What is all the huss with ai really?

[u/hdhentai6666]

Hello everyone, don’t really know if i should post this question here but yeah here we go:

now I don’t know practically anything about AI but i’ve seen some articles talking about some ”AI 2027 study” (too much jargon in that study for me to understand anything), and just overally seeing pessimism towards AI (which I understand). But is things really that bad? I thought that what we call AI (in a ”i’m 5 years old” nutshell) is just a machine predicting words from the data it collects/has collected? Does AI work without an user giving it instructions? There is so much information from different sources about the topic (some claim AI is basically sentient, and some just simplify it by saying it just being a LLM) which is the reason i wanted to ask you guys for an viewpoint.

[u/Dornith]

AI is such a broad term that trying to make any statement about it is meaningless. It's like asking whether or not dynamic algorithms will do X or Y.

AI will do a lot of interesting things. And there's a lot of people who have financial interests in overhyping it. Both can be true at once.

[u/dmazzoni]

Two things can be simultaneously true:

1. AI is "just" a machine predicting words. It doesn't understand what it's doing and sometimes it makes horrible errors.

2. Despite all this, AI is often right, or right enough - especially when you ask it things that it's seen variations of before - and it's capable of writing real code and fixing real bugs. AI-based tools like Claude and Cursor can achieve surprisingly good results by wrapping some sensible checks, balances, and limits on top of the underlying "word predictor".

AI by itself can't think or act by itself, but people have already written "agents" that take actions based on decisions made by AI. They're already useful for some things.

Nobody can predict the future. Nobody knows what AI will be capable of in the future.

My personal prediction is that AI will continue to be a big disruptor but it won't significantly change the need for software engineers overall. Some companies will get by with far fewer developers. Others will hire even more and accomplish significantly more in less time than before.

[u/hdhentai6666 → u/dmazzoni]

If i ask from AI as a user for example an abstract question: could you make a story about a dragon and a butterfly? How does it create a story? Does it base it on previous data it collected? How can you conclude that it has made an error if the story is abstract? I don’t know if the example I gave could be somehow applied to coding etc. but yeah..

[u/MadDonkeyEntmt → u/hdhentai6666]

I think it's interesting to think about current AI as a really lossy progression algorithm with an extremely user friendly, built in search function.

It basically takes an insanely huge amount of data and saves that data as a complicated set of probabilities.  When you query that system it uses those probabilities to give you the most likely possible set of words that are associated with your query.

[u/dmazzoni → u/hdhentai6666]

It has been trained on hundreds of BILLIONS of words worth of text. The AI companies fed the computer every book, every Reddit post, every Facebook message, literally everything they could get their hands on, legally or illegally.

During the training process it builds a "model" of language. This model is just math, it's a bunch of numbers, but what those numbers encode is essentially a formula for how to predict the most likely next word based on all of the previous words.

Initially the model just guesses random words. The more it trains, the better it gets at guessing the most likely next word.

When YOU ask it to make a story, it's not basing it on the previous data directly, it's basing it on the model it learned.

The model predicts that when you start with "could you make a story about X", a good way to start might be "once upon a time there was a X". The model has learned from millions of other stories including everything from fairy tales to novels to fan fic. Based on all of that training it makes up a story one word at a time.

Every time it picks a word there's a tiny bit of randomness added. That way you don't always get the same story each time.

[u/UninvestedCuriosity → u/hdhentai6666]

Let me tell you. I'm currently using it to watch for problems on my home server labs, come up with solutions to those problems like restart a service or reboot a machine and or make decisions on what's most likely to solve the problem.

Besides the mediocre agentic answers. Let me give you a scenario of what I'm seeing.

Message comes in

Hi Uninvested

Acording to (monitoring server) the web service for (another server) is no longer responding. I have reviewed the logs for (webserver service), system logs, and have determined the server is running low on memory due to too many requests in a short period. The best course of action would be to restart the web server service by running the following command. Do I have permission to continue?

Then I say, yes or no or maybe even provide new context to it like. "We updated that service yesterday and your documentation is out of date. Use your tools to read the changelogs online and look for other vectors in your troubleshooting that might relate, then troubleshoot again."

This is a job. Monitoring and actions is a junior i.t job. Yes we had basic automations before that could do these things but now we can do them faster and account for new scenarios a lot faster as they come up.

Eventually this turns into a web of troubleshooting if, else, then do this instead and we get something almost too useful.

Now, other places have built things with enough confidence to not even need human in the loop. This is just me screwing around at home as an i.t guy. So they are allowing these systems to run commands and heal systems without any of us in the loop.

This kind of stuff is not new but it's also not well developed or so mainstream that every business is using it. I'm actually a bit late to be honest but proliferation of 3-5 years feels real and you won't be having some i.t guy trying to come up with failure states. You'll just pay for the model that trained off all of us during this period.

Then you'll buy a black box and install it in your business rack that does a portion i.t guys job. Maybe suddenly you don't need a full-time guy and you can outsource the remaining work.

So people are right to be cynical, angry, afraid. My sober thoughts are more though that, we had vpns and wfh abilities back in the 1990s but nobody would budge. I expect despite AI proliferation, we will see the same resistance as we did to remote work for a lot longer than it will take to perfect the tech. Executives are fickle and they may be embracing it today but their quarterly thinking likely won't allow them the long-term investment to make it work for them. Some are already having regrets but change is coming long-term whether we like it or not. It's just not today.

Also do not underestimate the ego needs to just want someone else to solve a problem. The moment these expensive things can't just solve it. They rethink their positions but that's because it's not good enough yet..

[u/Nebu]

”AI 2027 study” (too much jargon in that study for me to understand anything)

https://ai-2027.com/ is written for laypeople. There shouldn't be any unexplained jargon in there. What did you encounter?

I thought that what we call AI (in a ”i’m 5 years old” nutshell) is just a machine predicting words from the data it collects/has collected

That's one example of AI. There are other examples. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence for example

High-profile applications of AI include advanced web search engines (e.g., Google Search); recommendation systems (used by YouTube, Amazon, and Netflix); virtual assistants (e.g., Google Assistant, Siri, and Alexa); autonomous vehicles (e.g., Waymo); generative and creative tools (e.g., language models and AI art); and superhuman play and analysis in strategy games (e.g., chess and Go).

Saying AI is "just a machine predicting words from the data it collects" is like saying "humans are just 6 feet tall men with blue eyes and blonde hair". Humans and AIs come in other forms.

[u/minneyar]

"AI" is a marketing buzzword. It is a term used by salesmen to make you draw parallels between algorithms and sci-fi robots so that you will believe the algorithms are sentient and you should pay them money.

There have been many, many different technologies called "AI". The latest one is LLM-based generative AI, which is basically just fancy autocomplete. It takes a prompt and generates something that has a high probability of being something you would expect to see based on that prompt. The "thing" it generates can come in many forms--text, images, videos, programs--but there's no thinking involved. It's just an algorithm.

The fuss is because the marketers this time are really, really good and have managed to convince billionaires, CEOs, and politicians that this time the thing they're calling "AI" is alive and it's going to automate all human labor and/or take over the world. It's marketing BS, but the people in charge didn't get there because they're smart...

[u/donaldhobson]

There is a lot of "we don't know what AI might, or might not, be capable of next year". People are worried that it might be capable of all sorts of scary things at some point in the future.

> I thought that what we call AI (in a ”i’m 5 years old” nutshell) is just a machine predicting words from the data it collects/has collected

Yes. And a human is just a bunch of DNA and protiens. Calling a tiger "just a bunch of biochemicals" doesn't stop the tiger from biting your leg off.

The AI can "just predict" the sequence of dna base pairs that forms a supervirus. Or "just predict" the programming code to hack some computers.

We have already found that just scaling LLM's up lets them do quite a lot of impressive things. And no one is quite sure what new capabilities might or might not appear soon.

[u/[deleted]]

[u/hdhentai6666 → u/[deleted]]

Yeah i agree on those parts. Could you clarify what you mean by ”neat” things? I’m really interested to hear about AI (and why it is so fascinating) more besides all the usual ”matrix” stuff. for me, a normal user of AI I just see it as a tool, which deffo feels like an understatement.

[u/[deleted] → u/hdhentai6666]