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Something Big Is Happening

shumer.dev

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Re: Something Big Is Happening

#61

Post by thegrim000 »

You know, as a (prickly) analogy, whatever your take on covid was, half the population vehemently disagreed with your take. No matter which side was more "correct", either way, a huge percentage of the population can be, and often is, completely deluded on even fairly understandable topics.

When it comes to something as complex as AI, what are the odds that a random person is going to have any sort of good/informed take on it? Especially someone like this, who's a non-technical angel investor? Their entire job is hyping things up to raise money / get paydays. They actually list on their resume various "viral articles/tweets" that they made that got attention / raised money. Could this guy remotely explain, technically, how an LLM works under the hood? I highly doubt it. His credentials are not building AI, not technical knowledge, but hyping up companies that use AI.

Well, at least he gives 1-5 year time frames for all his grand claims, so when they don't actually happen he'll be quickly proven wrong. But of course, it's the internet, and nothing will ever come from somebody making grand claims and then being completely proven wrong, there will be no follow up, no self reflection, no retraction, no long-term credibility hit, just on to hyping up the next thing after getting his payday.

Re: Something Big Is Happening

#62

Post by zem »

aero9188 wrote: post #21
psiszj wrote: post #11

What’s the point in using these tools if they’re gonna replace us in a few years? It’s weird the author says that but then his conclusion is basically “go spend money on stuff I’m invested in”. Covid comparison is apt. I remember being insanely scared in Jan 2020 when those videos of Chinese people dropping dead were coming out (and being shamed by most of my peers etc). Few months later it was starting to become obv…

> Few months later it was starting to become obvious it was really only a major risk if you were old or infirm, but the rest of the world had took awhile to catch up. Only a risk in terms of dying sure, but plenty of people lost taste and smell for long periods before the vaccine (I wouldn't be surprised if some of them have yet to get it back). I'd rather be dead, to be honest. The food around my part of the world i…

also people developed debilitating brain fog, chronic fatigue, and increased risk of heart trouble.

Re: Something Big Is Happening

#63

Post by diminish »

mattlangston wrote: post #47

PhD physicist (Stanford/SLAC), Research Software Engineer doing low-level systems work in C/C++ and LLM research. Not a founder or investor — just a practitioner. One data point for this thread: the jump from Opus 4.5 to 4.6 is not linear. The minor version number is misleading. In my daily work the capability difference is the largest single-model jump I've experienced, and I don't say that casually — I spent my car…

one feels the llm wow moment whenever what they do on an area has been surpassed by an llm. newer versions of llms are probably trained by the feedback from developer code agent sessions; so this is probably why pro developers started to feel "wow" recently.

the real challenge will be in the frontier of the human knowledge and whether llms will be able to advance things forward or not.

ps1; i'm using 5.3/o4.6/k2.5/m2.5/glm5 and others daily for development - so my work has 1.5x intensified - i tackle increasingly harder problems but llms still really fail big in brand new challenges like i fail too. so i'm more alert than ever.

ps2: syntactical autocomplete used to write 80% of my code; now llms replaced autocomplete but at a semanticlevel; i think and LLM implements most of my actions like a cerebellum for muscle coordination; but sometimes teaching me new info from the net.

Re: Something Big Is Happening

#64

Post by afpx »

whynotminot wrote: post #25
acjohnson55 wrote: post #14

I am not having the exact same experience as the author--Opus 4.6 and Codex 5.3 seem more incremental to me than what he is describing--but if we're on an exponential curve, the difference is a rounding error. 4 months ago, I tried to build an application mostly vibe-coded. I got impressively far for what I thought was possible, but it bogged down. This past weekend, my friend had OpenClaw build an application of sim…

> But I think we're in world where very soon, companies will be demanding their engineering departments converge to the lived experience of the people who are seeing something like the author. I think this part is very real. If you’re in this thread saying “I don’t get it” you are in danger much faster than your coworker who is using it every day and succeeding at getting around AI’s quirks to be productive.

My wife manages 70 software developers. Her boss, the CIO, who has no practical programming experiece, is demanding her and her peers cut 50% of their staff in the next year.

Re: Something Big Is Happening

#66

Post by hackable_sand »

zem wrote: post #62
aero9188 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Few months later it was starting to become obvious it was really only a major risk if you were old or infirm, but the rest of the world had took awhile to catch up. Only a risk in terms of dying sure, but plenty of people lost taste and smell for long periods before the vaccine (I wouldn't be surprised if some of them have yet to get it back). I'd rather be dead, to be honest. The food around my part of the world i…

also people developed debilitating brain fog, chronic fatigue, and increased risk of heart trouble.

I have all of the above still

Started in Feb 2020

Re: Something Big Is Happening

#67

Post by hackable_sand »

denysvitali wrote: post #42
zparky wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, you both used the exact same prompt, how is OP 'holding it worng'?

Granted that we can't see which model was picked, but one clearly shows that thinking was enabled, the other shows it's not. This just proves the article's point about using cheap models / free versions and complaining about the state of AI. Well done!

You are proud about baking classism into your little toy?

Disgusting

Re: Something Big Is Happening

#68

Post by mattlangston »

diminish wrote: post #63
mattlangston wrote: post #47

PhD physicist (Stanford/SLAC), Research Software Engineer doing low-level systems work in C/C++ and LLM research. Not a founder or investor — just a practitioner. One data point for this thread: the jump from Opus 4.5 to 4.6 is not linear. The minor version number is misleading. In my daily work the capability difference is the largest single-model jump I've experienced, and I don't say that casually — I spent my car…

one feels the llm wow moment whenever what they do on an area has been surpassed by an llm. newer versions of llms are probably trained by the feedback from developer code agent sessions; so this is probably why pro developers started to feel "wow" recently. the real challenge will be in the frontier of the human knowledge and whether llms will be able to advance things forward or not. ps1; i'm using 5.3/o4.6/k2.5/m2…

The frontier-of-knowledge point is the right question. My own research is a case in point - I apply experimental physics methods to LLMs, measuring their equations of motion in search of a unified framework for how and why they work. Some of the answers I'm looking for may not exist in any training data.

That's where the 4.5->4.6 jump hit me hardest - not routine tasks but problems where I need the model to reason about stuff it hasn't seen. It still fails, but it went from confidently wrong to productively wrong, if that makes sense. I can actually steer it now.

The cerebellum analogy resonates. I'd go further - it's becoming something I think out loud with, which is changing how I approach problems, not just how fast I solve them.

Re: Something Big Is Happening

#69

Post by marstall »

with these posts I always wonder, what happens when this code runs into a customer? Or 1000 customers, or a million? All with their own divergent needs year over year.

I have just gotten off 3 years as a developer for that kind of project, and I used the best AI tools diligently every day. It often saved me time. Like from some small drudgery of half day of flailing about in config land. Or it could generate some nice rails controllers and a javascript front end from a well-written spec. writing tests was also a strong suit.

but just as often it failed to understand the depth of the product and its myriad concerns and led me down the garden path, reducing my efficiency.

Aside from that, a large part of my job was the parts that weren't coding - wrestling with specs that were far from ready for primetim, chaotic internal processes, deployment, internal coordination/communcation, talking to customers, etc.

In the end it seemed like it saved me maybe 20% of my time overall. Nothing to sneeze at.

I get that greenfield apps that have no customer contact can be created with a phrase now. That's pretty amazing. But I would love to see Opus 4.6 up against a real beast of a codebase that you're far from a master of.

Re: Something Big Is Happening

#70

Post by marstall »

Let's take that vibe coded product and iterate what it gave you 100 times, as you tweak it to fit your vision. When you do that 101st iteration, can you prevent it from breaking something else, or changing it in a way you don't like it?

What if it doesn't understand what you're asking it to do and keeps failing and you have to keep rolling back? Can you understand the 20,000 lines it's generated so you can make the change yourself without tearing your hair out? Can you fix bugs in it that it can't, without starting from zero and having to understand the whole codebase?

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