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The Internet had plenty of very productive use cases before social networking, even from its most nascent origins. Spending billions building something on the

The Internet had plenty of very productive use cases before social networking, even from its most nascent origins. Spending billions building something on the assumption that someone else will figure out what it's good for, is not good business.

crazygringo 2y ago
And LLM's already have tons of productive uses. The biggest ones are probably still waiting, though. But this is about one particular price/performance ratio. You need to build things before you can see how the market responds. You say it's "not good business" but that's entirely wrong. It's excellent business. It's the only way to go about it, in fact. Finding product-market fit is a process. Companies aren't omniscient.
- bigstrat2003 2y ago
  > And LLM's already have tons of productive uses. I disagree strongly with that. Right now they are fun toys to play with, but not useful tools, because they are not reliable. If and when that gets fixed, maybe they will have productive uses. But for right now, not so much.
  - gjs4786 2y ago
    "it only needs to be good enough" there are tons of productive uses for them. Reliable, much less. But productive? Tons
  - fionic 2y ago
    Hello? Do you have a pulse? LLMs accomplish like 90% of everything I do now so I don’t have to do it… Explain what this code syntax means… Explain what this function does… Write a function to do X… Respond to my teammates in a Jira ticket explaining why it’s a bad idea to create a repo for every dockerfile… My teammate responded with X write a rebuttal… … and the list goes on … like forever
    - xrisk 2y ago
      It’s not that the LLM is doing something productive, it’s that you were doing things that were unproductive in the first place, and it’s sad that we live in a society where such things are considered productive (because of course they create monetary value). As an aside, I sincerely hope our “human” conversations don’t devolve into agents talking to each other. It’s just an insult to humanity.
    - nunez 2y ago
      Exactly what management wants to hear so they can lay off hundreds and push salaries down.
  - dwaltrip 2y ago
    Who do you speak for? Other people have gotten value from them. Maybe you meant to say “in my experience” or something like that. To me, your comment reads as you making a definitive judgment on their usefulness for everyone. I use it most days when coding. Not all the time, but I’ve gotten a lot of value out of them. And yes I'm quite aware of their pitfalls.
  - MyOutfitIsVague 2y ago
    They are pretty useful tools. Do yourself a favor and get a $100 free trial for Claude, hook it up to Aider, and give it a shot. It makes mistakes, it gets things wrong, and it still saves a bunch of time. A 10 minute refactoring turns into 30 seconds of making a request, 15 seconds of waiting, and a minute of reviewing and fixing up the output. It can give you decent insights into potential problems and error messages. The more precise your instructions, the better they perform. Being unreliable isn't being useless. It's like a very fast, very cheap intern. If you are good at code review and know exactly what change you want to make ahead of time, that can save you a ton of time without needing to be perfect.
    - kgwgk 2y ago
      > a $100 free trial What?
      - jdiff 2y ago
        A free trial of an amount of credits that would otherwise cost $100, I'm assuming.
        kgwgk 2y ago
        Could be. Does such a thing exist?
        jdiff 2y ago
        Not outwardly/visibly/readily from a quick scan of their site and a short list of search results.
      - MyOutfitIsVague 2y ago
        I misremembered, because I was checking out all the various trials available. I think I was thinking of Google Cloud's $300 in credits, since I'm using Claude through their VertexAI.
    - nyarlathotep_ 2y ago
  - alvah 2y ago
    This is a classic fallacy - you can't find a productive use for it, therefore nobody can find a productive use for it. That's not how the world works.
  - HDThoreaun 2y ago
    I use LLMs everyday to proofread and edit my emails. They’re incredible at it, as good as anyone I’ve ever met. Tasks that involve language and not facts tend to be done well by LLMs.
    - matwood 2y ago
      > I use LLMs everyday to proofread and edit my emails. This right here. I used to spend tons of time making sure my emails were perfect. Is it professional enough, am I being too terse, etc…
      - hadlock 2y ago
        The first profitable AI product I ever heard about (2 years ago) was an exec using a product to draft emails for them, for exactly the reasons you mention.
- nyc_data_geek1 2y ago
  You go into this process with a perspective, you do not build a solution and then start looking for the problem. Otherwise, you cannot estimate your TAM with any reasonable degree of accuracy, and thus cannot know how much to reasonably expect as return to expect on your investment. In the case of AI, which has had the benefit of a lot of hype until now, these expectations have been very much overblown, and this is being used to justify massive investments in infrastructure that the market is not actually demanding at such scale. Of course, this benefits the likes of Sam Altman, Satya Nadella et al, but has not produced the value promised, and does not appear poised to. And here you have one of the supposed bleeding edge companies in this space, who very recently was shown up by a much smaller and less capitalized rival, asking their own customers to tell them what their product is good for. Not a great look for them!
  - tonyhart7 2y ago
    wdym by this ?? "you do not build a solution and then start looking for the problem" their endgame goal was to replace Human entirely, Robotic and AI is perfect match to replace all human together They don't need to find problem because problem is full automatons from start to end
    - skydhash 2y ago
      > Robotic and AI is perfect match to replace all human together A FTL spaceship is all we need to make space travel viable between solar systems. This is the solution to depletion of resources on earth...
- alexashka 2y ago
  I heard this exact argument about blockchains. Or has that been a success with tons of productive uses in your opinion? At some point, I'd like to hear more than 'trust me bro, it'll be great' when we use up non-trivial amounts of finite resources to try these 'things'.
aprilthird2021 2y ago
It's incredibly good and lucrative business. You are confusing scientifically sound and well-planned out and conservative risk tolerance with good business

crazygringo 2y ago

And LLM's already have tons of productive uses. The biggest ones are probably still waiting, though. But this is about one particular price/performance ratio. You need to build things before you can see how the market responds. You say it's "not good business" but that's entirely wrong. It's excellent business. It's the only way to go about it, in fact. Finding product-market fit is a process. Companies aren't omniscient.

bigstrat2003 2y ago
> And LLM's already have tons of productive uses. I disagree strongly with that. Right now they are fun toys to play with, but not useful tools, because they are not reliable. If and when that gets fixed, maybe they will have productive uses. But for right now, not so much.
- gjs4786 2y ago
  "it only needs to be good enough" there are tons of productive uses for them. Reliable, much less. But productive? Tons
- fionic 2y ago
  Hello? Do you have a pulse? LLMs accomplish like 90% of everything I do now so I don’t have to do it… Explain what this code syntax means… Explain what this function does… Write a function to do X… Respond to my teammates in a Jira ticket explaining why it’s a bad idea to create a repo for every dockerfile… My teammate responded with X write a rebuttal… … and the list goes on … like forever
  - xrisk 2y ago
    It’s not that the LLM is doing something productive, it’s that you were doing things that were unproductive in the first place, and it’s sad that we live in a society where such things are considered productive (because of course they create monetary value). As an aside, I sincerely hope our “human” conversations don’t devolve into agents talking to each other. It’s just an insult to humanity.
  - nunez 2y ago
    Exactly what management wants to hear so they can lay off hundreds and push salaries down.
- dwaltrip 2y ago
  Who do you speak for? Other people have gotten value from them. Maybe you meant to say “in my experience” or something like that. To me, your comment reads as you making a definitive judgment on their usefulness for everyone. I use it most days when coding. Not all the time, but I’ve gotten a lot of value out of them. And yes I'm quite aware of their pitfalls.
- MyOutfitIsVague 2y ago
  They are pretty useful tools. Do yourself a favor and get a $100 free trial for Claude, hook it up to Aider, and give it a shot. It makes mistakes, it gets things wrong, and it still saves a bunch of time. A 10 minute refactoring turns into 30 seconds of making a request, 15 seconds of waiting, and a minute of reviewing and fixing up the output. It can give you decent insights into potential problems and error messages. The more precise your instructions, the better they perform. Being unreliable isn't being useless. It's like a very fast, very cheap intern. If you are good at code review and know exactly what change you want to make ahead of time, that can save you a ton of time without needing to be perfect.
  - kgwgk 2y ago
    > a $100 free trial What?
    - jdiff 2y ago
      A free trial of an amount of credits that would otherwise cost $100, I'm assuming.
      - kgwgk 2y ago
        Could be. Does such a thing exist?
        jdiff 2y ago
        Not outwardly/visibly/readily from a quick scan of their site and a short list of search results.
    - MyOutfitIsVague 2y ago
      I misremembered, because I was checking out all the various trials available. I think I was thinking of Google Cloud's $300 in credits, since I'm using Claude through their VertexAI.
  - nyarlathotep_ 2y ago
- alvah 2y ago
  This is a classic fallacy - you can't find a productive use for it, therefore nobody can find a productive use for it. That's not how the world works.
- HDThoreaun 2y ago
  I use LLMs everyday to proofread and edit my emails. They’re incredible at it, as good as anyone I’ve ever met. Tasks that involve language and not facts tend to be done well by LLMs.
  - matwood 2y ago
    > I use LLMs everyday to proofread and edit my emails. This right here. I used to spend tons of time making sure my emails were perfect. Is it professional enough, am I being too terse, etc…
    - hadlock 2y ago
      The first profitable AI product I ever heard about (2 years ago) was an exec using a product to draft emails for them, for exactly the reasons you mention.
nyc_data_geek1 2y ago
You go into this process with a perspective, you do not build a solution and then start looking for the problem. Otherwise, you cannot estimate your TAM with any reasonable degree of accuracy, and thus cannot know how much to reasonably expect as return to expect on your investment. In the case of AI, which has had the benefit of a lot of hype until now, these expectations have been very much overblown, and this is being used to justify massive investments in infrastructure that the market is not actually demanding at such scale. Of course, this benefits the likes of Sam Altman, Satya Nadella et al, but has not produced the value promised, and does not appear poised to. And here you have one of the supposed bleeding edge companies in this space, who very recently was shown up by a much smaller and less capitalized rival, asking their own customers to tell them what their product is good for. Not a great look for them!
- tonyhart7 2y ago
  wdym by this ?? "you do not build a solution and then start looking for the problem" their endgame goal was to replace Human entirely, Robotic and AI is perfect match to replace all human together They don't need to find problem because problem is full automatons from start to end
  - skydhash 2y ago
    > Robotic and AI is perfect match to replace all human together A FTL spaceship is all we need to make space travel viable between solar systems. This is the solution to depletion of resources on earth...
alexashka 2y ago
I heard this exact argument about blockchains. Or has that been a success with tons of productive uses in your opinion? At some point, I'd like to hear more than 'trust me bro, it'll be great' when we use up non-trivial amounts of finite resources to try these 'things'.

aprilthird2021 2y ago

It's incredibly good and lucrative business. You are confusing scientifically sound and well-planned out and conservative risk tolerance with good business