581–590 of 668 posts
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It probably is still subsidized, just not as much. We won't know if these APIs are profitable unless these companies go public, and till then it's safe to bet these APIs are underpriced to win the market share.
Anthropic has shared that API inference has a ~60% margin. OpenAI's margin might be slightly lower since they price aggressively but I would be surprised if it was much different.
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Then the social paradigm needs to change. Is everyone just going to roll over and die while AI destroys academia (and possibly a lot more)? Last September, Tyler Austin Harper published a piece for The Atlantic on how he thinks colleges should respond to AI. What he proposes is radical —but, if you've concluded that AI really is going to destroy everything these institutions stand for, I think you have to at least co…
I was pretty interested until I got to this part: > Another reason that a no-exceptions policy is important: If students with disabilities are permitted to use laptops and AI, a significant percentage of other students will most likely find a way to get the same allowances, rendering the ban useless. I witnessed this time and again when I was a professor—students without disabilities finding ways to use disability ac…
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> LLMs will get _so_ good that I don't feel the need to do this, in the same way that I don't think about the transistors my code is ultimately running on. The problem is, they're nothing like transistors, and never will be. Those are simple. Work or don't, consistently, in an obvious, or easily testable, way. LLM are more akin to biological things. Complex. Not well understood. Unpredictable behavior. To be safely u…
I suppose transistors is a bad example. Perhaps a better analogy would be the Linux kernel. It's built by biological humans, and fallible ones at that. And yet, I don't feel the need to learn the intricacies of kernel internals, because it's reliable enough that it's essentially never the kernel's fault when my code doesn't work.
Every abstraction is leaky, its not like I have 1 in every 100 tickets I work on needs understanding of the existence of filesystem buffers, it's in the back of my mind, it's always there. I didn't read linux kernel source, but I know it's existence. LLM output doesn't have that.
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AI assisted coding makes you dumber full stop. It's obvious as soon as you try it for the first time. Need a regex? No need to engage your brain. AI will do that for you. Is what it produced correct? Well who knows? I didn't actually think about it. As current gen seniors brains atrophy over the next few years the scarier thing is that juniors won't even be learning the fundamentals because it is too easy to let AI h…
Strongly disagree. If the complexity of your work it the software development itself, then it means that your work is not very complex to begin with. It has always been extremely annoying to fight with people who mistake the ability of building or engaging with complicated systems (like your regex) with competency. I work in building AI for a very complex application, and I used to be in the top 0.1% of Python progra…
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Do you think you learn as much from reading summaries of papers as reading the full thing? Do you think you learn as much from asking a friend to write a paper as when you write it yourself?
A more fair comparison might be, do you learn as much by reading one full paper vs. in a similar amount of time reading summaries of 3-4 papers, asking questions about details, reading the portions of those papers that you are interested in, etc.
What your describing here
> reading the portions of those papers that you are interested in
Is a hybrid use of the technology which no one would argue against.
The question remains if students have the foresight to use the correct method and which results in the best learning outcomes.
For myself, I would have absolutely let LLMs summarise swaths of text and write my essays when I was at Uni. That's just me though. Maybe today's learners are better than I.
These themes have been going around and around for a while. One thing I've seen asserted: > What he demonstrated is that Claude can, with detailed supervision, produce a technically rigorous physics paper. What he actually demonstrated, if you read carefully, is that the supervision is the physics. Claude produced a complete first draft in three days... The equations seemed right... Then Schwartz read it, and it was…
AI is extremely good at producing well formatted bullshit. You need to be constantly on guard against stuff that sounds and looks right but ultimately is just noise. You can also waste a ton of time on this. Especially OpenAI's offering shows poorly in this respect: it will keep circling back to its own comfort zone to show off some piece of code or some concept that it knows a lot about whilst avoiding the actual qu…
If this article was written a year ago, I would have agreed. But knowing what I know today, I highly doubt that the outcomes of LLM/non-LLM users will be anywhere close to similar. LLMs are exceptionally good at building prototypes. If the professor needs a month, Bob will be done with the basic prototype of that paper by lunch on the same day, and try out dozens of hypotheses by the end of the day. He will not be ch…
Isn't this learning swimming by watching others explaining swimming? Bob would think he knows swimming, until he has to get into the water.
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AI is extremely good at producing well formatted bullshit. You need to be constantly on guard against stuff that sounds and looks right but ultimately is just noise. You can also waste a ton of time on this. Especially OpenAI's offering shows poorly in this respect: it will keep circling back to its own comfort zone to show off some piece of code or some concept that it knows a lot about whilst avoiding the actual qu…
Have you tried turning up temperature in those cases where it circles back? I have been meaning to.
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> So if Bob can do things with agents, he can do things. The problem arrises when Bob encounters a problem too complex or unique for agents to solve. To me, it seems a bit like the difference between learning how to cook versus buying microwave dinners. Sure, a good microwave dinner can taste really good, and it will be a lot better than what a beginning cook will make. But imagine aspiring cooks just buying premade…
> The problem arrises when Bob encounters a problem too complex or unique for agents to solve. It’s actually worse than that: the AI will not stop and say ”too complex, try in a month with the next SOTA model”. Rather, it will give Bob a plausible looking solution that Bob cannot identify as right or wrong. If Bob is working on an instant feedback problem, it’s ok: he can flag it, try again, ask for help. But if the…
When he said we need more time to do this properly, he was labelled slow. They pushed him to use AI all day long and told at the all hands that there will be programmers who use AI and those who don't will be left behind. So he said fuck doing it right for the project, let me do it right for myself.
Now he got his promotion, they will hire 3 people in a cheaper location to handle various issues that are coming up (product will always have bugs you see). Given his excellent speed of delivery, they will report to him.
Good for Bob.
> Frank Herbert (yeah, I know I'm a nerd), in God Emperor of Dune, has a character observe: "What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking; there's the real danger." Herbert was writing science fiction. I'm writing about my office. The distance between those two things has gotten uncomfortably small. The author is a bit naive here: 1. Soc…