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Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster

theatlantic.com

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Re: Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster

#71

Post by try_the_bass »

watwut wrote: post #12
throwaway323929 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of just rejecting the future like a Roman fatalist because you've decided that it's just going to be someone else controlling you, maybe a better plan is to adopt emerging technology when it comes into play (like for example when the Internet came into play) and use it to start your own company, or make yourself more productive, or disrupt an industry that desperately needs it. I shouldn't have to explain the…

> disrupt an industry that desperately needs it. Why is the primary tech people impulse to disrupt, destroy and harm other industries? Maybe that is why we dont produce useful tech anymore. The primary impulse is always hostile, rarely something like "lets create and sell a useful thing for them". > adopt emerging technology when it comes into play (like for example when the Internet came into play) and use it to sta…

> Why is the primary tech people impulse to disrupt, destroy and harm other industries? Maybe that is why we dont produce useful tech anymore. The primary impulse is always hostile, rarely something like "lets create and sell a useful thing for them".

I think you misunderstand what disruption means in this context? Disruption means pursuing the same market as some incumbents, with the express goal of serving that market better/faster/more efficiently.

The impulse is hostile to the incumbents, but (in principle) good for the market: the market is getting competition, and competition is one way to make things cheaper/better/etc.

Obviously what this looks like varies by market, but the principle is very different from how you're presenting it

Re: Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster

#72

Post by satvikpendem »

watwut wrote: post #69
satvikpendem wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes the other industries are just bad, like Uber for taxis or Airbnb for hotels. Now the disrupted industries have gotten somewhat better but only due to competition. And disruption doesn't always mean destruction, it's just a word that is used, not to necessarily be taken literally.

Hotels did not got better. They are about the same. Uber sold rides under pruce for years and then pushed expensis on deivers. In my city, Uber is just like any other taxi company. >;And disruption doesn't always mean destruction, it's just a word that is used, not to necessarily be taken literally. It means exactly that tho. When tech people talk about disruption, they dont talk about creating better products, they…

I'd rather take an Uber, with an app and no tip or meter without redzoning than any taxi, same with Airbnb and having a full kitchen everywhere I go. So the disruption was in fact good for many facets of society. It is useful, otherwise so many would not, well, use it.

Re: Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster

#73

Post by unknownfuture »

try_the_bass wrote: post #70
blinkbat wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's really funny when people advise the fix for widespread sociological problems as "just become an entrepreneur and disrupt an industry bro"

I mean, that is the essence of how to fix the problems in a capitalist society? One of the core tenets of capitalism is that one person's profits are another person's opportunity. If the latter can do the work/obtain the capital to break into the industry, they can capture some of those profits by offering competition at a lower price point. I don't think the person you're bagging on is saying it's easy to do; but th…

> I mean, that is the essence of how to fix the problems in a capitalist society?

So... we're just gonna forget that governments exist?

We gonna assume rivers would've stopped burning in the US if only there had just been more startups working on making rivers stop burning?

Re: Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster

#74

Post by unknownfuture »

simianwords wrote: post #46

[flagged]

> This is obviously untrue so either the author is knowingly lying or is plain incompetent. We had LLMs not being able to do simple high school mathematics a year back, now it is solving open problems in mathematics. Fields medalists in physics and mathematics are using it on a daily basis.

I'm confused, how do you think this disproves the claim in the article?

What do you think that quoted portion was talking about?

Re: Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster

#75

Post by Rury »

neonstatic wrote: post #67
xg15 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never got the logic of "I don't like this thing, so why does it exist?" Others might not have a choice than to take the train or use public healthcare (or maybe you or me too, depending on how life turns out), and for that I'm glad they are of decent quality. Then there are the CO2 emissions of planes, but that's another topic...

> I never got the logic of "I don't like this thing, so why does it exist?" Nice straw man. I never said trains should not exist. I was merely talking about the fixation on trains, which is palpable in Europe.

There are more numerous cases where cities happen to be situated fairly close together in Europe, where trains actually are a more sensible travel option, hence the fixation there.

Planes instead make more sense the further you must travel.

I mean, depending on circumstances, it takes nearly the same amount of time to travel from Chicago to St. Louis by plane as it does by car. Something shorter than that and it can actually take longer to get there by plane than it does by car. I mean no one takes a plane to travel to a city that's only 30 minutes away by car - as it often takes longer to get through airport security and board a plane than that.

Re: Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster

#76

Post by JackSlateur »

scotty79 wrote: post #68
JackSlateur wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creating fake problems is not a caracteristic I would give to "a successful civilization" :)

Each solution generates new problems. That's the general physics of intelligence in our universe. Also label of "fake" is completely arbitrary. Because someone might call cancer a fake problem, because people shouldn't live too long and they need a reason to die.

A colleague of mine is fan of AI and we have, from time to time, serious discussion about that topic

Last week, I asked him in all seriousness: considering that everything you say is correct .. why the hell does you product still sucks ?!

He answered me: because of people

Perhaps people is the only problem that need solving :(

Re: Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster

#77

Post by tedggh »

maxcb wrote: post #3

Comparing how traditional tech companies scale to how frontier AI companies scale doesn't seem very fair to me. AI is still relatively new territory, in comparison traditional software companies benefit from decades of investment in cloud infrastructure, networking, and hardware. I'm certain those technologies also went through periods of heavy investment before they became scalable. The author also talks about advan…

I think LLMs, with only a few exceptions, have mostly created the illusion of value. It’s undeniable I can write code, troubleshoot and document much faster than in the pre LLM era, but putting a dollar value to that it’s not particularly easy. One group of people being 100x faster at one task doesn’t mean the organization as a whole runs at 100x the speed, in fact in most cases where the bottle neck is somewhere else, the productivity gains of the 100x group have little to no impact, or even a negative impact in some cases due to token overspending.

Re: Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster

#78

Post by naveen99 »

tedggh wrote: post #77
maxcb wrote: post #3

Comparing how traditional tech companies scale to how frontier AI companies scale doesn't seem very fair to me. AI is still relatively new territory, in comparison traditional software companies benefit from decades of investment in cloud infrastructure, networking, and hardware. I'm certain those technologies also went through periods of heavy investment before they became scalable. The author also talks about advan…

I think LLMs, with only a few exceptions, have mostly created the illusion of value. It’s undeniable I can write code, troubleshoot and document much faster than in the pre LLM era, but putting a dollar value to that it’s not particularly easy. One group of people being 100x faster at one task doesn’t mean the organization as a whole runs at 100x the speed, in fact in most cases where the bottle neck is somewhere els…

How about sole proprietors?

Re: Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster

#79

Post by neonstatic »

Rury wrote: post #75
neonstatic wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I never got the logic of "I don't like this thing, so why does it exist?" Nice straw man. I never said trains should not exist. I was merely talking about the fixation on trains, which is palpable in Europe.

There are more numerous cases where cities happen to be situated fairly close together in Europe, where trains actually are a more sensible travel option, hence the fixation there. Planes instead make more sense the further you must travel. I mean, depending on circumstances, it takes nearly the same amount of time to travel from Chicago to St. Louis by plane as it does by car. Something shorter than that and it can…

3 years ago I was traveling from northern Poland to southern Poland by train - the only option unless you have a car. It so happened that my family was flying from Toronto to Warsaw at the exact same time. They arrived before I did and were much more comfortable than I was, too. Not to mention the safety aspect.

Of course if we're talking about cities that are 20-30 minutes away by car, then flying would not be reasonable.

Re: Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster

#80

Post by mlsu »

inigyou wrote: post #24
tharmas wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that it is rent-seeking and asset accumulation that is a big problem. If the wealthy elite invested in production rather than consuming assets that would improve things. I don't share his politics but someone like Elon Musk at least invests in production whereas Blackrock is heavily into asset accumulation. However, part of the problem of why the wealthy elite don't invest in production is because of th…

They are neither investing in production nor consuming assets really. Any billionaire's yacht is an insignificant fraction of the world's resources. What matters is capital misallocation - they are investing in things that aren't productive that they think are productive and because they have too much money to invest, a too great share of society's resources are going towards those unproductive investments and produc…

This is why capital accumulation, of the extreme kind we see today in the USA, is wrong. Not because greed is a sin (although, it is, and most of these guys are going to burn in hell), but because it turns the country into functionally the USSR bureaucracy. We are basically doing central planning in huge swathes of the economy and surprise surprises, it’s not working.
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