I spent a lot of time thinking about this recently. Ultimately, English is not a clean, deterministic abstraction layer. This isn't to say that LLMs aren't useful, and can create some great efficiencies.
Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]
561–570 of 827 posts
Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]
#562Earlier quoted context omitted.
" Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Fair
PS apologies to jph00. I still believe what I believe but I should have phrased it differently or not at all. Good luck on your endeavors either way.
Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]
#563Earlier quoted context omitted.
In general, the functional use-case traditionally covered by basic heuristics is viable for a reasoning LLM. These are useful for search. media processing, and language translation. LLM is not AI, and never was... and while the definition has been twisted in marketing BS it does not mean either argument is 100% correct or in err. LLM is now simply a cult, and a rather old one dating back to the 1960s Lisp machines. H…
LLMs aren’t perfect, but calling them a “cult” misses the point. They’re not just fancy heuristics, they’re general-purpose function approximators that can reason, plan, and adapt across a huge range of tasks with zero task-specific code. Sure, it’s not AGI. But dismissing the progress as just marketing ignores the fact that we’re already seeing them handle complex workflows, multi-step reasoning, and real-time inter…
Sure, I have seen the detrimental impact on some teams, and it does not play out as Marketers suggest.
The trick is in people seeing meaning in well structured nonsense, and not understanding high dimension vector spaces simply abstracting associative false equivalency with an inescapable base error rate.
I wager Neuromorphic computing is likely more viable than LLM cults. The LLM subject is incredibly boring once your tear it apart, and less interesting than watching Opuntia cactus grow. Have a wonderful day =3
Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]
#564Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's cheap now. But if you take into account all the training costs, then at such prices they cannot make a profit in any way. This is called dumping to capture the market.
There is no "capture" here, it's trivial to switch LLM/providers, they all use OpenAI API. It's literally a URL change.
> There is no "capture" here, it's trivial to switch LLM/providers, they all use OpenAI API. It's literally a URL change.
So? That's true for search as well, and yet Google has been top-dog for decades in spite of having worse results and a poorer interface than almost all of the competition.
Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]
#565Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is most definitely not toys for rich people. Now perhaps depending on your country it may be considered rich but I would comfortably say that for most of the developed world, the costs for these tools are absolutely attainable, there is a reason ChatGPT has such a large subscriber base. Also the disconnect for me here is I think back on the cost of electronics, prices for the level of compute have generally gone…
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> You think of economics like a 6 years old.
If you continue to break the site guidelines, we'll end up having to ban you.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]
#566Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.
Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]
#567Earlier quoted context omitted.
All the devs I work with would have to go through me to touch the infra anyway, so I'm not sure I see the issue here. No one is saying they need to deploy fully through the stack. It's a great start for them and I can help them along the way just like I would with anyone else deploying anything.
In other words, most of the barriers to leveraging custom software are still present.
Yes, the parts we aren't talking about that have nothing to do with LLMs, ie normal business processes.
Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]
#568I know we've had thought leaders in tech before, but am I the only one who is getting a bit fed up by practically anything a handful of people in the AI space say being circulated everywhere in tech spaces at the moment?
If there are lesser-known voices who are as interesting as karpathy or simonw (to mention one other example), I'd love to know who they are so we can get them into circulation on HN.
Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]
#569Can't believe they wanted to postpone this video by a few weeks
No one wanted to! I think we might have bitten off more than we could chew in terms of video production. There is a lot of content to publish.
Once it was clear how high the demand was for this talk, the team adapted quickly.
That's how it goes sometimes! Future iterations will be different.
Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]
#570Earlier quoted context omitted.
This thread perfectly captures what Karpathy was getting at. We're witnessing a fundamental shift where the interface to computing is changing from formal syntax to natural language. But you can see people struggling to let go of the formal foundations they've built their careers on.
> This thread perfectly captures what Karpathy was getting at. We're witnessing a fundamental shift where the interface to computing is changing from formal syntax to natural language. Yes, telling a subordinate with natural language what you need is called being a product manager. Problem is, the subordinate has encyclopedic knowledge but it's also extremely dumb in many aspects. I guess this is good for people that…
I think the only places where the entry-level coder is being killed are corps that never cared about the junior to senior pipeline. Some of them love off-shoring too so I'm not sure much has changed.