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AI has been improving at a very rapid pace, which means that a lot of people have really outdated priors. I see this all the time online where people are dismis

by gdubs 1y ago

AI has been improving at a very rapid pace, which means that a lot of people have really outdated priors. I see this all the time online where people are dismissive about AI in a way that suggests it's been a while since they last checked-in on the capabilities of models. They wrote off the coding ability of ChatGPT on version 3.5, for instance, and have missed all the advancements that have happened since. Or they talk about hallucination and haven't tried Deep Research as an alternative to traditional web-search. Then there's a tendency to be so 'anti' that there's an assumption that anyone reporting that the tools are accomplishing truly impressive and useful things must be an 'AI booster' or shill. Or they assume that person must not have been a very good engineer in the first place, etc. Really is one of those examples of the quote, "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few." It's a rapidly evolving field, and unless you actually spend some time kicking the tires on the models every so often, you're just basing your opinions on outdated experiences or what everyone else is saying about it.

globnomulous 1y ago
I belong to the camp for whom the capabilities of the models are irrelevant. The largest and most successful models all appear to have been built unethically. I want nothing to do with these companies or the slime who run them, and I will leave my professional field before I'll become their unwilling user. I don't want machines to write my code. I want to write it. I want to solve the problems and find the bugs myself. The engineers I work with who seem to rely most heavily on these tools all seem to be losing their sharpness and problem-solving ability. Many of them praise the models for making it easy to write tests..(Software engineers who treats testing with this kind of carelessness and dismissiveness should lose their jobs.) I like what I do. I like the way I do it. The day I have no choice but do my work, in essence, by scheduling a fucking meeting with a chipper chat bot and telling it what to do will be the day I retire and start a new career. I can't imagine a drearier way to work with technology.
thegrim33 1y ago
To play devil's advocate, how is your argument not a 'no true scottsman' argument? As in, "oh, they had a negative view of X, well that's of course because they weren't testing the new and improved X2 model which is different". Fast forward a year .. "Oh, they have a negative view on X2, well silly them, they need to be using the Y24 model, that's where it's at, the X2 model isn't good anymore". Fast forward a year .. ad infinitum. Are the models that exist today a "true scottsman" for you?
- vlovich123 1y ago
  How is that different than the models today are actually usable for non trivial things and more capable than yesterdays and it’s also true that tomorrow’s models will also probably be more capable than today’s? For example, I dismissed AI three years ago because it couldn’t do anything I needed it to. Today I use it for certain things and it’s not quite capable of other things. Tomorrow it might be capable of a lot more. Yes, priors have to be updated when the ground truth changes and the capabilities of AI change rapidly. This is how chess engines on supercomputers were competitive in the 90s then hybrid systems became the leading edge competitive and then machines took over for good and never looked back.
  - Eggpants 1y ago
    It’s not that the LLMs are better, it’s the internal tools/functions being called that do the actual work are better. They didn’t spend millions to retrain a model to statistically output the number of r’s in strawberry, but just offloaded that trivial question to a function call. So I would say the overall service provided is better than it was, thanks to functions being built based on user queries, but not the actual LLM models themselves.
    - vlovich123 1y ago
      LLMs are definitely better quality today than 3 years ago at codegen quality - there’s quantitative benchmarks as well as for me my personal qualitative experience (given the gaming that companies engage in). It is also true that the tooling and context management has gotten more sophisticated (often using models by the way). That doesn’t negate that the models themselves have gotten better at reliable tool calling so that the LLM is driving more of the show rather than purpose built coordination into the LLM and that the codegen quality is higher than it used to be.
    - int_19h 1y ago
      This is a good example of making statements that are clearly not based in fact. Anyone who works with those models knows full well what a massive gap there is between e.g. GPT 3.5 and Opus 4.1 that has nothing to do with the ability to use tools.
CPLX 1y ago
I agree with you. I am a perpetual cynic about new technology (and a GenXer so multiply that by two) and I have deeply embraced AI in all parts of my business and basically am engaging with it all day for various tasks from helping me compare restaurant options to re-tagging a million contact records in salesforce. It’s incredibly powerful and will just clearly be useful. I don’t believe it’s going to replace intelligence or people but it’s just obviously a remarkable tool. But I think at least part of the dynamic is that the SV tech hype booster train has been so profoundly full of shit for so long that you really can’t blame people for skepticism. Crypto was and is just a giant and elaborate grift, to name one example. Also guys like Altman are clearly overstating the current trajectory. The dismissive response does come with some context attached.
- parineum 1y ago
  > But I think at least part of the dynamic is that the SV tech hype booster train has been so profoundly full of shit for so long that you really can’t blame people for skepticism. They are still full of shit about LLMs, even if it is useful.
jdoliner 1y ago
I feel like I see these two opposite behaviors. People who formed an opinion about AI from an older model and haven't updated it. And people who have an opinion about what AI will be able to do in the future and refuse to acknowledge that it doesn't do that in the present. And often when the two are arguing it's tricky to tell which is which, because whether or not it does something isn't totally black and white, there's some things it can sometimes do, which you can argue either way about that being in its capabilities or not.
- forgotTheLast 1y ago
  I.e. people who look at f(now) and assume it'll be like this forever against people who look at f'(now) and assume it'll improve like this forever
  - arcastroe 1y ago
    What is f''(now) looking like?
    - mxkopy 1y ago
      Very small. There’s very little fundamental research into AI compared to neural networks from what I can tell
- nchmy 1y ago
  Another very significant cohort is people who formed a negative opinion without even the slightest interest in genuinely trying to learn how to use it (or even trying at all)
dmead 1y ago
Is there anything you can tell me that will help me drop the nagging feeling that gradient descent trained models will just never be good? I understand all of what you said, but I can't get over that fact that the term AI is being used for these architectures. It seems like the industry is just trying to do a cool parlor trick in convincing the masses this is somehow AI from science fiction. Maybe I'm being overly cynical, but a lot of this stinks.
- Zacharias030 1y ago
  Wouldn’t you say that now, finally, what people call AI combines subsymbolic systems („gradient descent“) with search and with symbolic systems (tool calls)? I had a professor in AI who was only working on symbolic systems such as SAT-solvers, Prolog etc. and the combination of things seems really promising. Oh, and what would be really nice is another level of memory or fast learning ability that goes beyond burning in knowledge through training alone.
  - dmead 1y ago
    I had such a professor as well, but those people used to use the more accurate term "machine learning". There was also wide understanding that those architectures were trying to imitate small bits of what we understood was happening in the brain (see marvin minsky's perceptron etc). The hope was, as I understood it that there would be some breakthrough in neuroscience that would let the computer scientists pick up the torch and simulate what we find in nature. None of that seems to be happening anymore and we're just interested in training enough to fool people. "AI" companies investing in brain science would convince me otherwise. At this point they're just trying to come up with the next money printing machine.
    - app134 1y ago
      You asked earlier if you were being overly cynical, and I think the answer to that is "yes" We are indeed simulating what we find in nature when we create neural networks and transformers, and AI companies are indeed investing heavily in BCI research. ChatGPT can write an original essay better than most of my students. Its also artificial. Is that not artificial intelligence?
libraryofbabel 1y ago
I do see this a lot. It's hard to have a reasonable conversation about AI amidst, on the one hand, hype-mongers and boosters talking about how we'll have AGI in 2027 and all jobs are just about to be automated away, and on the other hand, a chorus of people who hate AI so much they have invested their identify in it failing and haven't really updated their priors since ChatGPT came out. Both groups repeat the same set of tired points that haven't really changed much in three years. But there are plenty of us who try and walk a middle course. A lot of us have changed our opinions over time. ("When the facts change, I change my mind.") I didn't think AI models were much use for coding a year ago. The facts changed. (Claude Code came out.) Now I do. Frankly, I'd be suspicious of anyone who hasn't changed their opinions about AI in the last year. You can believe all these things at once, and many of us do: * LLMs are extremely impressive in what they can do. (I didn't believe I'd see something like this in my lifetime.) * Used judiciously, they are a big productivity boost for software engineers and many other professions. * They are imperfect and make mistakes, often in weird ways. They hallucinate. There are some trivial problems that they mess up. * But they're not just "stochastic parrots." They can model the world and reason about it, albeit imperfectly and not like humans do. * AI will change the world in the next 20 years * But AI companies are overvalued at the present time and we're mostly likely in a bubble which will burst. * Being in a bubble doesn't mean the technology is useless. (c.f. the dotcom bubble or the railroad bubble in the 19th century.) * AGI isn't just around the corner. (There's still no way models can learn from experience.) * A lot of people making optimistic claims about AI are doing it for self-serving boosterish reasons, because they want to pump up their stock price or sell you something * AI has many potential negative consequences for society and mental health, and may be at least as nasty as social media in that respect * AI has the potential to accelerate human progress in ways that really matter, such as medical research * But anyone who claims to know the future is just guessing
- dvfjsdhgfv 1y ago
  > AI will change the world in the next 20 years Well, it's been changing the world for quite some time, both in good and bad ways. There is no need to add an arbitrary timestamp.
- IX-103 1y ago
Mars008 1y ago
There is another big and growing group: charlatans (influencers). People who don't know much but make bold statements, select 'proof' cases. Just to get attention. There are many of them on youtube. When you someone on thumbnail making faces this is most likely it.
- resource0x 1y ago
  > There are many of them on youtube. Not as many as on HN. "Influencers" have agendas and the stream of income, or other self-interest. HN always comes off as a monolith, on any subject. Counter-arguments get ignored and downvoted to oblivion.
  - jkubicek 1y ago
    I’m spending a lot of time on LinkedIn because my team is hiring and, boy oh boy, LinkedIn is terminally infested with AI influencers. It’s a hot mess.
  - tim333 1y ago
    If you type "AI" into the youtube search bar it's quite impressive. I think they win.
- trinsic2 1y ago
  Here[0] is a perfect example of this. There are so many youtubers making videos about the future of AI as a dooms-day prediction. Its kind of irresponsible actually. These youtubers read a book on the the down fall of humanity because of AGI. Many of these authors seem like they are repeating the Terminator/Skynet themes. Because of all this false information, It's hard to believe anything that is being said about the future of AI on youtube now. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KVDDfAkRgc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KVDDfAkRgc
on_the_train 1y ago
But the reports are from shills. The impact of ai is almost non existent. The greatest impact it had was on role-playing. It's hardly even useful for coding. And that all wouldn't be a problem if it wasn't for the wave of bots that makes the crypto wave seem like child's play.
- lopatin 1y ago
  > They wrote off the coding ability of ChatGPT on version 3.5, for instance, and have missed all the advancements that have happened since. > It's hardly even useful for coding. I’m curious what kind of projects you’re writing where AI coding agents are barely useful. It’s the “shills” on YouTube that keep me up to date with the latest developments and best practices to make the most of these tools. To me it makes tools like CC not only useful but indispensable. Now I do not focus on writing the thing, but I focus on building agents who are capable of building the thing with a little guidance.
- loandbehold 1y ago
  I don't understand people who say AI isn't useful for coding. Claude Code improved my productivity 10x. I used to put solid 8 hours a day in my remote software engineering job. Now I finish everything in 2 hours and go play with my kids. And my performance is better than before.
  - bigstrat2003 1y ago
    I don't understand people who say this. My knee jerk reaction (which I rein in because it's incredibly rude) is always "wow, that person must really suck at programming then". And I try to hold to the conviction that there's another explanation. For me, the vast, vast majority of the time I try to use it, AI slows my work down, it doesn't speed it up. As a result it's incredibly difficult to understand where these supposed 10x improvements are being seen.
    - loandbehold 1y ago
      For me, most of the value comes from Claude Code's ability to 1. research codebase and answer questions about it 2. Perform adhoc testing on the code. Actually writing code is icing on the cake. I work on large code base with more than two million lines of code. Claude Code's ability to find relevant code, understand its purpose, history and interfaces is very time saving. It can answer in minutes questions that would take hours of digging through the code base. Ad hoc testing is another thing. E.g. I can just ask it to test an API endpoint. It will find correct data to use in the database, call the endpoint and verify that it returned correct data and e.g. everything was updated in db correctly.
barrell 1y ago
There are also a bunch of us who do kick the tires very often and are consistently underwhelmed. There are also those of us who have used them substantially, and seen the damage that causes to a codebase in the long run (in part due to the missing gains of having someone who understands the codebase). There are also those of us who just don’t like the interface of chatting with a robot instead of just solving the problem ourselves. There are also those of us who find each generation of model substantially worse than the previous generation, and find the utility trending downwards. There are also those of us who are concerned about the research coming out about the effects of using LLMs on your brain and cognitive load. There are also those of us who appreciate craft, and take pride in what we do, and don’t find that same enjoyment/pride in asking LLMs to do it. There are also those of us who worry about offloading our critical thinking to big corporations, and becoming dependent on a pay-to-play system, that is current being propped up by artificially lowered prices, with “RUG PULL” written all over them. There are also those of us who are really concerned about the privacy issues, and don’t trust companies hundreds of billions of dollars in debt to some of the least trust worth individuals with that data. Most of these issues don’t require much experience with the latest generation. I don’t think the intention of your comment was to stir up FUD, but I feel like it’s really easy for people to walk away with that from this sort of comment, so I just wanted to add my two cents and tell people they really don’t need to be wasting their time every 6 weeks. They’re really not missing anything. Can you do more than a few weeks ago? Sure? Maybe? But I can also do a lot more than I was able to a few weeks ago as well not using an LLM. I’ve learned and improved myself. Chances are if you’re not already using an LLM it’s because you don’t like it, or don’t want to, and that’s really ok. If AGSI comes out in a few months, all the time you would have invested now would be out of date anyways. There’s really no rush or need to be tapped in.
- bigstrat2003 1y ago
  > There are also a bunch of us who do kick the tires very often and are consistently underwhelmed. Yep, this is me. Every time people are like "it's improved so much" I feel like I'm taking crazy pills as a result. I try it every so often, and more often than not it still has the same exact issues it had back in the GPT-3 days. When the tool hasn't improved (in my opinion, obviously) in several years, why should I be optimistic that it'll reach the heights that advocates say it will?
kelseyfrog 1y ago
There's three important beliefs at play in the A(G)I story: 1. When(if) AGI will arrive. It's likely going to be smeared out over a couple months to years, but relative to everything else, it's a historical blip. This really is the most contention belief with the most variability. It is currently predicted to be 8 years[1]. 2. What percentage of jobs will be replaceable with AGI? Current estimates between 80-95% of professions. The remaining professions "culturally require" humans. Think live performance, artisanal goods, in-person care. 3. How quickly will AGI supplant human labor? What is the duration of replacement from inception to saturation? Replacement won't happen evenly, some professions are much easier to replace with AGI, some much more difficult. Let's estimate a 20-30 years horizon for the most stubborn to replace professions. What we have is a ticking time bomb of labor change at least an order of magnitude greater than the transition from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy or from an industrial economy to a service economy. Those happened over the course of several generations. Society: culture, education, the legal system, the economy, where able to absorb the changes over 100-200 years. Yet we're talking about a change on the same scale happening 10 times faster - within the timeline of one's professional career. And still, with previous revolutions we had incredible unrest, and social change. Taken as a whole, we'll have possibly the majority of the economy operating outside the territory of society, the legal system, and the existing economy. A kid born on the the "day" AGI arrives will become an adult in a profoundly different world as if born on a farm in 1850 and reaching adulthood in a city in 2000. 1. https://www.metaculus.com/questions/5121/date-of-artificial-general-intelligence/ https://www.metaculus.com/questions/5121/date-of-artificial-...
- semi-extrinsic 1y ago
  Your only reference [1] is to a page where anybody in the world can join and vote. It literally means absolutely nothing. For [2] you have no reference whatsoever. How does AI replace a nurse, a vet, a teacher, a construction worker?
  - kelseyfrog 1y ago
    What are you talking about? This is common knowledge. Median forecasts indicated a 50% probability of AI systems being capable of automating 90% of current human tasks in 25 years and 99% of current human tasks in 50 years[1] The scope of work replaceable by embodied AGI and the speed of AGI saturation of vastly under estimated. The bottle necks are production of a replacement workforce, not retraining human laborers. 1. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.08579 https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.08579
analog31 1y ago
There's a middle ground which is to watch and see what happens around us. Is it unholy to not have an opinion?
research_pie 1y ago
I think one of the issue is also the sheer amount of shilling going on like crypto level I got a modest tech following and you wouldn’t believe the amount I’m offered to promote the most garbage AI company
9rx 1y ago
> They wrote off the coding ability of ChatGPT on version 3.5, for instance I found I had better luck with ChatGPT 3.5's coding abilities. What the newer models are really good at, though, is doing the high level "thinking" work and explaining it in plain English, leaving me to simply do the coding.
scotty79 1y ago
> They wrote off the coding ability of ChatGPT on version 3.5, for instance, and have missed all the advancements that have happened since. I feel like I see now more dismissive comments than previously. As if people, initially confused, formed a firm belief since. And now new facts don't really change it, just entrench them in chosen belief.
LennyHenrysNuts 1y ago
And that's why I keep checking back in. They're still pretty dumb if you want the to do anything (ie with MCPs) but they're not bad at writing and code.

by gdubs 1y ago

globnomulous 1y ago

I belong to the camp for whom the capabilities of the models are irrelevant. The largest and most successful models all appear to have been built unethically. I want nothing to do with these companies or the slime who run them, and I will leave my professional field before I'll become their unwilling user. I don't want machines to write my code. I want to write it. I want to solve the problems and find the bugs myself. The engineers I work with who seem to rely most heavily on these tools all seem to be losing their sharpness and problem-solving ability. Many of them praise the models for making it easy to write tests..(Software engineers who treats testing with this kind of carelessness and dismissiveness should lose their jobs.) I like what I do. I like the way I do it. The day I have no choice but do my work, in essence, by scheduling a fucking meeting with a chipper chat bot and telling it what to do will be the day I retire and start a new career. I can't imagine a drearier way to work with technology.

thegrim33 1y ago

To play devil's advocate, how is your argument not a 'no true scottsman' argument? As in, "oh, they had a negative view of X, well that's of course because they weren't testing the new and improved X2 model which is different". Fast forward a year .. "Oh, they have a negative view on X2, well silly them, they need to be using the Y24 model, that's where it's at, the X2 model isn't good anymore". Fast forward a year .. ad infinitum. Are the models that exist today a "true scottsman" for you?

vlovich123 1y ago
How is that different than the models today are actually usable for non trivial things and more capable than yesterdays and it’s also true that tomorrow’s models will also probably be more capable than today’s? For example, I dismissed AI three years ago because it couldn’t do anything I needed it to. Today I use it for certain things and it’s not quite capable of other things. Tomorrow it might be capable of a lot more. Yes, priors have to be updated when the ground truth changes and the capabilities of AI change rapidly. This is how chess engines on supercomputers were competitive in the 90s then hybrid systems became the leading edge competitive and then machines took over for good and never looked back.
- Eggpants 1y ago
  It’s not that the LLMs are better, it’s the internal tools/functions being called that do the actual work are better. They didn’t spend millions to retrain a model to statistically output the number of r’s in strawberry, but just offloaded that trivial question to a function call. So I would say the overall service provided is better than it was, thanks to functions being built based on user queries, but not the actual LLM models themselves.
  - vlovich123 1y ago
    LLMs are definitely better quality today than 3 years ago at codegen quality - there’s quantitative benchmarks as well as for me my personal qualitative experience (given the gaming that companies engage in). It is also true that the tooling and context management has gotten more sophisticated (often using models by the way). That doesn’t negate that the models themselves have gotten better at reliable tool calling so that the LLM is driving more of the show rather than purpose built coordination into the LLM and that the codegen quality is higher than it used to be.
  - int_19h 1y ago
    This is a good example of making statements that are clearly not based in fact. Anyone who works with those models knows full well what a massive gap there is between e.g. GPT 3.5 and Opus 4.1 that has nothing to do with the ability to use tools.

CPLX 1y ago

I agree with you. I am a perpetual cynic about new technology (and a GenXer so multiply that by two) and I have deeply embraced AI in all parts of my business and basically am engaging with it all day for various tasks from helping me compare restaurant options to re-tagging a million contact records in salesforce. It’s incredibly powerful and will just clearly be useful. I don’t believe it’s going to replace intelligence or people but it’s just obviously a remarkable tool. But I think at least part of the dynamic is that the SV tech hype booster train has been so profoundly full of shit for so long that you really can’t blame people for skepticism. Crypto was and is just a giant and elaborate grift, to name one example. Also guys like Altman are clearly overstating the current trajectory. The dismissive response does come with some context attached.

parineum 1y ago
> But I think at least part of the dynamic is that the SV tech hype booster train has been so profoundly full of shit for so long that you really can’t blame people for skepticism. They are still full of shit about LLMs, even if it is useful.

jdoliner 1y ago

I feel like I see these two opposite behaviors. People who formed an opinion about AI from an older model and haven't updated it. And people who have an opinion about what AI will be able to do in the future and refuse to acknowledge that it doesn't do that in the present. And often when the two are arguing it's tricky to tell which is which, because whether or not it does something isn't totally black and white, there's some things it can sometimes do, which you can argue either way about that being in its capabilities or not.

forgotTheLast 1y ago
I.e. people who look at f(now) and assume it'll be like this forever against people who look at f'(now) and assume it'll improve like this forever
- arcastroe 1y ago
  What is f''(now) looking like?
  - mxkopy 1y ago
    Very small. There’s very little fundamental research into AI compared to neural networks from what I can tell
nchmy 1y ago
Another very significant cohort is people who formed a negative opinion without even the slightest interest in genuinely trying to learn how to use it (or even trying at all)

dmead 1y ago

Is there anything you can tell me that will help me drop the nagging feeling that gradient descent trained models will just never be good? I understand all of what you said, but I can't get over that fact that the term AI is being used for these architectures. It seems like the industry is just trying to do a cool parlor trick in convincing the masses this is somehow AI from science fiction. Maybe I'm being overly cynical, but a lot of this stinks.

Zacharias030 1y ago
Wouldn’t you say that now, finally, what people call AI combines subsymbolic systems („gradient descent“) with search and with symbolic systems (tool calls)? I had a professor in AI who was only working on symbolic systems such as SAT-solvers, Prolog etc. and the combination of things seems really promising. Oh, and what would be really nice is another level of memory or fast learning ability that goes beyond burning in knowledge through training alone.
- dmead 1y ago
  I had such a professor as well, but those people used to use the more accurate term "machine learning". There was also wide understanding that those architectures were trying to imitate small bits of what we understood was happening in the brain (see marvin minsky's perceptron etc). The hope was, as I understood it that there would be some breakthrough in neuroscience that would let the computer scientists pick up the torch and simulate what we find in nature. None of that seems to be happening anymore and we're just interested in training enough to fool people. "AI" companies investing in brain science would convince me otherwise. At this point they're just trying to come up with the next money printing machine.
  - app134 1y ago
    You asked earlier if you were being overly cynical, and I think the answer to that is "yes" We are indeed simulating what we find in nature when we create neural networks and transformers, and AI companies are indeed investing heavily in BCI research. ChatGPT can write an original essay better than most of my students. Its also artificial. Is that not artificial intelligence?

libraryofbabel 1y ago

I do see this a lot. It's hard to have a reasonable conversation about AI amidst, on the one hand, hype-mongers and boosters talking about how we'll have AGI in 2027 and all jobs are just about to be automated away, and on the other hand, a chorus of people who hate AI so much they have invested their identify in it failing and haven't really updated their priors since ChatGPT came out. Both groups repeat the same set of tired points that haven't really changed much in three years. But there are plenty of us who try and walk a middle course. A lot of us have changed our opinions over time. ("When the facts change, I change my mind.") I didn't think AI models were much use for coding a year ago. The facts changed. (Claude Code came out.) Now I do. Frankly, I'd be suspicious of anyone who hasn't changed their opinions about AI in the last year. You can believe all these things at once, and many of us do: * LLMs are extremely impressive in what they can do. (I didn't believe I'd see something like this in my lifetime.) * Used judiciously, they are a big productivity boost for software engineers and many other professions. * They are imperfect and make mistakes, often in weird ways. They hallucinate. There are some trivial problems that they mess up. * But they're not just "stochastic parrots." They can model the world and reason about it, albeit imperfectly and not like humans do. * AI will change the world in the next 20 years * But AI companies are overvalued at the present time and we're mostly likely in a bubble which will burst. * Being in a bubble doesn't mean the technology is useless. (c.f. the dotcom bubble or the railroad bubble in the 19th century.) * AGI isn't just around the corner. (There's still no way models can learn from experience.) * A lot of people making optimistic claims about AI are doing it for self-serving boosterish reasons, because they want to pump up their stock price or sell you something * AI has many potential negative consequences for society and mental health, and may be at least as nasty as social media in that respect * AI has the potential to accelerate human progress in ways that really matter, such as medical research * But anyone who claims to know the future is just guessing

dvfjsdhgfv 1y ago
> AI will change the world in the next 20 years Well, it's been changing the world for quite some time, both in good and bad ways. There is no need to add an arbitrary timestamp.
IX-103 1y ago

Mars008 1y ago

There is another big and growing group: charlatans (influencers). People who don't know much but make bold statements, select 'proof' cases. Just to get attention. There are many of them on youtube. When you someone on thumbnail making faces this is most likely it.

resource0x 1y ago
> There are many of them on youtube. Not as many as on HN. "Influencers" have agendas and the stream of income, or other self-interest. HN always comes off as a monolith, on any subject. Counter-arguments get ignored and downvoted to oblivion.
- jkubicek 1y ago
  I’m spending a lot of time on LinkedIn because my team is hiring and, boy oh boy, LinkedIn is terminally infested with AI influencers. It’s a hot mess.
- tim333 1y ago
  If you type "AI" into the youtube search bar it's quite impressive. I think they win.
trinsic2 1y ago
Here[0] is a perfect example of this. There are so many youtubers making videos about the future of AI as a dooms-day prediction. Its kind of irresponsible actually. These youtubers read a book on the the down fall of humanity because of AGI. Many of these authors seem like they are repeating the Terminator/Skynet themes. Because of all this false information, It's hard to believe anything that is being said about the future of AI on youtube now. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KVDDfAkRgc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KVDDfAkRgc

on_the_train 1y ago

But the reports are from shills. The impact of ai is almost non existent. The greatest impact it had was on role-playing. It's hardly even useful for coding. And that all wouldn't be a problem if it wasn't for the wave of bots that makes the crypto wave seem like child's play.

lopatin 1y ago
> They wrote off the coding ability of ChatGPT on version 3.5, for instance, and have missed all the advancements that have happened since. > It's hardly even useful for coding. I’m curious what kind of projects you’re writing where AI coding agents are barely useful. It’s the “shills” on YouTube that keep me up to date with the latest developments and best practices to make the most of these tools. To me it makes tools like CC not only useful but indispensable. Now I do not focus on writing the thing, but I focus on building agents who are capable of building the thing with a little guidance.
loandbehold 1y ago
I don't understand people who say AI isn't useful for coding. Claude Code improved my productivity 10x. I used to put solid 8 hours a day in my remote software engineering job. Now I finish everything in 2 hours and go play with my kids. And my performance is better than before.
- bigstrat2003 1y ago
  I don't understand people who say this. My knee jerk reaction (which I rein in because it's incredibly rude) is always "wow, that person must really suck at programming then". And I try to hold to the conviction that there's another explanation. For me, the vast, vast majority of the time I try to use it, AI slows my work down, it doesn't speed it up. As a result it's incredibly difficult to understand where these supposed 10x improvements are being seen.
  - loandbehold 1y ago
    For me, most of the value comes from Claude Code's ability to 1. research codebase and answer questions about it 2. Perform adhoc testing on the code. Actually writing code is icing on the cake. I work on large code base with more than two million lines of code. Claude Code's ability to find relevant code, understand its purpose, history and interfaces is very time saving. It can answer in minutes questions that would take hours of digging through the code base. Ad hoc testing is another thing. E.g. I can just ask it to test an API endpoint. It will find correct data to use in the database, call the endpoint and verify that it returned correct data and e.g. everything was updated in db correctly.

barrell 1y ago

There are also a bunch of us who do kick the tires very often and are consistently underwhelmed. There are also those of us who have used them substantially, and seen the damage that causes to a codebase in the long run (in part due to the missing gains of having someone who understands the codebase). There are also those of us who just don’t like the interface of chatting with a robot instead of just solving the problem ourselves. There are also those of us who find each generation of model substantially worse than the previous generation, and find the utility trending downwards. There are also those of us who are concerned about the research coming out about the effects of using LLMs on your brain and cognitive load. There are also those of us who appreciate craft, and take pride in what we do, and don’t find that same enjoyment/pride in asking LLMs to do it. There are also those of us who worry about offloading our critical thinking to big corporations, and becoming dependent on a pay-to-play system, that is current being propped up by artificially lowered prices, with “RUG PULL” written all over them. There are also those of us who are really concerned about the privacy issues, and don’t trust companies hundreds of billions of dollars in debt to some of the least trust worth individuals with that data. Most of these issues don’t require much experience with the latest generation. I don’t think the intention of your comment was to stir up FUD, but I feel like it’s really easy for people to walk away with that from this sort of comment, so I just wanted to add my two cents and tell people they really don’t need to be wasting their time every 6 weeks. They’re really not missing anything. Can you do more than a few weeks ago? Sure? Maybe? But I can also do a lot more than I was able to a few weeks ago as well not using an LLM. I’ve learned and improved myself. Chances are if you’re not already using an LLM it’s because you don’t like it, or don’t want to, and that’s really ok. If AGSI comes out in a few months, all the time you would have invested now would be out of date anyways. There’s really no rush or need to be tapped in.

bigstrat2003 1y ago
> There are also a bunch of us who do kick the tires very often and are consistently underwhelmed. Yep, this is me. Every time people are like "it's improved so much" I feel like I'm taking crazy pills as a result. I try it every so often, and more often than not it still has the same exact issues it had back in the GPT-3 days. When the tool hasn't improved (in my opinion, obviously) in several years, why should I be optimistic that it'll reach the heights that advocates say it will?

kelseyfrog 1y ago

There's three important beliefs at play in the A(G)I story: 1. When(if) AGI will arrive. It's likely going to be smeared out over a couple months to years, but relative to everything else, it's a historical blip. This really is the most contention belief with the most variability. It is currently predicted to be 8 years[1]. 2. What percentage of jobs will be replaceable with AGI? Current estimates between 80-95% of professions. The remaining professions "culturally require" humans. Think live performance, artisanal goods, in-person care. 3. How quickly will AGI supplant human labor? What is the duration of replacement from inception to saturation? Replacement won't happen evenly, some professions are much easier to replace with AGI, some much more difficult. Let's estimate a 20-30 years horizon for the most stubborn to replace professions. What we have is a ticking time bomb of labor change at least an order of magnitude greater than the transition from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy or from an industrial economy to a service economy. Those happened over the course of several generations. Society: culture, education, the legal system, the economy, where able to absorb the changes over 100-200 years. Yet we're talking about a change on the same scale happening 10 times faster - within the timeline of one's professional career. And still, with previous revolutions we had incredible unrest, and social change. Taken as a whole, we'll have possibly the majority of the economy operating outside the territory of society, the legal system, and the existing economy. A kid born on the the "day" AGI arrives will become an adult in a profoundly different world as if born on a farm in 1850 and reaching adulthood in a city in 2000. 1. https://www.metaculus.com/questions/5121/date-of-artificial-general-intelligence/ https://www.metaculus.com/questions/5121/date-of-artificial-...

semi-extrinsic 1y ago
Your only reference [1] is to a page where anybody in the world can join and vote. It literally means absolutely nothing. For [2] you have no reference whatsoever. How does AI replace a nurse, a vet, a teacher, a construction worker?
- kelseyfrog 1y ago
  What are you talking about? This is common knowledge. Median forecasts indicated a 50% probability of AI systems being capable of automating 90% of current human tasks in 25 years and 99% of current human tasks in 50 years[1] The scope of work replaceable by embodied AGI and the speed of AGI saturation of vastly under estimated. The bottle necks are production of a replacement workforce, not retraining human laborers. 1. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.08579 https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.08579

analog31 1y ago

There's a middle ground which is to watch and see what happens around us. Is it unholy to not have an opinion?

research_pie 1y ago

I think one of the issue is also the sheer amount of shilling going on like crypto level I got a modest tech following and you wouldn’t believe the amount I’m offered to promote the most garbage AI company

9rx 1y ago

> They wrote off the coding ability of ChatGPT on version 3.5, for instance I found I had better luck with ChatGPT 3.5's coding abilities. What the newer models are really good at, though, is doing the high level "thinking" work and explaining it in plain English, leaving me to simply do the coding.

scotty79 1y ago

> They wrote off the coding ability of ChatGPT on version 3.5, for instance, and have missed all the advancements that have happened since. I feel like I see now more dismissive comments than previously. As if people, initially confused, formed a firm belief since. And now new facts don't really change it, just entrench them in chosen belief.

LennyHenrysNuts 1y ago

And that's why I keep checking back in. They're still pretty dumb if you want the to do anything (ie with MCPs) but they're not bad at writing and code.