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Not everyone is using AI for everything

gabrielweinberg.com

131–140 of 565 posts

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#131
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume it's because he is seeking to pay rent, food bills, and other expenses through employment.

I mean maybe that is because I live in a still mostly not failed state (Germany), but I can't imagine that these things would be _so bad_ that living in fear of saying the wrong thing would be something worth considering. Plus, and leaving that aside, I have my doubts that even if you did that, that that company would stay alive for very long. Reality has the habit of eventually ripping this kind of unproductively de…

No, if anything, I would say a very unfortunate trait of existence right now is that reality does NOT tend to punish corporations for being completely idiotic, at least not very fast at all.

Look at musk's companies. They will basically never (on any near timescale...) produce GAAP profitability and yet their IPO is in the trillions. To the point that S&P refusing to suspend their GAAP profitability requirements means the index will basically never see this company in it (which I'm quite pleased about).

The power of already-accumulated capital is simply more powerful than things like "don't be completely pants-on-head stupid about a recent fad" "don't seig-heil in front of the world stage" "there's no point in having people come to an office just to spend all day on zoom" etc etc etc.

The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, and companies can remain irrational longer than you can go without contributing to your 401k.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#132
I'm going back and forth with the llm agents.

They are great on exploring, understanding and finding bugs in existing codebase.

They are great for simple or one time scripts/programs.

They are terrible, really terrible coders. The overengineering is so deep in their training that no matter what is your prompt, your skills or agents.md/claude.md, if you don't babysit them continuously, at some point they will just fuck up your codebase.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#134

I understand the point being made, but it does feel a bit like writing a post in the early days of the internet saying: "No, everyone is not using the internet for everything." Which would have been entirely true when written, and entirely false a relatively short time later. Everyone does use the internet for everything today, and everyone will use AI for everything soon.

You'll find it hard to pin down what you mean by "everything" otherwise you wouldn't have said that. Nobody uses the internet for everything.

Local models are highly likely to dominate in the long run as "good enough" inevitably becomes trivially cheap. This is a very different pattern of incentives and adoption compared to the internet.

I think it's more similar to the advent of personal computers. They had a brief surge and then turned into something else (smartphones, cloud, etc.) for all but a few niche cases. AI is not changing the consumer landscape. It's getting absorbed into existing platforms where there's a clear use case and benefit. It's just another expected software feature. This is far from the first time people have rejected a "personal assistant" concept and they'll just keep rejecting it.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#135
Not everyone but most. And I've been having this discussion with people around me a lot lately and everyone that has the ability to think more than half a step ahead sees it(and frankly we are fed up). I previously discussed how a friend admitted that he's never seen the code that powers his project at an S&P 500 company. Yesterday I was talking to another friend and former coworker who complained that when cloudflare went out a month or so ago, his entire team just slammed their laptops and went home cause they couldn't work(no sloppus/sloppenai). Another friend of mine: her dad is in hospital with a terminal disease and her mom (in her late 50's or early 60's, idk) uses chatgpt as a personal therapist. Gatorade-fed crops here we come, Leeerooooy Jeeeenkins!

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#136
post #72

On the post-grad job hunt right now - I note that most employers will ask in a technical interview or whiteboard interview "how are you using LLMs?" It's tough to answer because you want to hedge for both an AI enthused employer and an AI hesitant employer with limited information about who they are and how they personally use these products. I've been responding with a sort of long winded answer about how 'there is…

I personally think "I pretty much use it as a faster and more flexible StackOverflow" is probably the most neutral position you can have on it That's probably not going to be enough for AI maxxers, but it probably won't be too much of a turn off for anyone but the most extreme AI minners, and everyone in between will probably be fine with it. Frankly I plan to steer well clear of any "the majority of our code is AI g…

The disaster isn’t even waiting to happen. It’s actively happening.

Look at the uptime and incident rate of all the big tech companies that have gone all in on AI generated code

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#137

I've noticed several companies replacing deterministic systems in their support flows with a LLM version that is slower and worse. Many interfaces simply aren't better with AI added

The real best case scenario is using LLMs to help build deterministic systems. Instead of asking an LLM to do some task that you know will be repeated, instead ask the LLM to build a program (Python script or whatever) to do the task.

The best case scenario of LLM is transforming input into output where both are languages and accuracy doesn't matter, e.g. "rewrite this poem in pirate speech."

But that's not worth trillions of dollars...

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#138
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Acknowledging that my perception might be skewed because there are still a ton of social safety nets in place. The same might not be true everywhere.

Last time I was in Germany I saw elderly people going through garbage bins in the park I sat at. I think you overestimate the safety net in Germany. In my European country the elderly sit at cafes drinking coffee, not going through bins. Update: Every street corner has a yellow garbage bin for recycling. That is where your plastic bottles go. Seems like a better system than having elderly going through bins.

That's why I said "mostly"

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#139

I've noticed several companies replacing deterministic systems in their support flows with a LLM version that is slower and worse. Many interfaces simply aren't better with AI added

Yeah but did number go up? Can CEO check a box to show investors?

Now that’s real value.

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything

#140
post #35
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where I work, management hasn't considered integrating AI at all, yet some clients are very vocal about it being the future and worry we are going to be left behind. Most people just don't care, and I worry the squeaky wheel will eventually get the grease.

> worry we are going to be left behind. I bet lemmings are grateful they were left behind. It beggars belief that people think that they should rush in some uncertain direction, like some drawbridge is going to be lifted the moment people work out what the right direction is. It's utter stupidity.

Every single person who bootstrapped becoming powerful did it by rushing into things, but it's a high variance strategy because you could also end up destitute
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