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The Generative AI Con
201–210 of 503 posts
Re: The Generative AI Con
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's your opinion on the productivity boost open source libraries have brought to developers? Did all of that free code reduce demand for developers? If not, why not?
> Did all of that free code reduce demand for developers? the anwser is yes, while in the meantime, the expansion of the industry offset the surplus of developers.
I think the answer is that open source made developers more valuable because they could build you a whole lot more functionality for the same amount of effort thanks to not having to constantly reinvent every wheel that they needed.
More effective developers results in more demand for custom software, resulting in more jobs for developers.
My hope is that AI-assisted programming will have similar results.
Re: The Generative AI Con
#203This 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…
The writer is a journalist, runs a media firm and podcasts. His job is to get attention. You get attention by being outrageous. The “AI will kill us all” take is covered by too many people, so he’s taking the “AI is doomed” path. No one is going to engage with a reasonable middle-of-the-road article. He’s got no credibility on this subject, but he knows how to turn attention into dollars. Everyone here keeps falling for it.
Re: The Generative AI Con
#204Directionally correct. GenAI is - imo - an assistant. Copilot does effectively templating. I can have ChatGPT read an email and check it for tone. Claude can comment on camera kit. Claude does a very nice image recognition for obscure things. What I have become persuaded of is that the /completions API is simply not much more than +10% or a low key helper. I do not need a dumber-than-intern agent going ape on my code…
> the /completions API
> I do not need a dumber-than-intern agent
two tells that you have not updated since 2023
Re: The Generative AI Con
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
In my opinion, AI only really helps you (a lot) if you are bottlenecked by the actual code-writin. I have not been in a such a position since... I dont even know. Maybe In my 20s, 15 or so years ago? Even if AI wrote my code 100x faster it would not appreciably change my working days.
If it could test and verify things though... ideally physically since Im in embedded and pulling SD-cards etc is a thing.
Re: The Generative AI Con
#206I’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…
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.
> That's not worth billions. It's definitely not worth trillions.
That is a problem for the VC’s that bet wrong, not for the world at large.
The models exist now and they’ll keep being used, regardless of whether a bunch of rich guys lost a bunch of money.
Re: The Generative AI Con
#207I 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.
Then you should probably stop using most applications today, specifically those that have been iterated upon in the past two years.
Re: The Generative AI Con
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ...
> If somebody sees a multi-billion dollar sink better than AI right now ...
I think if they could find a way to make their software good, instead of bad, like it increasingly is, that would be a good use of that money.
Re: The Generative AI Con
#209Plenty of AI companies that are cons or extremely overvalued, but the technology is the real deal and delivering huge improvements over previous techniques in all kinds of domains: language translation, weather prediction, code completion, self driving, etc.
LLMs can do weather prediction? There is no way that is true. Considering ChatGPT sometimes insists 2+2=5, I sincerely doubt it is solving PDEs used to model weather systems.
Re: The Generative AI Con
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Nobody has ever been punished for choosing IBM. It’s the same story here. Nobody is going to blame them for following the zeitgeist, but you bet they’d be punished if they didn’t and it doesn’t pan out.
The whole thing is like bitcoin. There’s too many people that benefit from maintaining the collective illusion.