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Comment by bpodgursky | Hacker News Reader

Please, please seriously think back to your 2020 self, and think about whether your 2020 self would be surprised by what AI can do today.

You've frog-boiled yourself into timelines where "No WORLD SHAKING AI launches in the past 4 months" means "AI is frozen". In 4 months, you will be shocked if AI doesn't have a major improvement every 2 months. In 6 months, you will be shocked if it doesn't have a major update ever 1 month.

It's hard to see exponential curves while you're on it, I'm not trying to fault you here. But it's really important to stretch yourself to try.

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I’m still surprised by what AI can do. It’s amazing. … but I still have to double check when it’s important that I get the right answer, I still have to review the code it writes, and I still am not sure there is actually enough business to cover what it will actually cost to run when it needs to pay for itself.

To be honest, I had the right idea back then... This technology has fundamental qualities that require it to provide inaccurate token predictions that are only statistically probable. They aren't even trying to change this situation other than trying to find more data to train, saying you have to keep adding layers of them, or are saying it is the user's responsibility.

There's been the obvious notion that digitizing the world's information is not enough and that hasn't changed.

I for one am quite surprised. Sometimes impressed. But also often frustrated. And occasionally disappointed. Sometimes worried about the negative follow-on effects. Working with current LLMs spans the whole gamut... But for coding we are at the point where even the current level is quite useful. And as the tools/systems get better, the usefilness is going to increase quite a bit. Even if models improve slowly from this point on. It will impact the whole industry over the next years, and since software is eating the world, will impact many other industries as well. Exponential? Perhaps in the same way as computers and Internet have been exponential - cost per X (say tokens) will probably go down exponentially the next years and decades, the same way cost per FLOP went down, on megabytes transferred. But those exponential gains did not results in exponential growth in productivity, or if so, the exponent is much much lower. And I suspect it will likely be the same for artificial intelligence.

What if I’ve not been impressed by giving a bunch of people a spam bot tuned to education materials? Am I frog boiled? Who cares about the actual advancement of this singular component if I was never impressed.

You assume everyone is “impressed”.

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