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The Generative AI Con

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Re: The Generative AI Con

#361

Post by consumer451 »

daveguy wrote: post #352
consumer451 wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks! It is not public yet. It's a b2b web app + browser extension. We currently have users in a friendly company testing it to replace their existing cumbersome Excel + Email/Teams workflow.

If you are in the same boat as me with modern front ends, come on in, the water's fine! I highly recommend using something like Refine.dev (YC S23) + Ant Design, or whatever is appropriate in your case. Giving a tool like Windsurf/Sonnet a much more narrow scope of options than just "React" is a huge win.

Even if you just started from a paid or free template for whatever language and framework you are targeting, it will greatly improve your chances of making something appealing, very quickly, using a tool like Windsurf.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#362

Post by mostlysimilar »

godelski wrote: post #300
hoseja wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well sure but how much cash did the MaPr corp. make selling their new and improved model implosion-type-u-235?

I don't know how to tell you this, but the government isn't a business and has completely different objectives and operating conditions

If more people understood this we might have avoided the carnage happening in the US right now.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#363

Post by [deleted] »

mostlysimilar wrote: post #347
nilamo wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Google search is useful, as a developer. The top results are all garbage, unrelated, or ads. Going past the first page used to be useful, now it's not. Honestly, it's so bad, that I straight up do not believe you that you use Google to find new information. DuckDuckGo/Kagi are where good search is at.

Agreed, I don't even bother with Google anymore. The only thing I use Google for is for local results, e.g. finding a restaurant. It's useless for finding actual information on the web.

[deleted]

Re: The Generative AI Con

#364

Post by vergessenmir »

I'm not sure what the rush is. Do we have to make it profitable now? 2 years is not a long time. The point has been made elsewhere by other commentators about the dot-com bubble and how long that took for trillion dollar industries to form. It sounds like his gripe with Altman's hype narrative has soley informed his somewhat negative view on LLMs as a whole.

I find it interesting that he almost equates OpenAI === LLMs and misses the fact that the hype is not purely industry driven. For instance, the number of machine learning papers in the last year has quite literally doubled.

This is also typical of an Americentric view on innovation that we don't report on the quiet revolution happening in education in underdeveloped countries that are a direct result of the accessibility of this unprofitable technology.

I don't think we need killer application right now

We also forget the internet bubble happend first

I think the author is looking at LLMs through the lens of Sam Altman's hype narrative and I wonder why we care so much that

Re: The Generative AI Con

#365

Post by bigstrat2003 »

jayd16 wrote: post #18
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…

Unreliable tools are utterly exhausting. > not much worse than a junior dev and 100x faster. Is there a greater hell than this!?

I am of the firm belief that unreliable help is worse than no help at all. LLMs are unreliable help, therefore they are useless to me.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#366

Post by TeaBrain »

square_usual wrote: post #248
adamc wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their ongoing operation is quite expensive, so even that is not assured.

Where are you getting this from? Outside of o3, every AI provider's API is super cheap, with most productive queries I do coming in under 2c. We have no reason to believe any of them are selling API requests at a loss. I think <2c per query hardly counts as "quite expensive".

The implication would be that those API requests are being sold at a loss. Amodei wrote in January that Claude 3.5 Sonnet was trained for only a few $10Ms, but Anthropic has been losing billions.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#367

Post by thefz »

chaos_emergent wrote: post #207
thefz wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So my first hand gut reaction is that people who cannot fathom meaningful use of modern LLMs are by definition people who are not trying to solve complex problems in domains they aren't yet super confident in. OTOH I would never trust anything built by someone not super confident while heavily relying on a LLM.

Then you should probably stop using most applications today, specifically those that have been iterated upon in the past two years.

There's a reason why most modern software is disappointing

Re: The Generative AI Con

#368

Post by incorrecthorse »

> So, what exactly has generative AI actually done? Where are the products?

The product is ChatGPT, actually.

If LLMs are a bubble, then you should expect most of OpenAI's revenue to come from its API (which is used by startups which have raised money to do "magic AI stuff", and the bubble would pop when investors would stop giving the money). But according to https://futuresearch.ai/openai-revenue-report, revenue from the API accounts only for 15%, the other 85% being the different subscriptions offers, including 55% of ChatGTP Plus subscriptions -- that is, _direct consumers_.

This doesn't prove that it isn't a bubble (the consumers could realize it's useless and then leave some time later), but it makes it less likely IMO.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#369

Post by LPisGood »

sejje wrote: post #355
LPisGood wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Of course that is exactly the middle ground that I’m not certain is so big.

Developer productivity has gone up immensely in the last 50 years and the industry is larger than ever.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#370

Post by karaterobot »

It's very rare that I can't get through a blog post because I find the argument too disingenuous to tolerate, but that was the case here. There are usually some nuggets of insight even in a tirade, and that may very well be the case here too, but the bad faith arguments came so fast and furious that I couldn't keep going.
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