Comment by dartos
20 hours ago
> a lot of people nevertheless are drawn to interact with this technology.
To look at this statement cynically, a lot of people are drawn to anything with billions of dollars behind it… like literally anything.
Not to mention the amount companies spend on marketing AI products.
> It looks as if it touches some deep psychological lever: have an assistant that can help to carry out tasks
That deep lever is “make value more cheaply and with less effort”
From what I’ve seen, most of the professional interest in AI is based on cost cutting.
There are a few (what I would call degenerate) groups who believe there is some consciousness behind these AI, but theyre very small group.
When I was a kid I messed with computers because they were new, fun, and interesting. At the time I never realized they'd be my source of a living in the future.
Current AI has brought back a lot of that wonder and interest for me, and I'm sure the same is true for a lot of other computer nerds.
I’d consider myself one of those nerds. I’ve been in love with programming since I was 9 (20+ years ago now)
I was mystified by LLMs a couple years ago. But after really understanding how they work and running into their limitations, a lot of that sheen was lost.
There’s not a ton of interesting technology happening with LLM, more a ton of interesting math. (Math, especially linalg, is not the part of computer science I, personally, fell in love with.)
The outputs of LLMs, unlike programming languages, is pretty random and trial and error based. There’s never any real skill or expertise being built by playing with these tools. My control over the output isn’t as direct or understandable as with programming.
There’s no joy of discovery, only joy of getting the slot machine to give me what I want once in a while.
I’ve regained a lot of that wonder, recently, by doing graphics programming and learning lisp. Going against industry trends in my recreational programming has helped the field feel fresh to me.
Regardless, I don’t think the extreme minority of people who are truly nerdily passionate about tech are the “a lot of people” OC or I was talking about.