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The Generative AI Con

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Re: The Generative AI Con

#241

Post by apstls »

agentultra wrote: post #231
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…

That experience is heavily subsidized and is unprofitable for these companies providing it based on what we know. Even with all of the other developers who are also using the same work flow and espousing how great it is. Even with all of the monthly subscribers at various tiers. It has been unprofitable for several years and continues to be unprofitable and will likely remain unprofitable given current trends. The au…

I think these types of arguments need to at the very least acknowledge the distribution of cost between training and inference.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#242

Post by square_usual »

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?

The Manhattan Project was driven by the U.S. Government, which doesn't need a VC-tier return. The entire business model of VCs is based on the idea that they'll have the occasional 100x return, and if none of the AI companies do that it would destroy the VC model.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#243

Post by scotty79 »

I think ChatGPT is rather iPod moment not iPhone moment and development of AI should be benchmarked against hardware companies not software companies. It's early day of AI, in the way, that at some point, it was early day for smartphones when some computing capacity in phones was prevalent and cheap, but better capabilities were super expensive and still not very good.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#244

Post by siva7 »

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…

>> 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.

I’ve hired lots of junior devs, some of them very capable. I’ve been in this industry for more than 15 years. LLMs operate at junior dev capacity, that’s pretty clear to me at this moment.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#245

Post by famouswaffles »

advael wrote: post #34
xnx wrote: post #27

Plenty 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.

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

Vision Language Models are absolutely being trialed for self-driving

https://wayve.ai/thinking/lingo-2-driving-with-language/

Re: The Generative AI Con

#246

Post by rsynnott »

n2d4 wrote: post #104
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…

I think that's an unfair comparison. If the IBM Simon disappeared in 1994, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't have cared. If search engines disappeared in 1992, you'd have felt the same. Also, (what later became) AWS probably didn't interface much with you in 2003. It takes some time for technology to mature, usually at least a decade or two. Even once the iPhone was released it took a few years until it became indispensab…

If IBM had been spending hundreds of billions on its phone thing in 1994, though, well, there would probably have been no IBM by the early-noughties when smartphones that people wanted to use started to become practical.

"It may or may not produce something useful, in a few decades" cannot justify the present level of spending; that's just not going to fly. Without concrete results _soon_, the whole thing is in very big trouble.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#247

Post by tasuki »

> If generative AI disappeared tomorrow — assuming you are not somebody who actively builds using it — would your life materially change?

Yes. My coding sessions would surely be different. I now have a very fast junior developer who has excellent knowledge of various libraries, though I have to check their code. Write me a function that accepts X and outputs Y. It works great!

Yes, the business model of OpenAI et al is probably unsustainable. I couldn't care less.

> I Feel Like I'm Going Insane

> Everywhere you look, the media is telling you that OpenAI and their ilk are the future, that they're building "advanced artificial intelligence" that can take "human-like actions," but when you look at any of this shit for more than two seconds it's abundantly clear that it absolutely isn't and absolutely can't.

Either I'm the dumb one or Ed Zitron is...

Re: The Generative AI Con

#248

Post by square_usual »

adamc wrote: post #212
Aeolun wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Their ongoing operation is quite expensive, so even that is not assured.

Where are you getting this from? Outside of o3, every AI provider's API is super cheap, with most productive queries I do coming in under 2c. We have no reason to believe any of them are selling API requests at a loss. I think <2c per query hardly counts as "quite expensive".

Re: The Generative AI Con

#249

Post by player1234 »

paulgb wrote: post #214
drpossum wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Say you reduced their revenue to only that application. Would it be sustainable? Would it be worth the billions upon billions of dollars that have been shoveled at it? Would it add more than the billions upon billions of dollars in the end? By your logic I could claim a quantum computer with qubits on the scale of the mass of the sun is a killer app for doing RSA encryption breaking. And I would be making an equally…

This is moving the goalpost on what "killer app" means. Code assistants are a compelling use of the tech that has quickly shown real-world value, which is the point I'm trying to make here. Whether the companies that are leading the market today will end up being the ones who capture that value is anyone's bet.

I fail to see how a technology that is to expensive to maintain can have a killer app.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#250

Post by fullshark »

A refreshing read, the take down of OpenAI's 300m users is very weak though and the hand waving "I know GenAI has use cases" could be fleshed out. It's a bubble obviously and some useful software will get written, which has happened in every other bubble and will continue to happen.

It's just this bubble is so public, rapidly moving, and capital intensive.

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