Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Where I'm at with AI

paulosman.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 72 posts

Re: Where I'm at with AI

#31

Post by sodapopcan »

happytoexplain wrote: post #20
Legend2440 wrote: post #2

> I am certain that generative AI is a productivity amplifier, but its economic, environmental, and cultural externalities are not being discussed enough. You sure? That’s basically all that’s being discussed. There’s nothing in this article I haven’t heard 100 times before. Open any mainstream news article or HN/Reddit thread and you’ll find all of OP’s talking points about water, electricity, job loss, the intrinsi…

Yes, it's being discussed a lot. No, it's not being discussed enough, nor by all the right people. It has the potential to cause untold suffering to the middle class of developed nations, since it's moving too fast for individual humans to adjust. On the Problem Scale that puts it on the "societal emergency" end, which basically can not be discussed enough.

Ya, I think "it's not being discussed enough" is a veiled way to say: "I can't believe so people are ok with this shit."

Re: Where I'm at with AI

#32

Post by benrutter »

aspenmartin wrote: post #24
ivanstojic wrote: post #4

> If you asked me six months ago what I thought of generative AI, I would have said It’s always this tired argument. “But it’s so much better than six months ago, if you aren’t using it today you are just missing out.” I’m tired of the hype boss.

Yea I hear this a lot, do people genuinely dismiss that there has been step change progress over 6-12 months timescale? I mean it’s night and day, look at benchmark numbers… “yea I don’t buy it” ok but then don’t pretend you’re objective

I think I'd be in the "don't buy it" camp, so maybe I can explain my thinking at least.

I don't deny that there's been huge improvements in LLMs over the last 6-12 months at all. I'm skeptical that the last 6 months have suddenly presented a 'category shift' in terms of the problems LLMs can solve (I'm happy to be proved wrong!).

It seems to me like LLMs are better at solving the same problems that they could solve 6 months ago, and the same could be said comparing 6 months to 12 months ago.

The argument I'd dismiss isn't the improvement, it's that there's a whole load of sudden economic factors, or use cases, that have been unlocked in the last 6 months because of the improvements in LLMs.

That's kind of a fuzzier point, and a hard one to know until we all have hindsight. But I think OP is right that people have been claiming "LLMs are fundamentally in a different category to where they were 6 months ago" for the last 2 years - and as yet, none of those big improvements have yet unlocked a whole new category of use cases for LLMs.

To be honest, it's a very tricky thing to weight into, because the claims being made around LLMs are very varied from "we're 2 months away from all disease being solved" to "LLMs are basically just a bit better than old school Markov chains". I'd argue that clearly neither of those are true, but it's hard to orient stuff when both those sides are being claimed at the same time.

Re: Where I'm at with AI

#33

Post by nancyminusone »

sharifhsn wrote: post #15
rootnod3 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And most of those concerns being wildly dismissed by the AI shills, even here on HN. Mention anything about the water and electricity wastage and embrace the downvotes.

Because those criticisms misses the forest for the trees. You might as well complain about the pollution caused by the Industrial Revolution. AI doesn’t use nearly as much as water as even a small amount of beef production. And we have cheap ways of producing electricity, we just need to overhaul our infrastructure and regulations. The more interesting questions are about psychology, productivity, intelligence, AGI r…

>we could see

Well, that's just it. Those extentitential risks aren't even proven yet.

Meanwhile, threats to resources are already being felt today. "just overhaul our infrastructure" isn't an actionable solution that will magically fix things today or next week. Even if these don't end up being big problems in the grand scheme of things doesn't mean they aren't problems now.

Re: Where I'm at with AI

#35

Post by throwup238 »

everdrive wrote: post #13
Legend2440 wrote: post #2

> I am certain that generative AI is a productivity amplifier, but its economic, environmental, and cultural externalities are not being discussed enough. You sure? That’s basically all that’s being discussed. There’s nothing in this article I haven’t heard 100 times before. Open any mainstream news article or HN/Reddit thread and you’ll find all of OP’s talking points about water, electricity, job loss, the intrinsi…

This is a weird quirk that I observe in all sorts of contexts. "No one's talking about [thing that is frequently discussed]!" or, "There's never been [an actor in this identity category] in major movie role before!" (except there has plenty of times) or sometimes "You can't even say Christmas anymore!" (except they just did) The somewhat inaccurate use of hyperbolic language does not mean that there is _nothing_ to t…

@dang has noted this phenomenon in various forms multiple times. The most recent one I can find:

> It's common, if not inevitable, for people who feel strongly about $topic to conclude that the system (or the community, or the mods, etc.) are biased against their side. One is far more likely to notice whatever data points that one dislikes because they go against one's view and overweight those relative to others. This is probably the single most reliable phenomenon on this site. Keep in mind that the people with the opposite view to yours are just as convinced that there's bias, but they're sure that it's against their side and in favor of yours. [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42205856

Re: Where I'm at with AI

#36

Post by vonneumannstan »

skydhash wrote: post #12
vonneumannstan wrote: post #3

Its really hard to take people who say this seriously: "If you asked me six months ago what I thought of generative AI, I would have said that we’re seeing a lot of interesting movement, but the jury is out on whether it will be useful" Like I'm sorry but if you couldn't see that this tech would be enormously useful for millions if not billions of people you really shouldn't be putting yourself out there opining on a…

First car prototypes were useless and it has taken a few decades to have a good version. The first combustion engine was in 1826. Would you buy a prototype or a carriage for transportation at that time?

If you couldn't foresee how they would eventually be useful with improvements over time you probably bought a lot of horse carriages in 1893 and appropriately lost your ass.

Re: Where I'm at with AI

#37

Post by skydhash »

JBAnderson5 wrote: post #17
skydhash wrote: post #11

> that most software will be built very quickly, and more complicated software should be developed by writing the specification, and then generating the code. We may still need to drop down to a programming language from time to time, but I believe that almost all development will be done with generative AI tools My strongly held belief is that anyone who think that way, also think that software engineering is readin…

I think part of the issue here is that software engineering is a very broad field. If you’re building another crud app, your job might only require reading a ticket and copy/pasting from stack overflow. If you are working in a regulated industry, you are spending most of your time complying with regulations. If you are building new programming languages or compilers, you are building the abstractions from the ground…

The thing is if you’re working on a CRUD app, you probably have (and you should) a framework, which make it easy to do all the boilerplate. Editor fluency can add an extra boost to your development speed.

I’ve done CRUD and the biggest proportion of the time was custom business rules and UI tweaking (updating the design system). And they were commits with small diffs. The huge commits were done by copy pasting, code generators and heavy use of the IDE refactoring tools.

Re: Where I'm at with AI

#38

Post by jillesvangurp »

> increases in worker productivity at best increase demand for labor, and at worst result in massive disruption - they never result in the same pay for less manual work.

Exactly. Strongly agree with that. This closed world assumption never holds. We would only do less work if nothing else changes. But of course everything changes when you lower the price of creating software. It gets a lot cheaper. So, now you get a lot of companies suddenly considering doing things that previously would be too expensive. This still takes skills and expertise they don't have. So, they get people involved doing that work. Maybe they'll employ some of those but the trend is actually to employ things that are core to your company.

And that's just software creation. Everything else is going to change as well. A lot of software we use is optimized for humans. Including all of our development tools. Replacing all that with tools more suitable for automatic driving by AI is an enormous amount of work.

And we have decades worth of actively used software that requires human operators currently. If you rent a car, some car rental companies still interface with stuff written before I was born. And I'm > 0.5 century old. Same with banks, airline companies, insurers, etc. There's a reason this stuff was never upgraded: doing so is super expensive. Now that just got a bit cheaper to do. Maybe we'll get around to doing some of that. Along with all the stuff for which the ambition level just went up by 10x. And all the rest.

Re: Where I'm at with AI

#39

Post by throwaway0123_5 »

leoedin wrote: post #16
skydhash wrote: post #11

> that most software will be built very quickly, and more complicated software should be developed by writing the specification, and then generating the code. We may still need to drop down to a programming language from time to time, but I believe that almost all development will be done with generative AI tools My strongly held belief is that anyone who think that way, also think that software engineering is readin…

I've been playing around with "vibe coding" recently. Generally react front end and Rust back end. Rust has the nice benefit that you only really get logic bugs if it compiles. In the few apps I've built, progress is initially amazing. And then you get to a certain point and things slow down. I've built a list of things that are "not quite right" and then, as I work through each one all the strange architectural deci…

> But I think we're still a long way off non-technical people being able to develop applications.

I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone do a case study, having truly non-technical people build apps with these tools. Take a few moderately tech-savvy (can use MS office up to doing basic stuff in excel, understands a filesystem) people who work white collar jobs. Give them a one or two-day crash course on how Claude Code works. See what is the most complicated app which they can develop that is reasonably stable and secure.

Re: Where I'm at with AI

#40

Post by yalogin »

There really are no other use cases for generative AI than software flows. The irony of all this is software engineers automated their own workflows and made themselves replaceable. One think I am convinced of is that software engineering salaries will fall and we have seen the peak salaries for this industry, they will only fall going forward. Sure there will be a few key senior folks that continue to make a lot, but the software salaries itself will go through a k split just like out economy.
Post reply on HN