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Generative AI Is Having Its Herbalife Moment

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Re: Generative AI Is Having Its Herbalife Moment

#31

Post by grncdr »

bawolff wrote: post #21

I can't help but wonder if this is really so different from an ad for any tool. If you see an ad for say kitchenware, it probably contains a lot of beautiful food with the implication that if you buy the pan you too can cook great food. Of course that takes skill and the frying pan doesn't matter too much. I guess im wondering where is the line that makes this evil but my made up frying pan ad just a harmless exagera…

Pretty simple really: do the ads for the frying pan make the direct claim that the pan will put you on the path to becoming highly paid chef? Perhap opening a Michelin-starred restaurant with the skills your new pan has unlocked?

"you can cook better food" and "you can drastically improve your economic situation" are two very different promises (or implications) that should be held to very different standards.

Re: Generative AI Is Having Its Herbalife Moment

#32

Post by byzantinegene »

bawolff wrote: post #21

I can't help but wonder if this is really so different from an ad for any tool. If you see an ad for say kitchenware, it probably contains a lot of beautiful food with the implication that if you buy the pan you too can cook great food. Of course that takes skill and the frying pan doesn't matter too much. I guess im wondering where is the line that makes this evil but my made up frying pan ad just a harmless exagera…

read the article. it stated clearly why vibe-coded apps do not work. a frying pan does its intended purpose.

Re: Generative AI Is Having Its Herbalife Moment

#33

Post by byzantinegene »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #15
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> see no argument whatsoever in the piece as to why this is the case It hasn’t happened. We have AI rolling out and the jobs data aren’t showing this effect.

We're what, 2 years in? Or 6 months since the coding models became reasonably proficient. No one knows what AI will look like 6 months from now let alone 5 years so the present jobs data can't tell you anything other than that nothing catastrophic has happened yet .

most ai use and spend is still by humans. laying off humans would (ironically) reduce ai spend and use.

Re: Generative AI Is Having Its Herbalife Moment

#34

Post by keybored »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #3

> in part because of the huckster-like triangulations of scumbags like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei I would happily read an AI-critical blogpost if it weren't clearly motivated by a strange, specific hatred of the prominent AI figureheads. At this point I automatically dismiss writing like this, the motivated reasoning is palpable. Their distaste for the character and general vibes of the AI industry trap them in blat…

Most reasoning outside of philosophy departments is motivated and it is fine as long as it is either reflected on or the audience knows where they are coming from. This is just having skin in the game. You know, needing a job to survive, which is much more immediate than the motivation of society disruptors who either get to become fantastically rich or else move on to some other executive role.

I would also have wished for some substantiation for how this and that were a lie.

As it stands though it’s an argument against multi-level marketing. And it really doesn’t hold up that your everyman will be able to make money off of vibe coded apps. Maybe build their own very personal software gadget? Yeah, but there’s no money in that.

The Reasoned Case Against AI Disruptors does not need to be covered in such a piece.

Re: Generative AI Is Having Its Herbalife Moment

#36

Post by fragmede »

torginus wrote: post #26
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one knows what AI will look like 6 months No, but we know what it’s looked like over the past 6 months. We also have two years of Altman preening about imminent, massive job losses. Per his own timelines, those haven’t manifested. Predicting indeterminate catastrophe isn’t a prediction, it’s a scam.

And its a quite insane thing to push, even if true - AI spend has outgrown wages (even in software) to such a degree, that basically if AI allowed companies to fire every human employee, they wouldn't be saving that much.

"Basically" is doing a lot of work there. What are the profit margins at FooCorp, and how much time and money is spent on messy human drama? If you could replace every human employee with AI, then you could fire the entire HR department and replace it with one AI "HR" that just spins up new AI employees like we do EC2 instances today. Since there are no more messy human resources to manage, anyway. Shutting down the entire department should boost profits by quite a bit!

Re: Generative AI Is Having Its Herbalife Moment

#37

Post by fc417fc802 »

torginus wrote: post #26
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one knows what AI will look like 6 months No, but we know what it’s looked like over the past 6 months. We also have two years of Altman preening about imminent, massive job losses. Per his own timelines, those haven’t manifested. Predicting indeterminate catastrophe isn’t a prediction, it’s a scam.

And its a quite insane thing to push, even if true - AI spend has outgrown wages (even in software) to such a degree, that basically if AI allowed companies to fire every human employee, they wouldn't be saving that much.

Are you perhaps confounding inference purchased by clients with R&D and capex invested by frontier providers?

Re: Generative AI Is Having Its Herbalife Moment

#38

Post by keybored »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #15
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> see no argument whatsoever in the piece as to why this is the case It hasn’t happened. We have AI rolling out and the jobs data aren’t showing this effect.

We're what, 2 years in? Or 6 months since the coding models became reasonably proficient. No one knows what AI will look like 6 months from now let alone 5 years so the present jobs data can't tell you anything other than that nothing catastrophic has happened yet .

> No one knows what AI will look like 6 months

Which means that they were lying.

Or they were wrong. But best to assume malice given their incentives. (No, that certain saying is just stupid.)

Re: Generative AI Is Having Its Herbalife Moment

#39

Post by aniokono »

Here "Vibe-coded software is simply not good." is not also correct 100% why?

If all you saw means that's all there is then that itself is incorrect, why? People are building better solutions and you just havent seen them yet.

I know so because I am building one, you didn't know about it, if you are interested in seeing a sample of what it produces, the architecture etc, though not perfect but it should cause you to rethink because some of us are building the solutions to the problem you saw, you just didn't know it yet.

It's who has funding support around them that you hear of and see often.

Re: Generative AI Is Having Its Herbalife Moment

#40

Post by petesergeant »

> Vibe-coded software is simply not good

It doesn't fucking matter to the success of a business.

I spent much of my early career unfucking large codebases that had been thrown together by sysadmins or teenagers or HTML guys who knew a bit of Perl on which an enterprising person had built very, very successful businesses. The software got fixed by pros long after profitability when it started to matter.

There are very few businesses where the quality of the software makes any real difference. What matters is execution, marketing, commercialization, but programmers see every business problem as a technical problem requiring technical excellence, because they're gigantic hammers.

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