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?
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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.
very interesting read thx for sharing. glad finally someone who actually knows something about “AI” said it.
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.
Looks like two people suckered by the grifters downvoted your comment (as of this writing). Should they read this, it is a grift, get over it.
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.
I’ve used crewai and autogen in production… And I still agree with the person you’re replying to.
The 2 main problems with agentic approaches I’ve discovered this far:
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One mistake or hallucination will propagate to the rest of the agentic task. I’ve even tried adding a QA agent for this purpose but what ends up happening is those agents aren’t reliable and also leads to the main issue:
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It’s very expensive to run and rerun agents at scale. The scaling factor of each agent being able to call another agent means that you can end up with an exponentially growing number of calls. My colleague at one point ran a job that cost $15 for what could have been a simple task.
One last consideration: the current LLM providers are very aware of these issues or they wouldn’t be as concerned with finding “clean” data to scrape from the web vs using agents to train agents.
If you’re using crewai btw, be aware there is some builtin telemetry with the library. I have a wrapper to remove that telemetry if you’re interested in the code.
Personally, I’m kinda done with LLMs for now and have moved back to my original machine learning pursuits in bioinformatics.
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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 know 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.
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.
I’m inclined to believe, based on this thread, that you and the person you’re replying to didn’t read the article because the person who wrote it and most of the replies to it are not saying “LLM’s are garbage and have no benefits”.
The post is specifically calling out companies that have jumped on the “AI LLM” train who are trying to force feed it into every single project and service regardless of whether it will be useful or beneficial or not. And they will not listen to people working in the field who tell them no it will not be beneficial.
The hype is what people are upset about because companies are selling something that is useful in selective cases as something that will be useful to everyone universally for just about everything and they’re making products worse.
Just look at Google and their implementation of AI LLM’S in search results. That’s a product that isn’t useful unless it’s accurate. And it was not ready to be a public facing service. In their other products it’s promising more but actually breaking or removing features that users have been using for years. That’s why people are upset. This isn’t even taking into account the theft that went on of people’s work to get these LLM’S trained.
This is literally just about companies having more FOMO than sense. This is about them creating and providing to the public broken interactions of products filled with the newest “tech marvel” to increase sales or stock price while detrimentally affecting the common user.
For every case of an LLM being useful there are several where it’s not. That’s the point.
I use them like wikipedia: it’s a good starting point and that’s it (and this comparison is a disservice to wikipedia).
Yep! It’s a good way to get over the fear of a blank page, but I don’t trust it for more than outlines or summaries
I wouldn’t even trust it for summaries beyond extremely basic stuff.
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.
but are good at mimicry.
I know engineers who make over double what I make solely because of that skill.
So it’s helpful for saving time typing some stuff
Legitimately, this is the only use I found for it. If I need something extremely simple, and feeling too lazy to type it all out, it’ll do the bulk of it, and then I just go through and edit out all little mistakes.
And what gets me is that anytime I read all of the AI wank about how people are using these things, it kind of just feels like they’re leaving out the part where they have to edit the output too.
At the end of the day, we’ve had this technology for a while, it’s just been in the form of predictive suggestions on a keyboard app or code editor. You still had to steer in the right direction. Now it’s just smart enough to make it from start to finish without going off a cliff, but you still have to go back and fix it, the same way you had to steer it before.
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.
Best AI rant hands-down. I can agree with every word there.
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 and 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.
I don’t think the author was referring to people pruning AI data but rather to mechanical turk instances like recently happened with Amazon.
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.
The Author’s Frustration with the Overhyped Use of AI in Businesses
• The author, a former data scientist, expresses frustration with the excessive hype surrounding AI and its implementation in businesses.
• They argue that most companies lack the expertise and infrastructure to effectively utilize AI and should focus on addressing fundamental issues like testing database backups and developing basic applications.
• The author criticizes the lack of genuine understanding and competence among many individuals promoting AI initiatives, leading to a culture of grifters and incompetents.
• They emphasize the importance of solving basic operational and cultural problems before attempting to implement complex technologies like AI.
• The author warns against the盲adoption of AI without a clear understanding of its benefits and feasibility, likening it to a recipe for disaster.
https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/
Yes i’m fully aware of the irony that i used AI for this summary
And you didn’t even proofread the output…
Which kind of proves that the author has some valid points…
Touché!
Why is blind in Chinese.
Because AI sucks and we use it anyway
I will learn enough judo to throw you into the sun
best line
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.
Fuck you for wasting my time with bullshit job descriptions then
Honestly, I use it because it does a better job than who we usually use, the items it adds to the Job descriptions usually actually exist.
That’s terrifying
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.
We need AI because it’s convenient to blame for any problems.
That is some good stuff actually. All the haters can focus on non-existent AI and the rest of us can work on improving society while they are distracted. Perfect scapegoat.
This is actually more terrifying than you might have intended.
I’ve long thought that the greatest danger AI poses is going to be the “man behind the curtain” effect. If people can blame everything on AI then AI can be a blanket covering deliberate harm.
Imagine if government starts using AI for decision making. You could easily end up with a “man behind the curtain” who’s actually calling all the shots and just pretending it’s the AI doing it. Then you’d effectively have a dictatorship where nobody knows/believes they’re in a dictatorship.
Yep AI will definitely be used as stamp of approval for bad decisions. Just give it input and questions in different ways until you get the answer you want, and you can say, hey the fancy AI advised it!
Using satire to convey a known truth some already understand implicitly, some don’t want to acknowledge, some refuse it outright, but when you think about it, we’ve always known how true it is. It’s tongue-in-cheek but it’s necessary in order to convince all these AI-washing fuckheads what a gimmick it is to really be making sweeping statements about a chatbot that still can’t spell lollipop backwards.
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. When did we start censoring shit on lemmy.
Hacker News is not Lemmy
Sorry, I don’t understand what you mean by that. The person I replied to had “[slur removed]” in their comment, they’re on lemmy.ml
Oh that. Yeah lemmy.ml has had a swear filter since day 1. In the early days it wasn’t even optional I think, all the servers had it
Hm. I had no idea. Interesting. Isn’t lemmy.ml the lemmy grad sister instance? Like, they’re commies?
Yep. Just another example of their ‘free speech’ principles at work
Fascinating, I am not surprised at all.
Even beyond AI, some of the implicit messaging has got to strike a nerve with that kind of crowd.
I don’t think this is satire either, more like a playful rant (as opposed to a formal critique).
I’m libertarian, I’m against this. I’m also against blockchain scams.
My ideas on digital currencies and something like artificial intelligence are simply an extension of the usual ancap\panarchy ideas. It’s actually a very good test for any libertarian you meet - they’ll usually agree that a “meta-society” consisting of voluntary exterritorial jurisdictions (which can be anything from crack-smoking ancap tribes to solarpunk communes), with some overarching security system to protect those jurisdictions from being ignored by somebody well-armed, is good, then you just have to ask why the systems they like for currencies and this are clearly manifestations of a different ideology.
very interesting read, thank you
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???
Yeah, this one is the bomb.
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.
Same here. I have seen and worked in entire projects based on AI bullshit.
Will you sign my petition?
