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Comment by cjk2 | Hacker News Reader

The AI industry needs to show that it's useful, not that it's innovative. People won't come if you just build stuff. Outside of the tech industry, I have found people have literally no interest or just disdain for this. Personally I haven't found a single use for any of the current AI tools out there which materially improves my life other than the de-noise in Adobe Lightroom.

I suspect Apple are the most likely organisation to be able to change this as they have a track record of taking existing technology and making it useful and demonstrating it effectively.

If they can't do this or it's a disaster I expect it will by proxy reflect badly across the entire industry. This will be an interesting year.

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I simply don't understand this take. Yes, I think AI is incredibly over-hyped at the moment, and I've come to totally agree with Yann LeCun's assessment that LLMs have nothing to do with AGI, but I still think it's an incredibly useful tool if one is aware of its limitations. Things like:

1. ChatGPT is great at translations (at least for English-French), and I've found it too be a great language learning assistant.

2. It's incredibly useful for me when it comes to writing a first draft of complicated SQL queries.

3. It's great at essentially a faster document search and summarization tool if I don't know the keyword of what I'm looking for, e.g. when I want to ask "I want to code X, which libraries can help me do that?"

4. I use cursor.sh as my IDE and I find it incredibly useful, especially for finding answers about a large codebase when I'm a newbie to the repository.

5. I've found ChatGPT to be great for trip ideas and planning.

In short, I think generative AI is a powerful if flawed tool, and I think the disillusionment comes when people think it's more than that.

I think the disillusion here is when you find out that these things are mostly smoke and mirrors that tend to generate very suboptimal solutions. For example I am forever having to shoot down ChatGPT generated code before it hits production which is naively and lazily generated and the engineer is not aware of this at all. Yes it can write SQL but does it understand the index strategy on the destination table or the consequences of running thousands of those queries a minute in a production database? No. Does it have a deep understanding of context rather than just syntax (ask a French language translator what they think of it). No. And with trip planning and ideas, which is a speciality of mine, it is always better to find someone local and ask them about it because a huge portion of the information out there isn't something a model can infer about because it isn't written down anywhere. Case in point, I'm off to the Azores islands shortly - it can't generate anything useful for me. I had someone suggest that already. On top of that it is compelled to over explain sometimes to the point of incorrectness, which it likes to do on travel advice. This becomes dangerous. I found someone local to talk to instead.

So personally I think the LLM and question based uses are limited and quite ridiculous from an objectivity perspective. They barely scratch the surface of the problem and the hit rate is less than I'd get doing the legwork myself, which I do not find useful. And the information is hard to verify and judge if it's safe without deeper contextual knowledge. This is a complete mire.

The other use cases, like classification and search are where I see it winning but those aren't sexy and don't play on our human emotions as well enough to part with cash. They will be left after the hype of course.

Really I think people are buying into a romantic fantasy at the moment.

>Yes it can write SQL but does it understand the index strategy on the destination table or the consequences of running thousands of those queries a minute in a production database? No.

It does if you instruct it well enough.

We're still really early and companies are figuring out how to best use it. It's been 1 year since GPT4 was released. We didn't invent the lightbulb, electric motor, telephone, radio, refrigerators etc. until many years after the invention of electricity.

Right now, LLMs are very useful for many tasks. Over time, they'll continue to get more useful and inventions will be built on top of them.

None of those things were commoditised in even a 20 year span. Many more things died.

Effectively everyone is running on faith. That’s not good enough.

But electricity didn't die. Many products built on top of electricity died.

I don't think AI is running on faith in 2024. I think it's running on very realistic projections and what is available now.

I have the exact opposite view of you. I actually think the AI hype is not overblown. I think it's "underblown". I think we have a very straight forward path in the next few years for AI to be useful everywhere.

It does if you instruct it well enough with a maybe 100k in GPU time and a team of data scientist who have expertise in the domain.

The other option you have is to hire somebody who can write a SELECT with a JOIN in SQL.

> I use cursor.sh as my IDE

How does it compare to Co Pilot or the AI Assistant from JetBrains IDEs

I can't answer that anymore. When I first used it it was much better than Copilot, especially for "ask my repo this question"-type queries, but I think Copilot may have added that functionality since I last used it.

>The AI industry needs to show that it's useful, not that it's innovative. People won't come if you just build stuff. Outside of the tech industry, I have found people have literally no interest or just disdain for this.

you could've said the same thing about computers, back when they were room-sized machines full of vacuum tubes, capable of rudimentary calculations and not much else. would you imagine that less than a century later, we would have devices with more computing power than a million of those in our pockets?

when AI industry stops obsessing over lobotomizing their models into being useless for anything except basic bitch customer support, content moderation and mediocre stack overflow substitute, there will be tons and tons of applications for generative AI. my own industry - gamedev - is within less than a decade from dialogue and audio being generated on the fly, with human writers doing maybe 10% of the work and voice actors just providing a few samples. of course, that will not happen until LLMs are allowed to produce anything but soulless garbage that strictly adheres to FAGMAN sensibilities.

Not really. Your point is hyperbole. Personal computing was a paradigm shift. This is a relatively minor change in a small subset of it.

it was a paradigm shift, yes, but you would never guess that if you were looking at ENIAC in the 40's.

I'm wearing Dick Tracy's watch so the ideas were already out there...

The point is that idea was actually useful!

It's not like "AI" is anything new though, it's been around since the 1950's and we've been through several AI winters since then:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter

There's no reason to believe that this time it'll be different.

> you could've said the same thing about computers, back when they were room-sized machines full of vacuum tubes, capable of rudimentary calculations and not much else

Electronic computers were seen as useful right from the start; they clearly fulfilled an existing need. No-one was handing out VC money to make computers of possible speculative future interest in the 1940s.

I must be the only one on HN who finds GPT4/GPT4o extremely useful and use it multiple times/day for different things.

I'm aware of its limitations and work around its limitations. For example, I'm not going to blindly push the code it gives me without checking it carefully and testing it. I'm not going to completely trust the legal document that it generates for me but I will use it for the first draft and ask it questions.

ChatGPT is excellent for tasks that are on the low end of the risk spectrum but are tedeous.

> Personally I haven't found a single use for any of the current AI tools out there which materially improves my life other than the de-noise in Adobe Lightroom.

Huh odd. I use the copilot mobile app continuously to find things that would be laborious or annoying with search.

Well, anecdotally, a Uber driver who is also a real estate agent told me that he used ChatGPT daily, and it was very helpful.

Just to put it out there.

Kinda opposite in my circles - techies are just meh while creatives use to do tons of writing or summarising stuff. Of course tons of friends never even heard of it.

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