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The Generative AI Con

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Re: The Generative AI Con

#121

Post by 2mlWQbCK »

levkk wrote: post #91

If my Android (or IPhone) disappeared tomorrow, I would feel like I time traveled back a century. If Google search was gone, I wouldn't be able to do my job anymore. If the cloud disappeared, I wouldn't be able to build apps anymore. There are no workarounds, unless you feel like going to a library...? If ChatGPT disappeared tomorrow (or derivatives like Copilot, etc.), I would be mildly inconvenienced. Then I'd go b…

It is sad that searching online is so much more convenient, since between downloading dumps of Stack Exchange sites and downloading the full documentation for programming languages and libraries I use it would be easy to have 99% of all the answers saved locally, but it would still be faster and easier to look those same answers up in the cloud.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#122

Post by krainboltgreene »

n2d4 wrote: post #111
krainboltgreene wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That doesn’t mean they were a good use of our energy and hype. A lot of those also didn’t in my way or cost billions.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#123

Post by lm28469 »

2mlWQbCK wrote: post #121
levkk wrote: post #91

If my Android (or IPhone) disappeared tomorrow, I would feel like I time traveled back a century. If Google search was gone, I wouldn't be able to do my job anymore. If the cloud disappeared, I wouldn't be able to build apps anymore. There are no workarounds, unless you feel like going to a library...? If ChatGPT disappeared tomorrow (or derivatives like Copilot, etc.), I would be mildly inconvenienced. Then I'd go b…

It is sad that searching online is so much more convenient, since between downloading dumps of Stack Exchange sites and downloading the full documentation for programming languages and libraries I use it would be easy to have 99% of all the answers saved locally, but it would still be faster and easier to look those same answers up in the cloud.

And generative AI made it even worse, probably worse than any single thing before it.

Now you're being fed incorrect answer by the search engine built in llm, it's impossible to find legit reviews: they're either sponsored reviews or written by bots, image search is next to useless, it's impossible to find a recipe, you can't tell if they're legit or if they're written by an LLM and will completely fall apart because as it turns out the best cookie recipe isn't the average of all known cookie recipes

Re: The Generative AI Con

#124

Post by trhway »

automatic6131 wrote: post #106
trhway wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it's cost hundreds of billions of dollars and it has absolutely zero hope of making the trillions needed to justify that. The BigTech companies have been flush with liquidity and poured those hundreds of billions into the promising tech, and as result we got a wonderful new technology. There is not much need for those trillions in return - just look at liquidity positions of those companies, they are just fine. If t…

>There is not much need for those trillions in return Whilst you are correct that big tech cos do not need the return to survive, that's not how public markets work at all, and thus not how the incentives for those in charge of the companies work, and so making you actually wrong.

If i were wrong, those companies would be distributing that cash to shareholders instead of chasing any promise of any big chance.

If investment in AI don't pan out (i do think that it will pan out, and those trillions will come) then those companies would just pour even more billions into whatever big thing/promise would come next. Rinse and repeat. Because some of those things do generate tremendous returns, and thus not playing that game is what really constitute true loss of money.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#125

Post by trhway »

krainboltgreene wrote: post #109
trhway wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it's cost hundreds of billions of dollars and it has absolutely zero hope of making the trillions needed to justify that. The BigTech companies have been flush with liquidity and poured those hundreds of billions into the promising tech, and as result we got a wonderful new technology. There is not much need for those trillions in return - just look at liquidity positions of those companies, they are just fine. If t…

Funny, I had been told we had to lay off all those workers because they weren’t flush with cash.

cash on hands GOOG - 100B, AMZN - 80B, FB - 70B, and their core businesses are basically printing money, so they pretty much do have to invest into new things. If somebody sees a multi-billion dollar sink better than AI right now ...

Re: The Generative AI Con

#126

Post by pimeys »

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.

Yep. There are people who love programming, it's the best part of the work anyhow! And then there are people who come and tell that whatever you do doesn't matter and they are more content on getting a new app by writing a prompt and deploying possibly buggy code. Two different crowds of people.

I'm in a middle. I enjoy Zed and its predictions, I utilize R1 to help me to reason. I do _not_ ever want to stop programming. And I see so often whenever somebody less experienced than me shows me look how Cursor did this with three prompts, can we merge? And the solution is just wrong and doesn't solve the hard issues.

For me the biggest issues are the people who want to see the craft of programming gone. But I do enjoy the tooling.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#127

Post by Lio »

jayd16 wrote: post #18
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…

Unreliable tools are utterly exhausting. > not much worse than a junior dev and 100x faster. Is there a greater hell than this!?

If the old metric is right, that it is ten times harder to debug code than to write it, having something that writes buggy code 100x faster than you can understand it is a problem.

Especially given that you can ask an LLM to optimise code and on multiple runs it can not tell if it's is improving or degenerating.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#128

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

krainboltgreene wrote: post #109
trhway wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it's cost hundreds of billions of dollars and it has absolutely zero hope of making the trillions needed to justify that. The BigTech companies have been flush with liquidity and poured those hundreds of billions into the promising tech, and as result we got a wonderful new technology. There is not much need for those trillions in return - just look at liquidity positions of those companies, they are just fine. If t…

Funny, I had been told we had to lay off all those workers because they weren’t flush with cash.

They're convinced they no longer need them.

Just as they were convinced after Covid that they needed to put hiring into overdrive.

Tech management has the collective IQ of a flock of sheep.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#129

Post by DebtDeflation »

>People like Marc Benioff claiming that "today's CEOs are the last to manage all-human workforces"

This is the real problem. Companies have ALREADY starting laying off significant percentages of their workforce because they're buying into the AI "digital worker" hype without any idea of how exactly AI is going to do the jobs of 80% of THEIR employees across all departments in the next year or so.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#130

Post by mylastattempt »

danroblew wrote: post #92
mylastattempt wrote: post #73

On LLM/ML itself: it seems a lot of cynical people start with some unreasonable idea that "AI" should be able to do what it will perhaps be able to in 10 or 100 years, and are subsequently upset that it is not capable of that yet. It may get there, it may not. But that's on you for starting with a wrong assumption. Is the AI "business" or "market" overvalued for it's current capabilities? Yeah, I do believe so. Welco…

Trillions of dollars, dude. They need to make trillions of dollars to satisfy their investors.

If you are correcting my use of millions to trillions: I was refering to the author himself, who writes like this giant AI bubble is pushing him forward to the edge of the cliff as people keep believing in it, and he is desperately trying to get the bubble to shrink or he'll fall off and die. Methaphorically.

But why does he act or feel that way? Let the trillions be lost, it's just how hypes, bubbles and the stock market in general work.

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