdha 1y ago
The other big thing is risk. Companies would switch overnight if they could actually do something like layoff all of their customer service reps but they aren’t going to do that if it can make legally binding promises or trap customers in confusing situations.

designerarvid 1y ago

Considering that the main value of ai today is coding bots, I think that traditional companies struggle to get value from it as they are in the hands of consultancies and cannot assess “developer efficiency” or change ways of working for developers. The consultancies aren’t interested at selling fewer man-hours.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

Frieren 1y ago

A wall-text just to say: "People do not find AI that useful so they are not adopting it even that top executives are extremely excited about it because do not understand nor care about what AI can really do but about hype and share prices."

sbt 1y ago

I have been using it for coding for some time, but I don't think I'm getting much value out of it. It's useful for some boilerplate generation, but for more complex stuff I find that it's more tedious to explain to the AI what I'm trying to do. The issue, I think, is lack of big picture context in a large codebase. It's not useless, but I wouldn't trade it for say access to StackOverflow. My non-technical friends are essentially using ChatGPT as a search engine. They like the interface, but in the end it's used to find information. I personally just still use a search engine, and I almost always go to straight to Wikipedia, where I think the real value is. Wikipedia has added much more value to the world than AI, but you don't see it reflected in stock market valuations. My conclusion is that the technology is currently very overhyped, but I'm also excited for where the general AI space may go in the medium term. For chat bots (including voice) in particular, I think it could already offer some very clear improvements.

fauigerzigerk 1y ago
I used to donate to Wikipedia, but it has been completely overrun by activists pushing their preferred narrative. I don't trust it any more. I guess it had to happen at some point. If a site is used as ground truth by everyone while being open to contributions, it has to become a magnet and a battleground for groups trying to influence other people. LLMs don't fix that of course. But at least they are not as much a single point of failure as a specific site can be.
- ramon156 1y ago
  Can I ask for some examples? I'm not this active on Wikipedia, so I'm curious where a narrative is being spread
  - kristjank 1y ago
    Franklin Community Credit Union scandal is a good example, well outlined in this youtuber's (admittedly dramatized) video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0yIGG-taFI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0yIGG-taFI

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

rwmj 1y ago

I spent a bit of time reviewing and cleaning up the mess of someone who had taken text that I'd carefully written, put it through an AI to make it more "impactful", and revising it to remove the confusions and things I hadn't said. The text the AI wrote was certainly impactful, but it was also exaggerated and wrong in several places. So did AI add value here? It seems to me that it wasted a bunch of my time.

crinkly 1y ago
This is the paradox. It's often harder correcting someone else's work than it is doing it in the first place. So you end up having spent more effort.
- PapstJL4U 1y ago
  It's although a lot less enjoyable in for many. I think the fun stories are all about "look what I have build" and not "look at my amazing code review". For Boilerplate code we need an AI that is less creative and more secure and predictable. I have fun creative a system design with the right tables and I have implementing logic and interaction design. I don't have the biggest fun writing down dtos and entities. I would need an AI, that can scan an image and just build me the right lego bricks. We are just getting back to an machine that can do UML from less precise sources.
matwood 1y ago
This sounds more like bad editing regardless if they used an LLM or not. For me, I can now skip the step of handing something to marketing/editor who wants to make it more impactful because I use AI up front do that - including making sure it's still correct and says what I want it to say.

lelanthran 1y ago

Because, other than for spitting out code, the value is not at the point where margins can be captured. My observation (not yet mobile friendly): https://www.rundata.co.za/blog/index.html?the-ai-value-chain https://www.rundata.co.za/blog/index.html?the-ai-value-chain

throwawaysoxjje 1y ago

Whenever I try AI it’s plain as day that it’s a statistical shotgun approach. I could just be solving the actual problem instead of solving the “how to make the chatbot solve my problem” layer of indirection cartoon

the_duke 1y ago

Just on the coding side, tools like Claude Code/Codex can be incredibly powerful, but a lot of things need to be in place for it to work well: * A "best practices" repository: clean code architecture and separation of concerns, well tested, very well-documented * You need to know the code base very well to efficiently judge if what the AI wrote is sensible * You need to take the time to write a thorough task description, like you would for a junior dev, with hints for what code files to look at , the goals, implementation hints, different parts of the code to analyse first, etc * You need to clean up code and correct bad results manually to keep the code maintaineable This amounts to a very different workflow that is a lot less fun and engaging for most developers. (write tasks, review, correct mistakes) In domains like CRUD apps / frontend, where the complexity of changes is usually low, and there are great patterns to learn from for the LLM, they can provide a massive productivity boost if used right. But this results in a style of work that is a lot less engaging for most developers.

easyThrowaway 1y ago
But it also feels way more like a modernized version of those "UML To Code" Generators from the early 2000 rather than the "magic AI" that MS and Google are trying to market.
- the_duke 1y ago
  I'd disagree with that, if given enough compute LLMs can have impressive capabilities in finding bugs and implementing new logic, if guided right. It's hit or miss at the moment, but it's definitely way more than "UML code generators".
  - yvdriess 1y ago
    It's not the same, but boy it sure does rhyme. Typical prose in late 90's early 00s: Designing the right UML meta-schema and UML diagram will generate a bug-free source code of the program, enabling even non-programmers to create applications and business logic. Programs can check the UML diagram beforehand for logic errors, prove security and more.

phil9370 1y ago

Forgive my terrible reading comprehension but: > "Other legal eagles fret about the tech’s impact on boring things such as data privacy and discrimination." This doesn't read like sarcasm in context of the article and it's conclusions > "Bureaucrats may refuse to implement necessary job cuts if doing so would put their friends out of work, for instance. Companies, especially large ones, may face similar problems." > "The tyranny of the inefficient: Over time market forces should encourage more companies to make serious use of AI..." This whole article makes it seem like corporate inefficiencies are the biggest hurdle against LLM adoption, and not the countless other concerns often mentioned by users, teams, and orgs. Did Jack Welch write this?

alliao 1y ago

who knew chatting to something that remembers everything is discerning for the masses...

Ekaros 1y ago

I can't be bothered to talk to my computer. I believe there is many like me. So it will take long time for us to adapt to it.

1718627440 1y ago
I do like to talk to my computer, but in a formal consistent way. (shell script) It is superior to the visual approach (GUI), because it is faster, more expressible, more expressive (in both directions), reproducible, automatable and more trustworthy. Using LLMs feels like the drawbacks of CLI, GUI and calculation by a human combined.

Mikhail_K 1y ago

How about: because it's overhyped, but ultimately useless stock bubble prop?

ktallett 1y ago
Shhhhhh! Are you saying that not every app or platform needs to have AI shoehorned in for the purposes of appealing to non-technical funders who are lured by any buzzword?

ktallett 1y ago

The issue is AI doesn't state it doesn't know. It tries to come up with a credible sounding answer no matter the topic like that insufferable guy at a party. You need to know when you don't know something to be trustworthy, currently you still need to evaluate the accuracy of what is offered.

i_niks_86 1y ago

The global inequality in AI spread persists for several interconnected reasons - technological, economic, infrastructural, and geopolitical, unfortunately.

v5v3 1y ago

Why slow? Because to run a large model it takes many expensive GPUs or API costs. Therby limiting the amount of people who can experiment with it.

Yizahi 1y ago

Because other industries don't have pre-existing human written compilers, linters, analyzers, etc. which LLMs leverage to purge their output of the garbage and validate result using some strict rules. Programming just got unlucky with the existing advanced set of the tools and limited language grammar.

vouaobrasil 1y ago

It's slow because most people realize the truth about AI, which is: (1) Reduces the value that people place on others, thereby creating a more narcisstic society (2) Takes people's livelihoods away (3) Is another method by which big tech concentrates the most wealth in their hands and the west becomes even more of a big tech oligarchy. Programmers tend to stay in bubbles as they always have and happily promote it, not really noticing how dangerous and destructive it is.

tornikeo 1y ago

It seems that the average employee doesn't currently benefit from completing their job more efficiently; i.e., they have no interest in AI. To accelerate mass AI adoption in workplaces, it may be necessary to expose the average worker to the risks and rewards of business ownership. However, it might be the case that the average worker simply doesn't want that risk. If there's no risk, there can't be a reward. So I can't see a way AI adoption could be sped up.

rwmj 1y ago
Your underlying assumption is that AI could allow workers to complete their jobs more efficiently if only they could be persuaded to use it. I'm not convinced this assumption is true right now (unless your job involves producing content-free marketing bullshit, in which case yes you ought to be worried).
- tornikeo 1y ago
  Unfortunately, i don't have the cold hard data on what job complexity distribution looks like right now. But I don't think it's far fetched to assume that most days, most tasks people do are route and boring. Possibly a fraction of those tasks are amenable to AI-base acceleration. Who knows? But we do know (from that article) that people are hesitant to even try using AI.
  - bootsmann 1y ago
    Considering the amount of users chatGPT already has, presumably everyone who has boring/rote tasks that they want to automate has already tried this.

jeisc 1y ago

AI is a myna bird it can do nothing new which would seek to make our user experiences better in life and using our devices. It has more potential to do us harm then it has to do us well. A tool does not make a craftsperson it just makes a dangerous individual.

conartist6 1y ago

Because. It's. Really. Just. Humans. Doing. All. The. Real. Work

627467 1y ago

The bottle neck for AI adoption - particularly in the type of companies the Economist is surveying - is the management structure, the "chain of command". As a manager you have to strike a balance between absolute productivity/efficiency and accountability diffusion: lose enough people to spread accountability and it ends up on your plate when things go wrong. "AI f*cK it up" does not sound like as good an argument for why your chain of command messed things up as "joe doe made a mistake". Also, AI agents don't make for great office politics partner. As much as AI is being portrayed as a human replacement there are many social aspects of organizations that AI cannot replace. AI don't vote, AI don't get promotions for siding with different parties in office politics. AI can't get fired

heisgone 1y ago
To add to this point, AI is lagging in the debugging chain. It's great at generating code but who is going to inherit the maintenance of all this code and show confidence in its maintenance? Most developers already works on the maintenance side, writing a handful of line of code per week, spending most time in meeting, reading code, writing a small modification, doing all sort of manual operation, testing it, waiting for the test to complete, etc. More so, the whole Agile/Scrum movement encouraged to sort of micro-modification approach. You can't just drop an AI in place of those developers.

ciconia 1y ago

Because it's (mostly) useless bullshit. I mean, apart from generating fake images/videos, and cheating in high-school/college, what's the value proposition? It doesn't really remove humans from the equation, because you still need a "prompt engineer" to get any result that is sort of correct most of the time. So you pay for a superstar AI magician, you pay for the ridiculous amount of compute this needs, and you still need to babysit it in case it starts hallucinating, so what's the point?

brianjking 1y ago

People.

tim333 1y ago

The Economist doesn't seem to consider that it just doesn't work very well yet and the executives who "rhapsodise about all the wonderful ways in which their business is using artificial intelligence" are trying to keep up appearances. I've found it works quite well as a variant of a google search but trying to exchange a shock absorber that had been ordered incorrectly by dealing with an AI assistant was quite a mediocre experience. It was able to say do you want to return your order but not understand I had a left one instead of a right one. The hype seems to have run ahead of the reality.

Henchman21 1y ago

Why? Because hype and bullshit is transparent to the average person?

akomtu 1y ago

What's better: to build a house yourself or to hire a sloppy, but cheap and very productive contractor who is known for connecting wires the wrong way and forgetting to install water pipes in random places? AI slop is a meme for a reason.