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The Generative AI Con

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Re: The Generative AI Con

#351

Post by outworlder »

light_triad wrote: post #336

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…

> 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.

The term "AI Winter" dates back from the 80s, and that should tell us something.

At every cycle, we have insane hype (remember when "expert systems" would replace doctors?), a lot of investment. Hype fails to catch up to reality, investors get spooked. Nobody talks about that flavor of "AI" for a few years, even though we usually get new and useful tools.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#352

Post by daveguy »

consumer451 wrote: post #344
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…

While that might be true for you, it's not at all true for me. If generic chatbots went away, no big deal. If Windsurf IDE + Sonnet 3.5 went away tomorrow, my prospects would look very different. The last production code I wrote was over 20 years ago. I don't know React and TypeScript. I recently created a SaaS MVP using Windsurf/Sonnet/React/Refine.dev/Supabase in 8 days. We already have live humans excitedly using…

Congrats on the rapid MVP! Is it launched / publicly available? I'm in the same boat with modern front ends. Would like to see what the current LLMs can help with.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#353

Post by mostlysimilar »

bayarearefugee wrote: post #332
pavlov wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

I think this was true for a long time and so it's burned into a lot of us as conventional wisdom, but have you actually tried lately?

I've made a habit to go directly to the website I want and use its search first. In almost all cases I find what I want, and I get to avoid touching Google.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#354

Post by TeaBrain »

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?

Completely irrelevant. The Manhattan Project wasn't funded by VCs with an expectation of a return.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#355

Post by sejje »

LPisGood wrote: post #323
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.

> it seems likely that LLMs will obsolete precisely the skills that developers use to earn their income I’m not particularly worried. I think it’s obvious that software engineering is definitely an “intelligence complete” problem. Any system that can do software engineering can solve any problem that requires intelligence. So, either my job is safe or I get to live through the fall of almost all white collar discipli…

> Any system that can do software engineering can solve any problem that requires intelligence. So, either my job is safe or I get to live through the fall of almost all white collar disciplines. There's not a huge middle ground.

How about the middle ground where a human using AI replaces you?

The human job is (maybe) safe, but your job?

Re: The Generative AI Con

#356

Post by jddj »

jcgrillo wrote: post #308
wanderingstan wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

These are not the sort of uses we need to make this thing valuable. To be worthwhile it needs to add value to existing products . Can it do that meaningfully well? If not it's nothing more than a curiosity.

Worthwhile is a hard measure.

To make money though it just needs to have a large or important audience and a means of convincing people to think, want, or do things that people with money will pay to make people think, want or do.

Ads, in other words

Re: The Generative AI Con

#357

Post by advael »

famouswaffles wrote: post #324
advael wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah so like, this is a cool result, and it uses a transformer architecture. I actually do think that it's fair to say that transformers have proven widely useful, especially in tasks that look like sequence modeling. It's a step change akin to the now-pervasive use of convolutional neural networks that started in the 2010s, and is deeply significant of course. This is also really different from "this is an LLM" The…

What you're saying does happen to some degree and in this instance, if i had linked some advance with a diffusion model then i would get it but about the only difference between this and chatgpt is the data it's been trained on. If Open AI cared, the next version of GPT could be a State of the Art weather predictor.

I mean by the same logic the only difference between a diffusion model and a VLM is that you put the spatial transformer on the other end.

Yes, one of the powerful things about every kind of neural network is that they're a very general class of function approximator. That we can use a similar toolkit of techniques to tackle a wide variety of problems is very cool and useful. Again, the analogy to statistical models is telling. You can model a lot of phenomena decently well with gaussian distributions. Should we report this as "Normal distribution makes yet another groundbreaking discovery!"? Probably this wouldn't have the same impact, because people aren't being sold sci-fi stories about an anthropomorphized bell curve. People who are using LLMs already think of "AI" as a thinking thing they're talking to, because they have been encouraged to do that by marketing. Attributing these discoveries made by scientists using this method to "AI" in the same way that we attribute answers produced by chatGPT to "AI" is a deliberate and misleading conflation

Re: The Generative AI Con

#358

Post by [deleted] »

outworlder wrote: post #351
light_triad wrote: post #336

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…

> 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. The term "AI Winter" dates back from the 80s, and that should tell us something. At every cycle, we have insane hype (remember when "expert systems" would replace doctors?), a lot of investment. Hype fails to catch up to reality, investors get spooked. Nobody…

[deleted]

Re: The Generative AI Con

#359

Post by [deleted] »

muddi900 wrote: post #346
CamperBob2 wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they were not. Trains are good for taking large numbers of people from one place where they don't want to be to another place where they don't want to be. In certain situations that can be a useful thing to do, but you can't design a city around it. In every case you have in mind, rest assured, the city was there first.

And yet we created trains that are a more efficient way of traversing cities built around horses as well. Why can't you design a city around it? It would be different than Houston or LA, but would that be a bad thing?

[deleted]

Re: The Generative AI Con

#360

Post by jcgrillo »

jddj wrote: post #356
jcgrillo wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are not the sort of uses we need to make this thing valuable. To be worthwhile it needs to add value to existing products . Can it do that meaningfully well? If not it's nothing more than a curiosity.

Worthwhile is a hard measure. To make money though it just needs to have a large or important audience and a means of convincing people to think, want, or do things that people with money will pay to make people think, want or do. Ads, in other words

Can you get enough revenue from ads to pay the cost of serving LLM queries? Has anyone demonstrated this is a viable business yet?

A related question: has anyone figured out how to monetize LLM input? When a user issues a Google search query they're donating extremely valuable data to Google that can be used to target relevant ads to that user. Is anyone doing this successfully with LLM prompt text?

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