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Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

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Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#41

Post by votepaunchy »

louthy wrote: post #26
tasty_freeze wrote: post #18

One thing I find frustrating is that management where I work has heard of 10x productivity gains. Some of those claims even come from early adopters at my work. But that sets expectation way too high. Partly it is due to Amdahl's law: I spend only a portion of my time coding, and far more time thinking and communicating with others that are customers of my code. Even if does make the coding 10x faster (and it doesn't…

> overall my productivity is 10-15% better. That is nothing to sneeze at, but it isn't 10x. It is something to sneeze at if you are 10-15% more expensive to employ due to the cost of the LLM tools. The total cost of production should always be considered, not just throughput.

> if you are 10-15% more expensive to employ due to the cost of the LLM tools

How is one spending anywhere close to 10% of total compensation on LLMs?

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#42

Post by farts_mckensy »

Jordan-117 wrote: post #27
careful_ai wrote: post #5

[flagged]

- superficial emotion - cliché phrasing - em dashes - abundant alliteration - all comments suspiciously similar in length - all posts pointing to the same website Does HN not have a policy against vapid AI comment spam? If not, it needs one. edit: It does: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37617714

Watch out, HN. The em dash police are here. Hands up

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#43

Post by sureglymop »

Loosely related, but I find the use of AGI (and sometimes even AI) as terms annoying lately. Especially in scientific papers, where I would imagine everything to be well defined. If at least in how it is used in that paper.

So, why can't we just come up with some definition for what AGI is? We could then, say, logically prove that some AI fits that definition. Even if this doesn't seem practically useful, it's theoretically much more useful than just using that term with no meaning.

Instead it kind of feels like it's an escape hatch. On wikipedia we have "a type of ai that would match or surpass human capabilities across virtually all cognitive tasks". How could we measure that? What good is this if we can't prove that a system has this property?

Bit of a rant but I hope it's somewhat legible still.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#44

Post by bgwalter »

Jordan-117 wrote: post #27
careful_ai wrote: post #5

[flagged]

- superficial emotion - cliché phrasing - em dashes - abundant alliteration - all comments suspiciously similar in length - all posts pointing to the same website Does HN not have a policy against vapid AI comment spam? If not, it needs one. edit: It does: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37617714

This one is funny though. I'd bet on Bing CoPilot, which now always agrees with "AI" concerns because MSFT has probably realized that no one wants "AI" and takes a more cautious approach.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#45

Post by gyomu »

hotpotat wrote: post #30

I have to say I’m in the exact camp the author is complaining about. I’ve shipped non trivial greenfield products which I started back when it was only ChatGPT and it was shitty. I started using Claude with copying and pasting back and forth between the web chat and XCode. Then I discovered Cursor. It left me with a lot of annoying build errors, but my productivity was still at least 3x. Now that agents are better an…

> I’ve shipped non trivial greenfield products

Links please

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#46

Post by CharlesW »

louthy wrote: post #26
tasty_freeze wrote: post #18

One thing I find frustrating is that management where I work has heard of 10x productivity gains. Some of those claims even come from early adopters at my work. But that sets expectation way too high. Partly it is due to Amdahl's law: I spend only a portion of my time coding, and far more time thinking and communicating with others that are customers of my code. Even if does make the coding 10x faster (and it doesn't…

> overall my productivity is 10-15% better. That is nothing to sneeze at, but it isn't 10x. It is something to sneeze at if you are 10-15% more expensive to employ due to the cost of the LLM tools. The total cost of production should always be considered, not just throughput.

> It is something to sneeze at if you are 10-15% more expensive to employ due to the cost of the LLM tools.

Claude Max is $200/month, or ~2% of the salary of an average software engineer.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#47

Post by gyomu »

garciasn wrote: post #32
labrador wrote: post #19

I'm a retired programmer. I can't imagine trusting code generated by probablities for anything mission critical. If it were close and just needed minor tweaks I could understand that. But I don't have experience with it. My comment is mainly to say LLMs are amazing in areas that are not coding, like brainstorming, blue sky thinking, filling in research details, asking questions that make me reflect. I treat the LLM l…

Well; I can't speak to your specific experience (current or past) but I'm telling you that while I'm skeptical as hell about EVERYTHING, it's blowing my expectations away in every conceivable way. I built something in less than 24h that I'm sure would have taken us MONTHS to just get off the ground, let alone to the polished version it's at right now. The most impressive thing is that it can do all of the things that…

> I built something in less than 24h that I'm sure would have taken us MONTHS to just get off the ground, let alone to the polished version it's at right now

Would love to see it!

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#48

Post by labrador »

svdr wrote: post #40
labrador wrote: post #19

I'm a retired programmer. I can't imagine trusting code generated by probablities for anything mission critical. If it were close and just needed minor tweaks I could understand that. But I don't have experience with it. My comment is mainly to say LLMs are amazing in areas that are not coding, like brainstorming, blue sky thinking, filling in research details, asking questions that make me reflect. I treat the LLM l…

I've been programming for 40 years and have started using LLM's a few months ago, and it has really changed the way I work. I let it write pieces of code (pasting error messages from logs mostly result in a fix in less then a minute), but also brainstorming about architecture or new solutions. Of course I check the code it writes, but I'm still almost daily amazed at the intelligence and accuracy. (Very much unlike c…

That's good to know if I ever get an idea for a side project. Anything to relieve the tedius aspects of programming would be very welcome.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#49

Post by farts_mckensy »

sherdil2022 wrote: post #10

I follow Emily Bender on LinkedIn. She cuts through the AI hype and is also the author of The AI Con book - https://thecon.ai/ Of course people will either love AI or hate AI - and some don’t care. I am cautious especially when people say ‘AI is here to stay’. It takes away agency.

AI is here to stay, and you do not have agency over that. You can choose not to use it, but that has zero impact on the broader adoption rate. Just like when the automobile was introduced and society as a whole evolved.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#50

Post by 0x696C6961 »

hotpotat wrote: post #30

I have to say I’m in the exact camp the author is complaining about. I’ve shipped non trivial greenfield products which I started back when it was only ChatGPT and it was shitty. I started using Claude with copying and pasting back and forth between the web chat and XCode. Then I discovered Cursor. It left me with a lot of annoying build errors, but my productivity was still at least 3x. Now that agents are better an…

I find that the code quality LLMs output is pretty bad. I end up going through so many iterations that it ends up being faster to do it myself. What I find agents actually useful for is doing large scale mechanical refractors. Instead of trying to figure out the perfect vim macro or AST rewrite script, I'll throw an agent at it.
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