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The Generative AI Con

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Re: The Generative AI Con

#221

Post by whatshisface »

hoseja wrote: post #218
automatic6131 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the crux. A cool thing has been invented, with real usages. Unfortunately, it's cost hundreds of billions of dollars and it has absolutely zero hope of making the trillions needed to justify that. Now someone will respond about how it's just a stepping stone, and how the billions are justified by _something completely imaginary, and not invented yet, and maybe not ever_ e.g. agents.

I see it a little differently. What was the direct economic return of the Manhattan Project?

Ideally it was thought to have shortened a very expensive war, and may have prevented the USSR from taking over Europe by leveraging its unquestioned postwar conventional forces advantage.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#222

Post by jcgrillo »

hoseja wrote: post #218
automatic6131 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the crux. A cool thing has been invented, with real usages. Unfortunately, it's cost hundreds of billions of dollars and it has absolutely zero hope of making the trillions needed to justify that. Now someone will respond about how it's just a stepping stone, and how the billions are justified by _something completely imaginary, and not invented yet, and maybe not ever_ e.g. agents.

I see it a little differently. What was the direct economic return of the Manhattan Project?

Wait, what? The Manhattan project produced something--multiple somethings in fact. What has this "project" produced?

Re: The Generative AI Con

#223

Post by whatshisface »

ben_w wrote: post #172
trhway wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Markets are funny things. US right now is run by someone whose explicit promises, if actually implemented, have an obvious immedidiate 13-14% reduction in GDP — literally, never mind side effects, I'm not counting any businesses losing confidence in the idea that America is a place to invest, this is just direct impact. DOGE + deportation by themselves do most of that percentage. The tariffs are a rounding error in c…

If you factor in the inflation and the worldwide trade crisis, trading dollars for shares that will lose 10% real value doesn't sound so bad.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#224

Post by [deleted] »

trashtester wrote: post #213
surgical_fire wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

If you define "junior" based mostly on age, then LLM's aren't yet at the level of a good "junior". If you base it on ability, then an LLM can be be more useful to a good developer than 1 or more less competent "junior" team members (regardless of their age). Not because it can do all the things like any "junior" can (like make coffee), but because the things it can do on top of what a "junior" can do, more than makes…

[deleted]

Re: The Generative AI Con

#225

Post by namaria »

hoseja wrote: post #218
automatic6131 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the crux. A cool thing has been invented, with real usages. Unfortunately, it's cost hundreds of billions of dollars and it has absolutely zero hope of making the trillions needed to justify that. Now someone will respond about how it's just a stepping stone, and how the billions are justified by _something completely imaginary, and not invented yet, and maybe not ever_ e.g. agents.

I see it a little differently. What was the direct economic return of the Manhattan Project?

About the GDP of the US and Europe over the past 80 years so a few quadrillion dollars.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#226

Post by xnx »

porridgeraisin wrote: post #169
xnx wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep. It's an interesting experiment and really stretched my understanding of what an LLM is and can do.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#227

Post by JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B »

sandos wrote: post #199
nbuujocjut wrote: post #178

GitHub Copilot and similar tools make good developers more productive. This alone is a genuine use case with some associated value. Is it enough to justify the valuations of OpenAI etc? Probably not by itself. But I expect other industries have similar productivity boosts where people learn to use the tools appropriately. What’s the total business opportunity of making all knowledge workers 10% more productive (to pi…

Generative AI only really helps (a meaningful amount) developers where writing code is actually the bottleneck. I have not been in a such a position for years and years.

Same experience here. Today I spent 5 hours debugging code, and wondering how I could put 3 contradicting specifications inside while negotiating some weird stuff that does not concerns me, and then I spent 3 hours deleting 100 lines of code and writing 100 lines of code to please everyone. I fail to see how a LLM could have helped me, and I've been doing this for more than 10 years.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#228

Post by namaria »

surgical_fire wrote: post #118
roenxi wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 p…

The value of developers is not the code they output. It's the mental models they develop of the problem domain and the systems they build. LLMs can output code without developing the mental models.

Code is liability. The knowledge inside developers' heads is the corresponding asset. If you just produce code without the mental models being developed and refined, you're just increasing liability without the counterpart increase in assets.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#229

Post by rsynnott »

> So yeah, OpenAI “burned only $340 million last year” as long as you don’t consider billions of other costs for some reason.

Ah, yes, the WeWork 'community EBITDA' model.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#230

Post by tyzoid »

rsynnott wrote: post #229

> So yeah, OpenAI “burned only $340 million last year” as long as you don’t consider billions of other costs for some reason. Ah, yes, the WeWork 'community EBITDA' model.

Cue Charlie Munger's "Just replace EBITDA with 'Bullshit Earnings'" https://youtu.be/7B_6AFG0lUU
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