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The Generative AI Con

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Re: The Generative AI Con

#381

Post by tim333 »

andsoitis wrote: post #42

> I am so very bored of having this conversation, so I am now going to write out some counterpoints so that I don't have to say them again. It is not clear to me why the author feels the need to have the conversation. Human consciousness gives us the ability imagine future states in the universe and make them come true. The results will speak for itself.

He seems to think the hype will do great damage to society

"I need you to fucking listen to me: everything I am describing is unfathomably dangerous, even if you put aside the environmental and financial costs."

Personally I think he's lost it a bit. I mean say he's right in that LLMs plateau and investors lose some money. Life will go on.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#382

Post by consumer451 »

levkk wrote: post #375
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…

What remains to be seen if your venture (and others like it) will translate into hundreds of billions of new economy. That was the effect of the iPhone, cloud, and Google Search (analogies used in the article). That's the difference between a "new era" and a cool tool that could of (and should of) been built at university with enough funding to produce it for the public good.

Yeah, I can agree with all of that comment.

My gut feeling is that this will play out like the dot-com bubble. There was definitely a bubble, it burst and many investors lost money, but the Internet did end up eating the world in the long run.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#383

Post by famouswaffles »

advael wrote: post #357
famouswaffles wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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.

Maybe if that was the only different but it's not. There are diffusion models that have nothing to do with transformers or attention or anything like that and where using them for arbitrary sequence prediction is either not possible or highly non-trivial.

Yes, All Neural Network architectures are function approximators but that doesn't they excel equally for all tasks or that you can even use them for anything other than a single task. This era of the transformer where you can simply use a single architecture for NLP, Computer Vision, Robotics, even reinforcement learning is a very new one. Literally anything a bog standard transformer can do is anything GPT can do if Open AI wished.

Like i said, i don't disagree with your broader point. I just don't think this is an instance of it.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#384

Post by deadbabe »

drpossum wrote: post #160
deadbabe wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The killer app is entertainment. Since LLMs emerged people have consistently loved getting them to say whatever they want or roleplay with them. Once integrated into games, it will be very fun to have natural conversations with the inhabitants of game worlds. Imagine a goomba talking to Super Mario before he stomps its head or delivering your pithy one liner in response to some final boss’s villainous monologue.

and strangely in two years no one has demonstrated anything like this that people found of value. In fact for all the "entertainment" sectors it has been injected into, we have gotten poisoning of self-publishing and soulless generic pornography. Remember the twitch channels that had AI generated content? Where did those go? Surely by your rationale the market would have taken over by now. Surely there would be somet…

The primary reason is because LLMs are expensive computationally and financially.

In an open world game, it’s trivial to assign memories and facts an AI learns about its world from interactions or in response to game events. All an LLM has to do is be fine tuned to take data from that internal knowledge base and express it as natural language text, in order to have intelligent and useful conversations with a player. It’s not difficult.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#385

Post by [deleted] »

jcgrillo wrote: post #143
alvah wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. Did you foresee Google becoming a massively profitable advertising company with a search engine attached in 2004? I certainly didn't.

Google solved a real problem. They indexed the web and made search work, and they did it very cheaply. So cheaply, in fact, that they could give their service away to users and monetize it with ads. LLMs are not like this. They're both extremely expensive to run and they don't do anything truly valuable--there's no killer app. So how exactly is OpenAI or their ilk (or for that matter the rest of us) supposed to use t…

[deleted]

Re: The Generative AI Con

#386

Post by tdeck »

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…

To play devil's advocate here, it takes time for society to orient around new technologies and make them feel indispensable.

If smartphones had disappeared in 2008, most users would be mildly inconvenienced. They'd go back to using a flip phone and a TomTom, or printing out map directions, and sending emails on their laptop with WiFi. No employer expected them to have a chat app on their phone* or use PagerDuty, no businesses required them to download an app to purchase services. People called taxis on the phone.

Perhaps in 5-10 years people will stop putting any effort into documentation or organizing information, (some companies are already ahead of the curve on this one) and our jobs will become that much harder without an LLM to sift through all the information.

* I'm ignoring the BlackBerry world here which was always pretty niche.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#387

Post by highfrequency »

LLMs write code. Quickly. That is a killer app.

Performance improves every year, and costs become 3x-10x lower every year for the same level of performance. The difficulty of the code we want it to write does not increase 3x-10x per year. So there is no cost problem in just a couple years.

The level of denial and anger about LLMs on HN is astounding to me. Is this just defensiveness from software engineers worried about losing their jobs? An inability to extrapolate cost or performance trends just a couple years forward? Personal criticism against Altman and Musk? What am I missing?

Re: The Generative AI Con

#388

Post by mvdtnz »

> The AI bubble means that effectively every single media outlet has been talking about artificial intelligence in the vaguest way, and there's really only been one "product" that they can try that "is AI" — and that product is ChatGPT.

What is this guy even talking about now? Zitron has gone so far off the rails.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#389

Post by immibis »

epistasis wrote: post #325
mplanchard wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of software work is not greenfielding a PoC or reimplementing an existing, small, well-specced project. We’ve had OpenAPI client generators for years after all. The majority of software work is maintaining large, existing products: adding features, fixing bugs, improving performance, etc., or building new software in problem domains that aren’t so well-defined.

This is my experience too. I think it also really accelerates learning of a new language or framework, when that language or framework is really well documented on the web. For novel programming frameworks, obviously it's a bit more challenging to get help from an LLM. One of more recent attempts at using LLM code assist was to try to fix a bug in a Swift SSH Agent's connection handling that was causing hangs. I know…

Searching is an area where LLM technology excels. It makes sense, given their structure.

Of course, you have to find a company willing to spend more money on worse (for them - less ads) search, and it's won't be Google.

The results aren't always accurate, but neither is Google...

Re: The Generative AI Con

#390

Post by lukevp »

agentultra wrote: post #231
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…

That experience is heavily subsidized and is unprofitable for these companies providing it based on what we know. Even with all of the other developers who are also using the same work flow and espousing how great it is. Even with all of the monthly subscribers at various tiers. It has been unprofitable for several years and continues to be unprofitable and will likely remain unprofitable given current trends. The au…

Inference isn’t that expensive. A single junior dev costs orders of magnitude more than the amount of inference I use. Companies in growth mode don’t have to make money, it’s a land grab right now. But the expense is largely in the R and D. You can build a rig to run full models for 10-20k right? That’s only a month or two of a junior dev’s time, and after that it’s just electricity. And you could have dozens of devs using the same rig as long as they could timeshare. I don’t see where the economics wouldn’t work, it’s just there’s no use in investing in the hardware until we know where AI is going.
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