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

471–480 of 503 posts

Re: The Generative AI Con

#471

Post by krainboltgreene »

Ancapistani wrote: post #464
krainboltgreene wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This terrifies me.

It excites me. The only way it would really terrify me is if I were a very junior engineer right now or in college to be one. I think we’ll see a ton of complaints about how bad the job market is in the next couple of years. That will be true, but only for juniors or for seniors who don’t embrace the tech. For seniors who do embrace it and specialize in implementing these systems, it’ll be a gold mine. Then, over 5-1…

You have massively misunderstood what I’m terrified by. In fact you’ve described something I find the least terrifying of anything I’ve ever read because it’s all pure fantasy.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#472

Post by fragmede »

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…

I'd take that bet. Google offers a very expensive service for free, but is able to monetize it with ads. Sometimes connecting users to companies is what users actually want. But Google has this problem that since the service is free, its users feel entitled to everything for free. They can't just go and charge people what it costs to run a Google search.

OpenAI doesn't have this problem. ChatGPT has a free level to get you hooked, but it's restricted. So a lot of users pay them $20 or $200 or some other amount per month to use their service. So how OpenAI makes money is by selling access to their service. What you do with it is up to you, but their value proposition is simple. Pay us to get more/better access to our service.

How much it costs them to operate the service is a secret known only to them. There are a lot of very very educated guesses, but they're just guesses. After the VC money runs out they'll have to charge more than it costs to provide the service to stay afloat, and then we'll see. $20/month for ChatGPT plus is the $1 Uber that got people hooked. There's already a $200/month tier.

Whether OpenAI, specifically, will be standing in 20 years, only time will tell. But by this point it should be obvious that there's something to this LLM thing. Even if the product doesn't get any better than it is today, it'll still take 5-10 years for its effects to reverberate through society.

The killer app is LLM-accelerated programming. Sure, it doesn't work for all domains and it can't do everything, but even if the only thing it's good for is creating JavaScript react CRUD apps, well, there are a lot of those out there, and they're not actually limited to that. And since tool use means they can generate code and compile it and test that it works, it's possible to generate datasets for other languages and libraries, the only question is which ones is it worth it for.

It might not help at all in your line of work, but a friend who does contracting is able to use LLMs to cut the time it takes him to do a specific kind of job in half, if not more, enabling him to take on twice as many clients and make more money. For him it would still worth it even at 100x the current price. thankfully competition means it'll take a while before it's that expensive.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#473

Post by fragmede »

crakhamster01 wrote: post #433
paulgb wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s only going to get cheaper over time. It’s already cheap enough that if these services disappeared overnight I’d switch to an open source alternative with a local model. The industry needed VC backing to pay the fixed cost of the research, but the cost of running inference is not insane compared to the volume it provides.

I think the argument this article makes though is that generative AI isn't generating enough value to justify the sky high valuations and investment. Sure, if all of these services disappeared overnight, the remaining users could self host or run a model locally. I feel like that speaks to the lack of value any one company provides though? Maybe this era of AI will be remembered as a wealth transfer from VCs back to…

Only insofar as $1 Uber rides were a transfer of VC funding to everyday consumers. When the funding dries up and there's a need for revenue, then we'll see what they charge. Hopefully for them, they've become inextricable from our lives, like Uber has, and we'll gladly pay the new price. Not everyone will be hooked though, but the VC bet is that enough people will be that their horse wins the race and they'll make money.

There are a lot of horses in this race and the literally billion dollar question is who's Amazon this time around, and who's Webvan. Who's Uber and who's Flywheel (which doesn't even have a Wikipedia page anymore, ouch). Not knowing which horse is going to win doesn't negate the fact that a horse is going to win.

Model available LLMs, like Llama and Deepseek and StableDiffusion are totally a wealth transfer to consumers. Better make use of them!

Re: The Generative AI Con

#474

Post by rcxdude »

ksynwa wrote: post #57
alvah wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotting bubbles and predicting they will burst at some point is not a particularly useful skill. Housing in Amsterdam was in a bubble for 37 years in the 1700s; identifying the bubble early on would have been completely pointless.

So what should one do when one notices a bubble?

Try not to be caught up in it, even if you feel a lot of FOMO as it lasts longer than you expect.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#475

Post by edanm »

krainboltgreene wrote: post #108
n2d4 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's an unfair comparison. If the IBM Simon disappeared in 1994, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't have cared. If search engines disappeared in 1992, you'd have felt the same. Also, (what later became) AWS probably didn't interface much with you in 2003. It takes some time for technology to mature, usually at least a decade or two. Even once the iPhone was released it took a few years until it became indispensab…

I remember when people commented here that the blockchain was the same as early google search or early aws or early iPhone. Everyone thinks their new thing is the T-1.

And yet many, many people - including me - were shouting from the rafters that this is nonsense, that Blockchain has no real use case (aside from cryptocurrencies), and that this was all a massive bubble.

Most of those some people - again, including me - are saying the opposite about AI.

The lesson to draw isn't "there's a lot of hype, means there's nothing there", nor is it "there's a lot of hype, means there something there". It's "we need to actually think about the technology we're discussing and make object-level decisions, not meta-level decisions".

Re: The Generative AI Con

#476

Post by edanm »

danroblew wrote: post #81
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…

The article is about how the economics of the LLM market is making all tech look bad. They need trillions of dollars in returns. VC's won't finance tech startups for decades. I use Cursor sometimes, and VSCode + Continue with llama.cpp, and it's great. That's not worth billions. It's definitely not worth trillions.

> The article is about how the economics of the LLM market is making all tech look bad.

No, it's not. The first half of the article talks about how useless the actual product is, how the only reason we hear about it is because the media loves to talk about it.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#477

Post by edanm »

Piskvorrr wrote: post #315
stevage wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, for me it's the opposite. It does the boring bit, writing pedestrian method bodies. Writing import statements. Closing tags. I do the fun bit: having creative ideas and trying them out.

Looks like you haven't used a decent IDE: these things have been standard for decades , locally and with minimal requirements. But wait, now it happens in the Cloud (meh, that's not gonna fly anymore, too last decade)...AND requires massive amounts of power AND cooling, PLUS it's FUBAR about 50/50. For an incremental improvement...not great, not terrible.

You're really comparing an IDE's autocomplete with something that can, at minimum, write out entire functions for you?

You're either completely misremembering what IDEs have been able to do up until 3 years ago, or completely misunderstanding what is available now. Even the very basic "autocomplete" functionality of IDEs is meaningfully better now.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#478

Post by edanm »

audunw wrote: post #77
adpirz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "iPhone moment" gets used a lot, but maybe it's more analogous to the early internet: we have the basics, but we're still learning what we can do with this new protocol and building the infrastructure around it to be truly useful. And as you've pointed out, our "bandwidth" is increasing exponentially at the same time. If nothing else, my workflows as a software developer have changed significantly in these past t…

But if this is like the internet, it’s not refuting the idea that this is a huge bubble. The internet did have a massive investment bubble. And I’d argue it took decades to actually achieve some of the things we were promised in the early days of the internet. Some have still not come to fruition (the tech behind end to end encrypted emails was developed decades ago, yet email as most people use it is still ridiculou…

Yes. But this article argues two things at once - that the technology is itself not useful and not used, and that this won't change in the future. And it also argues that this is a bad investment, at least in the form of OpenAI.

I have very little idea of the second - it's totally possible OpenAI is a bad investment. I think this article is massively wrong about the first part though - this is an incredible technology, and this should be evident to everyone (I'm a little shocked we're still having an argument of the form "I'm a world-class developer and this increases my productivity" vs. "no, you're wrong!" on the other).

Re: The Generative AI Con

#479

Post by edanm »

simonw wrote: post #202
suraci wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did all of that free code reduce demand for developers? the anwser is yes, while in the meantime, the expansion of the industry offset the surplus of developers.

I think the answer is that open source made developers more valuable because they could build you a whole lot more functionality for the same amount of effort thanks to not having to constantly reinvent every wheel that they needed. More effective developers results in more demand for custom software, resulting in more jobs for developers. My hope is that AI-assisted programming will have similar results.

How likely do you think this is Simon?

I don't really know myself, but I think there's a decent change that most developer jobs will actually disappear. Your argument isn't wrong, but when we're nearing (though still far from) the state where all productive tech work can be handled by LLMs. Once it can effectively and correctly fix bugs and add new well-defined features to a real codebase, things start to look very different for most developers.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#480

Post by michaelcampbell »

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…

As a developer I'm seeing less hate than apathy from my colleagues, but rather the hatred I do see is from people trying to push LLM's ON developers.

So it's from middle management levels riding the hype train, and possibly trying to save money and getting bonuses for it at the expense of other people.

Just like when offshoring was in its same point on Gartner's hype curve.

"Everyone has a model, but no one has a business".

Post reply on HN