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The Generative AI Con

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Re: The Generative AI Con

#91

Post by levkk »

If my Android (or IPhone) disappeared tomorrow, I would feel like I time traveled back a century. If Google search was gone, I wouldn't be able to do my job anymore. If the cloud disappeared, I wouldn't be able to build apps anymore. There are no workarounds, unless you feel like going to a library...?

If ChatGPT disappeared tomorrow (or derivatives like Copilot, etc.), I would be mildly inconvenienced. Then I'd go back to reading docs, writing code slightly slower and carry on. In fact, I did this already, several times (Copilot with GPT-3.5, Cursor, Copilot with GPT-4, Zed with Claude, etc.)

Re: The Generative AI Con

#92

Post by danroblew »

mylastattempt wrote: post #73

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. Welco…

Trillions of dollars, dude. They need to make trillions of dollars to satisfy their investors.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#93

Post by SolarNet »

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…

I feel like you missed the first third of this article that was quite clear they are not saying there are no uses cases. They are saying there doesn't seem to be an economic model that makes sense.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#94

Post by jemmyw »

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…

I was thinking the same but it's not really what the post is about. They talk about there are use cases for LLMs and devs can be benefiting.

What it goes into is how over hyped and over valued these companies are. They've blown through $5bn of compute each in a year and their revenue is abysmal. Microsoft won't report on ai separately, probably because it's abysmal.

I'm positive on LLMs for coding. But I think I have to agree with their assessment. Coding seems like the best area for these tools and what we see now is great. It's probably even worth $10b to the IT industry maybe eventually. But they're not paying for it yet, clearly. And I also think it's just not going to have huge significance outside our industry. The people I rub shoulders with outside of work have not mentioned or asked about it once, which is not necessarily meaningful but it does reveal the limits of hype too.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#95

Post by peteforde »

I would be highly amused if the OP revealed that the essay/rant had been written by o3-mini tomorrow.

While I don't really understand what fuels this person's Substack Forensic Journalist energy, I can only say that I am thrilled to pay $20 to OpenAI because it delivers outrageous value to me as a solo, self-taught "engineer"* designing reasonably complex physical devices intended for sale. Air quotes because here in Ontario, if you don't got the ring, you don't got no business using the title.

So my first hand gut reaction is that people who cannot fathom meaningful use of modern LLMs are by definition people who are not trying to solve complex problems in domains they aren't yet super confident in. No judgement, and this is intentionally reductive; an LLM skeptic is lots of other things, too. Just saying that if you want to build hard things, reasoning models are dramatic force multipliers.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#96

Post by advael »

xnx wrote: post #54
advael wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I swear no matter how many times people say it people will still conflate all ML with LLMs. No, chatGPT is not driving advances in self-driving or weather prediction

For better or worse, "LLM" or "generative ai" has become roughly synonymous with the current wave of ML. I know very little about ChatGPT, but Waymo is using an LLM: "Powered by Gemini, a multimodal large language model developed by Google, EMMA employs a unified, end-to-end trained model to generate future trajectories for autonomous vehicles directly from sensor data." ( https://waymo.com/blog/2024/10/introducing-e…

Huh. I mean it makes sense to train end-to-end on all the interrelated tasks involved in driving but putting a whole-ass language model in the middle of that seems like a stunt. I wonder if it does better than like, any random transformer not trained on language first? Still, I hadn't heard that so I guess I was wrong about that one

Re: The Generative AI Con

#97

Post by automatic6131 »

bccdee wrote: post #13
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.

Tbh they'd have been right. Cars are expensive to buy and to maintain. They are difficult to operate—people die every day. They do smell bad, and the particulate matter they emit is extremely bad for you. And they are slow: Traffic is an unsolvable problem in urban centres. Redesigning our cities around cars was one of the big mistakes of the 20th century.

>Redesigning our cities around cars was one of the big mistakes of the 20th century.

Cities have been designed around Carriages for millenia. You can go and walk in Pompeii and observe pavements for pedestrians, roads for wheeled carriages with crossing spots of elevated stones for pedestrians.

It turns out that cities require a lot of goods to be moved through - more than a pedestrian can carry, and over inclines that human muscle power doesn't like.

The reason why cities are designed around cars is that cars were designed to fit in contemporary cities and they co-evolved over the 20th century. It was the slow kind of evolution, with each step being easier and cheaper than the big redesign.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#98

Post by danroblew »

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.

People like the horse joke, but it works with computers in general. The best argument in favor of computers in the 80s was to save paper, otherwise they were expensive and overcomplicated.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#100

Post by stavros »

jayd16 wrote: post #18
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…

Unreliable tools are utterly exhausting. > not much worse than a junior dev and 100x faster. Is there a greater hell than this!?

"It makes lots of mistakes, but at least it makes them quickly!"
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