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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

#261

Post by khazhoux »

troupo wrote: post #237
khazhoux wrote: post #214

I'm honestly started to get pissed seeing these articles on HN every day. Aren't we technologists? I see these articles and it's just people who can't accept the future, or feel threatened by it, or are pissed they are not contributing to it. I'm an expert in my field with decades of experience, and a damn good programmer, and Cursor is like zipping down the street on a powered bike. There is no wishful thinking here…

> I'm honestly started to get pissed seeing these articles on HN every day. Aren't we technologists? Funnily enough, that's exactly what the article asks. > I'm an expert in my field with decades of experience, and a damn good programmer, and Cursor is like zipping down the street on a powered bike. Oh look, an unverified claim. Go through the first list in the article, and ask "what we, as technologists, know about…

Yeah, I read your article. It's the latest in the stream of "everyone is full of crap" about LLMs.

You say you've used it to build multiple projects, but then title it "everything is wishful thinking". That makes no sense. You're either click-baiting or have an inconsistent stance.

> This is crypto all over again

No. The fundamental vision for BTC is that it grows to be a mainstream currency for a huge variety of use cases. If BTC continues to be used just for pirate sites, black market, etc, then it will be considered to have failed. With LLMs the success is immediate. We don't need LLMs to solve every software problem, for them to be massive accelerator of daily coding.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#262

Post by TeMPOraL »

bobbob27 wrote: post #259
TeMPOraL wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too cheap to meter? Inference is cheap and there's no long-term or even mid-term moat here. As long as the courts don't shut down Meta over IP issues with LLama training data , that is. I can't stress that enough: "open source" models are what can stop the "real costs" for the customers from growing. Despite popular belief, inference isn't that expensive. This isn't Uber - stopping isn't going to make LLMs infeasible…

You can't just take cost of training out of the equation... If these companies plan to stay afloat, they have to actually pay for the tens of billions they've spent at some point. That's what the parent comment meant by "free AI"

Yes, you can - because of LLama.

Training is expensive, but it's not that expensive either. It takes just one of those super-rich players to pay the training costs and then release the weights, to deny other players a moat.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#263

Post by TeMPOraL »

wubrr wrote: post #74
m4rtink wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone actually know what the real cost for the customers will be once the free AI money no longer floods those companies?

I'm no LLM evangelist, far from it, but I expect models of similar quality to the current bleeding-edge, will be freely runnable on consumer hardware within 3 years. Future bleeding-edge models may well be more expensive than current ones, who knows.

For the purpose of keeping the costs of LLM-dependent services down, you don't need to run bleeding-edge models on single consumer GPUs. Even if it takes a hundred GPUs, it still means people can start businesses around hosting those models, and compete with the large vendors.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#264

Post by eachro »

"And 50% of the time they work 50% of the time."

I think this is still an incredible outcome given how many dice rolls you can take in parallel with multiple claude/o3/gemini attempts at a problem with slightly different prompts. Granted, each rollout does not come for free given the babysitting you need to do but the cost is much lower than going down the path yourself/having junior colleagues make the attempt.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#266

Post by troupo »

khazhoux wrote: post #261
troupo wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm honestly started to get pissed seeing these articles on HN every day. Aren't we technologists? Funnily enough, that's exactly what the article asks. > I'm an expert in my field with decades of experience, and a damn good programmer, and Cursor is like zipping down the street on a powered bike. Oh look, an unverified claim. Go through the first list in the article, and ask "what we, as technologists, know about…

Yeah, I read your article. It's the latest in the stream of "everyone is full of crap" about LLMs. You say you've used it to build multiple projects, but then title it "everything is wishful thinking". That makes no sense. You're either click-baiting or have an inconsistent stance. > This is crypto all over again No. The fundamental vision for BTC is that it grows to be a mainstream currency for a huge variety of use…

> That makes no sense. You're either click-baiting or have an inconsistent stance.

Or you haven't actually understood a single thing from the article.

Like the fact you say "aren't we technologists" immediately followed by a completely unverifiable claim that everyone is supposed to take at face value, uncritically.

And any criticism is immediately labeled as "crap", "people who can't see the future" etc. Remind you of anyone?

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#267

Post by sureglymop »

selfhoster11 wrote: post #174
sureglymop wrote: post #43

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 theore…

You don't need consensus on the meaning across the board. I maintain my own, more permissive milestone for what constitutes "AGI", but I have no expectations that others will share it. Much like "crypto" to me is still cryptography, not cryptocurrency - sometimes the mainstream will just have a different opinion.

My point is, it's not about the mainstream or marketing. In science, some rigor is expected. There doesn't need to be consensus if a definition is established within some context. It's perfectly fine to redefine something as needed for the research but only if that definition is declared.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#268

Post by infp_arborist »

Sherveen wrote: post #72

This is completely incoherent. 3 reasons: 1. he talks about what he's shipped, and yet compares it to crypto – already, you're in a contradiction as to your relative comparison – you straight up shouldn't blog if you can't conceive that these two are opposing thoughts 2. this whole refrain from people of like, "SHOW ME your enterprise codebase that includes lots of LLM code" – HELLO, people who work at private compan…

Re. 2 - I find it fascinating that people using coding agents have seemingly no problem to reveal their full codebases to AI companies.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#269

Post by Narciss »

Ok, I’ll take the bait and answer the questions you’ve set in the article.

Who am I? Senior engineer with 5 years of experience, working within the AI team.

Project: social platform with millions of MAU

Codebase: Typescript, NextJS frontend, express backend, Prisma ORM, monorepo . Hundreds of thousands of lines of code.

My expertise sits in the same domain, language, codebase that I apply AI to.

When do I use AI? All the time. It has significantly sped me up.

How do I use AI? Almost always in a targeted fashion. I line it up like a sniper rifle - I understand my problem, where in the codebase it should act in order to apply it, and what general structure I want. Then I create the prompt to get me there. Before, I needed to do the above anyway, minus the prompt, but then I needed to use my slow hands to code dozens or hundreds of lines of code to get there. Now, the AI does it for me, and it makes me much faster. To clarify, I do not plan everything in the prompt - I let the AI color between the lines, but I do give it the general direction. Of course, I also use AI for smaller tasks like writing SQL queries for example, and it’s saved tons of time there too.

In my side projects, I have a different approach - I vibe code my way through with less “sniper targeting”, because I care less about the beauty of the code organization and more about results. If I do see AI slop, I then ask the AI to clean it up, or redo the prompt with more targeting.

Overall, AI has significantly sped me up. I am still heavily involved as you can tell, but it is a phenomenal tool, and I can envision it taking over more and more of the code writing process, with the right rules in place (we are actively working on that at my work, with md files and rebuilding our FE from the ground up with AI in mind).

Does this sort of answer give you a better idea of how AI helps?

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#270

Post by omnimus »

Applejinx wrote: post #140
abletonlive wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a tech lead and I have maybe 5X output now compared to everybody else under me. Quantified by scoring tickets at a team level. I also have more responsibilities outside of IC work compared to the people under me. At this point I’m asking my manager to fire people that still think llms are just toys because I’m tired of working with people with this poor mindset. A pragmatic engineer continually reevaluates what t…

Are you the one at Ableton responsible for it ignoring the renaming of parameter names during the setState part of a Live program? Some of us are already jumping through ridiculous hoops to cover for your… mindset. There's stuff coming up that used to work and doesn't now, like in Live 12. From your response I would guess this is a trend that will hold. We should not be having to code special 'host is Ableton Live' c…

Why do you think this person works at Ableton? From their comments it doesnt seem that they would be a fit to small cool Berlin company making tools for techno.
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