I started working as a data scientist in 2019, and by 2021 I had realized that while the field was large, it was also largely fraudulent. Most of the leaders that I was working with clearly had not gotten as far as reading about it for thirty minutes despite insisting that things like, I dunno, the next five years of a ten thousand person non-tech organization should be entirely AI focused. The number of companies launching AI initiatives far outstripped the number of actual use cases. Most of the market was simply grifters and incompetents (sometimes both!) leveraging the hype to inflate their headcount so they could get promoted, or be seen as thought leaders.
And then some absolute son of a bitch created ChatGPT, and now look at us. Look at us, resplendent in our pauper's robes, stitched from corpulent greed and breathless credulity, spending half of the planet's engineering efforts to add chatbot support to every application under the sun when half of the industry hasn't worked out how to test database backups regularly. This is why I have to visit untold violence upon the next moron to propose that AI is the future of the business - not because this is impossible in principle, but because they are now indistinguishable from a hundred million willful fucking idiots.
I like this guy. :D
I was about to post this one. You beat me to it.
He's an Indian programming engineer, which means he can program but doesn't understand design or how to use things unless explained directly. So the cool things being made by AI are cool, but it's beyond his ability to comprehend it. All he sees is the fake stuff and the grift.
Perfectly stated. As you can see we have some people like that around here.
We're all exhausted by 'The new AI Skateboard powered by AI!', but in any industry/tech the scammers and grifters around a product are going to rise in proportion to the perceived value of that product, which is still somewhat correlated to the real value of the product even if the hucksters have hyped it beyond all recognition. Someday the hype will die down and only the valuable stuff will remain.
There articles asking why we are still investing in self driving cars. They're getting released soon btw.
I have done the initial designs for a theme park using AI. The trick is to know how it works and how to do your job. Once you do that, it's really useful. However, most guys try to skip one or both of those steps and claim to be revolutionary.
No less than Mercedes promised a self-driving taxi in 2025, and I'm still holding them to that. :)
Cuz I really believed it from them. When some a-hole startup full of 21 yr olds says they're gonna do it, you don't trust them. But Mercedes has actually proven themselves able to design and build things that work well. I mean not that thing but other thigns.
Amazon also had something, but it's the 21 year olds you mentioned.
I was thinking I have no idea when I read it. AI seems promising but very early. Hype happens around every new technology. v1 often has little utility. The market is there to sort out winners and losers, to the extent that it works.
The analogy to natural language software might be good. People take it for granted that a computer can basically write down what you're saying today. The first versions of that sucked. But people acted like it was going to be your primary way of talking to the computer. In the end, like I said, we use it on our Fire TVs, and dictation is quite useful for certain professions. The job of typist has gone out of style. It has not replaced typing, but it is an immensely useful tool, now, whereas the first versions were only really usable to repeatedly fill out forms and charts. Oh and then of course the other direction of that works so well that we have deepfake audio.
I've seen people try to build code with AI as if it were a natural language software. Because the AI still doesn't understand what it's actually supposed to do, people have basically taken the same amount of time to fix it as they would have if they had just built it correctly in the first place.
Yeah that's my experience of the chatbots. They're just crapping out the input, and they know how to rephrase things. I haven't seen one solve an actual problem.
That said, a robot that just does what you tell it to is good. I dunno how intelligent I need these things to be. Chatbots are not really useful to me. But I'm just saying AI applied to, I dunno, cleaning up my kitchen is good. The robot can clean it according to the instructions on YouTube.
AI is effectively just 1,000 Indian programmers typing away without context.
AI is also literally 1,000 Indian programmers typing away without context in at least one occassion.
Nah, the only thing he's wrong about is he's waayyy overstating AI's capabilities in terms of LLMs. LLMs are worthless junk, but NNs and DeepLearning and other shit is actually decently useful and decently well deployed in areas such as recognition software where it actually makes sense.
-- Actual Software Engineer who understands what a prediction engine (also known as the entirety of "AI") does and how it works.
Nvidia's 4k upscaling is, I believe, based on neural nets, and it works very well. It really improves the quality of video, and games can be scaled undetectably sometimes.
I see a near term future where Expert Systems hand off specific tasks to Convolutional Neural Networks and then the final product is put into words by a LLN.
This would make tools for specific jobs with repeatable, auditable results.
For example, drafting legal documents, including contracts could be done this way. Another job might be triage and early diagnosis. A specialist triage nurse could be greatly aided by a system that is helpful for picking up rare conditions or non-standard presentation of conditions.
The idea of general AI where people follow the orders of machines programmed to the specification of the Pointy Haired Boss (from Dilbert) is probably what we will get instead. Welcome to the future.
I think your failing to see the point that a major portion of "AI" is just straight up not AI or ML, and is literally just people lying about what the programmers would have built anyway.
Oh I know, I am well aware of marketing bullshit, it's common in the industry to use it to search for VC money.
He's definitely not an average one and does know how it works. He's also trying to prove he made the right choice to himself, and I can see that in the writing.