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The Generative AI Con

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Re: The Generative AI Con

#81

Post by danroblew »

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…

The article is about how the economics of the LLM market is making all tech look bad.

They need trillions of dollars in returns. VC's won't finance tech startups for decades.

I use Cursor sometimes, and VSCode + Continue with llama.cpp, and it's great. That's not worth billions. It's definitely not worth trillions.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#82

Post by notpachet »

stuckkeys wrote: post #36
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…

Honestyl. It has its drawbacks but I am usually at 50x with few different agents running side by side. What we need is better GPU competition with tons of ram.

Doesn't that just scream "bad design" at you? Shouldn't we be aiming for agents that require less GPU? And agents that are good enough that we don't have to shop around for "competing prices" on answers?

Re: The Generative AI Con

#83

Post by rainonmoon »

int_19h wrote: post #45

This reads like a straightforward rant to me, not something informative. Which then invites the question: why is this person's opinion on the subject relevant? Do they have some credentials that make it more valuable than a random comment with a similar rant (of which there are plenty) on Reddit or HN?

I mean we insist on enduring Paul Graham's every brainfart on this website so why not other bloggers?

Re: The Generative AI Con

#84

Post by danroblew »

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…

Cost as in, cost to you? Or cost to serve?

If the cost-to-serve is subsidized by VC money, they aren't getting cheaper, they're just leading you on.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#85

Post by suraci »

lukevp wrote: post #7

Why in the world would you want a car?? They are horrible to maintain, difficult to operate, expensive, smell bad, and are slower than horses! -somebody salty about automobiles, circa 1900.

it's different

car is consumer goods, we buy cars for use, not for reproduction

Re: The Generative AI Con

#86

Post by danroblew »

alvah wrote: post #14

Ed occasionally makes good points, but he's very very angry at Big Tech, and his anger often gets in the way of his message. Reading his latest rant reminds me of Karl Denninger railing against Google around the time of their IPO, claiming they would never make enough money to justify an $85 share price (a $1000 investment then would be worth around $375,000 today).

Maybe OpenAI can become an advertising company?

Re: The Generative AI Con

#87

Post by automatic6131 »

danroblew wrote: post #81
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…

The article is about how the economics of the LLM market is making all tech look bad. They need trillions of dollars in returns. VC's won't finance tech startups for decades. I use Cursor sometimes, and VSCode + Continue with llama.cpp, and it's great. That's not worth billions. It's definitely not worth trillions.

This is the crux. A cool thing has been invented, with real usages. Unfortunately, it's cost hundreds of billions of dollars and it has absolutely zero hope of making the trillions needed to justify that.

Now someone will respond about how it's just a stepping stone, and how the billions are justified by _something completely imaginary, and not invented yet, and maybe not ever_ e.g. agents.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#88

Post by automatic6131 »

alvah wrote: post #61
ksynwa wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what should one do when one notices a bubble?

If I had a reliable / repeatable answer to that question, my net worth would be a very large multiple of what it currently is!

And a Nobel prize in economics to your name!

Re: The Generative AI Con

#89

Post by alvah »

danroblew wrote: post #86
alvah wrote: post #14

Ed occasionally makes good points, but he's very very angry at Big Tech, and his anger often gets in the way of his message. Reading his latest rant reminds me of Karl Denninger railing against Google around the time of their IPO, claiming they would never make enough money to justify an $85 share price (a $1000 investment then would be worth around $375,000 today).

Maybe OpenAI can become an advertising company?

Maybe. Did you foresee Google becoming a massively profitable advertising company with a search engine attached in 2004? I certainly didn't.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#90

Post by danroblew »

BrenBarn wrote: post #70

A huge part of our problems stems from the fact that it's possible to make "companies" whose business model is built on losing money hand over fist until they've brainwashed everyone into thinking their "product" is good. In a sane world these companies would fail and AI would continue develop through small failures and small successes over a period of years or decades. Instead we get a firehose of nonsense just beca…

On the plus side, if all the AI companies collapse there will be a lot of spare hardware.

Open source projects would have a lot more compute to work with.

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