We have businesses getting real value from these toys. Maybe you have not been in the right circles to experience this?

Of course you can get value from toy business, but toys are toys.

Must be a pretty cool toy; it constantly 10X’s my productivity.

You said it mate. I feel bad for folks who turn away from this technology. If they persist... They will be so confused why they get repeatedly lapped.

I wrote a working machine vision project in 2 days with these toys. Key word: working... Not hallucinated. Actually working. Very useful.

Without details that's a meaningless stat, I remember some pytorch machine vision tutorials promising they'll only take like an hour, including training and also gives a working project at the end.

My daughter berated me for using AI (the sentiment among youth is pretty negative, and it is easy to understand why), but I simply responded, "if I don't my peers still will, then we'll be living on the street." And it's true, I've 10x'd my real productivity as a scientist (for example, using llms to help me code one off scripts for data munging, automating our new preprocessing pipelines, etc, quickly generating bullet points for slides).

The trick though is learning how to prompt, and developing the sense that the LLM is stuck with the current prompt and needs another perspective. Funnily enough, the least amount of luck I've had is getting the LLM to write precisely enough for science (yay I still have a job), even without the confabulation, the nuance is lacking...that it's almost always faster for me to write it myself.

> My daughter berated me for using AI (the sentiment among youth is pretty negative, and it is easy to understand why)

I can’t relate. Currently in university. Everyone is thankful to God ChatGPT exists. I’d think it must be a joke, or your daughter somehow managed to live in a social circle which doesn’t yet adopted chatbots for school purposes.

I just don't understand why AI is so polarising on a technology website.

OpenAI have even added a feature to make the completions from GPT near-deterministic (by specifying a seed). It seems that no matter what AI companies do, there will be a vocal minority shouting that it's worthless.

It is baffling where the polarization comes in.

The idea that we argue about safety... Seems reasonable to me.

The argument about its usefulness or capability at all? I dunno... That slider bar sure is in a wierd spot... I feel ya.

It's staggering to me that people on Hacker News are actually downvoting people saying how AI is boosting productivity or levering business or engineering or finance. The denial, cynicism and sheer wilful ignorance is actually depressing. I get that not everyone is working directly with AI/ML but I honestly expected better on a website about technology.

People are deliberately self selecting themselves out of the next industrial revolution. It's Darwin Awards for SWE careers. It's making me ranty.

Used toys to write a working machine vision project over last 2 days.

Key word: working

The bubble is real on both sides. Models have limitations... However, they are not toys. They are powerful tools. I used 3 different SotA models for that project. The time saved is hard to even measure. It's big.

> The time saved is hard to even measure. It's big.

You are aware that this is an obvious contradiction, right? Big times savings are not hard to measure.

Right... With precision...

Furthermore... big mountains are easier to weigh v small individual atoms? I think it's a little more complicated than big is easy to measure...

I care little about the precision... I've got other priorities. It's the same as the time the internet saves me... Big. It's obvious.

I stand by my statement. It's hard to measure...