What happened to the artificial-intelligence revolution?
economist.com
economist.com
What is, in general, strange is that noone has really figured out how to do the plumbing. We have the LLM and they can perform almost any text related task, summarize search results or provide complex code snippets based on limited specification.
But somehow, the integration into work flows remains cumbersome.
- Search somehow seems to be burdened by the inability of the search providers to process entire webpages. Google, despite their search advantage, seems to only be able to process the search snippets instead of summarizing the entire content of websites. Most likely a copyright issue...
- Github Copilot is still basically autocomplete or a chat interface where I manually have to copy&paste results. Prompting for changes across multiple files is not really solved. (I know there is cursor, but my experience was quite mixed).
- All the hailed agents seem to create a lot of fluff but little actual code beyond what I would get with zero shot prompting. (Just tried a new tool today, which consumed $2.00 in API credits on the first task and left me with a broken codebase).
- Nothing that properly addresses slide generation yet?
Anthropics new workflow with Artifacts and Projects seems very promising and is a great leap forward. But it cannot natively process diffs or work with multiple soruce file and is therefore limited in total codelength.
As other people in this thread already remarked, maybe this is early stage technology that is pushed to commercialization too soon.
The AI revolution has only just started. The web took years to really find its feet.
Anyone who is calling AI a fizzer is calling the end of the race when the horses have just started out of the gate.
It will moderate, but not pop.
Infrastructure spending will decrease but a bulk of purchasers are incredibly well funded with revenue sources that are not dependent on GenAI.
I have no degree of certainty, but I have seen enough of these takes over the years to always try to imagine the most likely counterfactual.
It’s not all hype.
Example: people spend ungodly amounts of time creating marketing materials, and this is all getting automated 10:1 or more.
So expect 10x more ad spam? How wonderful!
You have probably already read this kind of “money only” analysis (there was a better thinktank HN link last week on the topic of the massive investment overhang of about 500 billion dollars).
The Economist piece also asks (with almost tacit disappointment) why AI has not already allowed us to lay off many more employees.
This is only puzzling if the time-horizon of an analysis is measured in months (or at most a few years) and if you think of the world economy as a nimble gazelle.
There is plenty of work to keep humans busy and even satisfied with their lives. We just need a lot more human intelligence and cooperation to adapt to AIs impending impact. And keep it safe. It will make the 500 billion dollar investment overhang look like a small blip.
The human mind still outdoes Chat-gpt, but there are much more advanced systems. What lies beneath the term “intelligence”? Does fearing AI only lead us to use it incorrectly? How can we use AI for our advancement?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a buzzword in today’s technological discourse. The term "AI" has captivated the public and scientific communities alike, but it is essential to critically examine what AI represents.
you could say this exact same thing about the internet for many years (e.g. mid eighties to early nineties) after it's first use.
They, for sure, won't be getting any. So going against it is probably where they can squeeze the maximum of eyeballs they will get from all the "revolution".
You have all become AI food. Resign to your fate, past overlords.