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This is going to eat software, and is the beginning of agents. The orchestrator of these tasks will come, and OpenAI will turn into a general purpose compute sy

This is going to eat software, and is the beginning of agents. The orchestrator of these tasks will come, and OpenAI will turn into a general purpose compute system, the endgame of workflow software. Soon there will be a database, and your prompts will be able to directly read and write to an openai hosted postgres instance. And your CRUD app will begin to disappear. Programming will feel pointless

worldsayshi 2y ago
Sure but do they have a moat here? Anyone that can connect to an LLM could make that app.
- zb3 2y ago
  Yes, they have the name "ChatGPT". For non-technical people this appears to be the most important thing.
  - nozzlegear 2y ago
    Is it a household name? Anecdotally, only two of my five millennial/gen-z siblings use an AI app at all, and one of them calls her's "Gary" instead of ChatGPT. I'd be interested in seeing some actual data showing how much ChatGPT is an actual household name versus one that us technical people assume is a household name due to its ubiquity in our space.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      > Is it a household name? I think it is, yes. It was interviewed under that name on one of the UK's main news broadcasts almost immediately after it came out. Few hundred million users. Anecdotes about teachers whose students use it to cheat. But who knows. I was surprising people about the existence of Wikipedia as late as 2004, and Google Translate's augmented reality mode some time around the start of the pandemic.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 2y ago
  Does AWS have a moat on cloud computing?
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    Yes, it would take 10s of billions of dollars to recreate the infrastructure as far as servers and AWS has its own pipelines running under the oceans. Then you have to recreate all of the services on top of the AWS. Then you have to deal with regulations and certifications. Then you have to convince decision makers to go against their own interests. “No one ever got fired for Amazon”. Then you have to convince corporations to spend money to migrate.
  - worldsayshi 2y ago
    Yes that requires huge infrastructure investments. Creating an LLM requires huge investments. Running an LLM requires medium to big investments but using one remotely require very little investment.
rglover 2y ago
Possibly, but that's going to require 100% consistent, accurate outputs (tricky as that's not the nature of LLMs). Otherwise, you'll have a lot of systems dependent on these orchestrators creating hard-to-debug mistakes up and down the pipeline. With software, you can reach a state where it does what you tell it to without having to worry if some model adjustment or API change is going to break the output. If they solve that, then yes. Otherwise, what I personally expect is a lot of businesses rushing into implementing "agents" only to backpedal later when they start to have negative material effects on bottom lines.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 2y ago
  Its inevitable. You can argue about what's possible right now, but I'm not looking at it from that angle. I think these issues will be solved with time
  - potatoman22 2y ago
    Why? Past progress =/= equal rate of future progress.
  - rglover 2y ago
    That belief is at odds with the mechanics of how LLMs work. It's not a question of more effort/investment/compute/whatever, it's just a reality of how the underlying systems work (non-deterministic). If you can find a way to make the context window on the scale of the human brain, you may be able to mostly mitigate this. People want us to be at "Her" levels of AI, but we're at a far earlier stage. We can fake certain aspects of that (using TTS), but blindly trusting an AI to run everything is going to be a big mistake in the short-term. And in order for the inevitability of what you describe to take place, the predecessor(s) to that have to work in a way that doesn't scare people and businesses away. The plowing of money and hype into the current forms of AI (not to mention the gaslighting about their ability) makes me think the real inevitability is a meltdown in the next 5-10 years which leads to AI-hesitancy on a mass scale.
    - ldjkfkdsjnv 2y ago
daveguy 2y ago
This significantly overestimates the reliability of LLMs -- both their output integrity and their ability to understand context.
throwaway314155 2y ago
Bit of advice: you might want to actually use an offering before claiming it is revolutionary.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 2y ago
  I've got 15 years of engineering experience, worked on some of the largest distributed systems at FAANG. Its coming
  - throwaway314155 2y ago
    Oh wow good for you! Didn't realize you were a prodigy or that this was a contest. I take it all back. /s Maybe try some humility. You're not helping yourself with the bragging about frankly underwhelming and common (here) experience.
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    > worked on some of the largest distributed systems at FAANG. As have 10s of thousands of other people who could invert a btree on the whiteboard….

worldsayshi 2y ago

Sure but do they have a moat here? Anyone that can connect to an LLM could make that app.

zb3 2y ago
Yes, they have the name "ChatGPT". For non-technical people this appears to be the most important thing.
- nozzlegear 2y ago
  Is it a household name? Anecdotally, only two of my five millennial/gen-z siblings use an AI app at all, and one of them calls her's "Gary" instead of ChatGPT. I'd be interested in seeing some actual data showing how much ChatGPT is an actual household name versus one that us technical people assume is a household name due to its ubiquity in our space.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    > Is it a household name? I think it is, yes. It was interviewed under that name on one of the UK's main news broadcasts almost immediately after it came out. Few hundred million users. Anecdotes about teachers whose students use it to cheat. But who knows. I was surprising people about the existence of Wikipedia as late as 2004, and Google Translate's augmented reality mode some time around the start of the pandemic.
ldjkfkdsjnv 2y ago
Does AWS have a moat on cloud computing?
- scarface_74 2y ago
  Yes, it would take 10s of billions of dollars to recreate the infrastructure as far as servers and AWS has its own pipelines running under the oceans. Then you have to recreate all of the services on top of the AWS. Then you have to deal with regulations and certifications. Then you have to convince decision makers to go against their own interests. “No one ever got fired for Amazon”. Then you have to convince corporations to spend money to migrate.
- worldsayshi 2y ago
  Yes that requires huge infrastructure investments. Creating an LLM requires huge investments. Running an LLM requires medium to big investments but using one remotely require very little investment.

rglover 2y ago

Possibly, but that's going to require 100% consistent, accurate outputs (tricky as that's not the nature of LLMs). Otherwise, you'll have a lot of systems dependent on these orchestrators creating hard-to-debug mistakes up and down the pipeline. With software, you can reach a state where it does what you tell it to without having to worry if some model adjustment or API change is going to break the output. If they solve that, then yes. Otherwise, what I personally expect is a lot of businesses rushing into implementing "agents" only to backpedal later when they start to have negative material effects on bottom lines.

ldjkfkdsjnv 2y ago
Its inevitable. You can argue about what's possible right now, but I'm not looking at it from that angle. I think these issues will be solved with time
- potatoman22 2y ago
  Why? Past progress =/= equal rate of future progress.
- rglover 2y ago
  That belief is at odds with the mechanics of how LLMs work. It's not a question of more effort/investment/compute/whatever, it's just a reality of how the underlying systems work (non-deterministic). If you can find a way to make the context window on the scale of the human brain, you may be able to mostly mitigate this. People want us to be at "Her" levels of AI, but we're at a far earlier stage. We can fake certain aspects of that (using TTS), but blindly trusting an AI to run everything is going to be a big mistake in the short-term. And in order for the inevitability of what you describe to take place, the predecessor(s) to that have to work in a way that doesn't scare people and businesses away. The plowing of money and hype into the current forms of AI (not to mention the gaslighting about their ability) makes me think the real inevitability is a meltdown in the next 5-10 years which leads to AI-hesitancy on a mass scale.
  - ldjkfkdsjnv 2y ago

daveguy 2y ago

This significantly overestimates the reliability of LLMs -- both their output integrity and their ability to understand context.

throwaway314155 2y ago

Bit of advice: you might want to actually use an offering before claiming it is revolutionary.

ldjkfkdsjnv 2y ago
I've got 15 years of engineering experience, worked on some of the largest distributed systems at FAANG. Its coming
- throwaway314155 2y ago
  Oh wow good for you! Didn't realize you were a prodigy or that this was a contest. I take it all back. /s Maybe try some humility. You're not helping yourself with the bragging about frankly underwhelming and common (here) experience.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  > worked on some of the largest distributed systems at FAANG. As have 10s of thousands of other people who could invert a btree on the whiteboard….