8 ms·

I'm expecting a sobering year for AI in 2024, a result fueled by marketing gimmicks, closed training data and weights, false promises, chaos in recruiting, more

by nbzso 3y ago

I'm expecting a sobering year for AI in 2024, a result fueled by marketing gimmicks, closed training data and weights, false promises, chaos in recruiting, more tech layoffs due to economy (and false hopes for AI-powered workforce replacement), demotivation in the young workforce, etc. Another reality hit for AI implementation will be the cost of generative AI API services and environmental impact of the process of training the models. But I am not a Doctor, and CTO of big monopolist and I don't have a stake to sell you AI cloud services. So who knows..

bluGill 3y ago
I think it will be a few more years before the hype dies down enough for sane heads to realize that. Change the year though and you are correct.
reqo 3y ago
Another probable bad side effect of AI will be that a generation of developers will become dependent on copilot/chatgpt to be able to write code! They will definitely perform worse than before llm era without the help of a llm!
- mewpmewp2 3y ago
  Same could be said about developing with Notepad as opposed to modern IDEs though.
  - thinkingtoilet 3y ago
    Did modern IDEs start writing code for you when you made the jump from Notepad?
    - mjr00 3y ago
      In a lot of ways, yeah. Autocomplete is an absolute game changer and one of the biggest reasons that static typing came back in vogue and crushed dynamic languages. Massive productivity gains when you can ctrl+space and see all of the methods available on a variable, or use a hotkey to figure out if the method you want to call is `do_foo_bar` or `do_foo_and_bar`.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - pipes 3y ago
        I'm not sure I buy that argument about dynamic languages. You are probably right in that auto complete played a role, but for me working on a pure node js app back in 2014ish, it was a nightmare of runtime issues that type checking would have eliminated. The productivity gain in a typed language was not having to write unit tests for things that static typing does for free.
        mjr00 3y ago
        I agree with you, autocomplete definitely isn't the only reason for static typing making a comeback and dynamic language popularity dying off (and the big legacy names like Javascript and Python have Typescript and mypy/pyright to transform them into a facsimile of one). I think a lot of it has to do with maturity, where a lot of "move fast and break things" devs who loved untyped Node/PHP/Python got burned by bugs and impossible to comprehend legacy codebases and slowly realized the value of static typing. But that type of understanding takes years. A novice programmer can see the value of autocomplete and not having to check the docs or stackoverflow for the name of a method pretty much instantly.
      - wintogreen74 3y ago
        autocomplete accurately took care of a lot of the boilerplate; that low-hanging fruit has been picked. AI is not doing the same IME, the pay-off has been a lot slower coming, and sometimes it's making the work more painful.
        mjr00 3y ago
        I do agree. It's hard to get an unbiased assessment of how many developers are actually using generative AI (copilot/chatgpt) for work, and in what capacity they do use them. Anecdotally, at my org of ~40 devs, we encouraged everyone to try out Copilot and let us know if they wanted a full license; only 2 people took up the offer, and they use it either for generating unit tests or translating English data logic to pandas syntax (which it does seem quite good at!)
- blastro 3y ago
  All skills that the AI facilitates will be like this until all we can do is operate the AI
  - willsmith72 3y ago
    Exactly. We don't need an abacus. We need a human able to input the right variables into a computer and get the result.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- digging 3y ago
  But when would they not have the help of an LLM? We are all dependent on the tools we use. That's not a bad thing. The biggest risk is that it perhaps becomes more difficult to sift out bad developers from good ones, because LLMs let bad developers "cheat" more easily. But that's not a new problem, just a new era of the same problem.
  - rurp 3y ago
    If the best coding LLMs end up monopolized as much as most areas of the tech industry it will be very easy to lose access. Take mobile app development for example. If you piss off the wrong person or algorithm at Apple or Google then poof, half the market will evaporate for you. Corporate LLMs have and will monitor every single prompt entered and if the company doesn't like you for any reason, related or unrelated to your coding they will ban your access with no recourse. If open source LLMs are able to compete with the state of the art long term then I'm a lot more optimistic, but I'm skeptical they will be able to keep pace given the immense technical, financial, and lobbying resources the big players are certain to invest in the coming years.
- dewey 3y ago
  That's probably what everyone said when auto-complete was invented and IDEs were used. The actual code written in most cases isn't so important, the architecture, experience in building systems and debugging skills across a whole stack are what counts.
- runako 3y ago
  This argument rears its head every time the state of the art in developer tools makes a credible threat to improve. And yet relatively few developers use C, assembly, or machine language as their daily drivers. I've even met accomplished developers who don't know how to write a compiler! It's fine for developers to become dependent on tooling that makes them more efficient. This is a good thing, and we want more of this!
  - fomine3 3y ago
    I think it's a bit different discussion. I'm 100% agree to use any tools including LLMs, but LLMs may cause not good affect for ecosystem. New programming language, syntax, and API don't get LLMs support until they learned it (or given as a context). And perhaps new things less being used because of LLMs don't use it. Less usage in the wild means LLMs learn less from the nature. I wish it doesn't stop evolving programming (and other things).
    - runako 3y ago
      You're going further to "whether LLMs can be useful when programming in a new programming language." Which I will leave to developers using those new languages. I'm saying more that every time developers develop/find a tool that makes them more productive, if it doesn't look like the Old Ways, there will be other developers to crap on them and say they don't know enough about the Old Ways. Which may or not be true but isn't always relevant given the size of the space that comprises modern programming. This is why there are still people who deride programmers who use IDEs instead of using tools that were invented nearly 50(!) years ago. I'm not saying either way is a fit for every use, but the attitude that developers should eschew attempts to improve the state of our tools is toxic.
- dvngnt_ 3y ago
  I said the same thing when they made compilers and cobol
la64710 3y ago
I don’t think one have to be either to see that the future will mean increased choices and speed because of AI. Codegen AI tools may not do everything a developer do but I see it certainly evolving to a point where it can “understand” the context of a large code base and generate useful snippets of code as per the desires of the product owner. Yeah “development” as we know it may become obsolete but it would probably be two decades from now.
echelon 3y ago
> I'm expecting a sobering year for AI in 2024 I expect a sobering year for illustrators [1], animators [2], musicians [3], game designers, publishers, and news outlets [4] as GenAI starts to make their fields accessible to everyone. The prevailing opinion on HN is to sleep on this like crypto, which is baffling to me. The outputs are so good and are leading to entirely new classes of products, not to mention orders of magnitude reduction in time and cost structures. This is the most exciting moment in tech of the last 30 years, yet there's so much "nobody would use Dropbox" and "old man yells at cloud" negative forecasting. Entire industries are going to be disrupted by this. Y'all are sleeping on it. [1] https://playgroundai.com/ https://playgroundai.com/ [2] https://pikalabs.org/showcase/ https://pikalabs.org/showcase/ [3] https://www.suno.ai/ https://www.suno.ai/ [4] https://www.channel1.ai/ https://www.channel1.ai/
- bossyTeacher 3y ago
  > I expect a sobering year for illustrators [1], animators [2], musicians [3], game designers, publishers, and news outlets [4] as GenAI starts to make their fields accessible to everyone. That's such a privileged and insensitive thing to say imo. The careers of all these people are at risk, and no, this is no industrial revolution, there is no replacement for those people unless they decide to become LLM researchers/devs and join the LLM train. I wonder if you said the same thing if your job got made redundant because it's not needed anymore and you need to spend +5 years retraining without having the funds or economical support to do so.
- mjr00 3y ago
  Comparing generative AI favorably to crypto is an odd choice, given that crypto and blockchain are the poster children for "massively overhyped tech that led to absolutely nothing."
  - echelon 3y ago
    I'm comparing HN attitudes. People dismiss AI as if it were crypto. > that led to absolutely nothing. This is the part most of you are completely blind to. It's astonishing to me that you don't see the step function changes happening. I guess that means less competition, though. By the end of the year, anyone will be able to make brand new Taylor Swift music that sounds good. The average child will be able to animate short films. This is insane. Both the fact that sci-fi possibilities are tangibly right ahead of us, and the fact that so many people are dismissing it outright.
johnxie 3y ago
On the topic of AI, you've brought up some valid points, and I understand the skepticism, especially given the AI hype cycle. However, there's also plenty to get excited about beyond the marketing gimmicks. Consider the recent Google demo. It was recreated and, while still fun and impressive, it's definitely not ready for commercial use. You can see it at https://sagittarius.greg.technology https://sagittarius.greg.technology. This demo is a preview of what's to come, and I think it's important for us to stay open-minded. I believe that in 2024, we're going to witness a significant expansion in what's possible with AI, while costs decrease. Increased contributions in the open-source community will likely fuel another wave of startups and new applications.
- sien 3y ago
  Check out this on AWS's Q from Corey Quinn . https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/aws-degenerative-ai-blunder/ https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/aws-degenerative-ai-blund... Generative AI is awesome but also crazily overhyped. Remember when Siri / Alexa / Cortana / the Google thing were the big thing? Now presumably there are more Alexas in cupboards than anywhere else.
  - rurp 3y ago
    That Corey Quinn article is great, thanks for sharing. It's a more thorough mirror of my own experience with Q. After seeing the obnoxious popups all over the AWS docs I tested it out with a few simple questions about AWS services. My main takeaways were 1. It refuses to answer a lot of simple questions. 2. It provides a lot of factually incorrect answers. I didn't even try any complicated or subtle questions; it failed at simple factual asks. So many companies are rolling out obviously half-baked and useles Gen AI features that I would be embarrassed to release. All of these terrible user experiences must be damaging some company reputations. The only justification I can see is that many large corporations care more about being able to tell investors and journalists that they have checked the box on having the latest shiny trend than they do about building actually useful tools and user experiences.
- ben_w 3y ago
  My current reference class with AI today is 3D games in the 90s. Doom has just turned 30; when it was introduced, it blew people's minds with the quality, and fuelled a moral panic about it being a "murder simulator". Every year or so after that, a new game would come out, be hailed by the press as "photorealistic", and then forgotten as the next in the cycle replaced it… but even then, they're called "Doom clones", and the original doesn't disappear. I even remember one of the magazines bemoaning that Riven was pre-rendered rather than real-time "given Quake proves the PowerPC chip can handle polygon-based gaming" (or something close to that quote). I think we're in a similar phase with AI: ChatGPT-3.5 blew people's minds with the quality, and fuelled a moral panic about it being a fully automated plagiarism/cheating engine, we keep getting news stories about new models or ways to get much more out of any model, which are then forgotten as the next hot thing repeats the cycle… but even then, they're called "ChatGPT clones", and the original doesn't disappear. It's only an analogy; I don't know how long we have to wait before AI becomes an almost unnoticeable enhancement of everything in the kind of way CGI did.
rqtwteye 3y ago
I expect this to go down the same way as with the internet in 1990s and 2000s. Lots of potential followed by hype, big bubble with lots of bad ideas, crash, good ideas survive, wide adoption and then AI will be part of everybody's life.
- bossyTeacher 3y ago
  Sorry to break it to you but AI is already part of your life. It might not be a chatty one but it is there invisible. Really gets me when people think that before LLM there was no AI just because they expect a stereotypical cyber butler/assistant (whether physical or virtual). I feel like AI is going to be like flight in the sense that what we thought human flight would be like is not gonna be anywhere close to reality.
- FredPret 3y ago
  ... or death! Let's hope not though.
- somewhereoutth 3y ago
  Ah but the internet was about connecting every human being to all information ever, anywhere, instantly. LLMs are hardly much more than a very lossy and error prone compression algorithm for the same.
WheatMillington 3y ago
>more tech layoffs due to economy Why do you think the economy will worsen next year?
- bossyTeacher 3y ago
  if in doubt, expect things to worsen. Improvement is the exceptional state.
- losteric 3y ago
  If you think the economy will stay the same or grow - why? And why would that imply layoffs end or labor growth resumes?
  - smileysteve 3y ago
    Today's answer is that the federal reserve has announced that they feel recently high interest rates have achieved their goals and even see a possibility of rate decreases.
    - losteric 3y ago
      That answers the first part, not the second. What force would push tech companies to accelerate their pace of innovation, necessitating a larger workforce? I'm not seeing a surge of customers demanding new essential features on the horizon. We've gone through several bubbles with no deflation over the past few years. I expect big companies can keep up their pace of innovation while continuing to layoff through efficiency/consolidation/depreciation efforts (which shareholders will love). Small tech companies will get closer to the norm of small-businesses, needing an efficient and effective business strategy for funding - there will be fewer new players, each running tighter ships. Zombie start-ups will continue folding over several years, freeing up more labor. What are the systemic signs pointing to a need for more labor within the tech industry?
      - dghlsakjg 3y ago
        Someone has to glue AI APIs onto all of the existing apps, right?

by nbzso 3y ago

bluGill 3y ago

I think it will be a few more years before the hype dies down enough for sane heads to realize that. Change the year though and you are correct.

reqo 3y ago

Another probable bad side effect of AI will be that a generation of developers will become dependent on copilot/chatgpt to be able to write code! They will definitely perform worse than before llm era without the help of a llm!

mewpmewp2 3y ago
Same could be said about developing with Notepad as opposed to modern IDEs though.
- thinkingtoilet 3y ago
  Did modern IDEs start writing code for you when you made the jump from Notepad?
  - mjr00 3y ago
    In a lot of ways, yeah. Autocomplete is an absolute game changer and one of the biggest reasons that static typing came back in vogue and crushed dynamic languages. Massive productivity gains when you can ctrl+space and see all of the methods available on a variable, or use a hotkey to figure out if the method you want to call is `do_foo_bar` or `do_foo_and_bar`.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - pipes 3y ago
      I'm not sure I buy that argument about dynamic languages. You are probably right in that auto complete played a role, but for me working on a pure node js app back in 2014ish, it was a nightmare of runtime issues that type checking would have eliminated. The productivity gain in a typed language was not having to write unit tests for things that static typing does for free.
      - mjr00 3y ago
        I agree with you, autocomplete definitely isn't the only reason for static typing making a comeback and dynamic language popularity dying off (and the big legacy names like Javascript and Python have Typescript and mypy/pyright to transform them into a facsimile of one). I think a lot of it has to do with maturity, where a lot of "move fast and break things" devs who loved untyped Node/PHP/Python got burned by bugs and impossible to comprehend legacy codebases and slowly realized the value of static typing. But that type of understanding takes years. A novice programmer can see the value of autocomplete and not having to check the docs or stackoverflow for the name of a method pretty much instantly.
    - wintogreen74 3y ago
      autocomplete accurately took care of a lot of the boilerplate; that low-hanging fruit has been picked. AI is not doing the same IME, the pay-off has been a lot slower coming, and sometimes it's making the work more painful.
      - mjr00 3y ago
        I do agree. It's hard to get an unbiased assessment of how many developers are actually using generative AI (copilot/chatgpt) for work, and in what capacity they do use them. Anecdotally, at my org of ~40 devs, we encouraged everyone to try out Copilot and let us know if they wanted a full license; only 2 people took up the offer, and they use it either for generating unit tests or translating English data logic to pandas syntax (which it does seem quite good at!)
blastro 3y ago
All skills that the AI facilitates will be like this until all we can do is operate the AI
- willsmith72 3y ago
  Exactly. We don't need an abacus. We need a human able to input the right variables into a computer and get the result.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
digging 3y ago
But when would they not have the help of an LLM? We are all dependent on the tools we use. That's not a bad thing. The biggest risk is that it perhaps becomes more difficult to sift out bad developers from good ones, because LLMs let bad developers "cheat" more easily. But that's not a new problem, just a new era of the same problem.
- rurp 3y ago
  If the best coding LLMs end up monopolized as much as most areas of the tech industry it will be very easy to lose access. Take mobile app development for example. If you piss off the wrong person or algorithm at Apple or Google then poof, half the market will evaporate for you. Corporate LLMs have and will monitor every single prompt entered and if the company doesn't like you for any reason, related or unrelated to your coding they will ban your access with no recourse. If open source LLMs are able to compete with the state of the art long term then I'm a lot more optimistic, but I'm skeptical they will be able to keep pace given the immense technical, financial, and lobbying resources the big players are certain to invest in the coming years.
dewey 3y ago
That's probably what everyone said when auto-complete was invented and IDEs were used. The actual code written in most cases isn't so important, the architecture, experience in building systems and debugging skills across a whole stack are what counts.
runako 3y ago
This argument rears its head every time the state of the art in developer tools makes a credible threat to improve. And yet relatively few developers use C, assembly, or machine language as their daily drivers. I've even met accomplished developers who don't know how to write a compiler! It's fine for developers to become dependent on tooling that makes them more efficient. This is a good thing, and we want more of this!
- fomine3 3y ago
  I think it's a bit different discussion. I'm 100% agree to use any tools including LLMs, but LLMs may cause not good affect for ecosystem. New programming language, syntax, and API don't get LLMs support until they learned it (or given as a context). And perhaps new things less being used because of LLMs don't use it. Less usage in the wild means LLMs learn less from the nature. I wish it doesn't stop evolving programming (and other things).
  - runako 3y ago
    You're going further to "whether LLMs can be useful when programming in a new programming language." Which I will leave to developers using those new languages. I'm saying more that every time developers develop/find a tool that makes them more productive, if it doesn't look like the Old Ways, there will be other developers to crap on them and say they don't know enough about the Old Ways. Which may or not be true but isn't always relevant given the size of the space that comprises modern programming. This is why there are still people who deride programmers who use IDEs instead of using tools that were invented nearly 50(!) years ago. I'm not saying either way is a fit for every use, but the attitude that developers should eschew attempts to improve the state of our tools is toxic.
dvngnt_ 3y ago
I said the same thing when they made compilers and cobol

la64710 3y ago

I don’t think one have to be either to see that the future will mean increased choices and speed because of AI. Codegen AI tools may not do everything a developer do but I see it certainly evolving to a point where it can “understand” the context of a large code base and generate useful snippets of code as per the desires of the product owner. Yeah “development” as we know it may become obsolete but it would probably be two decades from now.

echelon 3y ago

> I'm expecting a sobering year for AI in 2024 I expect a sobering year for illustrators [1], animators [2], musicians [3], game designers, publishers, and news outlets [4] as GenAI starts to make their fields accessible to everyone. The prevailing opinion on HN is to sleep on this like crypto, which is baffling to me. The outputs are so good and are leading to entirely new classes of products, not to mention orders of magnitude reduction in time and cost structures. This is the most exciting moment in tech of the last 30 years, yet there's so much "nobody would use Dropbox" and "old man yells at cloud" negative forecasting. Entire industries are going to be disrupted by this. Y'all are sleeping on it. [1] https://playgroundai.com/ https://playgroundai.com/ [2] https://pikalabs.org/showcase/ https://pikalabs.org/showcase/ [3] https://www.suno.ai/ https://www.suno.ai/ [4] https://www.channel1.ai/ https://www.channel1.ai/

bossyTeacher 3y ago
> I expect a sobering year for illustrators [1], animators [2], musicians [3], game designers, publishers, and news outlets [4] as GenAI starts to make their fields accessible to everyone. That's such a privileged and insensitive thing to say imo. The careers of all these people are at risk, and no, this is no industrial revolution, there is no replacement for those people unless they decide to become LLM researchers/devs and join the LLM train. I wonder if you said the same thing if your job got made redundant because it's not needed anymore and you need to spend +5 years retraining without having the funds or economical support to do so.
mjr00 3y ago
Comparing generative AI favorably to crypto is an odd choice, given that crypto and blockchain are the poster children for "massively overhyped tech that led to absolutely nothing."
- echelon 3y ago
  I'm comparing HN attitudes. People dismiss AI as if it were crypto. > that led to absolutely nothing. This is the part most of you are completely blind to. It's astonishing to me that you don't see the step function changes happening. I guess that means less competition, though. By the end of the year, anyone will be able to make brand new Taylor Swift music that sounds good. The average child will be able to animate short films. This is insane. Both the fact that sci-fi possibilities are tangibly right ahead of us, and the fact that so many people are dismissing it outright.

johnxie 3y ago

On the topic of AI, you've brought up some valid points, and I understand the skepticism, especially given the AI hype cycle. However, there's also plenty to get excited about beyond the marketing gimmicks. Consider the recent Google demo. It was recreated and, while still fun and impressive, it's definitely not ready for commercial use. You can see it at https://sagittarius.greg.technology https://sagittarius.greg.technology. This demo is a preview of what's to come, and I think it's important for us to stay open-minded. I believe that in 2024, we're going to witness a significant expansion in what's possible with AI, while costs decrease. Increased contributions in the open-source community will likely fuel another wave of startups and new applications.

sien 3y ago
Check out this on AWS's Q from Corey Quinn . https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/aws-degenerative-ai-blunder/ https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/aws-degenerative-ai-blund... Generative AI is awesome but also crazily overhyped. Remember when Siri / Alexa / Cortana / the Google thing were the big thing? Now presumably there are more Alexas in cupboards than anywhere else.
- rurp 3y ago
  That Corey Quinn article is great, thanks for sharing. It's a more thorough mirror of my own experience with Q. After seeing the obnoxious popups all over the AWS docs I tested it out with a few simple questions about AWS services. My main takeaways were 1. It refuses to answer a lot of simple questions. 2. It provides a lot of factually incorrect answers. I didn't even try any complicated or subtle questions; it failed at simple factual asks. So many companies are rolling out obviously half-baked and useles Gen AI features that I would be embarrassed to release. All of these terrible user experiences must be damaging some company reputations. The only justification I can see is that many large corporations care more about being able to tell investors and journalists that they have checked the box on having the latest shiny trend than they do about building actually useful tools and user experiences.
ben_w 3y ago
My current reference class with AI today is 3D games in the 90s. Doom has just turned 30; when it was introduced, it blew people's minds with the quality, and fuelled a moral panic about it being a "murder simulator". Every year or so after that, a new game would come out, be hailed by the press as "photorealistic", and then forgotten as the next in the cycle replaced it… but even then, they're called "Doom clones", and the original doesn't disappear. I even remember one of the magazines bemoaning that Riven was pre-rendered rather than real-time "given Quake proves the PowerPC chip can handle polygon-based gaming" (or something close to that quote). I think we're in a similar phase with AI: ChatGPT-3.5 blew people's minds with the quality, and fuelled a moral panic about it being a fully automated plagiarism/cheating engine, we keep getting news stories about new models or ways to get much more out of any model, which are then forgotten as the next hot thing repeats the cycle… but even then, they're called "ChatGPT clones", and the original doesn't disappear. It's only an analogy; I don't know how long we have to wait before AI becomes an almost unnoticeable enhancement of everything in the kind of way CGI did.

rqtwteye 3y ago

I expect this to go down the same way as with the internet in 1990s and 2000s. Lots of potential followed by hype, big bubble with lots of bad ideas, crash, good ideas survive, wide adoption and then AI will be part of everybody's life.

bossyTeacher 3y ago
Sorry to break it to you but AI is already part of your life. It might not be a chatty one but it is there invisible. Really gets me when people think that before LLM there was no AI just because they expect a stereotypical cyber butler/assistant (whether physical or virtual). I feel like AI is going to be like flight in the sense that what we thought human flight would be like is not gonna be anywhere close to reality.
FredPret 3y ago
... or death! Let's hope not though.
somewhereoutth 3y ago
Ah but the internet was about connecting every human being to all information ever, anywhere, instantly. LLMs are hardly much more than a very lossy and error prone compression algorithm for the same.

WheatMillington 3y ago

>more tech layoffs due to economy Why do you think the economy will worsen next year?

bossyTeacher 3y ago
if in doubt, expect things to worsen. Improvement is the exceptional state.
losteric 3y ago
If you think the economy will stay the same or grow - why? And why would that imply layoffs end or labor growth resumes?
- smileysteve 3y ago
  Today's answer is that the federal reserve has announced that they feel recently high interest rates have achieved their goals and even see a possibility of rate decreases.
  - losteric 3y ago
    That answers the first part, not the second. What force would push tech companies to accelerate their pace of innovation, necessitating a larger workforce? I'm not seeing a surge of customers demanding new essential features on the horizon. We've gone through several bubbles with no deflation over the past few years. I expect big companies can keep up their pace of innovation while continuing to layoff through efficiency/consolidation/depreciation efforts (which shareholders will love). Small tech companies will get closer to the norm of small-businesses, needing an efficient and effective business strategy for funding - there will be fewer new players, each running tighter ships. Zombie start-ups will continue folding over several years, freeing up more labor. What are the systemic signs pointing to a need for more labor within the tech industry?
    - dghlsakjg 3y ago
      Someone has to glue AI APIs onto all of the existing apps, right?