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AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

economist.com

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Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#281

Post by mmargenot »

jebarker wrote: post #248
boringg wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the payment model is still not there which is making everything blurry. Until we figure out how much people have to pay to use it and all the services built on its back it will remain challenging to figure out full value prop. That and a lot of company are going to go belly up when they have to start paying the real cost instead of growth acquisition phase.

I don’t think a payment model can be figured out until the utility of the technology justifies the true cost of training and running the models. As you say, right now it’s all subsidized based on the belief it will become drastically more useful. If that happens I think the payment model becomes simple.

There's enough solid FOSS tooling out there between vLLM and Qwen3 Apache 2.0 models that you can get a pretty good assistant system running locally. That's still in the software creation domain rather than worldwide impact, but that's valuable and useful right now.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#282

Post by spicyusername »

kragen wrote: post #260
spicyusername wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the moment, LLM products are like Microsoft Office, they primarily serve as a tool to help solve other problems more efficiently. They do not themselves solve problems directly. Nobody would ask, "What new Office-based products have been created lately?", but that doesn't mean that Office products aren't a permanent, and critical, foundation of all white collar work. I suspect it will be the same with LLMs as they…

Where are the other problems that are being solved more efficiently? If there's an "explosive change" in that, we should be able to see some shrapnel. Let's take one component of Microsoft Office. Microsoft Word is seen as a tool for people to write nicely formatted documents, such as books. Reports produced with Microsoft Word are easy to find, and I've even read books written in it. Comparing reports written before…

    Where is the software that wouldn't exist without LLMs?
Where are the books that wouldn't exist without Microsoft Word?

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#284

Post by lukev »

aNoob7000 wrote: post #257
cainxinth wrote: post #255

Here’s what amazes me about the reaction to LLMs: they were designed to solve NLP, stunningly did so, and then immediately everyone started asking why they can’t do math well or reason like a human being.

Because the heads of tech companies jumped on TV and said that AGI was around the corner to basically prepare for job losses. They just can't shut up about how AI is going to either save us all or kill us all.

The VC economy depends on a hype cycle. If one doesn't exist, they'd manufacture one (see web 3.0), but LLMs were perfect.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#285

Post by measurablefunc »

andrepd wrote: post #264
measurablefunc wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laid it on a little too thick to be sincere & more generally I don't comment on internet forums to be complimented on my response style. Address the substance of my arguments or just save yourself the keystrokes.

If you really can't see the irony of using AI to make up your thoughts on AI then perhaps there's keystrokes to be saved on your end as well.

I recommend you address the content & substance of the argument in any further responses to my posts or if you can't do that then figure out a more productive way to spend your time. I'm sure there is lots of work to be done in automated theorem proving.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#286

Post by kragen »

spicyusername wrote: post #282
kragen wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are the other problems that are being solved more efficiently? If there's an "explosive change" in that, we should be able to see some shrapnel. Let's take one component of Microsoft Office. Microsoft Word is seen as a tool for people to write nicely formatted documents, such as books. Reports produced with Microsoft Word are easy to find, and I've even read books written in it. Comparing reports written before…

Where is the software that wouldn't exist without LLMs? Where are the books that wouldn't exist without Microsoft Word?

I've definitely read a lot of books that wouldn't exist without WYSIWYG word processors, although MacWrite would have done just as well. Heck, NaNoWriMo probably wouldn't.

I've been reading Darwen & Date lately, and they seem to have done the typesetting for the whole damn book in Word—which suggests they couldn't get anyone else to do it for them and didn't know how to do a good job of it. But they almost certainly couldn't have gotten a major publisher to publish it as a mimeographed typewriter manuscript.

Your turn.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#287

Post by kragen »

mmargenot wrote: post #280
kragen wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are the other problems that are being solved more efficiently? If there's an "explosive change" in that, we should be able to see some shrapnel. Let's take one component of Microsoft Office. Microsoft Word is seen as a tool for people to write nicely formatted documents, such as books. Reports produced with Microsoft Word are easy to find, and I've even read books written in it. Comparing reports written before…

I do agree that there's a lot of garbage and navel-gazing that is directly downstream from the creation of LLMs. Because it's easier to task and evaluate an LLM [or network of LLMs] with generation of code, most of these products end up directly related to the production of software. The professional production of software has definitely changed, but sticky impact outside of the tech sector is still brewing. I think…

Yes, but I'm asking about new non-AI products. I agree that lots of people are integrating AI into products, which makes products that wouldn't have existed otherwise. But if the answer to "where's the explosive changes and development of new products?" is 100% composed of integrating AI into their products, that means current AI isn't actually helping people write software, much. It's just giving them more software to write.

That doesn't entail that current AI is useless! Or even non-revolutionary! But it's a different kind of software development revolution than what I thought you were claiming. You seem to be saying that the relationship of AI to software development is similar to the relationship of the Japanese language, or raytracing, or early microcomputers to software development. And I thought you were saying that the relationship of AI to software development was similar to the relationship of compilers, or open source, or interactive development environments to software development.

It also doesn't entail that six months from now AI will still be only that revolutionary.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#288

Post by spicyusername »

kragen wrote: post #286
spicyusername wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is the software that wouldn't exist without LLMs? Where are the books that wouldn't exist without Microsoft Word?

I've definitely read a lot of books that wouldn't exist without WYSIWYG word processors, although MacWrite would have done just as well. Heck, NaNoWriMo probably wouldn't. I've been reading Darwen & Date lately, and they seem to have done the typesetting for the whole damn book in Word—which suggests they couldn't get anyone else to do it for them and didn't know how to do a good job of it. But they almost certainly…

My point is that these are accelerating technologies.

    maybe they don't actually work for that yet.
So you're not going to see code that wouldn't exist without LLMs (or books that wouldn't exist without Word), you're going to see more code (or more books).

There is no direct way to track "written code" or "people who learned more about their hobbies" or "teachers who saved time lesson planning", etc.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#289

Post by kragen »

spicyusername wrote: post #288
kragen wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've definitely read a lot of books that wouldn't exist without WYSIWYG word processors, although MacWrite would have done just as well. Heck, NaNoWriMo probably wouldn't. I've been reading Darwen & Date lately, and they seem to have done the typesetting for the whole damn book in Word—which suggests they couldn't get anyone else to do it for them and didn't know how to do a good job of it. But they almost certainly…

My point is that these are accelerating technologies. maybe they don't actually work for that yet. So you're not going to see code that wouldn't exist without LLMs (or books that wouldn't exist without Word), you're going to see more code (or more books). There is no direct way to track "written code" or "people who learned more about their hobbies" or "teachers who saved time lesson planning", etc.

You must have failed to notice that you were replying to a comment of mine where I gave a specific example of a book that I think wouldn't exist without Word (or similar WYSIWYG word processors), because you're asserting that I'm never going to see what I am telling you I am currently seeing.

Generally, when there's a new tool that actually opens up explosive changes and development of new products, at least some of the people doing the exploding will tell you about it, even if there's no direct way to track it, such as Darwen & Date's substandard typography. It's easy to find musicians who enthuse about the new possibilities opened up by digital audio workstations, and who are eager to show you the things they created with them. Similarly for video editors who enthused about the Video Toaster, for programmers who enthused about the 80386, and electrical engineers who enthused about FPGAs. There was an entire demo scene around the Amiga and another entire demo scene around the 80386.

Do people writing code with AI today have anything comparable? Something they can point to and say, "Look! I wrote this software because AI made it possible!"?

It's easy to answer that question for, for example, visual art made with AI.

I'm not sure what you mean about "accelerating technologies". WYSIWYG word processors today are about the same as Bravo in 01979. HTML is similar but both better and worse. AI may have a hard takeoff any day that leaves us without a planet, who knows, but I don't think that's something it has in common with Microsoft Word.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#290

Post by nielsbot »

cainxinth wrote: post #255

Here’s what amazes me about the reaction to LLMs: they were designed to solve NLP, stunningly did so, and then immediately everyone started asking why they can’t do math well or reason like a human being.

maybe a classic case of the sales team selling features you haven't built yet
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