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The Generative AI Con

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Re: The Generative AI Con

#331

Post by wut-wut »

JimDabell wrote: post #55
anothermathbozo wrote: post #3

This is one of the most tilted pieces I’ve ever read. For months Ed has predicted The AI Bubble will burst “any day now” frequently citing ai company’s revenue as a sign the product is not viable and the valuations are too high. The valuations seem to be primarily based on the R&D progress instead of on a theory that widespread adoption of the existing product will experience an uptick. The current landscape imho sho…

> This is one of the most tilted pieces I’ve ever read. He comes across as just a ludicrously unpleasant, spite-filled person. > I'm fucking tired of having to write this sentence. > I am so very bored of having this conversation > I don't care about this number! > Shut the fuck up! > This isn't the early days of shit . > Didn't we just talk about this? Fine, fine. > $3.25 billion a quarter is absolutely pathetic. >…

I know! I Loved it!

Re: The Generative AI Con

#332

Post by bayarearefugee »

pavlov wrote: post #105
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…

If Google search disappeared, I would still remember the names of several sites like Stack Overflow that are always at the top of the results, and I’d just go directly there. Maybe the original Yahoo! style curated list of categorized links would actually be more useful for me at this point than Google with all the SEO spam. That kind of high-quality directory combined with ChatGPT would probably replace Google for m…

> If Google search disappeared, I would still remember the names of several sites like Stack Overflow that are always at the top of the results, and I’d just go directly there.

I kind of agree with this, but Google is still, IMO, the best way to search these sites even when you know they exist because most of them have terrible local search.

Google searches with the site: tag are one of the few ways in which I find google search to be somewhat useful. Its pretty terrible these days at more generalized search due to their capitulation to SEO.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#333

Post by hooverd »

lukevp wrote: post #7

Why in the world would you want a car?? They are horrible to maintain, difficult to operate, expensive, smell bad, and are slower than horses! -somebody salty about automobiles, circa 1900.

They'd be right too soon. The ICE has been a very useful technology but car dependency has been a nightmare for society. Forget a bicycle for the mind, maybe LLMs are like an SUV for the mind.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#334

Post by hooverd »

automatic6131 wrote: post #97
bccdee wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tbh they'd have been right. Cars are expensive to buy and to maintain. They are difficult to operate—people die every day. They do smell bad, and the particulate matter they emit is extremely bad for you. And they are slow: Traffic is an unsolvable problem in urban centres. Redesigning our cities around cars was one of the big mistakes of the 20th century.

>Redesigning our cities around cars was one of the big mistakes of the 20th century. Cities have been designed around Carriages for millenia. You can go and walk in Pompeii and observe pavements for pedestrians, roads for wheeled carriages with crossing spots of elevated stones for pedestrians. It turns out that cities require a lot of goods to be moved through - more than a pedestrian can carry, and over inclines th…

Surely you can differentiate between horse drawn carriage routes and six lane stroads?

Re: The Generative AI Con

#335

Post by boringg »

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…

Chat right now is search in 99. Highly functional

Re: The Generative AI Con

#336

Post by light_triad »

If you've been in SV long enough, you've seen multiple hype cycles. AI is the latest one. It doesn't mean AI is a con, there's just a tendency to exaggerate and make hyperbolic claims to sell.

AI is primarily used to write text and code. Actually integrating it into workflows across markets will take time.

A great article that is neither overly pessimistic or optimistic is Benedict Evan's The AI Summer [1]. He argues that there's a lot of excitement with big corporates but their actual adoption is low so far.

"an LLM by itself is not a product - it’s a technology that can enable a tool or a feature, and it needs to be unbundled or rebundled into new framings, UX and tools to be become useful. That takes even more time"

[1] https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2024/7/9/the-ai-summ...

Re: The Generative AI Con

#337

Post by wut-wut »

AlienRobot wrote: post #278

>iPhone fundamentally redefined what a cellphone and a portable computer could be, as did the iPad, creating entirely new consumer and business use cases almost immediately. >So, what exactly has generative AI actually done? Where are the products? No, really, where are they? What's the product you use every day, or week, that uses generative AI, that truly changes your life? If generative AI disappeared tomorrow — a…

My concern is when you've implemented it and rely on it and then the company providing the service pulls a "Google" and deprecates the project. I haven't seen that mentioned in any of the comments.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#338

Post by jcgrillo »

vonneumannstan wrote: post #298
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…

It's just status anxiety. Mid engineers go on and on claiming theres literally no value from LLMs even possible in principle while top tier people are using them as force multipliers.

> top tier people

Who? How? This is not what I've seen where I work. There's a bunch of hubbub and generalized excitement, and lots of talk about what could be done, or what might be done, but not very much actual doing. I must just be a clueless "mid".

Re: The Generative AI Con

#339

Post by randcraw »

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…

And how much money per month are you willing to pay for each of these capabilities/services? I can't imagine paying $50/month for any use of AI.

I willingly pay $80/month for a smart phone and its ecosystem. Google search (for general queries) is worth a lot less to me, since it's fairly easily replicated by federating a search across a dozen sites where most answers arise now. So I might pay $5/mo for that, or maybe $20/mo for code queries (to be paid by my employer of course). Internet access for desktop/laptop computing or for media streaming might be worth $40/mo.

So what are the end uses of AI that I'm willing to pay generaously for? If GenAI is supposed to revolutionize the infosphere, the question has to be, what service will it provide that can justify its cost -- the $trillion investment in infrastructure that is underway?

I have absolutely no idea what AI's killer app could be. IMO, not even a dedicated secretary/tutor/companion is worth more than $50/mo to the average bloke. And that drip of revenue per user isn't nearly enough to justify the development costs that AI is incurring now.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#340

Post by paulcole »

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…

> I’m a little shocked at how much negativity there is around LLMs among developers

There's a Quentin Tarantino quote where he says there are 2 kinds of film critics. There are those who love movies and there are those that love the movies they love.

A lot of developers really seem to love the technology they love.

These people are where most of the negativity is coming from. And my guess is that the people who are encouraged by LLMs and not negative (mostly) aren't taking time out of their days to write long blog posts or argue about it online.

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