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The Generative AI Con

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251–260 of 503 posts

Re: The Generative AI Con

#251
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…

I personally think IDE makes for worse programmers vs just using a text editor.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#252
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…

> 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 seconds later. The amount of speed up I see as a very experienced dev is astronomical

Personally, I find that waiting for the code to generate, then reviewing the code carefully, then deciding if I need to rewrite it to be more painful, more error prone, and much slower than writing the code correctly.

Especially since this AI junior never learn from it’s mistakes.

I think it speaks to different approaches to how individuals write code.

> How great is it gonna be in a year or two?

I would bet that it’s about the same (not great code, generally), but the tools fail to generate responses less often and likely would have more context.

Hopefully they become fast enough to run offline or at least feel more instantaneous.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#253
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.

> they’ll keep being used How? I get that many devs like using them for writing code. Personally I don't, but maybe someday someone will invent a UX for this that I don't despise, and I could be convinced. So what? That's a tiny market. Where in the landscape of b2b and b2c software do LLMs actually find market fit? Do you have even one example? All the ideas I've heard so far are either science fiction (just wait an…

> What is this shit for?

Various minor thing so far. For example I heard about ChatGPT being evaluated as a tool for providing answers for patients in therapy. ChatGPT answers were evaluated as more empathetic, more human and more aligned with guidelines of therapy than answers given by human therapists.

Providing companionship to lonely people is another potential market.

It's not as good as people at solving problems yet but it's already better than humans at bullshiting them.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#254
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.

Sounds like airlines need to start using ChatGPT to autopilot their airplanes.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#255
post #51
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He hasn't said anything about when the bubble will burst. Just says that it is a bubble and it will inevitably burst.

Spotting bubbles and predicting they will burst at some point is not a particularly useful skill. Housing in Amsterdam was in a bubble for 37 years in the 1700s; identifying the bubble early on would have been completely pointless.

Sure, but predicting when an economic bubble will burst with any accuracy is virtually impossible.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#256
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.

> they’ll keep being used How? I get that many devs like using them for writing code. Personally I don't, but maybe someday someone will invent a UX for this that I don't despise, and I could be convinced. So what? That's a tiny market. Where in the landscape of b2b and b2c software do LLMs actually find market fit? Do you have even one example? All the ideas I've heard so far are either science fiction (just wait an…

Anecdotally, almost every day I’ll overhear conversations at my local coffee shop of non-developers gushing about how much ChatGPT has revolutionized their work: church workers for writing bulletins and sermons, small business owners for writing loan applications or questions about taxes, writers using it for proofreading, etc. And this is small town Colorado.

Not since the advent of Google have I heard people rave so much about the usefulness of a new technology.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#258
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…

Writing the code isn't the hard part, and wrangling the computer is the part of the work I enjoy most. My problem with AI bros is that they explicitly want to automate all the shit people like to do, such that we can all finally be free to work service jobs.

I happen to value human creativity.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#259
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

Vision Language Models are absolutely being trialed for self-driving https://wayve.ai/thinking/lingo-2-driving-with-language/

Okay so because of the ambiguity of the other reply I'm just gonna say, I don't think we should be surprised that someone is trying to use LLMs to do basically anything. That's basically what prints funding money right now, so long as you're the kind of company or guy the VCs or whoever will believe in. The signal here is "does it do something to appreciably advance the state of the art over previous methods"?

Re: The Generative AI Con

#260
post #220

Protein folding is a an application of generative AI that will probably produce trillions of dollars of value in the long term. It was probably impossible for Google to squeeze that sort of money from researchers who use it, but it proves that the technology definitely useful. Another application that is highly underrated is with robots completing complicated tasks.

How is predicting protein folding GenAI? Seems like traditional machine learning?
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