Earlier quoted context omitted.
You realize they had razor thing margins on purpose, right?
Of course. Does that aspect differ from this other emerging market?
[deleted]
Between the Booms: AI in Winter – Communications of the ACM
61–70 of 73 posts
Re: Between the Booms: AI in Winter – Communications of the ACM
#62From “big program, small data” to “big data, small program” seems like a useful way to summarize the main shift from elaborate rules in the first generation, to huge piles of data today.
Re: Between the Booms: AI in Winter – Communications of the ACM
#63The biggest problem was "expert systems and a flood of public money" - that public money led to complacency and a lot of research in unproductive areas. It is private money that has really kickstarted the new systems since Google bought AlexNet
Re: Between the Booms: AI in Winter – Communications of the ACM
#64every other article these days on this site is about AI. And it's incredibly tedious and annoying. Isn't it enough that clueless marketers who get their Tech knowledge from businessinsider and bloomberg are constantly harping on about AI. Seems we as a community have resigned or given up in this battle against common sense. Maybe long ago. Still there should be some form of moderation penalizing these shill posts tha…
Not just you. Clearly useful tools coming out of this AI crazy, but a LOT of fluff. Outside of pure tech companies, there's a lot of "Head of AI" hiring by CTOs to show "we are doing AI" regardless of if they have found any application for it yet. I've also seen a lot of product pivots to AI where they don't really have a need or explanation for the use case that AI helps with. Further I've seen a number of orgs that…
> Clearly useful tools coming out of this AI crazy, but a LOT of fluff.
Isn't this true of every boom? Like A.C. Clarke said, you find the limits of the possible by venturing into the impossible.
Re: Between the Booms: AI in Winter – Communications of the ACM
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know about the professional professionals, but as a science professor, I have to wear a lot of hats, which has required me to gain skills in a multitude of areas outside my area of deep expertise. I use Claude and Chatgpt EVERY DAY. Those services help me run out scripts for data munging, etc etc very quickly. I don't use it for high expertise writing, as I find it takes more than I get back, but I do use it…
> I use Claude and Chatgpt EVERY DAY […] What other innovation in the last decade has been this disruptive? I use some sort of IDE everyday. Previously at my early days, I was a “true-hacker” and using Vim in console to type out massive code bases, we had waterfall development practices, I would fumble through source codes of various poorly documented features of the language or libraries for hours to figure out abou…
Counterpoint: I programmed exclusively in vim for a decade, switched to intellij for scala, did find it more productive (although I found intellij annoyingly sluggish relative to vim -- especially at startup), but then realized that scala itself was limiting my productivity even with the help of an IDE. I abandoned scala, went back to vim and wrote my own language in the most minimal way possible. I don't even use simple tab completions. Yet I am more productive in my language than in any other that I've previously used with or without an IDE.
I don't doubt that you are more productive with an IDE than without, but I personally think the magnitude is reflective of poor language and system design rather than the magic of IDEs (which I believe is relatively minor compared to using a fast compiler with good error reporting). In fact, I sort of think IDEs lead to a kind of trap where people design systems that require their use to be effective which then makes it seem as though the features of the IDE are essential rather than perhaps a source of complexity that is actually making the system worse.
I also will say that your horse vs flight example raises something for me. It's a bit like saying I could drive the Camino de Santiago in a day which saves me an insane amount of time. Sure, it's true, but it misses the entire point of the journey. I basically think the vast majority of programming efficiency boosting tools (ides and llms alike) are mainly just taking us faster on a road to nowhere. I live in San Francisco, supposedly the mecca of technology, and almost never encounter anyone working on anything of truly significant value (according to my personal value system). But I do find a lot of people slinging code for cash, which is a fine and understandable choice, but deeply uninspiring to me. Which also reflects how I feel about LLMs and the like.
Re: Between the Booms: AI in Winter – Communications of the ACM
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you're paying for ChatGPT is not likely covering their expenses, let alone making up their massive R&D investment. People paid for Sprig and Munchery too, but those companies went out of business. Obviously what they developed wasn't nearly as significant as what OpenAI has developed, but the question is: where will their pricing land once they need to turn a profit? It may well end up in a place where it's not…
Looking at history, anything in its first few iterations costs insane and stay as luxury or is sold at massive loss. Once the research goes on for several years, the costs keep coming down first very slowly and then in avalanche . The question always remains to which one can continue “selling at a loss” long enough to last the point until the costs continue going down while people are used to paying standard price(se…
One very viable possibility is that the technology sticks around and does great things, but the first mover entities like OpenAI go out of business anyway because it's gotten cheaper to copy their work.
Re: Between the Booms: AI in Winter – Communications of the ACM
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not just you. Clearly useful tools coming out of this AI crazy, but a LOT of fluff. Outside of pure tech companies, there's a lot of "Head of AI" hiring by CTOs to show "we are doing AI" regardless of if they have found any application for it yet. I've also seen a lot of product pivots to AI where they don't really have a need or explanation for the use case that AI helps with. Further I've seen a number of orgs that…
> Clearly useful tools coming out of this AI crazy, but a LOT of fluff. Isn't this true of every boom? Like A.C. Clarke said, you find the limits of the possible by venturing into the impossible.
On the adoption side, no.
This feels way more like the 90s IT offshoring wave where it was forced bluntly, top down because they thought it would save money.
Things like crypto or cloud or big data had a much longer and measured adoption cycle.
Re: Between the Booms: AI in Winter – Communications of the ACM
#68every other article these days on this site is about AI. And it's incredibly tedious and annoying. Isn't it enough that clueless marketers who get their Tech knowledge from businessinsider and bloomberg are constantly harping on about AI. Seems we as a community have resigned or given up in this battle against common sense. Maybe long ago. Still there should be some form of moderation penalizing these shill posts tha…
Not just you. Clearly useful tools coming out of this AI crazy, but a LOT of fluff. Outside of pure tech companies, there's a lot of "Head of AI" hiring by CTOs to show "we are doing AI" regardless of if they have found any application for it yet. I've also seen a lot of product pivots to AI where they don't really have a need or explanation for the use case that AI helps with. Further I've seen a number of orgs that…
A lot of the fluff is all about boosting sales IMO which is where a lot of money for tech comes from. When MBA types (a large chunk of tech's buyers) hear the promises of efficiency, and replacing workers they get all excited very very quickly unless it requires lots of capital to do so - where they might instead look at cheaper labor (think offshore). AI is the ultimate SaaS product to these types, or at least how it it pitched to them it is. These people see tech workers, and IP as just "resources" - they are fungible bodies not qualified professionals. Obviously this creates a lot of technology delivery issues; and dysfunction. Places run by these types (many corporations) see technology as an expensive cost centre and secondary to the main business. I've seen this even in companies where they have to pivot to being a tech business - because of market competition they were forced to invest, but because it was reluctant investment the old culture remains. Engineers and other "builders/do'ers" are usually second class to the "decision makers" in these places. These are the places where engineers keep the place running, sometimes doing a lot of work and absolutely critical, but get paid little and receive little recognition. This is very common position for a software engineer outside the US.
With this kind of thinking often comes being a laggard in technology as you put it - engineers are a "forced necessary cost" because competitors are forcing us to keep up; not because we actually value it.
AI in their minds has vindicated their thinking hence the excitement about it. As a product it is very easy to "sell/fluff" to these kinds of people; it really excites them. They think engineers are now the expendable people they always wanted them to be rather than the people they had to put up with to get what they wanted. They were now justified in being "laggards" - they now have AI to do it cheaper than they would of had to pay an engineer before.
Yes there's a lot wrong with the thinking above, overestimation of current capabilities, etc and real innovative growth leading companies don't think this way. But the decision makers in these companies don't have that perspective. Much of technology trends, corporate hype is around things you can sell to these decision makers who often overpay for the wrong kind of technologies if you sell to them right (think typical RFQ/RFP corporate processes) - AI is an easy sell/dream to these people.
Re: Between the Booms: AI in Winter – Communications of the ACM
#69I'm not an expert in the field, but I find this article incredible. For someone like me who didn't major in AI at CS, it's clear and entertaining.
Re: Between the Booms: AI in Winter – Communications of the ACM
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not just you. Clearly useful tools coming out of this AI crazy, but a LOT of fluff. Outside of pure tech companies, there's a lot of "Head of AI" hiring by CTOs to show "we are doing AI" regardless of if they have found any application for it yet. I've also seen a lot of product pivots to AI where they don't really have a need or explanation for the use case that AI helps with. Further I've seen a number of orgs that…
A lot of the fluff is all about boosting sales IMO which is where a lot of money for tech comes from. When MBA types (a large chunk of tech's buyers) hear the promises of efficiency, and replacing workers they get all excited very very quickly unless it requires lots of capital to do so - where they might instead look at cheaper labor (think offshore). AI is the ultimate SaaS product to these types, or at least how i…
Yes I think this encapsulates my critique and observation from inside the belly of the beast. To these guys $100/year or even $1000/year per head to give AI to 1000 excel jockey analysts is great. It's cheaper, by an order of magnitude, than upsizing their IT org to the size of their leading competitors. I mean we are talking single digit SWEs for the numbers above.
Of course they probably aren't thinking through how AI will allow their leading competitors to maintain or expand their lead if it is any good anyway.
Interestingly I was in a meeting with our firms IT org recently where they were describing some of the "upgrades" they are making across systems, some of which were going to degrade service. Upon enough prodding they conceded the reasoning was not value, or even cost, but cost attribution. That is, it was too hard to figure out how to meter usage & charge back to business lines, so they are essentially going to discontinue those services and make business lines self manage. Crazy.