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There's a bunch of crap and most of the AI bubble is low-value BS, and back when the Web was starting there was Pets.com. Realistically how many people are cur

There's a bunch of crap and most of the AI bubble is low-value BS, and back when the Web was starting there was Pets.com. Realistically how many people are currently employed "writing low quality spam articles" That's not reality. That's just reddit crapping on strawmen because a lot of the visible results from AI is 1) Crap creative work and 2) Polluted search results/comment sections These are red herrings There's real people doing real productive things with AIs that do boring things right now. The ability to search for things that are still fuzzy in my mind, ask open-ended questions and get an answer back, or find something when you can't come up with a good keyword I've never had the google-fu that some other developers have so this was something that often required asking a peer before. Sometimes a forum or some Discord, even. Now you just feed your garbage question to a large language model that swallowed the entirety of the internet and a few seconds later it's spitting back something useful. It's the first time I have access to a robot that's on stand-by with surface level knowledge of everything. I suspect people who don't find this extremely valuable in their day-to-day life are just not catching the moments when they could've used it -- while on the other side of the spectrum the value it removes from comment sections/image search results is impossible to ignore.

red-iron-pine 2y ago
> Realistically how many people are currently employed "writing low quality spam articles" Up until LLMs started eating their lunch, a lot. I knew several people who wrote softball slop articles for no name tech blogs. Lots of generic how-tos in basic Java or Python questions, etc. Now that's all automated and its mostly slop being used by AI to generate more slop. > There's real people doing real productive things with AIs that do boring things right now. elaborate. I can think of at least a couple, but most of their approaches are only "AI" in a marketing sense, like Moderna using data driven, highly automated testing to create vaccine candidates. Absolutely nothing to do with LLMs as they exist in most places. > Now you just feed your garbage question to a large language model that swallowed the entirety of the internet and a few seconds later it's spitting back something useful. citation needed. I'm about 4 for 8 in terms of real technical questions and real, correct answers. Feeding Copilot and ChatGPT some questions about CVEs exploited in the wild got me wildly wrong answers until I started doing a lot of prompt work, but by that point I could have just googled the CVEs myself and got an answer I knew was accurate. Ditto with fixing some MongoDB calls that look correct but didn't work, and took me longer to understand than just trying random shit, or asking on reddit. Maybe it will get there, eventually, but outside of mass content generation I can't see a reason to trust the results.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  > Feeding Copilot and ChatGPT some questions My guess is the GP is talking about things like Perplexity. What is indeed ChatGPT, but it's set so that it can point you to useful sites instead of just giving you an answer. (I don't know why so many people think they answer itself will be useful, it can only be good if it was taken verbatim from some site.) And yeah, those things are useful. But to say they'll disrupt one's workflow is a bit too much.

red-iron-pine 2y ago

> Realistically how many people are currently employed "writing low quality spam articles" Up until LLMs started eating their lunch, a lot. I knew several people who wrote softball slop articles for no name tech blogs. Lots of generic how-tos in basic Java or Python questions, etc. Now that's all automated and its mostly slop being used by AI to generate more slop. > There's real people doing real productive things with AIs that do boring things right now. elaborate. I can think of at least a couple, but most of their approaches are only "AI" in a marketing sense, like Moderna using data driven, highly automated testing to create vaccine candidates. Absolutely nothing to do with LLMs as they exist in most places. > Now you just feed your garbage question to a large language model that swallowed the entirety of the internet and a few seconds later it's spitting back something useful. citation needed. I'm about 4 for 8 in terms of real technical questions and real, correct answers. Feeding Copilot and ChatGPT some questions about CVEs exploited in the wild got me wildly wrong answers until I started doing a lot of prompt work, but by that point I could have just googled the CVEs myself and got an answer I knew was accurate. Ditto with fixing some MongoDB calls that look correct but didn't work, and took me longer to understand than just trying random shit, or asking on reddit. Maybe it will get there, eventually, but outside of mass content generation I can't see a reason to trust the results.

marcosdumay 2y ago
> Feeding Copilot and ChatGPT some questions My guess is the GP is talking about things like Perplexity. What is indeed ChatGPT, but it's set so that it can point you to useful sites instead of just giving you an answer. (I don't know why so many people think they answer itself will be useful, it can only be good if it was taken verbatim from some site.) And yeah, those things are useful. But to say they'll disrupt one's workflow is a bit too much.