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The Generative AI Con

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Re: The Generative AI Con

#71

Post by spaceman_2020 »

idonotknowwhy wrote: post #25
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…

Yeah I'm surprised by all the negativity as well. I'm listening to the post right now (using xtts-v2 finetuned on a voice I like lol). Sounds like these companies are overvalued / over hyped. Maybe they are / some of these companies go the way of myspace, but LLMs are incredibly useful for me. I'm able to do a so much more using LLMs (Mistral-Large, Qwen2.5 and R1 locally, Claude via API) than without them. I have to…

Personally, I've found DeepSeek R1 to be a profoundly good model for thinking through problems across fields.

I had a complex finance situation that I was struggling with, both from a mathematical/taxation perspective and a personal psychological finance hangup. I spent a few good hours talking to it through everything and had a mental breakthrough. To get the same kind of insight, I would have to pay a financial advisor AND a psychologist for several hours.

That all of this was free while someone calls it a "con" seems completely wrong

(I got my CFA cousin to look over the numbers and he agreed with R1's advice, fwiw)

Re: The Generative AI Con

#72

Post by suraci »

this can be both true:

1. The Generative AI is very very useful

2. The Generative AI is a epic bubble and it will kill us all (financially) one day

It's entirely appropriate to describe it as a 'con', as long as you look deep enough into OpenAI, SoftBank, MSFT, NVDA, SMCI, etc.

it's a con, but it's useful, and it will kill us all

Re: The Generative AI Con

#73

Post by mylastattempt »

On LLM/ML itself: it seems a lot of cynical people start with some unreasonable idea that "AI" should be able to do what it will perhaps be able to in 10 or 100 years, and are subsequently upset that it is not capable of that yet. It may get there, it may not. But that's on you for starting with a wrong assumption.

Is the AI "business" or "market" overvalued for it's current capabilities? Yeah, I do believe so. Welcome to the financial world, which is completely separated from reality. It's like that in all sectors where something new and exciting is happening, not just IT or AI. People poor money in hoping to be early enough to make a profit. Nothing more, nothing less. The rest is marketing. Some Sam Altman guy promoting the hell out of his own product? That is literally his job, regardless of wether or not he believes it all.

But articles like these are so bizarre to me. The author acts like he has millions at stake and his money manager just won't listen and pull all investments out of AI. Hurry up, the bubble is about to burst, I will lose all my money!

Except that... they don't. They are just "old man yelling at cloud". If you believe AI is the next Metaverse or WeWork, then it will just die off by itself once the bubble pops. Why are you having so many conversations about it, where you seem to be desperately trying to convince people of the bubble/con that is AI. To the point that you're so sick of it, that you write down your arguments so you can point the blinded there instead of having those tiresome arguments.

Genuinely baffled. Spend your energy on something productive rather than destructive, perhaps?

Re: The Generative AI Con

#74

Post by suraci »

anothermathbozo wrote: post #3

This is one of the most tilted pieces I’ve ever read. For months Ed has predicted The AI Bubble will burst “any day now” frequently citing ai company’s revenue as a sign the product is not viable and the valuations are too high. The valuations seem to be primarily based on the R&D progress instead of on a theory that widespread adoption of the existing product will experience an uptick. The current landscape imho sho…

> a theory that widespread adoption of the existing product will experience an uptick

because profit of this can not cover the investment in this industry

adoption of iphone/smartphone/internet brought new products, including those for reproduction and those for consumption

but generative AI is totally different with iPhone, consumers maybe willing to buy a new ai-powered iphone __just like how they bought new iPhones for every 2years before__

> The current landscape imho should be viewed as an R&D race amongst private actors

in fact, it's a CapEx race, you don't need to R&D anything (ofc you must pretent you do)

that's why it's a con

> The AI Bubble will burst “any day now”

"The canary in the coal mine to look at is when Satya Nadella or Sundar or Zuckerberg say, ‘You know that $80bn of capex I said I was going to do? I think I’m going to cut that by two-thirds.’ That’s what you need to look for."

that's the day

Re: The Generative AI Con

#75

Post by xyzzy123 »

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…

For easy things, LLM assist has sped things up a lot for me.

For medium complexity things, I can get them done quickly without manual coding if I have a clear understanding in mind of what the implementation should look like. I supply the requirements, design and strategy and it's fairly easy to "keep things on the rails". The "write a PRD first" hack (https://www.aiagentshub.net/blog/how-to-10x-your-development...) works pretty well. Agent with YOLO mode and terminal access rips, particularly if you have good tests.

For tasks where I know the spec of the feature but don't clearly understand how I would design / implement the feature myself, it's hit-and-miss. Mostly miss for me.

I also haven't had much success with niche libraries, have to stick to the most popular library/tool/framework choices or it will quickly get stuck.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#76

Post by idonotknowwhy »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #71
idonotknowwhy wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I'm surprised by all the negativity as well. I'm listening to the post right now (using xtts-v2 finetuned on a voice I like lol). Sounds like these companies are overvalued / over hyped. Maybe they are / some of these companies go the way of myspace, but LLMs are incredibly useful for me. I'm able to do a so much more using LLMs (Mistral-Large, Qwen2.5 and R1 locally, Claude via API) than without them. I have to…

Personally, I've found DeepSeek R1 to be a profoundly good model for thinking through problems across fields. I had a complex finance situation that I was struggling with, both from a mathematical/taxation perspective and a personal psychological finance hangup. I spent a few good hours talking to it through everything and had a mental breakthrough. To get the same kind of insight, I would have to pay a financial adv…

Yeah, I've had similar experiences. I still hesitate if it's a field I don't know too well of course (never trust an LLM), but R1 has been able to solve things I've been stuck on. And watching it's process has been insightful. Only issue is that it ties up all my GPUs while I run it.

Hopefully Mistral can copy their technique and give us a 123b reasoning model.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#77

Post by audunw »

adpirz wrote: post #9
simonw wrote: post #5

> When you put aside the hype and anecdotes, generative AI has languished in the same place, even in my kindest estimations, for several months, though it's really been years. The one "big thing" that they've been able to do is to use "reasoning" to make the Large Language Models "think" [...] This is missing the most interesting changes in generative AI space over the last 18 months: - Multi-modal: LLMs can consume…

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 ridiculously primitive and janky)

Re: The Generative AI Con

#78

Post by suraci »

adpirz wrote: post #9
simonw wrote: post #5

> When you put aside the hype and anecdotes, generative AI has languished in the same place, even in my kindest estimations, for several months, though it's really been years. The one "big thing" that they've been able to do is to use "reasoning" to make the Large Language Models "think" [...] This is missing the most interesting changes in generative AI space over the last 18 months: - Multi-modal: LLMs can consume…

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…

> If nothing else, my workflows as a software developer have changed significantly in these past two years with just what's available today, and there is so much work going into making that workflow far more productive.

this is exactly the problem

The more productivity AI brings to workers, the fewer employees employers need to hire, the less salary employers need to pay, and the less money workers have for consumption.

capitalist mode of production

Re: The Generative AI Con

#79

Post by qingcharles »

simonw wrote: post #46
idonotknowwhy wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is missing the most interesting changes in generative AI space over the last 18 months I agree, though personally I'm liking the "big thing" as well. R1 is able to one-shot a lot of work for me, churning away in the background while I do other things. > Multi-modal IMO this is still early days and less reliable. What are some of your daily use cases? > Context lengths This is the biggest thing IMO (Models rema…

Multi-modal audio is great. I talk to ChatGPT when I'm cooking or walking the dog. For images I use it for things like helping draft initial alt text for images, extracting tables from screenshots, translating photos of signs in languages I don't speak - and then really fun stuff like "invent a recipe to recreate this plate of food" or "my CSS renders like this, what should I change?" or "How do you think I turn on t…

Multi-modal was the absolute game-changer.

Just last night I was digging around in my basement, pulling apart my furnace, showing pics of the inside of it, having GPT explain how it works and what I needed to do to fix it.

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