"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
My favourite one at my place, labelling things as "AI Search✨" when I know, cause I was one of the ones coding it, that it's just a plain-old no-AI algorithm, and we just lied so we can say we have AI search
"The other way to look at this is like there's no free lunch here," said Smiley. "We know what the limitations of the model are. It's hard to teach them new facts. It's hard to reliably retrieve facts. The forward pass through the neural nets is non-deterministic, especially when you have reasoning models that engage an internal monologue to increase the efficiency of next token prediction, meaning you're going to get a different answer every time, right? That monologue is going to be different.
"And they have no inductive reasoning capabilities. A model cannot check its own work. It doesn't know if the answer it gave you is right. Those are foundational problems no one has solved in LLM technology. And you want to tell me that's not going to manifest in code quality problems? Of course it's going to manifest."
This is from an AI consultant, btw.
And yet governments everywhere insist on more "AI investment"
Fear of missing out.
And heavy lobbying too, I imagine.
Vaguely based words from an AI consultant? Are these the end times?
Organizations using this without having someone that knows what they're looking at reading the code are pretending that they have good processes to evaluate code quality, performance, and security which basically no company does.
Proving that code that looks like it works is wrong, slow, or dangerous is more difficult than writing it.
It's more difficult to automate the evaluation of software than it is to hire competent people to evaluate and write software and be responsible for it.
So congratulations, corporate boardroom AI addicts you've turned a difficult to solve problem into a nearly impossible one.
Great article from a grounded professional. As usual for The Reg there's some great comments on the article including this one responding to a user mentioning that AI image generation seems useful but flawed :
"that wouldn't be possible without someone with some talent" Exactly - and that person with talent isn't getting paid. A very astute person has said that the purpose of AI is to give wealthy people access to skill without giving skilled people access to wealth.
the purpose of AI is to give wealthy people access to skill without giving skilled people access to wealth.
Perfectly said.
My boss: more lines of code is more better! Look how many more lines of code AI wrote!
The one time one of my managers suggested measuring lines of code to determine performance programming, I very vocally offered to make a "loop unroller" (something that transforms "for" loops into just the content block repeated as many times as the loop loops) for the rest of the team.
I don't code but I know enough about it to know your boss is an idiot.
ChatGPT said he was super smart though...