7 ms·

I’ve recently thought about iron man movies, where tony stark actually designs stuffs by simply talking to jarvis. I’ve always thought « if only i could have th

by bsaul 4y ago

I’ve recently thought about iron man movies, where tony stark actually designs stuffs by simply talking to jarvis. I’ve always thought « if only i could have those kind of tools available, i would too be able to design crazy stuffs ». We didn’t think « damn, tony stark didn’t have to write a line of code, he got rendered obsolete by this damn AI ». That’s how i choose to think about AI tools for developers from now on.

swyx 4y ago
its also escapist fiction, while tech in the real world very much has disproportionate negative impact on some parts of the population :) but i support your optimism because what else are we gonna do
jrumbut 4y ago
It works for Tony Stark because he gets the economic benefit of that AI's output. I hope that we get there, but it won't happen by default.
- valine 4y ago
  Can you think of any category of software that doesn't eventually have an open source alternative? There are many open source projects orders of magnitude more complicated than a LLM. The linux kernel, Blender, Firefox, etc. These LLMs aren't inherently complicated to implement, just expensive to train. And if the LLaMA release/leak is anything to go by we are extremely close to ChatGPT running on consumer hardware.
  - jrumbut 4y ago
    Straining this metaphor beyond all recognition, it seems like Tony Stark's AI allows him to be the entire military industrial complex with a tiny headcount, since it's hooked up to a highly automated factory. He is able to use the AI the way he uses it because he inherited an arms company. So maybe everyone can have their own Jarvis, but theirs won't be hooked up to a factory. I guess it can help them forage for food and remind them that their rent is past due. But that's not an appealing future.
    - valine 4y ago
      I don’t know about a factory, but 3D printers, lathes and Arduinos are pretty cheap. Even PCBs are manufacturable at home with a little creativity and patience. If you’ve ever watched Stuff Made Here on youtube, imagine people inventing things like that on a mass scale. That’s a future I want to live in, the pace of technological progress would be staggering.
      - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
        3D printers are cute and all, but untill it can build a car engine, this is not a valid argument
        valine 4y ago
        I bet with a lathe, a 3d printer and AGI you could make the tools you need to build an engine. I’m not sure why you would though, since electric motors are both the future and 3D printable.
        pksebben 4y ago
        if it can't print a horse, what's the point?
        ClumsyPilot 4y ago
        With a lathe and hand tools you Can build an engine, that's how first engines were built. If that's the criteria, AI and 3D printing are superfluous. What are they contributing?
        valine 4y ago
        Presumably running the lathe/printer, drawing schematics and providing step by step directions unique to the materials you can afford.
        ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  - layer8 4y ago
    It could turn into a Microsoft Office situation where the integrations couple so strongly that it’s very difficult to compete.
  - inawarminister 4y ago
    fwiw I've been experimenting with 75% Pygmalion 25% ppo_hh mixed GPT-J models and it seems to be 80% as useful as chatGPT... With the exception of coding. Hope we can get there.
- the_only_law 4y ago
  It works for tony stark because he’s a fictional comic book character and there probably wasn’t that much thought put into it.
  - jrumbut 4y ago
    Well that too, but I think there is something to it as an image of what is possible.
mdgrech23 4y ago
As someone who has been in the game a long time let me tell you that as our tools have gotten better user expectations have gotten way higher. I would argue that it's actually harder than ever before to deliver a true first class product for mobile or web.
- visarga 4y ago
  That's what the hivemind says - AI will automate all our jobs. Well, yes it will automate a lot, but we won't be having the same expectations in a few years. The bar will rise so high we'll still have jobs with AI on top. There's also a small little thing called competition. When your competitors use AI, your job just got harder.
vasco 4y ago
Let's hope in reality it isn't available only to the billionnaire owners of software companies. In those movies everyone else wasn't designing cool suites by talking to voice assistants.
- atonse 4y ago
  It won’t be. Some of the biggest companies in the tech world got that way by building platforms and ecosystems that others build on top of. AWS and Azure the most obvious examples. What’s more likely is that someone like a Microsoft will make it part of their cloud offerings so devs like us can build things on top. Why try to capture every market when you can build tools and take percentages of the rest of the economy?
- bko 4y ago
  The marginal cost of technology is pretty close to zero (albeit slightly higher for large LLM model inference) so it would make sense that the technology gets distributed widely. Kind of like how everyone has essentially the best smart phone. And it's laughable when someone tries to create a luxury smartphone for $10k and its just a sub-par Android with leather accents. If you have a technology with practically zero marginal cost, pricing it very low and distributing it widely would maximize your profit. Not to mention that once its out of the bag, others will know that its possible and copy it. [0] https://newatlas.com/vertu-ti-luxury-10000-dollar-android-smartphone/26255/ https://newatlas.com/vertu-ti-luxury-10000-dollar-android-sm...
  - afpx 4y ago
    The problem won't be the cost. It will be access. Someone's going to say it's too powerful and restrict it.
    - antibasilisk 4y ago
      A similar thing also applies to all arguments in favor of transhumanism, which is worth pointing out
  - 4y ago
thih9 4y ago
I don’t see it like that. To me it illustrates that if you have money and want to build something, you don’t need to hire coders or have any coding skills, AI will help. And if you’re a regular coder, you just got replaced by Jarvis.
- dimal 4y ago
  Software development isn’t just “writing code”. It’s knowing what code to write. It’s knowing how to accomplish a goal using code. It’s knowing how to structure all of your code to work together. It’s knowing how to adapt code to meet new requirements. I don’t foresee rich “idea” guys figuring out how to do that any time soon.
  - thih9 4y ago
    Then again, AI is making unforeseen advances.
snozolli 4y ago
damn, tony stark didn’t have to write a line of code, he got rendered obsolete by this damn AI I was watching one of the movies and Stark was flying around some baddie castle/base. He tells Jarvis to locate all the missile placements and, when that's done, he tells Jarvis to target them. That was when I thought, "oh, he's just a middle manager now" and lost interest. I'm less concerned that AI tools will replace developers in the short term, and more concerned that it will encourage incompetent management to try their hand at "contributing" to projects using AI tools, creating more headaches for the developers. Kind of like how Blackberries made managers feel super productive firing off emails, while adding significantly to the work load of those under them.
preommr 4y ago
> We didn’t think « damn, tony stark didn’t have to write a line of code, he got rendered obsolete by this damn AI » Because it's a movie. In reality an AI like that would be more important than all the other nonsense. But it wouldn't be fun to watch an AI easily unravel the mysteries of magic, time travel, multiverse, etc.
aaron695 4y ago
[dead]
rg111 4y ago
Tony Stark inherited tens of billions of dollars. YOU DIDN'T. And, so, if we get Jarvis level AI, and you will get rendered obsolete. When these tools come, inheriting billionaires will hire 10 people with Tony Stark intelligence as opposed to 10,000 devs with your level of intelligence. So, don't be in denial that you will be made obsolete. (And probably so will I.)

by bsaul 4y ago

swyx 4y ago

its also escapist fiction, while tech in the real world very much has disproportionate negative impact on some parts of the population :) but i support your optimism because what else are we gonna do

jrumbut 4y ago

It works for Tony Stark because he gets the economic benefit of that AI's output. I hope that we get there, but it won't happen by default.

valine 4y ago
Can you think of any category of software that doesn't eventually have an open source alternative? There are many open source projects orders of magnitude more complicated than a LLM. The linux kernel, Blender, Firefox, etc. These LLMs aren't inherently complicated to implement, just expensive to train. And if the LLaMA release/leak is anything to go by we are extremely close to ChatGPT running on consumer hardware.
- jrumbut 4y ago
  Straining this metaphor beyond all recognition, it seems like Tony Stark's AI allows him to be the entire military industrial complex with a tiny headcount, since it's hooked up to a highly automated factory. He is able to use the AI the way he uses it because he inherited an arms company. So maybe everyone can have their own Jarvis, but theirs won't be hooked up to a factory. I guess it can help them forage for food and remind them that their rent is past due. But that's not an appealing future.
  - valine 4y ago
    I don’t know about a factory, but 3D printers, lathes and Arduinos are pretty cheap. Even PCBs are manufacturable at home with a little creativity and patience. If you’ve ever watched Stuff Made Here on youtube, imagine people inventing things like that on a mass scale. That’s a future I want to live in, the pace of technological progress would be staggering.
    - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      3D printers are cute and all, but untill it can build a car engine, this is not a valid argument
      - valine 4y ago
        I bet with a lathe, a 3d printer and AGI you could make the tools you need to build an engine. I’m not sure why you would though, since electric motors are both the future and 3D printable.
        pksebben 4y ago
        if it can't print a horse, what's the point?
        ClumsyPilot 4y ago
        With a lathe and hand tools you Can build an engine, that's how first engines were built. If that's the criteria, AI and 3D printing are superfluous. What are they contributing?
        valine 4y ago
        Presumably running the lathe/printer, drawing schematics and providing step by step directions unique to the materials you can afford.
        ClumsyPilot 4y ago
- layer8 4y ago
  It could turn into a Microsoft Office situation where the integrations couple so strongly that it’s very difficult to compete.
- inawarminister 4y ago
  fwiw I've been experimenting with 75% Pygmalion 25% ppo_hh mixed GPT-J models and it seems to be 80% as useful as chatGPT... With the exception of coding. Hope we can get there.
the_only_law 4y ago
It works for tony stark because he’s a fictional comic book character and there probably wasn’t that much thought put into it.
- jrumbut 4y ago
  Well that too, but I think there is something to it as an image of what is possible.

mdgrech23 4y ago

As someone who has been in the game a long time let me tell you that as our tools have gotten better user expectations have gotten way higher. I would argue that it's actually harder than ever before to deliver a true first class product for mobile or web.

visarga 4y ago
That's what the hivemind says - AI will automate all our jobs. Well, yes it will automate a lot, but we won't be having the same expectations in a few years. The bar will rise so high we'll still have jobs with AI on top. There's also a small little thing called competition. When your competitors use AI, your job just got harder.

vasco 4y ago

Let's hope in reality it isn't available only to the billionnaire owners of software companies. In those movies everyone else wasn't designing cool suites by talking to voice assistants.

atonse 4y ago
It won’t be. Some of the biggest companies in the tech world got that way by building platforms and ecosystems that others build on top of. AWS and Azure the most obvious examples. What’s more likely is that someone like a Microsoft will make it part of their cloud offerings so devs like us can build things on top. Why try to capture every market when you can build tools and take percentages of the rest of the economy?
bko 4y ago
The marginal cost of technology is pretty close to zero (albeit slightly higher for large LLM model inference) so it would make sense that the technology gets distributed widely. Kind of like how everyone has essentially the best smart phone. And it's laughable when someone tries to create a luxury smartphone for $10k and its just a sub-par Android with leather accents. If you have a technology with practically zero marginal cost, pricing it very low and distributing it widely would maximize your profit. Not to mention that once its out of the bag, others will know that its possible and copy it. [0] https://newatlas.com/vertu-ti-luxury-10000-dollar-android-smartphone/26255/ https://newatlas.com/vertu-ti-luxury-10000-dollar-android-sm...
- afpx 4y ago
  The problem won't be the cost. It will be access. Someone's going to say it's too powerful and restrict it.
  - antibasilisk 4y ago
    A similar thing also applies to all arguments in favor of transhumanism, which is worth pointing out
- 4y ago

thih9 4y ago

I don’t see it like that. To me it illustrates that if you have money and want to build something, you don’t need to hire coders or have any coding skills, AI will help. And if you’re a regular coder, you just got replaced by Jarvis.

dimal 4y ago
Software development isn’t just “writing code”. It’s knowing what code to write. It’s knowing how to accomplish a goal using code. It’s knowing how to structure all of your code to work together. It’s knowing how to adapt code to meet new requirements. I don’t foresee rich “idea” guys figuring out how to do that any time soon.
- thih9 4y ago
  Then again, AI is making unforeseen advances.

snozolli 4y ago

damn, tony stark didn’t have to write a line of code, he got rendered obsolete by this damn AI I was watching one of the movies and Stark was flying around some baddie castle/base. He tells Jarvis to locate all the missile placements and, when that's done, he tells Jarvis to target them. That was when I thought, "oh, he's just a middle manager now" and lost interest. I'm less concerned that AI tools will replace developers in the short term, and more concerned that it will encourage incompetent management to try their hand at "contributing" to projects using AI tools, creating more headaches for the developers. Kind of like how Blackberries made managers feel super productive firing off emails, while adding significantly to the work load of those under them.

preommr 4y ago

> We didn’t think « damn, tony stark didn’t have to write a line of code, he got rendered obsolete by this damn AI » Because it's a movie. In reality an AI like that would be more important than all the other nonsense. But it wouldn't be fun to watch an AI easily unravel the mysteries of magic, time travel, multiverse, etc.

aaron695 4y ago

[dead]

rg111 4y ago

Tony Stark inherited tens of billions of dollars. YOU DIDN'T. And, so, if we get Jarvis level AI, and you will get rendered obsolete. When these tools come, inheriting billionaires will hire 10 people with Tony Stark intelligence as opposed to 10,000 devs with your level of intelligence. So, don't be in denial that you will be made obsolete. (And probably so will I.)