this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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Senior developer here. It is hard to overstate just how useful AI has been for me.
It's like having a junior programmer on standby that I can send small tasks to--and just like the junior developer I have to review it and send it back with a clarification or comment about something that needs to be corrected. The difference is instead of making a ticket for a junior dev and waiting 3 days for it to come back, just to need corrections and wait another 3 days--I get it back in seconds.
Like most things, it's not as bad as some people say, and it's not the miracle others say.
This current generation was such a leap forward from previous AI's in terms of usefulness, that I think a lot of people were looking to the future with that current rate of gains--which can be scary. But it turns out that's not what happened. We got a big leap and now are back at a plateau again. Which honestly is a good thing, I think. This gives the world time to slowly adjust.
As far as similarities with crypto. Like crypto there are some ventures out there just slapping the word AI on something and calling it novel. This didn't work for crypto and likely won't work for AI. But unlike crypto there is actually real value being derived from AI right now, not some wild claims of a blockchain is the right DB for everything--which it was obviously not, and most people could see that, but hey investors are spending money so lets get some of it kind of mentality.
Same. 5 minutes after installing Copilot I literally said out loud, "Well.. I'm never turning this off."
It's one of the nicest software releases in years. And it's instantly useful too.. No real adjustment period at all.
I tried it for a couple months and it was alright but eventually it got too frustrating. I did love how well it did some really repetitive things. But rarely did it actually get anything complex 100% right. In computing, "almost right" is wrong. But because it was so close, it was hard to spot the mistakes.
There were cases where my IDE knew the right answer but Copilot did not. Realizing that Copilot was messing up my IDE enhancements to produce code I was painfully babysitting, I cancelled it.
This is the most insidious conundrum related to AI usage. At the end of the day, a LLM's top priority is to ensure that your question is answered in a way that satisfies that model. The accuracy of its answers are a secondary concern. If forced to choose between making up BS so it can have a response that looks right versus admitting it doesn't have enough information to answer, it can and often will choose the former. Thus the "hallucination" problem was born.
The chance of getting your answer lightly sprinkled with made up stuff is disturbingly high. This transfers the cognitive load of the AI user from "what is the answer" to "I must repeatedly go verify everything in this answer because I can't trust it".
Not an insurmountable obstacle, and they will likely solve it sooner rather than later, but AI right now is arguably the perfect extension of the modern internet - take absolutely everything you read with at least a grain of salt... and keep a pile of salt cubes close by.