It’s always amazing to see how folks latch on to the extreme vs the reality.
ML and AI tools are quite helpful. Yes they make mistakes but at the end of the day it reduces human effort. It’s really not hard to see the usefulness.
The day to day reality for me at least is that the new hyped up llms are largely useless for work and in some cases actually detriments. Some people at work use them a lot, but the heavy users tend to be people who were bad at their jobs, or at least bad at the communication aspect of their jobs. They were bad at communicating before and now, with the help of chat gpt, they are still bad at communicating, except they have gotten weirdly obstinate about their crappy work output.
Other folks I know have tried to use them to learn new things but gave up on them when they kept getting corrected by subject matter experts.
I played around with them for code generation but did not find it any faster than just writing and debugging my own code.
It reduces effort in summarizing reports or paper abstracts that you aren’t sure you need to read. It reduces efforts in outlining formulaic types of writing such as cover letters, work emails etc.
It reduces effort when brainstorming mundane solutions to things, often by knocking off the most obvious choices but that’s an important step in brainstorming if you’ve ever done it.
Hell, I’ve never had chat GPT give me the wrong instructions when I ask it for a basic cooking recipe, and it also cuts out all of the preamble.
If you haven’t found uses for them, you either aren’t trying too hard or you’re simply not in an industry/job that can use them for what they are useful for. Both of which are ok, but it’s silly to think your experience of not using them means that no one can use them for anything useful.
Creating a lot of filler “content” is also another use for them, which is what I was getting at. While I have seen some uses for AI, it overwhelmingly seems to be used to create more work than reduce it. Endless spam was bad enough, but now that there’s an easy way to generate mass amounts of convincingly unique text, it’s a lot more to wade through. Google search, for example, used to be a lot more useful, and results that were wastes of time were easier to spot. That summaries can include inaccuracies or outright “hallucinations” makes it mostly worthless to me since I’d have to at the very least skim the original material to verify just in case anyway.
I’ve seen AI in action in my industry (software development). I’ve seen it do the equivalent of slapping together code pieced together from Stack Overflow. It’s impressive that it can do that, but what’s less impressive are clueless developers trusting the code as-is with minimal verification/tweaks (just because it runs, doesn’t mean it’s correct or anywhere close to optimal) or the even more clueless executives who think this means they can replace developers with AI or that tasks are a simple matter of “ask the AI to do it”.
To add on to your comment. Even beyond job/industry, its like your cooking example. I spin up an llm locally at home for random tasks. An llm can be your personal fitness coach, help you with budgeting, improve your emails, summarize news articles, help with creative writing, christmas shopping list ideas, brainstorm plants for your new garden, etc etc. they can fit into so many simple roles that you sporadically need.
Its just so easy to fall into the trap of hating them because of the bullshit surrounding them.
extreme is tech bros hyping ML and AI for not what it is to get shareholders to pay millions to projects that will likely not achieve its end goals. Anyone in the genuine ML and AI domain should be pissed because it is going to reduce interest and trust in these domains when the bubble bursts and then real researchers will be left to pick up the pieces whereas the tech bros will likely move onto the next thing.
Things that chatGPT, gen AI etc can do now? They are already crazy wild to me. But somehow to create more hype about it, they are advertised as being one step away from AGI or one step away from flawlessly pipelining creative processes. It is neither of these yet and from what it seems throwing more data to it will likely not be it either. But of course if you come up with a plan like “we need to double our compute bro and then we will have AGI bro” then you can get investors to pay double or quadruple of what they paid before. So in summary, they are basically con men.
It’s always amazing to see how folks latch on to the extreme vs the reality.
ML and AI tools are quite helpful. Yes they make mistakes but at the end of the day it reduces human effort. It’s really not hard to see the usefulness.
The day to day reality for me at least is that the new hyped up llms are largely useless for work and in some cases actually detriments. Some people at work use them a lot, but the heavy users tend to be people who were bad at their jobs, or at least bad at the communication aspect of their jobs. They were bad at communicating before and now, with the help of chat gpt, they are still bad at communicating, except they have gotten weirdly obstinate about their crappy work output.
Other folks I know have tried to use them to learn new things but gave up on them when they kept getting corrected by subject matter experts.
I played around with them for code generation but did not find it any faster than just writing and debugging my own code.
Reduces human effort in what? Certainly for producing garbage, but it increases my human effort in having to wade through that garbage.
It reduces effort in summarizing reports or paper abstracts that you aren’t sure you need to read. It reduces efforts in outlining formulaic types of writing such as cover letters, work emails etc.
It reduces effort when brainstorming mundane solutions to things, often by knocking off the most obvious choices but that’s an important step in brainstorming if you’ve ever done it.
Hell, I’ve never had chat GPT give me the wrong instructions when I ask it for a basic cooking recipe, and it also cuts out all of the preamble.
If you haven’t found uses for them, you either aren’t trying too hard or you’re simply not in an industry/job that can use them for what they are useful for. Both of which are ok, but it’s silly to think your experience of not using them means that no one can use them for anything useful.
Creating a lot of filler “content” is also another use for them, which is what I was getting at. While I have seen some uses for AI, it overwhelmingly seems to be used to create more work than reduce it. Endless spam was bad enough, but now that there’s an easy way to generate mass amounts of convincingly unique text, it’s a lot more to wade through. Google search, for example, used to be a lot more useful, and results that were wastes of time were easier to spot. That summaries can include inaccuracies or outright “hallucinations” makes it mostly worthless to me since I’d have to at the very least skim the original material to verify just in case anyway.
I’ve seen AI in action in my industry (software development). I’ve seen it do the equivalent of slapping together code pieced together from Stack Overflow. It’s impressive that it can do that, but what’s less impressive are clueless developers trusting the code as-is with minimal verification/tweaks (just because it runs, doesn’t mean it’s correct or anywhere close to optimal) or the even more clueless executives who think this means they can replace developers with AI or that tasks are a simple matter of “ask the AI to do it”.
To add on to your comment. Even beyond job/industry, its like your cooking example. I spin up an llm locally at home for random tasks. An llm can be your personal fitness coach, help you with budgeting, improve your emails, summarize news articles, help with creative writing, christmas shopping list ideas, brainstorm plants for your new garden, etc etc. they can fit into so many simple roles that you sporadically need.
Its just so easy to fall into the trap of hating them because of the bullshit surrounding them.
Removed by mod
extreme is tech bros hyping ML and AI for not what it is to get shareholders to pay millions to projects that will likely not achieve its end goals. Anyone in the genuine ML and AI domain should be pissed because it is going to reduce interest and trust in these domains when the bubble bursts and then real researchers will be left to pick up the pieces whereas the tech bros will likely move onto the next thing.
Things that chatGPT, gen AI etc can do now? They are already crazy wild to me. But somehow to create more hype about it, they are advertised as being one step away from AGI or one step away from flawlessly pipelining creative processes. It is neither of these yet and from what it seems throwing more data to it will likely not be it either. But of course if you come up with a plan like “we need to double our compute bro and then we will have AGI bro” then you can get investors to pay double or quadruple of what they paid before. So in summary, they are basically con men.
Calling this view extreme is extreme my dude.
👌👍
And this is the worst it will ever be