Earlier quoted context omitted.
I flagged your comment for adding zero additional information to the discussion. Let's see if it also sticks around.
still is a shit article.
So you say.
AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
291–300 of 320 posts
Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are a lot of simple web apps out there that haven't been built because of the cost and many more that have been built but cost a lot to maintain. AI seems to work on those and fill in a pretty large space.
Probably true. But isn't this a failure of software engineering? We should have plenty of simple ways to build simple apps by now. Maybe you should be able to go down to your local web app shop, give a couple simple requirements, and get back an app in a week. So why can't you? Well there's actually a good reason for that - the customer would never be satisfied by the result, and building a satisfactory result requir…
AI doesn't suffer the same fate because the customer can input that feedback in near realtime. I built a very quick database site for my car club to track a car meet we had. Registrations, Money, Cars coming, hotels, t-shirts. It was probably a mess of code. It worked though and didn't take long to get setup. This would never have been an app and would have been done with spreadsheets if we had to pay a developer for a month to get things right.
Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
That Ford story was really misleading. It wasn't about modern LLMs, and the way it was reported implied that Ford had fired and then hired people but if you read closer that wasn't necessarily the case at all - it sounded more like they were re-hiring people who had retired because they needed expertise that had left the company. You need to get through the Bloomberg paywall: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2…
> That Ford story was really misleading. It wasn't about modern LLMs, and the way it was reported implied that Ford had fired and then hired people but if you read closer that wasn't necessarily the case at all - it sounded more like they were re-hiring people who had retired because they needed expertise that had left the company. Oh come on, Simon. Are your glasses so rose coloured they are opaque? They fired, and…
Show me evidence that they had previously fired any of the people who were hired.
Your comment is exactly the misinterpretation I'm pushing back against here.
The time period covered by this story starts three years ago! What kind of LLMs do you think they were using back then?
> Side question -- do you worry about being so pro-LLM when the promises of LLMs are so clearly falling short
I think my record is looking pretty good here. I was early to the "LLMs are useful for writing code" thing, especially with the code interpreter pattern (both write and then execute code in a loop) which I now realize was our first hint at coding agents.
A couple of years ago I was one of the few people talking about what a natural fit LLMs were for the commandline - https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jun/17/cli-language-models/ With hindsight maybe I should have doubled-down on that!
I've also written plenty about the weaknesses of these models - in terms of security in particular - which has aged well.
Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
#294This post feels like its correct but also doesn't align with my own personal usage of claude for writing advanced sql and python code. I haven't with my own eyes seen an AI chatbot actually deliver a user experience that lets them query data with natural language BUT I have personally experienced writing extremely advanced queries using natural language and it is absolutely able to get close to (by my estimate) 80-90…
When executives say "AI", they basically seem to mean LLMs right now.
AI that just, does something, like extract text from scanned documents, is apparently boring. They don't seem interested in bragging about boring things.
The companies tracking AI usage don't seem to be tracking usage of that sort of thing either.
Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
That has ever been the case. As soon as it works reliably, it's not "AI" any more. Take spellcheckers or collaborative filtering as examples, but there are lots more. Hofstadter in G.E.B. said it well: > There is a related “Theorem” about progress in AI: once some mental function is programmed, people soon cease to consider it as an essential ingredient of “real thinking”. The ineluctable core of intelligence is alwa…
Sure, or maybe the actual applications of “AI” are small and unobtrusive, like the dictation of doctor’s notes example, and it’s not actually the massive revolution it’s claimed to be.
I struggle to reconcile this attitude with, among other things, the massive number of exploits being discovered and the pretty straightforward utility for coding. Have you used codex recently?
Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
#296Most of us on some level felt confident that AI would completely revolutionise our society. The singularity made sense to me, at least. It hasn't worked out like that, but rather than accept the crushing reality of our mistake and take a second to re-evaluate, we've decided to LARP out the future we promised ourselves by crowbar-and-vaselineing AI into every crack and crevice we can find and loudly proclaiming progre…
> Most of us on some level felt confident that AI would completely revolutionise our society. Seriously? Maybe I’m just getting old, but having lived through the dot-com hype in the 1990s, the XML hype in the 2000s, and the cloud hype in the 2010s, this has been an utterly predictable hype cycle around AI. This does not mean that AI is completely useless. It will impact the world but not in the ways the snake oil sal…
"most" is a hell of a claim, yea. "they're going to be useful sometimes and will stick around in some form" has been rather clear from early on (they're Transformer++, of course they'd be useful sometimes), but every session I spend with one still turns into lengthy deeply-misleading wild goose chases until I learn enough to force them down the right path[1]. quality/size of the model hasn't mattered for that, it always happens at some points (and it's just luck whether or not it's a critical point), and I see no reason to expect that it will change.
>From memory, the last time I was given a presentation on it, by actual Snowflake staff, they reported that ideal configuration results in something like ~92% accuracy due to the complexity of data at a large business ...
it's exactly this problem. nobody has solved it. lots of companies are trying to sell that they have solved it.
when I don't care about the end result that might be fine (I have used wordpress too), but frequently it ends up that they helped find relevant docs (they're quite good at finding that from vague descriptions, and it's very easy to verify) and I would have been quicker if I had simply read those docs in full. and then I'd have a more complete understanding of the space too. my biggest worry for personal use is that LLMs will write those docs in the future, and be riddled with mistakes :\
1: ...and then they're quite good code dictation tools. people who think "writing code isn't the bottleneck" just haven't spent enough time in well-understood spaces or rebuilt enough wheels. it absolutely can be a several-multiples bottleneck in day-to-day work, or when re-doing something you've done before and fully understand.
Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
#297>Reading this while working for a division that pivoted to provide interfaces for agentic workflows, only to discover that only ten users had ever touched the products we made for agents, only to pivot again to support for agentic workflows, which has a lot of competition because every company has to do something agentic now and there's only like four things you can do in that space, is bracing.
>– An editor of this essay
The most popular form of AI psychosis in a nutshell, yea. "AI will understand this for us, so we can be groundbreaking and get rich if we just try" is only possible to believe when you have no idea what you or the rest of your field is doing, and have only attempted to learn about it from "AI", which has spent a lot of your money convincing you that you're brilliant and revolutionary.
It's exactly like surrounding yourself with relentless ego-boosting yes-men. You lose touch with reality. Just take a brief look at any super-wealthy person, they're obviously insane but everyone around them thrives on convincing them that they're not.
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>For the latter customer-facing applications, I have rarely had a pleasant experience as a consumer, with perhaps the exception of live transcription during medical appointments...
These have been abject failures, personally. They've made major mistakes in summaries, and added non-existent symptoms multiple times. Medical transcription seems an especially dangerous place to put them.
Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
"To someone who never did anything like this themselves the result might seem fantastic ..." I've been "doing this" for over 30 years now and I consider these LLM results to be fantastic. If one has a deep, conceptual understanding of tools, systems and protocols and if one has the ability to carefully provide careful, concise specifications, these LLM tools are like being granted superpowers. In fact ... My next pro…
Umm, hate to break it to you, but by the time you load up an open weights model, the environmental externality has already happened
This is a fair point - and well taken.
However, I never asked for LLMs nor did my consumer nor professional behavior send market signals that I would use them. They were thrust upon me apropos of nothing.
Now that I find them useful, the least I can do is stop making the problem worse.
Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
Umm, hate to break it to you, but by the time you load up an open weights model, the environmental externality has already happened
This is a fair point - and well taken. However, I never asked for LLMs nor did my consumer nor professional behavior send market signals that I would use them. They were thrust upon me apropos of nothing. Now that I find them useful, the least I can do is stop making the problem worse.
As a rule of thumb the energy use to produce a silicon wafer is roughly equal to the energy it will use in its lifetime. For GPU and VRAM this is considerable. To equip yourself with the capability to run an LLM locally is making an upfront investment in the production of extremely toxic and resource intensive products.
Why buy a personal EV with 600 mile range that sits idle 95% of the time when you can take a bus (aka the cloud) that maximizes the resource utilization?
Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> Have you not used one since Opus 4.5 came out? Every time there's a new model This Changes Everything. Every single time. Every time someone points out a limitation of LLMs it's always the same refrain: "Have you tried the latest? Because they're so much better now!". Except this happens with every single model generation. Every time the new models are so good that it's a seismic shift, a step change, a paradigm s…
But it is now possible for a very non technical user to vibe code Grand Theft Auto II for fun. In two years they'll be able to vibe code GTA V for fun. Likewise with many other things - people who don't know how to code can produce large custom programs which do what they needed. They're probably not amazingly well written nor maintainable by a human with limited time on their hands but that also doesn't matter at al…
That should completely destroy the software industry and the software development profession, but this hasn't happened yet far as I can tell. Maybe we're not quite there yet?
I've only found this guy trying to code GTA 6 before it's released (not II):
https://mashable.com/tech/ai-startup-founder-attempts-to-vib...
Is that the one you meant? I wonder why he didn't try to code GTA 7. I mean, why not?