8 ms·

What baffles me most is that JetBrains didn't realise AI integration makes their product unusable in many companies, that it's more than a matter of personal pr

What baffles me most is that JetBrains didn't realise AI integration makes their product unusable in many companies, that it's more than a matter of personal preference. It's one thing to create a plugin, but deeply integrating it to a point it can't be removed when corps like Amazon prohibit the use of Copilot betrays a total lack of foresight.

gregd 3y ago
Boggles my mind that they lacked the foresight to seriously consider whether this was a good move or not. I always considered them extremely developer friendly, but with this latest move, I'm not so sure.
- giancarlostoro 3y ago
  I wouldnt just write them off for one goof. It can happen to anyone. In the grand scheme of things this is a new market that is growing and adapting accordingly.
  - yieldcrv 3y ago
    Nah they tried a tone deaf cash grab The llm should have been offline
    - giancarlostoro 3y ago
      I have a feeling that's one of their goals, if you watch the launch video you can see they're really trying to make their offering as flexible as possible.
alkonaut 3y ago
> What baffles me most is that JetBrains didn't realise AI integration makes their product unusable in many companies At least if they either use the user's code in training OR if it uses any code with unknown provenance. Microsoft's solution seems to be the best: we take responsibility for the code. But that responsibility comes at a cost.
- explaininjs 3y ago
  Microsoft’s (VS Code) solution is actually better: don’t want any AI? Don’t opt in to installing optional extension that uses AI. And, if you want AI but only using local models, all the same UI API’s are available to you. (modulo some know-how)
- slimsag 3y ago
  > At least if they either use the user's code in training OR if it uses any code with unknown provenance. There are also many other cases where it is just outright prohibited, or heavily restricted, even if the aspects you describe were allowed.
  - alkonaut 3y ago
    So unrelated to IP? What’s an example of that?
    - slimsag 3y ago
      Compliance-related challenges due to transferring data outside the network. Compliance-related challenges due to potentially biased decision making. Financial regulation compliance concerns. Government regulations around the application of AI/ML in certain circumstances, or model use restrictions.
- Aurornis 3y ago
  > At least if they either use the user's code in training JetBrains makes it clear that the code is not submitted for training purposes, contrary to the speculation in a lot of comments. It’s also not enabled by default and requires a trial or subscription as well, so it’s not something people are going to stumble into accidentally using. I’m sure some strict companies will forbid the use of any product that might possibly have an AI component, but they’ll be refining policies and making exceptions as everything from operating systems to web browsers start coming with optional AI features.
- ta988 3y ago
  It is said explicitly in the article that 1) you have to activate it and pay for it 2) the data is not used for training
mlinhares 3y ago
The messianic fervor AI proponents have been spewing these past few months are blinding even people we’d deem reasonable in the past. People are now in the phase of “if there’s no AI we’ll die” of their products so we should expect it will get much worse before it gets better. I’m now mostly turned off whenever I see a company saying they’re adding “more AI” to their products as that usually means the experience is about to get worse.
- pjerem 3y ago
  Also, imo, a lot of companies greatly underestimate the real runtime cost of AI. You can’t just throw AI into your existing product and hope that it will fly. Even the most impressive implementations will hit the hard wall of money. Adding AI to an existing product is far from free and you’ll probably need to upgrade your Pricing pages if you add AI to your core offer. Heck, even OpenAI is currently having a hard time making ChatGPT+ profitable even though they are pricing it at $25 a month. So imagine all those companies hoping they could easily add "ChatGPT" to their $9.99/m business. I think there is a reason we still don’t see Siri or Alexa powered by GPT while everyone is hoping it’ll happen : Siri & Alexa have always been designed to be cheap and they still dont know how they will sell you the $30/month Alexa Prime.
  - staunton 3y ago
    > OpenAI is currently having a hard time making ChatGPT+ profitable If they made a profit right now, all investors would hit the ceiling and tell them to stop doing such insane things. In the current stage they're supposed to grow and take over the market (and build a "platform"), not make profits...
    - pjerem 3y ago
      I was referring to the fact that they had to stop new _paid_ subscriptions because they weren’t able to deploy enough resources.
  - mlinhares 3y ago
    While I don’t think it’s problematic for OpenAI as they have infinite money to scale but the Jetbrains solution is so behind copilot I don’t even understand why they bothered pushing it.
dangerwill 3y ago
Given that a huge percentage of code is written via JetBrains IDEs, couldn't this be a scheme on their part to gather source code training data on a similar scale as github is doing with copilot?
- ta988 3y ago
  No because you have to explicitly enable it for it to even start to send things.
  - blibble 3y ago
    at present
  - Izkata 3y ago
    According to one of the other comments here, the plugin is enabled by default, you just can't get anything out of it until you get a subscription.
  - dangerwill 3y ago
    Yeah and has this actually been audited? Tech companies routinely lie about data collection. What's more likely, JetBrains decided that 1 year old LLMs are so foundational a technology that they needed to embed this crap irrevocably in the IDE? Or that they purposefully embedded it so that slurping up your code is hard to disentangle from diagnostics data collection?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bloopernova 3y ago
Before the new year, some executives made it known they wanted a chatgpt like interface to answer questions about a service. Current page gets less than a thousand visits a month. Current page has a list of answers on one page, and costs a few cents to run. Executives want AI everywhere to the point of fiduciary irresponsibility. My poorly made point being: executives have been driven insane by AI/ML hype.
- goostavos 3y ago
  Executives, senior leadership, middle management trying to please leadership, engineers trying to get promoted... everyone has been whipped into a frenzy. I sat through a two day (all day) "retreat" (conference room in our regular office) where people tripped over themselves to present their teams innovative AI ideas to leadership. "It's a chat bot that..." "It's a chat bot that..." "It's a chat bot that..."
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    A shame, I went into tech to escape all these fleeting fads. But ofc I end up taking Computer Science in college right when Tech is blowing up (I really just looked at STEM fields and picked the best engineering I saw in each college. I coulda easily been a mechanical or electrical engineer if I wasn't accepted at the school I went to) so I end up seeing all sorts of booms and busts. mobile, cloud, data science, ML. Now AI. I just wanna make pretty graphics go fast. I don't need to turn everything into a cloud based app with an LLM attached to it.
  - Terr_ 3y ago
    Meanwhile, I'm over at a company where one of our most important products is literally a white-label-able chatbot, and we are very careful to corral any "AI" off into specific controllable parts. This is partly because it needs to output reliable well-structured data for downstream integrations.
SebastianKra 3y ago
Oh so that's why there's a company-wide kill switch on account.jetbrains.com that requires an admin to explicitly opt-in to AI features. Do any of you even use the stuff you complain about?
- drpossum 3y ago
  There is now. That was not there day 1
  - SebastianKra 3y ago
    If by day 1 you mean the day it was publicly available out of beta, it was there day one.
  - mvdtnz 3y ago
    There absolutely was on day 1, which is the day I tried to enable it and ran into a brick wall because my employer refuses to enable it.
    - gergelykralik 3y ago
      Can confirm, tried to enable it day 1, got denied, because the Organisation Admin has to enable it.

gregd 3y ago

Boggles my mind that they lacked the foresight to seriously consider whether this was a good move or not. I always considered them extremely developer friendly, but with this latest move, I'm not so sure.

giancarlostoro 3y ago
I wouldnt just write them off for one goof. It can happen to anyone. In the grand scheme of things this is a new market that is growing and adapting accordingly.
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  Nah they tried a tone deaf cash grab The llm should have been offline
  - giancarlostoro 3y ago
    I have a feeling that's one of their goals, if you watch the launch video you can see they're really trying to make their offering as flexible as possible.

alkonaut 3y ago

> What baffles me most is that JetBrains didn't realise AI integration makes their product unusable in many companies At least if they either use the user's code in training OR if it uses any code with unknown provenance. Microsoft's solution seems to be the best: we take responsibility for the code. But that responsibility comes at a cost.

explaininjs 3y ago
Microsoft’s (VS Code) solution is actually better: don’t want any AI? Don’t opt in to installing optional extension that uses AI. And, if you want AI but only using local models, all the same UI API’s are available to you. (modulo some know-how)
slimsag 3y ago
> At least if they either use the user's code in training OR if it uses any code with unknown provenance. There are also many other cases where it is just outright prohibited, or heavily restricted, even if the aspects you describe were allowed.
- alkonaut 3y ago
  So unrelated to IP? What’s an example of that?
  - slimsag 3y ago
    Compliance-related challenges due to transferring data outside the network. Compliance-related challenges due to potentially biased decision making. Financial regulation compliance concerns. Government regulations around the application of AI/ML in certain circumstances, or model use restrictions.
Aurornis 3y ago
> At least if they either use the user's code in training JetBrains makes it clear that the code is not submitted for training purposes, contrary to the speculation in a lot of comments. It’s also not enabled by default and requires a trial or subscription as well, so it’s not something people are going to stumble into accidentally using. I’m sure some strict companies will forbid the use of any product that might possibly have an AI component, but they’ll be refining policies and making exceptions as everything from operating systems to web browsers start coming with optional AI features.
ta988 3y ago
It is said explicitly in the article that 1) you have to activate it and pay for it 2) the data is not used for training

mlinhares 3y ago

The messianic fervor AI proponents have been spewing these past few months are blinding even people we’d deem reasonable in the past. People are now in the phase of “if there’s no AI we’ll die” of their products so we should expect it will get much worse before it gets better. I’m now mostly turned off whenever I see a company saying they’re adding “more AI” to their products as that usually means the experience is about to get worse.

pjerem 3y ago
Also, imo, a lot of companies greatly underestimate the real runtime cost of AI. You can’t just throw AI into your existing product and hope that it will fly. Even the most impressive implementations will hit the hard wall of money. Adding AI to an existing product is far from free and you’ll probably need to upgrade your Pricing pages if you add AI to your core offer. Heck, even OpenAI is currently having a hard time making ChatGPT+ profitable even though they are pricing it at $25 a month. So imagine all those companies hoping they could easily add "ChatGPT" to their $9.99/m business. I think there is a reason we still don’t see Siri or Alexa powered by GPT while everyone is hoping it’ll happen : Siri & Alexa have always been designed to be cheap and they still dont know how they will sell you the $30/month Alexa Prime.
- staunton 3y ago
  > OpenAI is currently having a hard time making ChatGPT+ profitable If they made a profit right now, all investors would hit the ceiling and tell them to stop doing such insane things. In the current stage they're supposed to grow and take over the market (and build a "platform"), not make profits...
  - pjerem 3y ago
    I was referring to the fact that they had to stop new _paid_ subscriptions because they weren’t able to deploy enough resources.
- mlinhares 3y ago
  While I don’t think it’s problematic for OpenAI as they have infinite money to scale but the Jetbrains solution is so behind copilot I don’t even understand why they bothered pushing it.

dangerwill 3y ago

Given that a huge percentage of code is written via JetBrains IDEs, couldn't this be a scheme on their part to gather source code training data on a similar scale as github is doing with copilot?

ta988 3y ago
No because you have to explicitly enable it for it to even start to send things.
- blibble 3y ago
  at present
- Izkata 3y ago
  According to one of the other comments here, the plugin is enabled by default, you just can't get anything out of it until you get a subscription.
- dangerwill 3y ago
  Yeah and has this actually been audited? Tech companies routinely lie about data collection. What's more likely, JetBrains decided that 1 year old LLMs are so foundational a technology that they needed to embed this crap irrevocably in the IDE? Or that they purposefully embedded it so that slurping up your code is hard to disentangle from diagnostics data collection?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

bloopernova 3y ago

Before the new year, some executives made it known they wanted a chatgpt like interface to answer questions about a service. Current page gets less than a thousand visits a month. Current page has a list of answers on one page, and costs a few cents to run. Executives want AI everywhere to the point of fiduciary irresponsibility. My poorly made point being: executives have been driven insane by AI/ML hype.

goostavos 3y ago
Executives, senior leadership, middle management trying to please leadership, engineers trying to get promoted... everyone has been whipped into a frenzy. I sat through a two day (all day) "retreat" (conference room in our regular office) where people tripped over themselves to present their teams innovative AI ideas to leadership. "It's a chat bot that..." "It's a chat bot that..." "It's a chat bot that..."
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  A shame, I went into tech to escape all these fleeting fads. But ofc I end up taking Computer Science in college right when Tech is blowing up (I really just looked at STEM fields and picked the best engineering I saw in each college. I coulda easily been a mechanical or electrical engineer if I wasn't accepted at the school I went to) so I end up seeing all sorts of booms and busts. mobile, cloud, data science, ML. Now AI. I just wanna make pretty graphics go fast. I don't need to turn everything into a cloud based app with an LLM attached to it.
- Terr_ 3y ago
  Meanwhile, I'm over at a company where one of our most important products is literally a white-label-able chatbot, and we are very careful to corral any "AI" off into specific controllable parts. This is partly because it needs to output reliable well-structured data for downstream integrations.

SebastianKra 3y ago

Oh so that's why there's a company-wide kill switch on account.jetbrains.com that requires an admin to explicitly opt-in to AI features. Do any of you even use the stuff you complain about?

drpossum 3y ago
There is now. That was not there day 1
- SebastianKra 3y ago
  If by day 1 you mean the day it was publicly available out of beta, it was there day one.
- mvdtnz 3y ago
  There absolutely was on day 1, which is the day I tried to enable it and ran into a brick wall because my employer refuses to enable it.
  - gergelykralik 3y ago
    Can confirm, tried to enable it day 1, got denied, because the Organisation Admin has to enable it.