Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Generative AI Con

wheresyoured.at

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 503 posts

Re: The Generative AI Con

#411

Post by peteforde »

thefz wrote: post #120
peteforde wrote: post #95

I would be highly amused if the OP revealed that the essay/rant had been written by o3-mini tomorrow. While I don't really understand what fuels this person's Substack Forensic Journalist energy, I can only say that I am thrilled to pay $20 to OpenAI because it delivers outrageous value to me as a solo, self-taught "engineer"* designing reasonably complex physical devices intended for sale. Air quotes because here in…

> 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.

Nobody starts off super confident! I'm proud to be a life-long learner. I've just learned more, about more things, in the last three years than I did in the previous few decades of coding every day.

One person's imposter syndrome is often superior to another's blustery confidence.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#412

Post by vonneumannstan »

jcgrillo wrote: post #338
vonneumannstan wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Yeah unironically.

Guido van Rossum - "I use it every day. My biggest adjustment with using Copilot was that instead of writing code, my posture shifted to reviewing code." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DVyjdw4t9I

Here's Jeff Dean saying 25% of the characters in new PRs at Google are AI Generated. https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/jeff-dean-and-noam-shazeer

Andrej Karpathy - "I basically can't imagine going back to "unassisted" coding at this point" https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1ezssll/andrej...

Andrew Ng - "I run multiple models on my laptop — Mistral, Llama, Zefa. And I use ChatGPT quite often. " https://www.ft.com/content/2dc07f9e-d2a9-4d98-b746-b051f9352...

Simon Willison https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/27/ai-enhanced-developmen...

I mean I can keep going. I doubt you would compare yourself to these people.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#413

Post by krainboltgreene »

trhway wrote: post #125
krainboltgreene wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, I had been told we had to lay off all those workers because they weren’t flush with cash.

cash on hands GOOG - 100B, AMZN - 80B, FB - 70B, and their core businesses are basically printing money, so they pretty much do have to invest into new things. If somebody sees a multi-billion dollar sink better than AI right now ...

Workers, infrastructure, taxes…

Re: The Generative AI Con

#414

Post by jack_pp »

skydhash wrote: post #287
jack_pp wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah you don't to know to build the same thing precisely. Just the other day I wanted to write a vanilla JS component that could let you select a picture from something like a carousel and be able to blow up the selected picture when clicked. I know JS / HTML but am not used to working with vanilla JS. Copilot didn't write it all by itself but it did teach me things I didn't know like making a custom tag in vanilla JS…

> Copilot didn't write it all by itself but it did teach me things I didn't know like making a custom tag in vanilla JS by extending an HTMLElement. > This is a simple component for a 5 page landing page build with astro You're already in the over-engineered section there.

Not that over engineered, here's the code :

https://gist.github.com/lazarcf/c80ae6f9362aaf3aa92e21e3a0dd...

you can see the component (the "image gallery") here : https://pixico.roware.ro/apa-distilata/

Re: The Generative AI Con

#415

Post by jack_pp »

hudon wrote: post #153
jack_pp wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah you don't to know to build the same thing precisely. Just the other day I wanted to write a vanilla JS component that could let you select a picture from something like a carousel and be able to blow up the selected picture when clicked. I know JS / HTML but am not used to working with vanilla JS. Copilot didn't write it all by itself but it did teach me things I didn't know like making a custom tag in vanilla JS…

It’s not a common use case though, dipping into an unfamiliar tech stack only to dip out after committing the code. Typically, when you learn a new stack (eg. for a job), you’ll be living in it for at least a few months, and at that point, you’d be better served by perusing the docs and getting deeply familiar with the API. The copilots get you going quick at the expense of your learning, which is great for one-offs,…

I believe if you spend months / hundreds of hours using any framework / tool you will eventually read so much of it that it's easy to get "deeply familiar" and even then.. it's often times faster to have an LLM write 80-90% of the code for you and just refine / finish it.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#416

Post by webmaven »

nostrademons wrote: post #273
square_usual wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reasoning people have for them selling API requests at a loss is simply their financial statements. Anthropic burned $3B this year. ChatGPT lost $5B. Microsoft has spent $19B on AI and Google has spent close to $50B. Given that revenue for the market leader ChatGPT is $3.7B, it's safe to say that they're losing massive amounts of money. These companies are heavily subsidized by investors and their cloud service p…

Are the training costs (CapEx) and inference costs (OpEx) being lumped together?

Re: The Generative AI Con

#417

Post by [deleted] »

simonw wrote: post #349
camdenreslink wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would never trust an LLM to do this unless it was pointing me to pages/sections in a real manual or reputable source I could reference.

I admire your optimism that good manuals and reputable sources exist for the average furnace in the average basement.

[deleted]

Re: The Generative AI Con

#418

Post by mahogany »

simonw wrote: post #349
camdenreslink wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would never trust an LLM to do this unless it was pointing me to pages/sections in a real manual or reputable source I could reference.

I admire your optimism that good manuals and reputable sources exist for the average furnace in the average basement.

If there are no reputable sources to point to, then where exactly is GPT deriving its answer from? And how can we be assured GPT is correct about the furnace in question?

Re: The Generative AI Con

#419

Post by webmaven »

LPisGood wrote: post #369
sejje wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Um. How are you measuring that productivity?

Re: The Generative AI Con

#420

Post by gamblor956 »

bko wrote: post #391
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…

The author betrays himself early with this line: > a cynical bubble inflated by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman built to sell into an economy run by people that have no concept of labor other than their desperation to exploit or replace it. He brings up the concept of labor and applies a moral judgement about "replacing" and "exploiting" labor. And then he throws the kitchen sink at the technology. People use it sure, but it's…

Very few people get real value from an LLM. They're useful for minor grammatical checks, and idiot-level summaries. Maybe for entry-level coding. Outside of that, they're basically just gimmicks. You can't trust the output at all; literally everything an LLM outputs must be verified before it can be used for anything important, so you end up doing all of the work you thought you would have avoided by using an LLM.
Post reply on HN