[dead]
AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power
131–140 of 467 posts
Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power
#132“As a designer…” IMHO the bleeding edge of what’s working well with LLMs is within software engineering because we’re building for ourselves, first. Claude code is incredible. Where I work, there are an incredible number of custom agents that integrate with our internal tooling. Many make me very productive and are worthwhile. I find it hard to buy in to opinions of non-SWE on the uselessness of AI solely because I t…
I'm a SWE, DBA, SysAdmin, I work up and down the stack as needed. I'm not using LLMs at all. I really haven't tried them. I'm waiting for the dust to settle and clear "best practices" to emerge. I am sure that these tools are here to stay but I am also confident they are not in their final form today. I've seen too many hype trains in my career to still be jumping on them at the first stop.
Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another major use case for it is enabling students to more easily cheat on their homework. Which is why it is probably going to end up putting Chegg out of business.
I am shocked when I talk to college kids about AI these days. I try to explain stuff to them like regurgitating the training data, context window limits, and confabulation. They stick their fingers in their ears and say "LA LA LA LA it does my homework for me nothing else matters LA LA LA LA i can't hear you" They really do not care about the Turing Test. Today's LLMs pass the "snowed my teaching assistant test" and…
Maybe AI will finally skewer the myth that an undergraduate degree means anything.
Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power
#134Could have been, or rather, they thought it would, but the open models from China that you can just run locally are changing the game. Distributing power instead of concentrating it.
Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with everyone else, where is the Microsoft Office competitor created by 2 geeks in a garage with Claude Code? Where is the Exchange replacement created by a company of 20 people? There are many really lucrative markets that need a fresh approach, and AI doesn't seem to have caused a huge explosion of new software created by upstarts. Or am I missing something? Where are the consumer facing software apps devel…
> Office…Exchange The challenge in competing with these products is not code. The challenge competing in lucrative markets that need a fresh approach is also generally not code. So I’m not sure that is a good metric to evaluate LLMs for code generation.
I think the point remains, if someone armed with Claude Code could whip out a feature complete clone of Microsoft Office over the weekend (and by all accounts, even a novice programmer could do this, because of the magnificent greatness of Claude), then why don't they just go ahead and do it? Maybe do a bunch of them: release one under GPL, one under MIT, one under BSD, and a few more sold as proprietary software. Wow, I mean, this should be trivial.
Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power
#136My experience with AI in the design context tends to reflect what I think is generally true about AI in the workplace: the smaller the use case, the larger the gain. This might be the money quote, encapsulating the difference between people who say their work benefits from LLMs and those who don't. Expecting it to one-shot your entire module will leave you disappointed, using it for code completion, generating docume…
What am I finding is that the size of the "small" use case is becoming larger and larger as time goes by and the models improve.
Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power
#137I'd like more people to talk about AI and surveillance. I think that is going to be one of it's biggest impacts on society(ies). We are a decade or two in to having massive video coverage, such that you are probably on someone's camera much of your day in the world, and video feeds that are increasingly cloud hosted. But nobody could possibly watch all that video. Even cameras specifically controlled by the police, i…
I think you're describing technology that has existed for 15+ years and is already pretty accurate. It's not even necessarily "AI"/ML. For example, I think OpenALPR (automated license plate recognition) is all "classical" computer vision. The most accurate facial/gait/etc. recognition is most likely ML-based with a state-of-the-art model, admittedly, and perhaps the threshold of accuracy for large-scale usefulness wa…
The difference is that AI makes annotating/combing through all that data much more feasible.
Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with everyone else, where is the Microsoft Office competitor created by 2 geeks in a garage with Claude Code? Where is the Exchange replacement created by a company of 20 people? There are many really lucrative markets that need a fresh approach, and AI doesn't seem to have caused a huge explosion of new software created by upstarts. Or am I missing something? Where are the consumer facing software apps devel…
> Office…Exchange The challenge in competing with these products is not code. The challenge competing in lucrative markets that need a fresh approach is also generally not code. So I’m not sure that is a good metric to evaluate LLMs for code generation.
Fine, where's the slop then? I expected hundreds of scammy apps to show up imitating larger competitors to get a few bucks, but those aren't happening either. At least not any more than before AI.
Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power
#139“As a designer…” IMHO the bleeding edge of what’s working well with LLMs is within software engineering because we’re building for ourselves, first. Claude code is incredible. Where I work, there are an incredible number of custom agents that integrate with our internal tooling. Many make me very productive and are worthwhile. I find it hard to buy in to opinions of non-SWE on the uselessness of AI solely because I t…
> IMHO the bleeding edge of what’s working well with LLMs is within software engineering because we’re building for ourselves, first.
the jury is still out on that...
Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power
#140Many people use AI as the source for knowledge. Even though it is often wrong or misleading, it's advice is better on average than their own judgement or the judgement of people they know. When an AI is "smarter" than 95%? of the population, even if it does not reach superintelligence, will be a very big deal.
How is this different from a less reliable search engine?
AI can interpolate in the space of search results, yielding results in between the hits that a simple text index would return.
It is also a fuzzy index with the unique ability to match on multiple poorly specified axes at once in a very high dimensional search space. This is notoriously difficult to code with tradition computer science techniques. Large language models are in some sense optimal at it instead of “just a little bit better than a total failure”, which is what we had before.
Just today I needed to find a library I only vaguely remembered from years ago. Gemini found it in seconds based on the loosest description of what it does.
That is a technology that is getting difficult to distinguish from magic.