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Comment by kybernetyk | Hacker News Reader

I don't give a flying f about """AI""". It's the XML of this decade. Still haven't seen any actual use case for it (other than generating spam content for the web). At least with Bitcoin you could buy drugs ;)

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Amen brother. At least one voice of sanity has been heard through the AI hype. I more equate an AI toaster to being like the old 3D LCD TV crap from 10 years ago.

Yeah, this feels like cloud all over again. AI's not living up the hype.

At this time last year, GPT 4 really looked promising. It seemed like it could do logical reasoning, which would enable a lot of use cases besides just "automate the 50% dumbest people in your office." I wish OpenAI or someone else would push harder in that direction.

AI is great at parsing and classification. Use it in a specific feature in our product that would be impossible to do with manual regex/parsing - saves hundreds of man hours a year.

It’s also been immensely useful for software development work - I find myself reaching for AI over docs more often these days due to its ability to understand context.

"AI" is literally a marketing term for what we used to call algorithms, macros, etc. until very recently. Nothing fundamentally new is happening, just that what was largely confined to businesses and enterprises before has been adapted to become accessible to every man.

>I find myself reaching for AI over docs

I sincerely hope you read the documentation regardless to verify you aren't hallucinating. At best you'll just get the compiler mocking you, at worst you might find yourself responsible for a 737 MAX.

Oh, I still end up in the docs and have them open all the time. I don't generally use it for AI code completion. Maybe what's needed is just better doc search (that understands context and intent).

True AI should be like stackoverflow:

"How do I do X?".

"Are you crazy? You shouldn't do X. Best practices are doing Y, Z and T".

Sorry, but you mentioned the LLM understanding intent.

Now that’s an interesting idea!

Just for the record, in this example StackOverflow doesn't even attempt to understand intent, so neither should the LLM.

We are using it for parsing and classification as well and have done a full internal study. The case is financial data collection. There are three side-by-side approaches we are comparing. Human-only, human-led, and ML-only. The only viable outcome for what we are doing is still human-only. The net cost of correcting the mistakes the ML makes in the human-led model are higher than the human-only model. The ML-only model has a capital risk higher than the value of our business. We're still experimenting with training but at least in our case, it's a poor solution.

Ergo YMMV and we shouldn't be spilling absolutes about it. It looks like it might work but does it really? We work in a very intellectually dishonest fashion-driven industry. Some objectivity would be nice in arguments.

As for writing code, I find it does a reasonable job of boilerplate but hits the crack pipe almost always if you stretch it. Then again that's better than any junior developer I've worked with so there is some utility there.

I agree. Occasionally ours doesn't work (frequent and very irritating OpenAI timeouts) or the output is inconsistent (different output from the same input).

It's going to be like "search engines" or "the cloud" or whatever.

- Insane levels of hype

- 99% of what is promised is useless buzzword driven utter crap

- The other 1% will actually change the world

- 10 years from now it will be baked into a lot of stuff we do and become the new norm

It is simultaneously the future in some positive ways annnnnnd a firehose of sludgy toxic meaningless crap.

XML of the decade is a good way to put it

I have developed the a super effective prompt that saves me a ton of time working with SQL:

What is wrong with this code? Assume the tables exists.

And then I don't have to spend the time to find out that I placed the join after the where clause or that I should use one = sign when checking for equality or whatever.

You are welcome to your belief of course, I work as a consultant and if we are more effective than others we get more business.

Interesting opinion!

I am retired and only program and write books for fun now, so my experience is likely not relevant: I have used co-pilot with Emacs and VSCode for the last year and it truly does save time. When I write, I like to ingest several pages into ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude 2, and ask things “any suggests for new topics for me to write about?”, etc.

I find the technology useful. Less useful, but fun are open source projects like open interpreter using local models.

I am not totally disagreeing with you, the level of hype is epic.

If this is true, XML must've been way more exciting than I could've imagined

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