Technology

Over half of tech industry workers have seen the "great demo -> overhyped bullshit" cycle before.

Best assessment I've heard: Current AI is an aggressive autocomplete.

Largely because we understand that what they're calling "AI" isn't AI.

It is overrated. At least when they look at AI as some sort of brain crutch that redeems them from learning stuff.

My boss now believes he can "program too" because he let's ChatGPT write scripts for him that more often than not are poor bs.

He also enters chunks of our code into ChatGPT when we issue bugs or aren't finished with everything in 5 minutes as some kind of "Gotcha moment", ignoring that the solutions he then provides don't work.

Too many people see LLMs as authorities they just aren't....

It is overrated. It has a few uses, but it's not a generalized AI. It's like calling a basic calculator a computer. Sure it is an electronic computing device and makes a big difference in calculating speed for doing finances or retail cashiers or whatever. But it's not a generalized computing system that can basically compute anything that it's given instructions for which is what we think of when we hear something is a "computer". It can only do basic math. It could never be used to display a photo , much less make a complex video game.

Similarly the current thing that's called "AI", can learn in a very narrow subject that it is designed for. It can't learn just anything. It can't make inferences beyond the training material or understand. It can't create anything totally new, it just remixes things. It could never actually create a new genre of games with some kind of new interface that has never been thought of, or discover the exact mechanisms of how gravity works, since those things aren't in its training material since they don't yet exist.

Many areas of machine learning, particularly LLMs are making impressive progress but the usual ycombinator techbro types are over hyping things again. Same as every other bubble including the original Internet one and the crypto scams and half the bullshit companies they run that add fuck all value to the world.

The cult of bullshit around AI is a means to fleece investors. Seen the same bullshit too many times. Machine learning is going to have a huge impact on the world, same as the Internet did, but it isn't going to happen overnight. The only certain thing that will happen in the short term is that wealth will be transferred from our pockets to theirs. Fuck them all.

I skip most AI/ChatGPT spam in social media with the same ruthlessness I skipped NFTs. It isn't that ML doesn't have huge potential but most publicity about it is clearly aimed at pumping up the market rather than being truly informative about the technology.

I think it will be the next big thing in tech (or "disruptor" if you must buzzword). But I agree it's being way over-hyped for where it is right now.

Clueless executives barely know what it is, they just know they want it get ahead of it in order to remain competitive. Marketing types reporting to those executives oversell it (because that's their job).

One of my friends is an overpaid consultant for a huge corporation, and he says they are trying to force-retro-fit AI to things that barely make any sense...just so that they can say that it's "powered by AI".

On the other hand, AI is much better at some tasks than humans. That AI skill set is going to grow over time. And the accumulation of those skills will accelerate. I think we've all been distracted, entertained, and a little bit frightened by chat-focused and image-focused AIs. However, AI as a concept is broader and deeper than just chat and images. It's going to do remarkable stuff in medicine, engineering, and design.

I have a doctorate in computer engineering, and yeah it’s overhyped to the moon.

I’m oversimplifying it and some one will ackchyually me but once you understand the core mechanics the magic is somewhat diminished. It’s linear algebra and matrices all the way down.

We got really good at parallelizing matrix operations and storing large matrices and the end result is essentially “AI”.

I remember when it first came out I asked it to help me write a MapperConfig custom strategy and the answer it gave me was so fantastically wrong - even with prompting - that I lost an afternoon. Honestly the only useful thing I've found for it is getting it to find potential syntax errors in terraform code that the plan might miss. It doesn't even complement my programming skills like a traditional search engine can do; instead it assumes a solution that is usually wrong and you are left to try to build your house on the boilercode sand it spits out at you.

That’s because it is overrated and the people in the tech industry are actually qualified to make that determination. It’s a glorified assistant, nothing more. we’ve had these for years, they’re just getting a little bit better. it’s not gonna replace a network stack admin or a programmer anytime soon.

Reality: most tech workers view it as fairly rated or slightly overrated according to the real data: https://www.techspot.com/images2/news/bigimage/2023/11/2023-11-20-image-3.png

I work in AI, and I think AI is overrated.

It is currently overhyped and so much of it just seems to be copying the same 3 generative AI tools into as many places as possible. This won't work out because it is expensive to run the AI models. I can't believe nobody talks about this cost.

Where AI shines is when something new is done with it, or there is a significant improvement in some way to an existing model (more powerful or runs on lower end chips, for example).

In a podcast I listen to where tech people discuss security topics they finally got to something related to AI, hesitated, snickered, said "Artificial Intelligence I guess is what I have to say now instead of Machine Learning" then both the host and the guest started just belting out laughs for a while before continuing.

I'll join in on the cacophony in this thread and say it truly is way overrated right now. Is it cool and useful? Sure. Is it going to replace all of our jobs and do all of our thinking for us from now on? Not even close.

I, as a casual user, have already noticed some significant problems with the way that it operates such that I wouldn't blindly trust any output that I get without some serious scrutiny. AI is mainly being pushed by upper management-types who don't understand what it is or how it works, but they hear that it can generate stuff in a fraction of the time a person can and they start to see dollar signs.

It's a fun toy, but it isn't going to change the world overnight.

id say its like the dotcom bubble.
yeah its incredible new & emerging tech,
but that doesnt mean it isnt overhyped.

Of course, because hype didn't come from tech people, but content writers, designers, PR people, etc. who all thought they didn't need tech people anymore. The moment ChatGPT started being popular I started getting debugging requests from few designers. They went there and asked it to write a plugin or a script they needed. Only problem was it didn't really work like it should. Debugging that code was a nightmare.

I've seen few clever uses. Couple of our clients made a "chat bot" whose reference was their poorly written documentation. So you'd ask a bot something technical related to that documentation and it would decipher the mess. I still claim making a better documentation was a smarter move, but what do I know.

I use github copilot. It really is just fancy autocomplete. It's often useful and is indeed impressive. But it's not revolutionary.

I've also played with ChatGPT and tried to use it to help me code but never successfully. The reality is I only try it if google has failed me, and then it usually makes up something that sounds right but is in fact completely wrong. Probably because it's been trained on the same insufficient data I've been looking at.

Because it is?

It's me. I'm over half of all tech industry workers.

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.

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.

There is a lot of marketing about how it's going to disrupt every possible industry, but I don't think that's reasonable. Generative AI has uses, but I'm not totally convinced it's going to be this insane omni-tool just yet.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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