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Spending on AI Is at Epic Levels. Will It Ever Pay Off?

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Re: Spending on AI Is at Epic Levels. Will It Ever Pay Off?

#81

Post by yeasku »

majewsky wrote: post #74
yeasku wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We reemplaced one tech that was used by literally the whole world, pair copper wires, with something orders of magnitude better and future proof. My pc literally cant handle the bandwidth of my fiber connection. We did not need it? Did you ever used DSL? What is AI replacing? People?

> Did you ever use DSL? Where I live (Germany), lots of people have vDSL at advertised speeds of 100 Mib/s, using pair copper wires. Not saying that fiber is not better, it obviously is, and hence the government is subsidizing large-scale fiber buildouts. But as it stands right now, I'm confident that for 99% of consumers, vDSL is indeed enough. In the 90s and 2000s, I remember our (as in: tech nerds') argument to po…

Personally I could not work from home with adsl.

Is not only the bandwidth but latency, i get 5 ms ping to servers in eu.

The quality of life I get from that cant be paid with money.

Also with DSL because how it works they can give you only 10% of the bandwidth and is fine.

Re: Spending on AI Is at Epic Levels. Will It Ever Pay Off?

#82

Post by oblio »

0000000000100 wrote: post #70
oblio wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Its not like there is zero benefit to it, but I am genuinely curious how you get consistently correct output for a "complicated subject matter like insurance". Most likely by trying to get a promotion or bonus now and getting the hell out of Dodge before anyone notices those subtle landmines left behind :-)

Wow the bad faith is quite strong here. As it turns out, small to mid sized insurance companies have some ridiculously poorly architected front ends. Not everyone is the biggest cat in town with infinite money and expertise. I have no intention of leaving anytime soon, so I have confidence that the code that was generated by the AI (after confirming with our guy who is the insurance OG) is solid improvement over what…

The bad faith is super strong when it's being swamped by a lot more bad faith driven by greed. I'm not talking about you, but about all these companies with overnight valuations in the billions and their PR machines.

To your example, frankly, I would have started with that very important caveat, of an initial situation defined by very poor quality. It's a very valid angle as a lot of code that's available today is of very low quality and if AI can't take 1/10 or 2/10 and make it 5/10 or 6/10, yes, everyone benefits.

Re: Spending on AI Is at Epic Levels. Will It Ever Pay Off?

#83

Post by danpalmer »

bdangubic wrote: post #61
danpalmer wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you measuring increased productivity? Honest question, because I've seen teams claim more code, but I've also seen teams say they're seeing more unnecessary churn (which is more code). I'm interested in business outcomes, is more code or perceived velocity translating into benefits to the business? This is really hard to measure though because in pretty much any startup or growing company you'll see better bu…

same as we have before LLMs for a decade - story points. we move faster now, we have automated stuff we could never automate before. same project, largely same team since 2016, we just get a lot more shit done, a lot more

I'm glad you're more productive, although I would question this result both in terms of objectivity (story points are typically very subjective), and in terms of capturing all externalities of the LLM workflow. It's easy to have "build the thing", "fix the thing", "remove tech debt in the thing", "replace the thing" be 4 separate projects, each with story points, where "build the better thing" would have been one, and churn is something that is evidenced with LLM development.

Re: Spending on AI Is at Epic Levels. Will It Ever Pay Off?

#84

Post by tim333 »

rubyfan wrote: post #15

Is it possible all this capital would be better deployed creating value through jobs that leverage human creativity?

Indeed. I'm optimistic on AI but think it would be better if they spend less on data centers and more on research.

If they AI companies just charged enough to users to cover their costs then the demand would drop 10x and we wouldn't need most of the data centers.

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