I genuinely believed that AI this capable wouldn’t be feasible in my lifetime.
Anytime I ask it about things I’m knowledgeable about, it falls on it’s face. It only seems smart on topics I don’t know shit about (this red flag has spotlights on it!). Given this, I cannot trust it on anything lest I be led down false paths. Given how LLMs work, I don’t see this problem as fixable.
I have found them useful for search term generation. (Using a topic I know things about) If I need a more powerful drill for screwing lag bolts into hardwood and I’m not finding what I need, asking it and and getting back the keyword ‘impact driver’ is helpful, as it lets me go search for what that is and if it is the solution to my need for a more powerful drill. Note: I do not let it teach me about impact drivers (as it falls on it’s face all the fucking time), only use it to get the keyword to then use to search the internet.
To circle back to your question, I’m not scared with how fast they are advancing. I’m scared by how many people think they are good at everything and put them in places they don’t belong.
I have to use AI tools for my work, so arguably I am knowledgeable about that topic (programming). I have seen Claude code do pretty good work. HUGE CAVEAT it works well because we spent a lot of time building out our architecure and the really complex parts have an easy to follow pattern. It’s standing on the backs of giants.
If you do something like software engineering and you have a significant body of existing good work for it to pull from. Claude can be pretty exceptional.
It’s not great at breaking new ground though.
If you do something like software engineering and you have a significant body of existing good work for it to pull from. Claude can be pretty exceptional.
the fresh grad new hires at my last place were able to code circles around me because of their embrace of ai and it made me think that i was already a dinosaur and became the biggest reason why i went back into IT.
It’s not great at breaking new ground though.
but watching the soon-to-be grads w a similar embrace fall flat on their faces repeatedly because the codebase at my new place hasn’t been updated in almost 15 years and was created by their fellow students, has made me realize that this is also true.
still though, if you know what you’re doing; ai is a pretty decent idea/concept generator and sounding board if all but one of your colleagues are students, so you don’t have anyone else to ask like it is in my present situation.
It is scary, less because of AI itself and more because of corporate greed and regular people without critical thinking skills that will blindly trust anything AI tells them. AI is and can be a really useful tool for a lot of scenarios. I use it as a coding assistant for my job almost daily. But I dont blindly accept what it tells me or programs. I test, debug, and research things. Its good for summarization, easy, repetitive tasks, and taking suggestions from the internet.
AI is a tool, and like any tool, it can be really dangerous if you don’t use it in a smart way.
I genuinely believed that AI this capable would be available in 2010 from 1990,
as sci-fi movies were showing flying cars, skyscraper cities and space travel.
Things slowed down a lot in the 2000s and got weird.No. Don’t be afraid of a tool. But be cautious of those who wield it and how they use it. People pushing it usually don’t have your best interest. Its a product. A vehicle for profit. Own your tools and don’t fear the man behind the curtains.
The feeling of constant acceleration is valid. It will only get more intense in the coming years, so consider this your practice round.
In spite of the marginal results a lot of current LLMs can deliver, they are making a difference in some areas of work. I’m a data engineer and working with an agent over the last few months has been a revelation. You have to wrangle it just so, but with an adequate context well-defined, you can plow through months of tedious due-diligence and fine-tuning in days.
I wouldn’t trust it for medical advice… yet… but the time will come when it stops being “ai” and becomes like autofocus or voice transcription or shopping cart suggestions, just another tool. Something else will take on that mantle, and be a different, even more disconcerting mixed bag.
There was a book that came out about 20 years ago by Ray Kurzweil, named The Singularity is Near that discussed this phenomenon in detail, and so far has been prophetic. It will help you understand what’s happening and what’s coming next.
no, it’s a glorified calculator. it doesn’t think.
Not even that, at least calculator gets math right.
You should stop reading marketing junk. Several of the newer models have benchmarked as worse then original releases. Many firms roll back AI deployments, some models create more errors then it would take to fire and intern and some can’t even run a vending machine business
Your answer seems to be regarding large language models and the possibility of them replacing human workers, which, to be clear, is fine and all but I was talking about ai in general.
For example, seedance is so much better than sora, veo and the like.
Recently, with the release of Open Ai’s new image model I have seen how hard it is to tell they are ai generated. Youtuber Dan Dingle made a video about it if you wanna see how good it is.
Even people who are supposedly good at spotting ai generated media often mention “vibes” instead of anything concrete when describing why they think something is ai generated.
You are fine with people loosing jobs to a technology that doesn’t work but are worried about a model that can make pixels in kinda the right order?
You are fine with people loosing jobs to a technology that doesn’t work
I don’t know if this will help you, but that’s not the worst thing.
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