Technology

Only if you believe in it. Many CEOs do. They're very good in magical thinking.

Magic as in street magician, not magic as in wizard. Lots of the things that people claim AI can do are like a magic show, it's amazing if you look at it from the right angle, and with the right skill you can hide the strings holding it up, but if you try to use it in the real world it falls apart.

Everything is magic if you don't understand how the thing works.

If you're a thechbro, this is the new magic shit, man! To the moooooon!

The masses have been treating it like actual magic since the early stages and are only slowly warming up to the idea it‘s calculations. Calculations of things that are often more than the sum of it‘s parts as people start to realize. Well some people anyway.

Sam Altman will make a big pile of investor money disappear before your very eyes.

Conversely, there are way too many people who think that humans are magic and that it's impossible for AI to ever do <insert whatever is currently being debated here>.

I've long believed that there's a smooth spectrum between not-intelligent and human-intelligent. It's not a binary yes/no sort of thing. There's basic inert rocks at one end, and humans at the other, and everything else gets scattered at various points in between. So I think it's fine to discuss where exactly on that scale LLMs fall, and accept the possibility that they're moving in our direction.

Not being combative or even disagreeing with you - purely out of curiosity, what do you think are the necessary and sufficient conditions of intelligence?

It's like watching mainstream media news talk about something you know about.

I really only use for "oh damn, I known there's a great one-liner to do that in Python" sort of thing. It's usually right and of it isn't it'll be immediacy obvious and you can move on with your day. For anything more complex the gas lighting and subtle errors make it unusable.

ChatGPT is great for helping with specific problems. Google search for example gives fairly general answers, or may have information that doesn't apply to your specific situation. But if you give ChatGPT a very specific description of the issue you're running into it will generally give some very useful recommendations. And it's an iterative process, you just need to treat it like a conversation.

I find it incredibly helpful for breaking into new things.

I want to learn terraform today, no guide/video/docs site can do it as well as having a teacher available at any time for Q&A.

Aside from that, it's pretty good for general Q&A on documented topics, and great when provided context (ie. A full 200MB export of documentation from a tool or system).

But the moment I try and dig deeper I to something I'm an expert in, it just breaks down.

Also interesting is that most people don't understand the advances it makes possible so when they hear people saying it's amazing and then try it of course they're going to think it's not lived upto hype.

The big things are going to completely change things like how we use computers especially being able to describe how you want it to lay out ui and create custom tools on the fly.

I think a big obstacle to meaningfully using AI is going to be public perception. Understanding the difference between CHAT-GPT and open source models means that people like us will probably continue to find ways of using AI as it continues to improve, but what I keep seeing is botched applications, where neither the consumers nor the investors who are pushing AI really understand what it is or what it's useful for. It's like trying to dig a grave with a fork - people are going to throw away the fork and say it's useless, not realising that that's not how it's meant to be used.

I'm concerned about the way the hype behaves because I wouldn't be surprised if people got so sick of hearing about AI at all, let alone broken AI nonsense, that it hastens the next AI winter. I worry that legitimate development may be held back by all the nonsense.

I agree 100%, and I think Zuckerberg's attempt at a massive 340,000 of Nvidia’s H100 GPUs AI based on LLM with the aim to create a generel AI sounds stupid. Unless there's a lot more to their attempt, it's doomed to fail.

I suppose the idea is something about achieving critical mass, but it's pretty obvious, that that is far from the only factor missing to achieve general AI.

I still think it's impressive what they can do with LLM. And it seems to be a pretty huge step forward. But It's taken about 40 years from we had decent "pattern recognition" to get here, the next step could be another 40 years?

It's pretty useful if you know exactly what you want and how to work within it's limitations.

Coworkers around me already use ChatGPT to generate code snippets for Python, Excel VBA, etc. to good success.

Well, natural language processing is placed in the trough of disillusionment and projected to stay there for years. ChatGPT was released in November 2022...