Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Generative AI Con

wheresyoured.at

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 503 posts

Re: The Generative AI Con

#111

Post by n2d4 »

krainboltgreene wrote: post #108
n2d4 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's an unfair comparison. If the IBM Simon disappeared in 1994, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't have cared. If search engines disappeared in 1992, you'd have felt the same. Also, (what later became) AWS probably didn't interface much with you in 2003. It takes some time for technology to mature, usually at least a decade or two. Even once the iPhone was released it took a few years until it became indispensab…

I remember when people commented here that the blockchain was the same as early google search or early aws or early iPhone. Everyone thinks their new thing is the T-1.

That's always been true. We went through PDAs, 3D TVs, smart cities, cyberspace, but some of those actually did become our iPhones. "Nothing ever happens" is just hindsight/survivorship bias.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#112

Post by forgetfreeman »

lukevp wrote: post #12

I’m a little shocked at how much negativity there is around LLMs among developers. It’s a new tool that requires some learning, and it’s sometimes not so great, but if you’ve used an IDE with real coding assistance built in (eg. VS Code in Edit with Copilot mode - NOT Chat mode, using Claude 3.5), it’s honestly not much worse than a junior dev and 100x faster. And if the code is bad you throw it away and try again 10…

Conversely I'm shocked the negativity hasn't graduated to naked hostility among developers. A group that tends to pride itself on clarity of thought entranced by bullshit generators? A group that tends to pride itself on correctness of work cheerfully adding tools to their workflow that provably fuck up in unpredictable ways and that have to be monitored constantly for just such behavior? Why not hire a few junior devs instead if that's your jam, at least you can train a human towards competence.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#113

Post by froidpink »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #28
lukevp wrote: post #12

I’m a little shocked at how much negativity there is around LLMs among developers. It’s a new tool that requires some learning, and it’s sometimes not so great, but if you’ve used an IDE with real coding assistance built in (eg. VS Code in Edit with Copilot mode - NOT Chat mode, using Claude 3.5), it’s honestly not much worse than a junior dev and 100x faster. And if the code is bad you throw it away and try again 10…

LLMs are pretty good at the aspects of coding that I consider to be "the fun part". Using them has made me more productive, but also made my job less fun, because I can't justify spending time using my own brain to do "the fun part" on my employer's dime. And that was something I was particularly good at, which is why I was able to be paid well to do it. So now my company makes more money, and the work gets done fast…

It's kind of analogous to the old taxi drivers who took pride in having a sixth sense knowing which route to take you, vs uber drivers who just blindly follow their navigation

Re: The Generative AI Con

#114

Post by krainboltgreene »

anothermathbozo wrote: post #3

This is one of the most tilted pieces I’ve ever read. For months Ed has predicted The AI Bubble will burst “any day now” frequently citing ai company’s revenue as a sign the product is not viable and the valuations are too high. The valuations seem to be primarily based on the R&D progress instead of on a theory that widespread adoption of the existing product will experience an uptick. The current landscape imho sho…

I can’t help but be reminded of Greenspan’s remarks on the housing market in 2006 while reading this comment:

    While he was chairman of the central bank through January 2006, Greenspan always denied there was a 
    bubble in the nationwide U.S. real estate market, 
    saying only that a certain number of metropolitan real estate markets could 
    see declines in home values because of a localized run-up in prices. That view of any real estate bubble as 
    a merely a local phenomenon is a condition he 
    termed as "froth" in congressional testimony in 2005, as well as in subsequent comments.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#115

Post by parodysbird »

danroblew wrote: post #90
BrenBarn wrote: post #70

A huge part of our problems stems from the fact that it's possible to make "companies" whose business model is built on losing money hand over fist until they've brainwashed everyone into thinking their "product" is good. In a sane world these companies would fail and AI would continue develop through small failures and small successes over a period of years or decades. Instead we get a firehose of nonsense just beca…

On the plus side, if all the AI companies collapse there will be a lot of spare hardware. Open source projects would have a lot more compute to work with.

This is a great point. Now I have extra reason to cheer on the bubble bursting.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#116

Post by spacemanspiff01 »

danroblew wrote: post #90
BrenBarn wrote: post #70

A huge part of our problems stems from the fact that it's possible to make "companies" whose business model is built on losing money hand over fist until they've brainwashed everyone into thinking their "product" is good. In a sane world these companies would fail and AI would continue develop through small failures and small successes over a period of years or decades. Instead we get a firehose of nonsense just beca…

On the plus side, if all the AI companies collapse there will be a lot of spare hardware. Open source projects would have a lot more compute to work with.

This is my thought, sure a lot of VCs will lose a lot of money as they write things off.

But it's not like people are going to throw out all the Nvidia hardware they bought.

And there are ai applications that I can think of that would be viable at 100x cheaper price.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#117

Post by cookiemonsieur »

dzonga wrote: post #69

for people using these AI products for coding what exactly are you doing ? general API plumbing ? call this api, combine the json results & spit it out. Then slap a React / Next.js frontend ? lately, I have been doing your classical business apps - due to the domain rules - ai is pretty useless - but I have found perplexity and deep mind to be smarter stack overflows. that's it.

personally I use it as a glorified stack overflow. It really just saves me a few clicks on my browser.

For anything even remotely complex or involved, it's just not that useful. Interestingly, It seems to shine the most when doing boilerplate stuff in widely used languages such as python or javascript, but it's extremely bad with terraform.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#118

Post by surgical_fire »

roenxi wrote: post #107
lukevp wrote: post #12

I’m a little shocked at how much negativity there is around LLMs among developers. It’s a new tool that requires some learning, and it’s sometimes not so great, but if you’ve used an IDE with real coding assistance built in (eg. VS Code in Edit with Copilot mode - NOT Chat mode, using Claude 3.5), it’s honestly not much worse than a junior dev and 100x faster. And if the code is bad you throw it away and try again 10…

> I’m a little shocked at how much negativity there is around LLMs among developers. While the timeline is unclear; it seems likely that LLMs will obsolete precisely the skills that developers use to earn their income. I imagine a lot of them feel rather threatened by the rapid rate of progress. Pointing out that it is already operating at junior dev quality and rapidly improving is unlikely to quiet the discontent.

I use LLMs in coding. There are Junior Devs in my team.

If you think LLMs operate at "junior dev" capacity you either don't work with junior devs and is just bullshitting your way around here, or you just pick pretty awful junior devs.

LLMs are alright. An okay productivity tool, although its inconsistencies many times nullify productivity gains - By design they often spit out wrong results that look and sound very plausible. A productivity blackhole. Its mistakes are sometimes hard to spot, but pervasive.

Beyond that, if your think that all a dev does is spit out code, and since LLMs can spit out code it can replace devs in some imaginary timeline, you are sorely mistaken. The least part of my work is actually spitting out code, although it is the part I enjoy the most.

I honestly feel way nore threatened by economic downturns and the looming threat of recession. The only way LLMs threaten me is by being a wasteful technology that may precipitate a downturn in tech companies, causing more layoffs, etc nd so forth.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#119

Post by krainboltgreene »

Ancapistani wrote: post #41
locusofself wrote: post #4

As a 40yo software engineer (at Microsoft) with no specific domain expertise other than using genAI for fun and some code completion, this essay/blog post articulates my gut feelings about where we are at, very well.

41 here, working in healthtech… and Devin has committed more code and closed more tickets on my behalf in the past week at my behest than I’ve done on my own in a month. It’s basically functioning as a team of entry-level junior engineers at this point. Previously I was having to spend a fair amount of time writing tickets and providing context, but lately I’ve fed all my meeting transcripts and such into an LLM and…

This terrifies me.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#120

Post by thefz »

peteforde wrote: post #95

I would be highly amused if the OP revealed that the essay/rant had been written by o3-mini tomorrow. While I don't really understand what fuels this person's Substack Forensic Journalist energy, I can only say that I am thrilled to pay $20 to OpenAI because it delivers outrageous value to me as a solo, self-taught "engineer"* designing reasonably complex physical devices intended for sale. Air quotes because here in…

> So my first hand gut reaction is that people who cannot fathom meaningful use of modern LLMs are by definition people who are not trying to solve complex problems in domains they aren't yet super confident in.

OTOH I would never trust anything built by someone not super confident while heavily relying on a LLM.

Post reply on HN