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AI is different

antirez.com

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Re: AI is different

#731

Post by bigstrat2003 »

barrell wrote: post #725
gdubs wrote: post #622

AI has been improving at a very rapid pace, which means that a lot of people have really outdated priors. I see this all the time online where people are dismissive about AI in a way that suggests it's been a while since they last checked-in on the capabilities of models. They wrote off the coding ability of ChatGPT on version 3.5, for instance, and have missed all the advancements that have happened since. Or they t…

There are also a bunch of us who do kick the tires very often and are consistently underwhelmed. There are also those of us who have used them substantially, and seen the damage that causes to a codebase in the long run (in part due to the missing gains of having someone who understands the codebase). There are also those of us who just don’t like the interface of chatting with a robot instead of just solving the pro…

> There are also a bunch of us who do kick the tires very often and are consistently underwhelmed.

Yep, this is me. Every time people are like "it's improved so much" I feel like I'm taking crazy pills as a result. I try it every so often, and more often than not it still has the same exact issues it had back in the GPT-3 days. When the tool hasn't improved (in my opinion, obviously) in several years, why should I be optimistic that it'll reach the heights that advocates say it will?

Re: AI is different

#732

Post by mdaniel »

grumpy-de-sre wrote: post #262

Honestly the long-term consequences of Baumol's disease scare me more than some AI driven job disruption dystopia. If we want to continue on the path of increased human development we desperately need to lift the productivity of a whole bunch of labor intensive sectors. We're going to need to seriously think about how to redistribute the gains, but that's an issue regardless of AI (things like effective tax policy).

I didn't recognize that expression, so in case others were in the same boat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

Re: AI is different

#733

Post by palmfacehn »

antirez wrote: post #461
mgradowski wrote: post #459

I wouldn't trust a taxi driver's predictions about the future of economics and society, why would I trust some database developer's? Actually, I take that back. I might trust the taxi driver.

The point is that you don't have to "trust" me, you need to argue with me, we need to discuss about the future. This way, we can form ideas that we can use to understand if a given politician or the other will be right, when we will be called to vote. We can also form stronger ideas to try to influence other people that right now have a vague understanding of what AI is and what it could be. We will be the ones that…

Whether it is a taxi driver or a developer, when someone starts from flawed premises, I can either engage and debate or tune out and politely humor them. When the flawed premises are deeply ingrained political beliefs it is often better to simply say, "Okay buddy. If you say so..."

We've been over the topic of AI employment doom several times on this site. At this point it isn't a debate. It is simply the restating of these first principles.

Re: AI is different

#734

Post by bigstrat2003 »

loandbehold wrote: post #720
on_the_train wrote: post #708

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the reports are from shills. The impact of ai is almost non existent. The greatest impact it had was on role-playing. It's hardly even useful for coding. And that all wouldn't be a problem if it wasn't for the wave of bots that makes the crypto wave seem like child's play.

I don't understand people who say AI isn't useful for coding. Claude Code improved my productivity 10x. I used to put solid 8 hours a day in my remote software engineering job. Now I finish everything in 2 hours and go play with my kids. And my performance is better than before.

I don't understand people who say this. My knee jerk reaction (which I rein in because it's incredibly rude) is always "wow, that person must really suck at programming then". And I try to hold to the conviction that there's another explanation. For me, the vast, vast majority of the time I try to use it, AI slows my work down, it doesn't speed it up. As a result it's incredibly difficult to understand where these supposed 10x improvements are being seen.

Re: AI is different

#735

Post by pixl97 »

juniperus wrote: post #309
motorest wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're missing the point, language can be tricky. Technically, the state confiscating wealth derived from your labor through taxes is a form of robbery and slavery. You're letting your irrational biases show. To start off, social security contributions are not a tax. But putting that detail aside, do you believe that paying a private health insurance also represents slavery and robbery? Are you a slave to a private…

No, I'm a progressive and believe in socialism. But taxation is de facto a form of unpaid labor taken by the force of the state. If you don't pay your taxes, you will go to jail. It is both robbery and slavery, and in the ideal situation, it is a benevolent sort of exchange, despite existing in the realm of slavery/robbery. In a totalitarian system, it become malevolent very quickly. It also can be seen as not benevo…

Good idea, lets make taxes optional or non enforceable. What comes next. Oh right, nobody pays. The 'government' you have collapses and then strong men become warlords and set up fiefdoms that fight each other. Eventually some authoritarian gathers up enough power to unite everyone by force and you have your totalitarian system you didn't want, after a bunch of violence you didn't want.

We assume you're libertarian because you are spouting libertarian ideas that just don't work in reality.

Re: AI is different

#736

Post by mdaniel »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #370
poink wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It will undoubtedly lead to great advances "Undoubtedly" seems like a level of confidence that is unjustified. Like Travis Kalanick thinking AI is just about to help him discover new physics, this seems to suggest that AI will go from being able to do (at best) what we can already do if we were simply more diligent at our tasks to being something genuinely more than "just" us

Angela Collier has a hilarious video on tech bros thinking they can be physicists.

Is it this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmJI6qIqURA

and, germane to this discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMoz3gSXBcY vibe physics

Re: AI is different

#737

Post by PKop »

treis wrote: post #579
johnecheck wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very similar to the 'machines will do all the work, we'll just get to be artists and philosophers' idea. It sounds nice. But to have that, you need resources. Whoever controls the resources will get to decide whether you get them. If AI/machines are our entire economy, the people that control the machines control the resources. I have little faith in their benevolence. If they also control the political syste…

>This is very similar to the 'machines will do all the work, we'll just get to be artists and philosophers' idea We've come a long ways to that goal. The amount of work both economic and domestic that humans do has dropped dramatically.

There are more mouths to feed and less territory per capita for each person (thus real estate inflation in desired locations). Like lanes on a highway, the population just fills the capacity with growth without the selective pressure of even selecting for skill or ability. The ways we've come see mostly front loaded as initially population takes time to grow while the immediate low hanging fruit of domestic drudgery being eliminated was quite a while ago. Meanwhile now "work" that has filled much of that obligation in the home has expanded to necessitating two full-time income households.

Re: AI is different

#738

Post by barrell »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #731
barrell wrote: post #725

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are also a bunch of us who do kick the tires very often and are consistently underwhelmed. There are also those of us who have used them substantially, and seen the damage that causes to a codebase in the long run (in part due to the missing gains of having someone who understands the codebase). There are also those of us who just don’t like the interface of chatting with a robot instead of just solving the pro…

> There are also a bunch of us who do kick the tires very often and are consistently underwhelmed. Yep, this is me. Every time people are like "it's improved so much" I feel like I'm taking crazy pills as a result. I try it every so often, and more often than not it still has the same exact issues it had back in the GPT-3 days. When the tool hasn't improved (in my opinion, obviously) in several years, why should I be…

haha I have to laugh because I’ve probably said “I feel like I’m taking crazy pills” at least 20 times this week (I spent a day using cursor with the new GPT and was thoroughly, thoroughly unimpressed).

I’m open to programming with LLMs, and I’m entirely fine with people using them and I’m glad people are happy. But this insistence that progress is so crazy that you have to be tapped in at all times just irks me.

LLM models are like iPhones. You can skip a couple versions it’s fine, you will have the new version at the same time with all the same functionality as everyone else buying one every year.

Re: AI is different

#739

Post by vlovich123 »

Eggpants wrote: post #661
vlovich123 wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that different than the models today are actually usable for non trivial things and more capable than yesterdays and it’s also true that tomorrow’s models will also probably be more capable than today’s? For example, I dismissed AI three years ago because it couldn’t do anything I needed it to. Today I use it for certain things and it’s not quite capable of other things. Tomorrow it might be capable of a lot m…

It’s not that the LLMs are better, it’s the internal tools/functions being called that do the actual work are better. They didn’t spend millions to retrain a model to statistically output the number of r’s in strawberry, but just offloaded that trivial question to a function call. So I would say the overall service provided is better than it was, thanks to functions being built based on user queries, but not the actu…

LLMs are definitely better quality today than 3 years ago at codegen quality - there’s quantitative benchmarks as well as for me my personal qualitative experience (given the gaming that companies engage in).

It is also true that the tooling and context management has gotten more sophisticated (often using models by the way). That doesn’t negate that the models themselves have gotten better at reliable tool calling so that the LLM is driving more of the show rather than purpose built coordination into the LLM and that the codegen quality is higher than it used to be.

Re: AI is different

#740

Post by libraryofbabel »

barrell wrote: post #725
gdubs wrote: post #622

AI has been improving at a very rapid pace, which means that a lot of people have really outdated priors. I see this all the time online where people are dismissive about AI in a way that suggests it's been a while since they last checked-in on the capabilities of models. They wrote off the coding ability of ChatGPT on version 3.5, for instance, and have missed all the advancements that have happened since. Or they t…

There are also a bunch of us who do kick the tires very often and are consistently underwhelmed. There are also those of us who have used them substantially, and seen the damage that causes to a codebase in the long run (in part due to the missing gains of having someone who understands the codebase). There are also those of us who just don’t like the interface of chatting with a robot instead of just solving the pro…

There’s really three points mixed up in here.

1) LLMs are controlled by BigCorps who don’t have user’s best interests at heart.

2) I don’t like LLMs and don’t use them because they spoil my feeling of craftsmanship.

3) LLMs can’t be useful to anyone because I “kick the tires” every so often and am underwhelmed. (But what did you actually try? Do tell.)

#1 is obviously true and is a problem, but it’s just capitalism. #2 is a personal choice, you do you etc., but it’s also kinda betting your career on AI failing. You may or may not have a technical niche where you’ll be fine for the next decade, but would you really in good conscience recommend a juniorish web dev take this position? #3 is a rather strong claim because it requires you to claim that a lot of smart reasonable programmers who see benefits from AI use are deluded. (Not everyone who says they get some benefit from AI is a shill or charlatan.)

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