How I keep up with AI progress

Maybe I’ve been missing some important stuff, but it seems the most relevant and important updates eventually just bubble up to the front page of HN or get mentioned in the comments

This is my attitude for all tech surrounding IT

Trying to keep up is like jumping on a 90mph treadmill. I have decided to opt out. I think AI (and currently LLMs) is more than a fad and not going away but it's in a huge state of churn right now. I'm not investing a ton of time into anything until I have to. In another few years the landscape will hopefully be more clear. Or not, but at least I won't have spent a lot of time on stuff that has quickly become irrelevant.

I'm currently not using AI or LLMs in any of my day-to-day work.

This. When has early adoptation paid off lately? Remember prompt engineering?

I agree pretty strongly

Yeah it's not a fad, but I think it's really not as useful to me right now as the hype seems to suggest

I'm going to keep an eye on developments, but I'm not using it for my day to day either. I'm just not seeing the same value other people seem to be seeing right now and I'm not going to exhaust myself trying to keep up

One day Claude is the best. Next is Cursor. People are switching tools every two weeks trying to keep up

Not for me thanks. Especially not with how inconsistent the quality and output still are

give me whisper real-time transcriber and I'll be happy!!

Yeah these companies have made unbelievable investments, keeping their products a secret is antithetical to their existence.

I remember the same FOMO that happened with "Google searching." People wrote and sold books about how to search properly on Google. The same with AI will happen: either it will flop, or we'll be able to learn all the needed skills in a few days. I don't worry about it.

i'm in the same boat, i did the zero-to-hero series karpathy put out to get a basic understanding of what we're dealing with. At work, I helped put together a basic rag setup last year that's in production so feel ok with implementation. Finally, i have a little personal pet project that i'm going to feel out with claude code over Christmas to get more hands on. That's about it all i'm going to do to "keep up". I'll let the fighters fight it out and then just use whatever wins.

btw here's a link to the karpathy videos https://karpathy.ai/zero-to-hero.html

edit: i use claude and chatgpt day to day to help with simple things like regex, a replacement for google search in same cases, and self contained classes, functions, and other small discreet blocks of code.

I've banked professional success on my superior "Google Searching" ability (compared to my peers) for 20 years. A little but of thinking goes a long way, even when using tools designed to replace thought.

For some of us this time has come, i.e. it's already useful and worth learning and spending on prime accounts.

what do you mean remember? it didn't go anywhere. I try to understand how to make this useful for my daily programming, and every credible-looking advice begins with "tell LLM to program in style ABC and avoid antipatterns like XYZ", sometimes pages and pages long. It seems like without this prompt sourcery you cannot produce good code using an LLM it will make the same stupid mistakes over and over unless you try to pre-empt them with a carefully engineered upfront prompt. Aside from stupid "influencers" who bullshit that they produced a live commercial app with a one-liner English sentence, it seems that getting anything useful really requires a lot of prompt work, whatever you want to call it.

Expert Systems looked really cool back in the '80s. Doctors would become a thing of the past etc etc. It seemed so obvious - codify knowledge and then ask it questions. Profit!

This time the expert systems generate themselves over vast fields of everything by reading Facebook, Reddit and the rest of the internet that they can find.

On that rather shaky basis the next "leap" in AI will be around 2070. Perhaps that one will create AGI or something that looks more like it.

Also, if it does achieve superhuman level intellect what is the point of learning at all. It will have solved physics and math for us already and the model owners will have reaped all the rewards, what good are us meatbags?