How stupid do you have to be to believe that only 8% of companies have seen failed AI projects? We can’t manage this consistently with CRUD apps and people think that this number isn’t laughable? Some companies have seen benefits during the LLM craze, but not 92% of them. 34% of companies report that generative AI specifically has been assisting with strategic decision making? What the actual fuck are you talking about?
…
I don’t believe you. No one with a brain believes you, and if your board believes what you just wrote on the survey then they should fire you.
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I had my fun with Copilot before I decided that it was making me stupider - it’s impressive, but not actually suitable for anything more than churning out boilerplate.
This. Many of these tools are good at incredibly basic boilerplate that’s just a hint outside of say a wizard. But to hear some of these AI grifters talk, this stuff is going to render programmers obsolete.
There’s a reality to these tools. That reality is they’re helpful at times, but they are hardly transformative at the levels the grifters go on about.
I interviewed a candidate for a senior role, and they asked if they could use AI tools. I told them to use whatever they normally would, I only care that they get a working answer and that they can explain the code to me.
The problem was fairly basic, something like randomly generate two points and find the distance between them, and we had given them the details (e.g. distance is a straight line). They used AI, which went well until it generated the Manhattan distance instead of the Pythagorean theorem. They didn’t correct it, so we pointed it out and gave them the equation (totally fine, most people forget it under pressure). Anyway, they refactored the code and used AI again to make the same mistake, didn’t catch it, and we ended up pointing it out again.
Anyway, at the end of the challenge, we asked them how confident they felt about the code and what they’d need to do to feel more confident (nudge toward unit testing). They said their code was 100% correct and they’d be ready to ship it.
They didn’t pass the interview.
And that’s generally my opinion about AI in general, it’s probably making you stupider.
I’ve seen people defend using AI this way by comparing it to using a calculator in a math class, i.e. if the technology knows it, I don’t need to.
And I feel like, for the kind of people whose grasp of technology, knowledge, and education are so juvenile that they would believe such a thing, AI isn’t making them dumber. They were already dumb. What the AI does is make code they don’t understand more accessible, which is to say, it’s just enabling dumb people to be more dangerous while instilling them with an unearned confidence that only compounds the danger.
Wait wait wait so… this person forgot the pythagorean theorem?
Like that is the most basic task. It’s
d = sqrt((x1 - x2)^2 + (y1 - y2)^2), right?That was off the top of my head, this person didn’t understand that? Do I get a job now?
I have seen a lot of programmers talk about how much time it saves them. It’s entirely possible it makes them very fast at making garbage code. One thing I’ve known for a long time is that understanding code is much harder than writing it, and so asking an LLM to generate your code sounds like it’s just creating harder work for you, unless you don’t care about getting it right.
Yup, you’re hired as whatever position you want. :)
Our instructions were basically:
- randomly place N coordinates on a 2D grid, and a random target point
- report the closest of those N coordinates to the target point
It was technically different (we phrased it as a top-down game, but same gist). AI generated manhattan distance (
abs(x2 - x1) + abs(x2 - x1)) probably due to other clues in the text, but the instructions were clear. The candidate didn’t notice what it was doing, we pointed it out, then they asked for the algorithm, which we provided.Our better candidates remember the equation like you did. But we don’t require it, since not all applicants finished college (this one did). We’re more concerned about code structure, asking proper questions, and software design process, but math knowledge is cool too (we do a bit of that).
College? Pythagorean Theorem is mid-level high school math.
I did once talk to a high school math teacher about a graphics program I was hacking away on at the time, and she was surprised that I actually use the stuff she teaches. Which is to say that I wouldn’t expect most programmers to know it exactly off the top of their head, but I would expect they’ve been exposed to it and can look it up if needed. I happen to have it pretty well ingrained in my brain.
Yes, you learn it in the context of finding the hypotenuse of a triangle, but:
- a lot of people are “bad” at math (more unconfident), but good with logic
- geometry, trig, etc require a lot of memorization, so it’s easy to forget things
- interviews are stressful, and good applicants will space on basic things
So when I’m interviewing, I try to provide things like algorithms that they probably know but are likely to space on, and focus on the part I care about: can they reason their way through a problem and produce working code, and then turn around and review their code. Programming is mostly googling stuff (APIs, algorithms, etc), I want to know if they can google the right stuff.
And yeah, we let applicants look stuff up, we just short circuit the less important stuff so they have time to show us the important parts. We dedicate 20-30 min to coding (up to an hour if they rocked at questions and are struggling on code), and we expect a working solution and for them to ask questions about vague requirements. It’s a software engineering test, not a math test.
Yeah, that’s absolutely fair, and it’s a bit snobby of me to get all up in arms about forgetting a formula - although it is high school level where I live. But to be handed the formula, informed that there’s an issue and still not fix it is the really hard part to wrap my head around, given it’s such a basic formula.
I guess I’m also remembering someone I knew who got a programming job off the back of someone else’s portfolio, who absolutely couldn’t program to save their life and revealed that to me in a glaring way when I was trying to help them out. It just makes me think of that study that was done that suggested that there might be a “programmer brain” that you either have or you don’t. They ended up costing that company a lot to my knowledge.
I use them like wikipedia: it’s a good starting point and that’s it (and this comparison is a disservice to wikipedia).
Copilot / LLM code completion feels like having a somewhat intelligent helper who can think faster than I can, however they have no understanding of how to actually code, but are good at mimicry.
So it’s helpful for saving time typing some stuff, and sometimes the absolutely weird suggestions make me think of other scenarios I should consider, but it’s not going to do the job itself.
Yes, and then you take the time to dig a little deeper and use something agent based like aider or crewai or autogen. It is amazing how many people are stuck in the mindset of “if the simplest tools from over a year aren’t very good, then there’s no way there are any good tools now.”
It’s like seeing the original Planet of the Apes and then arguing against how realistic the Apes are in the new movies without ever seeing them. Sure, you can convince people who really want unrealistic Apes to be the reality, and people who only saw the original, but you’ll do nothing for anyone who actually saw the new movies.
Also, a lot of people who are using AI have become quiet about it of late exactly because of reactions like this article’s. Okay, you’ll “piledrive” me if I mention AI? So I won’t mention AI. I’ll just carry on using it to make whatever I’m making without telling you.
There’s some great stuff out there, but of course people aren’t going to hear about it broadly if every time it gets mentioned it gets “piledriven.”
Pretty much me. I am using it everywhere but usually not interested in mentioning it to some internet trolls.
You can check my profile if you want, or not. 7 months ago I baked my first loaf of bread. I got the recipe from chatgpt. Over 7 months I have been going over with it on recipes and techniques, and as of this month I now have a part time gig job making artisan breads for a restaurant.
There is no way I could have progressed this fast without that tool. Keep in mind I have a family and a career in engineering, not exactly an abundance of time to take classes.
I mentioned this once on lemmy and some boomer shit starting screaming how learning how to bake with the help of an AI didn’t count and I need to buy baking books.
Edit: spelling
And if you need examples of people being piledriven, you can browse my history a bit. :) Since I’m not doing anything with AI that would suffer “professionally” from backlash (such as might happen to an artist who becomes the target of anti-AI witch-hunters) I’ve not been shy about talking about the good things AI can do and how I use it. Or at calling out biased or inaccurate arguments against various AI applications. As a result I get a lot of downvotes.
Fundamentally, I think it’s just that people are afraid. They’re seeing a big risk from this new technology of losing their jobs, their lifestyles, and control over their lives. And that’s a real concern that should be treated seriously, IMO. But fear is not a good cultivator of rational thought or honest discourse. It’s not helping people work towards solving those real concerns.
Yeah, this is exactly what I think it is. I’m a bit concerned about how hard it’s going to hit a large number of people when they realize that they’re echo chamber of “LLMs are garbage and have no benefits” was so completely wrong. I agree that there are scary aspects of all this, but pretending like they don’t exist will just make it harder to deal with. It’s like denying that the smoke alarm is going off until your arm is on fire.
Hacker News was silencing this article outright. That’s typically a sign that its factual enough to strike a nerve with the potential CxO libertarian [slur removed] crowd.
If this is satire, I don’t see it. Because i’ve seen enough of the GenAI crowd openly undermine society/the environment/the culture and be brazen about it; violence is a perfectly normal response.
What happened to HN? I have now heard HN silencing cetain posts multiple times. Is this enshittification?
HN is run by a VC firm, Y Combinator. One of its largest supporters is OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Do the math.
That’s depressing
deleted by creator
I want to confirm this. Hacker News is nothing like it used to be and is approaching the cliff of “group think” narrator, the opposite of Entrepreneurship.
What. When did we start censoring shit on lemmy.
[slur removed] was my choice.
Another friend of mine was reviewing software intended for emergency services, and the salespeople were not expecting someone handling purchasing in emergency services to be a hardcore programmer. It was this false sense of security that led them to accidentally reveal that the service was ultimately just some dude in India. Listen, I would just be some random dude in India if I swapped places with some of my cousins, so I’m going to choose to take that personally and point out that using the word AI as some roundabout way to sell the labor of people that look like me to foreign governments is fucked up, you’re an unethical monster, and that if you continue to try { thisBullshit(); } you are going to catch (theseHands)
This aspect of it isn’t getting talked about enough. These companies are presenting these things as fully-formed AI, while completely neglecting the people behind the scenes constantly cleaning it up so it doesn’t devolve into chaos. All of the shortcomings and failures of this technology are being masked by the fact that there’s actual people working round the clock pruning and curating it.
You know, humans, with actual human intelligence, without which these miraculous “artificial intelligence” tools would not work as they seem to.
If the "AI’ needs a human support team to keep it “intelligent”, it’s less AI and more a really fancy kind of puppet.
I work in AI as a software engineer. Many of my peers have PhD’s, and have sunk a lot of research into their field. I know probably more than the average techie, but in the grand scheme of things I know fuck all. Hell, if you were to ask the scientists I work with if they “know AI” they’ll probably just say “yeah, a little”.
Working in AI has exposed me to so much bullshit, whether it’s job offers for obvious scams that’ll never work, or for “visionaries” that work for consultancies that know as little about AI as the next person, but market themselves as AI experts. One guy had the fucking cheek to send me a message on LinkedIn to say “I see you work in AI, I’m hosting a webinar, maybe you’ll learn something”.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of cool stuff out there, and some companies are doing some legitimately cool stuff, but the actual use-cases for these tools where they won’t just be productivity enhancers/tools is low at best. I fully support this guy’s efforts to piledrive people, and will gladly lend him my sword.
very interesting read thx for sharing. glad finally someone who actually knows something about “AI” said it.
Oh my god this whole post is amazing, thought I’d share my favorite excerpt:
This entire class of person is, to put it simply, abhorrent to right-thinking people. They’re an embarrassment to people that are actually making advances in the field, a disgrace to people that know how to sensibly use technology to improve the world, and are also a bunch of tedious know-nothing bastards that should be thrown into Thought Leader Jail until they’ve learned their lesson, a prison I’m fundraising for. Every morning, a figure in a dark hood7, whose voice rasps like the etching of a tombstone, spends sixty minutes giving a TedX talk to the jailed managers about how the institution is revolutionizing corporal punishment, and then reveals that the innovation is, as it has been every day, kicking you in the stomach very hard.
Where the fuck do I donate???
“Right-thinking”??
Right as in the actual definition of the word, no political
Conforming with or conformable to justice, law, or morality.
In accordance with fact, reason, or truth; correct.
Fitting, proper, or appropriate.
I get that, didn’t think it was a political meaning. Just seems like an iffy word to me personally, hard to put my finger on it.
Maybe since the inverse would be “wrong-think”?
English your second language? Phrases that seem common to natives may seem off to those who learned English later in life. 'Tis a silly language.
Is the AI boom the new Blockchain of scams?
Hey, we can always say: how can you check if an AI is working, it doesn’t come to the office? 🤔
It’s consistently pretty good for writing items with low technical importance and minimal need for accuracy.
I’ll never write a job description myself again and my need for getting with communications for mass correspondence is almost gone.
Good for writing things nobody will read and reading things nobody wrote.
Masterful wordsmithing, I must find a place for this quote in my future writing. I’ll save and credit.
I don’t fear Artificial Intelligence, I fear Administrative Idiocy. The managers are the problem.
I know AI can’t replace me. But my boss’s boss’s boss doesn’t know that.
Fortunately, it’s my job as your boss to convince my boss and boss’ boss that AI can’t replace you.
We had a candidate spectacularly fail an interview when they used AI and didn’t catch the incredibly obvious errors it made. I keep a few examples of that handy to defend my peeps in case my boss or boss’s boss decide AI is the way to go.
I hope your actual boss would do that for you.
TLDR; AI-Bad, I’m smart.
Why is this on here?
OP dumb.
:0
This is such a fun and insightful piece. Unfortunately, the people who really need to read it never will.
It blatantly contradicts itself. I would wager good money that you read the headline and didn’t go much further because you assumed it was agreeing with you. Despite the subject matter, this is objectively horribly written. It lacks a cohesive narrative.
I read every single word of it, twice, and I was laughing all the way through. I’m sorry you don’t like it, but it seems strange that you immediately assume that I haven’t read it just because I don’t agree with you.
There is literally not a chance that anyone downvoting this actually read it. It’s just a bunch of idiots that read the title, like the idea that llms suck and so they downvoted. This paper is absolute nonsense that doesn’t even attempt to make a point. I seriously think it is ppprly ai generated and just taking the piss out of idiots that love anything they think is anti-ai, whatever that means.
I read the fun blogpost that is not an academic paper and ive downvoted you. Does that mean i dont actually exist or that u dont actually exist???
Everyone who downvoted me didnt read the article, or didnt read what i said, or didnt read op, or something, i dont remember what they didnt read but they cannot be real because the only way to disagree with me is to not have read something or other (or did read it, cant remember which)
Because the headline goes along with all the people that thoughtlessly think ai is pointless, but the blog post itself is an incoherent mess that actually sometimes talks about how ai is useful and rapidly improving. It is a rambling mess. People who read it realise this. People who just read the headline assume it will say what they think. The chances that you made it through that whole thing are slim to none, but sure, maybe you read it, whatever. Congratulations, I’m sure it really improved your understanding.
Which makes the point that while AI LLM’s can be useful and can be improved, hamfisting them into every product you make as a company because you have FOMO is ill advised and aggravating, especially when you pay people to be subject matter experts in the field and they tell you it’s a bad idea. That’s what the article said in some very verbose language. Your attention span must be severely lacking because you couldn’t read the article and glean that simple point from the words on the page. I read it and it was entertaining and insightful.
You seem like someone who might need paragraphs to be a single sentence.
Other than having to scroll down an extra 3 centimeters to see your Google results, have you actually been inconvenienced by ai being used somewhere? All this outrageous about terrible ai getting in the way all the time is hilarious because it is absolutely manufactured by people who are obsessed with complaining and then parroted by people incapable of thinking for themselves. Nobody’s actually living worse lives because a few companies are trying out new tech. The fact of the matter is that there are obnoxious karens online, just like in real life.
You seem like someone who is probably self-righteous, obnoxious, and annoying to be around in real life, just like you are online.
What a good full set of possibilities since it’s certainly impossible for anyone on the internet to lie. How fun for a blog to contradict its main point.
It’s not a paper, it’s a stream-of-consciousness style blog post.
I hate anti-ai mania as much as the next person but the post is funny and it does have a point.
This gets a vote from me for “Best of the Internet 2024”, brilliant pacing, super braced, and with precision bluntness. I’m going to pretend the Monero remark is not even there, that’s how good it was.
I don’t know how much stock to put in this author. They can’t even read the chart that they shared. They saw that 8% didn’t get use from gen ai and so assumed that 92% did. There are also 7% that haven’t tried using it yet. Ironically, pretty much any LLM with vision would have done a better job of comprehending the chart than this author did.
After reading that entire post, I wish I had used AI to summarize it.
I am not in the equally unserious camp that generative AI does not have the potential to drastically change the world. It clearly does. When I saw the early demos of GPT-2, while I was still at university, I was half-convinced that they were faked somehow. I remember being wrong about that, and that is why I’m no longer as confident that I know what’s going on.
This pull quote feels like it’s antithetical to their entire argument and makes me feel like all they’re doing is whinging about the fact that people who don’t know what they’re talking about have loud voices. Which has always been true and has little to do with AI.
Yeah, this paper is time wasted. It is hilarious that they think that 3 years is a long time as a data scientists and this somehow gives them such wisdom. Then, they can’t even accurately extract the data from the chart that they posted in the article. On top of all this, like you pointed out, they can’t even keep a clear narrative, and they blatantly contradict themself on their main point. They want to pile drive people who come to the same conclusion as themself. What a strange take.
