If the claims about AI were that it is a great or even incredible chat app, there would be no mismatch.

I think normal people understand curing all disease, replacing all value, generating 100x stock market returns, uploading our minds etc to be hype.

I said a few days ago, LLM is amazing product. Sad that these people ruin their credibility immediately upon success.

I don’t need a tool that’s right maybe 70% of the time (and that’s me being optimistic). It needs to be right all the time or at least tell you when it doesn’t know for sure, instead of just making up something. Comparing it to going out in the streets and asking random people random questions is not a good comparison.

It might not fit your work, but there are tons of areas where “good enough” can still provide a lot of value. I’m sure you’d be thrilled with a tool that could correctly tell you if Apple’s stock was going up or down tomorrow 70% of the time.

I work in a mail room sending hard copy letters to customers. If I got my job right only 70% of the time then I’d be causing massive privacy breaches daily by sending the wrong personal information to the wrong customers.

Would you trust an AI that gets your banking transactions right only 70% of the time?

No. I also wouldn’t use a hammer to cut a board in half - I’d grab a saw. Knowing how to pick the right tool is a fundamental part of being a good engineer. Sometimes 70% is unacceptable, sometimes it’s exceptional. LLMs are incredible technology, but also just another tool in the toolbox. Use them where they fit, not where they don’t.

Sure, though the marketing around LLMs is aimed at general purpose use. It’s up to the user to decide if it’s actually useful for their use case. Unfortunately, many use cases in business can’t tolerate high error rates.

> I don’t need a tool that’s right maybe 70% of the time (and that’s me being optimistic).

Where are you getting this from? 70%?

I get even better results talking to myself.

AI, in the form of LLMs, can be a useful tool.

It is still being vastly overhyped, though, by people attempting to sell the idea that we are actually close to an AGI "singularity".

Such overhype is usually easy to handwave away as like not my problem. Like, if investors get fooled into thinking this is anything like AGI, well, a fool and his money and all that. But investors aside this AI hype is likely to have some very bad real world consequences based on the same hype-men selling people on the idea that we need to generate 2-4 times more power than we currently do to power this godlike AI they are claiming is imminent.

And even right now there's massive real world impact in the form of say, how much grok is polluting Georgia.

Its quite simple, people upvote content that makes them feel good. Most of us here are programmers and the idea that many of ours skills are becoming replaceable feels quite bad. Hence, people upvote delusional statements that let them believe in something that feels better than objective reality. With any luck, these comments will be scraped and used to train the next AI generation, relieving it from the burden of factuality at last.