this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2024
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[–] [email protected] 23 points 16 hours ago (3 children)

So you're saying we wont have any crowdsourced blockchain Web 2.0 AIs?

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 20 hours ago (4 children)

"Built to do my art and writing so I can do my laundry and dishes" -- Embodied agents is where the real value is. The chatbots are just fancy tech demos that folks started selling because people were buying.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

Though the image generators are actually good. The visual arts will never be the same after this

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[–] [email protected] 63 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (16 children)

There is this seeming need to discredit AI from some people that goes overboard. Some friends and family who have never really used LLMs outside of Google search feel compelled to tell me how bad it is.

But generative AIs are really good at tasks I wouldn't have imagined a computer doing just a few year ago. Even if they plateaued in place where they are right now it would lead to major shakeups in humanity's current workflow. It's not just hype.

The part that is over hyped is companies trying to jump the gun and wholesale replace workers with unproven AI substitutes. And of course the companies who try to shove AI where it doesn't really fit, like AI enabled fridges and toasters.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 16 hours ago

This is easy to say about the output of AIs.... if you don't check their work.

Alas, checking for accuracy these days seems to be considered old fogey stuff.

[–] [email protected] 63 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

The part that is over hyped is companies trying to jump the gun and wholesale replace workers with unproven AI substitutes. And of course the companies who try to shove AI where it doesn't really fit, like AI enabled fridges and toasters.

This is literally the hype. This is the hype that is dying and needs to die. Because generative AI is a tool with fairly specific uses. But it is being marketed by literally everyone who has it as General AI that can "DO ALL THE THINGS!" which it's not and never will be.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

The obsession with replacing workers with AI isn't going to die. It's too late. The large financial company that I work for has been obsessively tracking hours saved in developer time with GitHub Copilot. I'm an older developer and I was warned this week that my job will be eliminated soon.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (1 children)

The large financial company that I work for

So the company that is obsessed with money that you work for has discovered a way to (they think) make more money by getting rid of you and you're surprised by this?

At least you've been forewarned. Take the opportunity to abandon ship. Don't be the last one standing when the music stops.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

I never said that I was surprised. I just wanted to point out that many companies like my own are already making significant changes to how they hire and fire. They need to justify their large investment in AI even though we know the tech isn't there yet.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 23 hours ago (9 children)

Even if they plateaued in place where they are right now it would lead to major shakeups in humanity's current workflow

Like which one? Because it's now 2 years we have chatGPT and already quite a lot of (good?) models. Which shakeup do you think is happening or going to happen?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 22 hours ago (4 children)

Computer programming has radically changed. Huge help having llm auto complete and chat built in. IDEs like Cursor and Windsurf.

I’ve been a developer for 35 years. This is shaking it up as much as the internet did.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (6 children)

I quit my previous job in part because I couldn't deal with the influx of terrible, unreliable, dangerous, bloated, nonsensical, not even working code that was suddenly pushed into one of the projects I was working on. That project is now completely dead, they froze it on some arbitrary version.
When junior dev makes a mistake, you can explain it to them and they will not make it again. When they use llm to make a mistake, there is nothing to explain to anyone.
I compare this shake more to an earthquake than to anything positive you can associate with shaking.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 21 hours ago (9 children)

I hardly see it changed to be honest. I work in the field too and I can imagine LLMs being good at producing decent boilerplate straight out of documentation, but nothing more complex than that.

I often use LLMs to work on my personal projects and - for example - often Claude or ChatGPT 4o spit out programs that don't compile, use inexistent functions, are bloated etc. Possibly for languages with more training (like Python) they do better, but I can't see it as a "radical change" and more like a well configured snippet plugin and auto complete feature.

LLMs can't count, can't analyze novel problems (by definition) and provide innovative solutions...why would they radically change programming?

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 20 hours ago (20 children)

Computers have always been good at pattern recognition. This isn't new. LLM are not a type of actual AI. They are programs capable of recognizing patterns and Loosely reproducing them in semi randomized ways. The reason these so-called generative AI Solutions have trouble generating the right number of fingers. Is not only because they have no idea how many fingers a person is supposed to have. They have no idea what a finger is.

The same goes for code completion. They will just generate something that fills the pattern they're told to look for. It doesn't matter if it's right or wrong. Because they have no concept of what is right or wrong Beyond fitting the pattern. Not to mention that we've had code completion software for over a decade at this point. Llms do it less efficiently and less reliably. The only upside of them is that sometimes they can recognize and suggest a pattern that those programming the other coding helpers might have missed. Outside of that. Such as generating act like whole blocks of code or even entire programs. You can't even get an llm to reliably spit out a hello world program.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 6 minutes ago)

oh wow who would have guessed that business consultancy companies are generally built on bullshitting about things which they dont really have a grasp off

[–] [email protected] 119 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

A big issue that a lot of these tech companies seem to have is that they don't understand what people want; they come up with an idea and then shove it into everything. There are services that I have actively stopped using because they started cramming AI into things; for example I stopped dual-booting with Windows and became Linux-only.

AI is legitimately interesting technology which definitely has specialized use-cases, e.g. sorting large amounts of data, or optimizing strategies within highly restrained circumstances (like chess or go). However, 99% of what people are pushing with AI these days as a member of the general public just seems like garbage; bad art and bad translations and incorrect answers to questions.

I do not understand all the hype around AI. I can understand the danger; people who don't see that it's bad are using it in place of people who know how to do things. But in my teaching for example I've never had any issues with students cheating using ChatGPT; I semi-regularly run the problems I assign through ChatGPT and it gets enough of them wrong that I can't imagine any student would be inclined to use ChatGPT to cheat multiple times after their grade the first time comes in. (In this sense, it's actually impressive technology - we've had computers that can do advanced math highly accurately for a while, but we've finally developed one that's worse at math than the average undergrad in a gen-ed class!)

[–] [email protected] 49 points 1 day ago (15 children)

The answer is that it's all about "growth". The fetishization of shareholders has reached its logical conclusion, and now the only value companies have is in growth. Not profit, not stability, not a reliable customer base or a product people will want. The only thing that matters is if you can make your share price increase faster than the interest on a bond (which is pretty high right now).

To make share price go up like that, you have to do one of two things; show that you're bringing in new customers, or show that you can make your existing customers pay more.

For the big tech companies, there are no new customers left. The whole planet is online. Everyone who wants to use their services is using their services. So they have to find new things to sell instead.

And that's what "AI" looked like it was going to be. LLMs burst onto the scene promising to replace entire industries, entire workforces. Huge new opportunities for growth. Lacking anything else, big tech went in HARD on this, throwing untold billions at partnerships, acquisitions, and infrastructure.

And now they have to show investors that it was worth it. Which means they have to produce metrics that show people are paying for, or might pay for, AI flavoured products. That's why they're shoving it into everything they can. If they put AI in notepad then they can claim that every time you open notepad you're "engaging" with one of their AI products. If they put Recall on your PC, every Windows user becomes an AI user. Google can now claim that every search is an AI interaction because of the bad summary that no one reads. The point is to show "engagement", "interest", which they can then use to promise that down the line huge piles of money will fall out of this pinata.

The hype is all artificial. They need to hype these products so that people will pay attention to them, because they need to keep pretending that their massive investments got them in on the ground floor of a trillion dollar industry, and weren't just them setting huge piles of money on fire.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 21 hours ago

I've ran some college hw through 4o just to see and it's remarkably good at generating proofs for math and algorithms. Sometimes it's not quite right but usually on the right track to get started.

In some of the busier classes I'm almost certain students do this because my hw grades would be lower than the mean and my exam grades would be well above the mean.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 18 hours ago (8 children)

I saved a lot of time due to ChatGPT. Need to sign up some of my pupils for a competition by uploading their data in a csv-File to some plattform? Just copy and paste their data into chsatgpt and prompt it to create the file. The boss (headmaster) wants some reasoning why I need some paid time for certain projects? Let ChatGPT do the reasoning. Need some exercises for one of my classes that doesn't really come to grips with while-loops? let ChatGPT create those exercises (some smartasses will of course have ChatGPT then solve those exercises). The list goes on...

[–] [email protected] 7 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

ChatGPT is basically like a really good intern, and I use it heavily that way. I run literally every email through it and say "respond to so and so, say xyz" and then maybe a little refining, copy paste, done.

The other day, my boss sent me an excel file with a shitload of data in it that he wanted me to analyze some such way. I just copy pasted it into gpt and asked it, and it spit out the correct response. Then my boss asked me to do something else that required a bit of excel finagling that I didn't really know how to do, so i asked gpt, and it told me the formula, which worked immediately first try.

So basically it helps me accomplish tasks in seconds that previously would've taken hours. If anything, I think markets are currently undervalued, because remarkably, fucking NONE of my colleagues or friends are using it at all yet. Once there's widespread adoption, which will pretty much have to happen if anyone wants to stay competitive once it gains more traction, look out...

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 16 hours ago

Yeah, and Wikipedia is one of the most useful sites on the net, but it didn't exactly result in the entire web becoming crowdsourced.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 14 hours ago

Those pupils will really thank you when they grow up and there isn't enough fresh water because all the data centres are using it up far faster than it can be replenished.

https://utulsa.edu/news/data-centers-draining-resources-in-water-stressed-communities/

[–] [email protected] 4 points 17 hours ago

The poem about AI that often gets posted says "What are you trying to avoid? The living [of a life]?"

And yeah, that's what it's for, dodging shit you don't want to do. I gotta produce some useless bullshit that no one's going to read or care about: AI.

I don't even mind AI art for things like LinkedIn posts, blogs like "What is warehouse management?" or "Top 10 finance trends in 2025" - SEO spam that no human will read. No one wants to write it, read it, or care about it- its just a x kb file to tell Google to look here.

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