Technology

In my experience, well over half of tech industry workers don't even understand it.

I was just trying to explain to someone on Hacker News that no, the "programmers" of LLMs do not in fact know what the LLM is doing because it's not being programmed directly at all (which even after several rounds of several people explaining still doesn't seem to have sunk in).

Even people that do understand the tech more generally pretty well are still remarkably misinformed about it in various popular BS ways, such as that it's just statistics and a Markov chain, completely unaware of the multiple studies over the past 12 months showing that even smaller toy models are capable of developing abstract world models as long as they can be structured as linear representations.

It's to the point that unless it's in a thread explicitly on actual research papers where explaining nuances seem fitting I don't even bother trying to educate the average tech commentators regurgitating misinformation anymore. They typically only want to confirm their biases anyways, and have such a poor understanding of specifics it's like explaining nuanced aspects of the immune system to anti-vaxxers.

Yeah... About that... How's block chain going these days? Solved all the problems in the world yet?

As with all tech; it depends. It's another tool in my toolbox and a useful one at that. Will it replace me in my job? Not anytime soon. However, it will make me more proficient at my job and my 30+ years of experience will keep its bad ideas out of production. If my bosses decide tomorrow that I can be replaced with AI in the current state, they deserve what they have coming. That said, they are willing to pay for additional tooling provided me with multiple AI engines and I can't be more thrilled. I'd rather give AI a simple task to do the busy work than work with overseas developers that get it wrong time and time again and take a week to iterate while asking how for loops work in Python.

it's very good sometimes and very stupid other times, and you have to know enough about the subject to distinguish it

That is a terrible graph. There's no y axis, there's no indication of what the scale is, and I don't know how many people they asked or who these people were or what tech company they worked in.

Just over 23% believe it is rated fairly, while a quarter of respondents were presumably proponents of the tech as they said it was underrated. However, 51.6% of people said it was overrated.

That sentence is a fantastic demonstration of how bad this article is. The article says that a quarter say the technology is underrated, but it looks more like half to me. Not that it matters because, as I said the scale is useless. Also they are lumping 51.6% I don't know how they came up with that number because again we don't know what the total was, just that it was more than 1,500. You can't calculate a percentage without knowing the total.

The graph has 11 options so were they rating it on a scale of between 1 and 11. What's that?

I work in an AI company. 99% of our tech relies on tried and true standard computer vision solutions instead of machine-learning based. It's just that unreliable when production use requires pixel precision.

We might throw a gradient descent here or there, but not for any learning ops.

I mean in its current form yeah, but obviously it's going to get really good in the near future

The best use I've found for AI is getting it to write me covering letters for job applications. Even then I still need to make a few small adjustments. But it saves a bit of time and typing effort.

Other than that, I just have fun with it making stupid images and funny stories based on inside jokes.

People who use ChatGPT to program for them deserve their programs to fail

I asked chatGPT to generate a list of 5 random words, and then tell me the fourth word from the bottom. It kept telling me the third. I corrected it, and it gave me the right word. I asked it again, and it made the same error. It does amazing things while failing comically at simple tasks. There is a lot of procedural code added to plug the leaks. Doesn't mean it's overrated, but when something is hyped hard enough as being able to replace human expertise, any crack in the system becomes ammunition for dismissal. I see it more as a revolutionary technology going through evolutionary growing pains. I think it's actually underrated in its future potential and worrisome in the fact that its processing is essentially a black box that can't be understood at the same level as traditional coding. You can't debug it or trace the exact procedure that needs patching.

Overrated? Compared to what AGI that does not exist yet? Overhyped though? Absolutely.

We went from very little AI content making its way to your eyeballs and ears, to it occurring daily if not during your very session here today. So many thumbnails and writeups have used AI that to say it is overrated it a bit absurd unless you were expecting it to be be AGI, then yes the AI today is overrated, but it does not matter as you are consuming it still.

Well, it depends on your bubble I guess. But personally I'd say it's underrated and overrated at the same time, but mostly underrated.

It depends on your expectations and way of usage in your toolbox I'd say. It keeps surprising me weekly how fast progress is. But we get used to it perhaps.

Meh. Roughly 90% of what I know about baking is from chatgpt. There just wasn't a comparable resource. "Oh God the dough is too dry", "can I sub in this fat for this fat and if so how?", "if I change the bath do I have to change the score method?".

It is like I have a professional baker I can just talk to whenever. I am sure as I get better at baking I will exceed it's ability to help but I can't deny that what I have accomplished now I could not have in the same timeframe without it.

It's an effective tool at providing introductory information to well documented topics. A smarter Google Search, basically. And that's all I really want it to be. Overrated? Probably not. It's useful if you use it correctly. Overhyped? Yeah, but that's more a fault of marketing than technology.