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The Generative AI Con

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Re: The Generative AI Con

#161

Post by lysecret »

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…

Google search example is interesting I wouldn’t care at all. YouTube or maps on the other hand…

Re: The Generative AI Con

#162

Post by drpossum »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #129

>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.

No, they're using that and RTO as an excuse for layoffs. They layoffs were coming inevitably from ZIRP going away. If you were a CEO and looking at that balance sheet would you tell investors "we need to shed workforce because we can't be profitable" or "we can shed workforce because we're cutting edge". Stop listening to CEOs whose literal job it is to make their company look good under any and all circumstances and start looking at SEC filing numbers.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#163

Post by Maken »

alvah wrote: post #89
danroblew wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe OpenAI can become an advertising company?

Maybe. Did you foresee Google becoming a massively profitable advertising company with a search engine attached in 2004? I certainly didn't.

By 2004 AdWords was already like 90% of their revenue. If anything, with their cloud business they are less of an advertising company now.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#164

Post by ben_w »

roenxi wrote: post #149
danroblew wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is about how the economics of the LLM market is making all tech look bad. They need trillions of dollars in returns. VC's won't finance tech startups for decades. I use Cursor sometimes, and VSCode + Continue with llama.cpp, and it's great. That's not worth billions. It's definitely not worth trillions.

> I use Cursor sometimes, and VSCode + Continue with llama.cpp, and it's great. That's not worth billions. It's definitely not worth trillions. That seems like a suspect claim. If you're saying that you, personally, cannot create billions of dollars in value with Cursor & friends that is certainly true - but you are in no position to make a judgement call about where the cap on value creation is for the LLM market is…

It's possible to grow an economy by trillions of real value without any actor being able to extract that as a profit or it even showing up in the books as money.

Consider that Wikipedia is much bigger than Encyclopedia Britanica, but because it is given away to everyone for free, it is not counted as E.B.'s max sale price ($2900 in 1989?) times the world's internet connected population (5.6e9?) — $16 trillion.

AI, regardless of value, are priced at the marginal cost to reproduce weights or run inference depending on which you care about.

But I do mean "reproduce" not "invent" — it doesn't matter if DeepSeek's "a few million" was only possible because they benefited from published research, it just matters that they could.

And if the hardware is the bottleneck for inference, that profit goes to the hardware manufacturer, not to the top ten companies who made models.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#165

Post by Cemlolo »

It's not a con.

It's the frontier. The only new really big one we know.

It already solved real issues, see alphafold and it will continue until we hit a ceiling.

The money throwing thing is a zeitgeist issue: we have this money and people don't know what to do with it.

But yes ml is now the thing.

And no it was very very far away speaking to a machine and the machine feeling smart. If you can't see this breakthrough as what it is, you will never be excited for any new invention.

Until perhaps aliens are arriving on our door steps.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#167

Post by cootsnuck »

drpossum wrote: post #162
DebtDeflation wrote: post #129

>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.

No, they're using that and RTO as an excuse for layoffs. They layoffs were coming inevitably from ZIRP going away. If you were a CEO and looking at that balance sheet would you tell investors "we need to shed workforce because we can't be profitable" or "we can shed workforce because we're cutting edge". Stop listening to CEOs whose literal job it is to make their company look good under any and all circumstances and…

This part. Companies love a smokescreen when they need to tighten their belts.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#168

Post by newAccount2025 »

audunw wrote: post #77
adpirz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "iPhone moment" gets used a lot, but maybe it's more analogous to the early internet: we have the basics, but we're still learning what we can do with this new protocol and building the infrastructure around it to be truly useful. And as you've pointed out, our "bandwidth" is increasing exponentially at the same time. If nothing else, my workflows as a software developer have changed significantly in these past t…

But if this is like the internet, it’s not refuting the idea that this is a huge bubble. The internet did have a massive investment bubble. And I’d argue it took decades to actually achieve some of the things we were promised in the early days of the internet. Some have still not come to fruition (the tech behind end to end encrypted emails was developed decades ago, yet email as most people use it is still ridiculou…

Can it be an investment bubble but also a hugely promising technology? The FOMO-frothing herd will over-invest in whatever is new and shiny, regardless of its merits?

Re: The Generative AI Con

#169

Post by porridgeraisin »

xnx wrote: post #54
advael wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I swear no matter how many times people say it people will still conflate all ML with LLMs. No, chatGPT is not driving advances in self-driving or weather prediction

For better or worse, "LLM" or "generative ai" has become roughly synonymous with the current wave of ML. I know very little about ChatGPT, but Waymo is using an LLM: "Powered by Gemini, a multimodal large language model developed by Google, EMMA employs a unified, end-to-end trained model to generate future trajectories for autonomous vehicles directly from sensor data." ( https://waymo.com/blog/2024/10/introducing-e…

Waymo uses reinforcement learning (what it was before LLMs) (TD3+BC according to one of their blogs)

Emma is something they tried, but further down the article they explain why they don't use it as such yet.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#170

Post by mplanchard »

cmdtab wrote: post #38
epistasis wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep on trying them, but if they are useful they are useful for only a small fraction of engineers at the moment. I'm not sure if this is due to the nature of the work, or the nature of the user. I have heard "top" engineers at various places say it makes them 2x faster, or whatever, but I would like to see this assessed by timed testing, as is sometimes done for evaluating software engineering. Copilot may let me…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43071381 You can see this example where I timed myself to deployment using AI tools to rewrite a show HN project in half an hour. The code is open source. My comment was posted 2 hours after show HN when I saw it on front page so you know I didn’t lose track of time I spent.

The vast majority of software work is not greenfielding a PoC or reimplementing an existing, small, well-specced project. We’ve had OpenAPI client generators for years after all.

The majority of software work is maintaining large, existing products: adding features, fixing bugs, improving performance, etc., or building new software in problem domains that aren’t so well-defined.

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