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How the AI Bubble Will Pop

derekthompson.org

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Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#251

Post by chilmers »

mrweasel wrote: post #227
bko wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think text is the ultimate interface. A company can just build and maintain very strong internal APIs and punt on the UX component. For instance, suppose I'm using figma, I want to just screenshot what I want it to look like and it can get me started. Or if I'm using Notion, I want a better search. Nothing necessarily generative, but something like "what was our corporate address". It also replaces help if well int…

For AI I'm of the opinion that the best interface is no interface. AI is something to be baked into the functionality of software, quietly working in the back. It's not something the user actually interacts with. The chat interfaces are, in my opinion infuriating. It feels like talking to the co-worker who knows absolutely everything about the topic at hand, but if you use the wrong terms and phrases he'll pretend th…

But isn't that a limitation of the AI, not necessarily how the AI is integrated into the software?

Personally, I don't want AI running around changing things without me asking to do so. I think chat is absolutely the right interface, but I don't like that most companies are adding separate "AI" buttons to use it. Instead, it should be integrated into the existing chat collaboration features. So, in Figma for example, you should just be able to add a comment to a design, tag @figma, and ask it to make changes like you would with a human designer. And the AI should be good enough and have sufficient context to get it right.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#252

Post by datadrivenangel »

automatic6131 wrote: post #223
pruetj wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> purchase laptops with decent hardware specs > It costs nothing Seems like it does cost something?

Quite, the typical 5 year depreciation on personal computing means a top-of-the-line $5k laptop works out to a ~$80/month spend... but it's on something you'd already spend for an employee

$2k / 5 years is ~$30/mo, and you'll get a better experience spending another $25/mo on one of the AI services (or with enough people a small pile of H100s)

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#253

Post by manishsharan »

fabian2k wrote: post #74
kumarm wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[even in programming it's inconclusive as to how much better/worse it makes programmers.] Try building something new in claude code (or codex etc) using a programming language you have not used before. Your opinion might change drastically. Current AI tools may not beat the best programmer, they definitely improves average programmer efficiency.

AI can be quite impressive if the conditions are right for it. But it still fails at so many common things for me that I'm not sure if it's actually saving me time overall. I just tried earlier today to get Copilot to make a simple refactor across ~30-40 files. Essentially changing one constructor parameter in all derived classes from a common base class and adding an import statement. In the end it managed ~80% of t…

This is exactly my experience. We wanted to modernize a java codebase by removing java JNDI global variables. This is a simple though tedious task. And we tried Claude Code and Gemini. Both of these results were hilarious.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#254

Post by bakugo »

isamuel wrote: post #160
bakugo wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're working under the assumption that punching a prompt into ChatGPT and getting up to grab some coffee while it spits out thousands of tokens of meaningless slop to be used as a substitute for something that you previously would've written yourself is a net upgrade for everyone involved. It's not. I can use ChatGPT to write 20 paragraph email replies that would've previously been a single manually written paragra…

> And yes, ChatGPT is kinda like an addictive drug here. If someone "can't work without ChatGPT anymore", they're addicted and have lost the ability to work on their own as a result. Come on, you can’t mean this in any kind of robust way. I can’t get my job done without a computer; am I an “addict” who has “lost the ability to work on my own?” Every tool tends to engender dependence, roughly in proportion to how much…

> I can’t get my job done without a computer

Are you really comparing an LLM to a computer? Really? There are many jobs today that quite literally would not exist at all without computers. It's in no way comparable.

You use ChatGPT to do the things you were already doing faster and with less effort, at the cost of quality. You don't use it to do things you couldn't do at all before.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#255

Post by Deegy »

bko wrote: post #217
donatj wrote: post #123

I feel kind of like a Luddite sometimes but I don't understand why EVERYONE is rushing to use AI? I use a couple different agents to help me code, and ChatGPT has largely replaced Google in my everyday use, but I genuinely don't understand the value proposition of every other companies offerings. I really feel like we're in the same "Get it out first, figure out what it is good for later" bubble we had like 7 years a…

I think text is the ultimate interface. A company can just build and maintain very strong internal APIs and punt on the UX component. For instance, suppose I'm using figma, I want to just screenshot what I want it to look like and it can get me started. Or if I'm using Notion, I want a better search. Nothing necessarily generative, but something like "what was our corporate address". It also replaces help if well int…

I'd call text the most versatile interface, but not sold on it being the ultimate. As the old saying goes 'a picture is worth a thousand words' and well crafted guis can allow a user to grok the functionality of an app very quickly.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#256

Post by Seb-C »

jacknews wrote: post #83

I think these articles slightly miss the point. Sure, AI as a tool, as it currently is, will take a very long time to earn back the $B being invested. But what if someone reaches autonomous AGI with this push? Everything changes. So I think there's a massive, massive upside risk being priced into these investments.

Except that the bubble's money is not being invested into cutting-edge ML research, but only into LLMs. And it has been obvious from the start to anyone half-competent about the topic that LLMs are not the path to AGI (if such a thing ever happens anyway).

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#257

Post by Gerardo1 »

crazygringo wrote: post #82
Etheryte wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The recent MIT report on the state of AI in business feels relevant here [0]: > Despite $30–40 billion in enterprise investment into GenAI, this report uncovers a surprising result in that 95% of organizations are getting zero return. There's no doubt that you'll find anecdotal evidence both for and against in all variations, what's much more interesting than anecdotes is the aggregate. [0] https://mlq.ai/media/quart…

No. The aggregate is useless. What matters is the 5% that have positive return. In the first few years of any new technology, most people investing it lose money because the transition and experimentation costs are higher than the initial returns. But as time goes on, best practices emerge, investments get paid off, and steady profits emerge.

On the provider end, yes. Not on the consumer end.

These are business customers buying a consumer-facing product.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#258

Post by datadrivenangel »

skybrian wrote: post #214
hemloc_io wrote: post #7

The most frustrating thing to me about this most recent rash of biz guy doubting the future of AI articles is the required mention that AI, specifically an LLM based approach to AGI, is important even if the numbers don't make sense today. Why is that the case? There's plenty of people in the field who have made convincing arguments that it's a dead end and fundamentally we'll need to do something else to achieve AGI…

Maybe you just haven’t heard of them? For example, just the other day I heard about a company using an LLM to provide advice to doctors. News to me. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/openevidence-the-fa... > OpenEvidence is actively used across more than 10,000 hospitals and medical centers nationwide and by more than 40% of physicians in the United States who log in daily to make high-stakes clinical decision…

I've had doctors google things in front of me. This may be an improvement.

Re: How the AI Bubble Will Pop

#260

Post by ACCount37 »

emp17344 wrote: post #157
ivape wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI figured out something on my mind that I didn’t tell it about yesterday (latest Sonnet). My best advice to you is to spend time and allow the AI to blow your mind. Then you’ll get it. Sometimes I sit in wonder at how the fuck it’s able to figure out that much intent without specific instructions. There’s no way anyone programmed it to understand that much. If you’re not blown away by this then I have to assume you…

I don’t understand what you’re saying. You know the AI is incapable of reading your mind, right? Can you provide more information?

LLMs can have surprisingly strong "theory of mind", even at base model level. They have to learn that to get good at predicting all the various people that show up in conversation logs.

You'd be surprised at just how much data you can pry out of an LLM that was merely exposed to a single long conversation with a given user.

Chatbot LLMs aren't trained to expose all of those latent insights, but they can still do some of it occasionally. This can look like mind reading, at times. In practice, the LLM is just good at dredging the text for all the subtext and the unsaid implications. Some users are fairly predictable and easy to impress.

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