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The Generative AI Con

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Re: The Generative AI Con

#41

Post by Ancapistani »

locusofself wrote: post #4

As a 40yo software engineer (at Microsoft) with no specific domain expertise other than using genAI for fun and some code completion, this essay/blog post articulates my gut feelings about where we are at, very well.

41 here, working in healthtech… and Devin has committed more code and closed more tickets on my behalf in the past week at my behest than I’ve done on my own in a month.

It’s basically functioning as a team of entry-level junior engineers at this point.

Previously I was having to spend a fair amount of time writing tickets and providing context, but lately I’ve fed all my meeting transcripts and such into an LLM and it interactively creates Jira tickets for me. Each one takes me maybe 30s to read before I confirm them and the assistant creates the actual tickets.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#42

Post by andsoitis »

> 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.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#43

Post by Ancapistani »

bccdee wrote: post #13
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.

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.

And yet, they’re better than what they replaced.

Horses weren’t cheap when they were a primary mode of transportation. Lots of people have died riding, driving, and breaking horses. They definitely smell bad, and their “particulate matter” was so bad that houses had to be set back and elevated from the street.

Cities designed around cars are far superior to cities designed around horses.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#44

Post by alvah »

NewUser76312 wrote: post #24

Hey I have my gripes with the landscape, certainly, but this is just too much. > It sure is! But it doesn't really prove anything other than that people are using the single-most-talked about product in the world. By comparison, billions of people use Facebook and Google. I don't care about this number! > User numbers alone tell you nothing about the sustainability or profitability of a business, or how those people…

"I'll say I agree with the Deep Research criticisms. These products are very underwhelming."

I haven't shelled out the $200/month for OpenAI's Deep Research offering, but similar products from Google and Perplexity are extremely useful (at least for my use case). I would never present the results unchecked / unedited, but the Deep Research products will dig much deeper for information than Perplexity could be persuaded to previously. The results can then be fed into another part of the process.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#45

Post by int_19h »

This reads like a straightforward rant to me, not something informative.

Which then invites the question: why is this person's opinion on the subject relevant? Do they have some credentials that make it more valuable than a random comment with a similar rant (of which there are plenty) on Reddit or HN?

Re: The Generative AI Con

#46

Post by simonw »

idonotknowwhy wrote: post #40
simonw wrote: post #5

> When you put aside the hype and anecdotes, generative AI has languished in the same place, even in my kindest estimations, for several months, though it's really been years. The one "big thing" that they've been able to do is to use "reasoning" to make the Large Language Models "think" [...] This is missing the most interesting changes in generative AI space over the last 18 months: - Multi-modal: LLMs can consume…

> This is missing the most interesting changes in generative AI space over the last 18 months I agree, though personally I'm liking the "big thing" as well. R1 is able to one-shot a lot of work for me, churning away in the background while I do other things. > Multi-modal IMO this is still early days and less reliable. What are some of your daily use cases? > Context lengths This is the biggest thing IMO (Models rema…

Multi-modal audio is great. I talk to ChatGPT when I'm cooking or walking the dog.

For images I use it for things like helping draft initial alt text for images, extracting tables from screenshots, translating photos of signs in languages I don't speak - and then really fun stuff like "invent a recipe to recreate this plate of food" or "my CSS renders like this, what should I change?" or "How do you think I turn on this oven?" (in an Airbnb).

I've recently started using the share-screen feature provided for Gemini by https://aistudio.google.com/live when I'm reading academic papers and I want help understanding the math. I can say "What does this symbol with the squiggle above it?" out loud and Gemini will explain it for me - works really well.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#47

Post by andsoitis »

anothermathbozo wrote: post #30
ergonaught wrote: post #6

Well, he isn't wrong.

He might be. It’s an emergent technology and no one knows for certain how far it can be pushed.

Technology is largely a function of human imagination, tempered by constraints imposed by time on the one hand and amplified by new discoveries unfolding on the other. Imagination being a fuel, what does the imagination project is possible in 100 years?

Re: The Generative AI Con

#48

Post by simonw »

int_19h wrote: post #45

This reads like a straightforward rant to me, not something informative. Which then invites the question: why is this person's opinion on the subject relevant? Do they have some credentials that make it more valuable than a random comment with a similar rant (of which there are plenty) on Reddit or HN?

They have 55,000 newsletter subscribers. https://www.wheresyoured.at/about/

Re: The Generative AI Con

#49

Post by blueelephanttea »

paulgb wrote: post #11

> And even then, we still don't have a killer app! There is no product that everybody loves, and there is no iPhone moment! I would strongly argue that coding assistants are AI’s first killer app. Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf etc.

> I would strongly argue that coding assistants are AI’s first killer app. Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf etc.

These IMO are relatively useful things. But probably (in their current state) will not justify the valuation of the companies involved and the massive investment occurring right now.

I don't know how the future will unfold. I do think it is reasonable to be somewhat bearish on what has been promised vs. what has been released.

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