4 ms·

Think about what you're asking when you tell these people to interrogate the assumption that LLM based AIs are going to be the dominant technology going forward

by __loam 2y ago

Think about what you're asking when you tell these people to interrogate the assumption that LLM based AIs are going to be the dominant technology going forward. Hundreds of billions, the growth of the technology industry, the entire US stock market, and the global economy has been wagered on this technology. Imagine the turmoil when those in power realize the reality of what they're betting the farm on.

bayarearefugee 2y ago
The next time I am angrily typing to claude 3.7 in all caps because he overengineered a bunch of code I didn't even ask him to write in the first place, I'll be sure to let him know his continued failures are risking the entire world economy.
- __loam 2y ago
  You can be as snarky as you want but the reality is we're years deep into a market cycle that has seen a tremendous amount of capex with very little visible return. How much more productive do you think claude makes you as compared to Google or Stack Overflow? 15%? 50%? 200? Do you think that's enough to satisfy the market or are we all trading on unrealistic expectations? Do you think shareholders are going to like it that they're losing billions a quarter so Anthropic can run a service that helps you write web dev projects marginally faster? Do you even understand the amount of value that's tied up in these questions having a good answer right now?
  - enraged_camel 2y ago
    It will be incredible when the bubble pops. Especially if it coincides with the upcoming downturn in the economy.
  - weatherlite 2y ago
    I don't think companies like Meta, Alphabet or even Amazon are extremely overvalued. Their growth in revenues and earnings is still very solid, so even if A.I is a no show their earnings should continue to do fine (I'd even add Microsoft to the list). Sure stock price might slow down significanty but it can easily add 10% yearly for the forseeable future. Its much less than what we're used to, but its solid growth that has not much to do with A.I. And I totally agree people should forget about the s&p 500 returns we've seen in the last 15 years going forward, it would probably be less (though I have no crystal ball, but regression to the mean seems likely).
    - n_ary 2y ago
      Actually, all stocks are dead and tech heavy Nasdaq has entered the correction zone this year. It will be a real while before the stocks return to their pre-correction value. The AI hype drivers have lost massive value, hence the desperation will get immense, expect the “AI ready to replace expensive SWE/Lawyer/Entertainers/Creatives” narrative to start any moment now! Of course everything is smoke&mirrors so those will be charged at such premium that the naysayers will not be able to afford it and irrational leaders will buy it and cite immense success to maximise their C level bonuses and will early retire before the tower comes falling down.
      - weatherlite 2y ago
        Correction is one thing but saying "stocks are dead" is hyperbole. Just my poor ass startup is paying Google Cloud around 1 million USD a year to have our operations going. We're quite a cheap company but we're totally dependent on them. And Cloud is a minor part of Google's earnings they have Youtube, Search, Android etc etc. This isn't a bubble, these are real earnings that are probably not going away any time soon. Does it mean Google is bullet proof? No. They may experience a big correction at some point but that has always been the case for all companies. I can make the same case for Meta, Microsoft, to lesser extent Amazon. I'll leave Tesla aside it's indeed too richly valued.
        n_ary 2y ago
        I meant red(dead). Also losing a lot of valuation after jacking up to that point is not fun. Also a business paying $1M/year in cloud bill is neither poor nor tiny. We have very different definition of tiny and poor. Meta is very well suited in this AI race and will prevail well. Others will cut some loss and throw some ashes sometime soon.
  - csomar 2y ago
    You don't stop the car but speed up faster toward the wall. That has been the strategy in the last decade or so. In other words, you invent a new AI-BLOCK-WEB-4.X thing and move the bubble one stage further.
    - eastbound 2y ago
      Just like we study the “Crash of 1929”, our kids will study the “bubbles economy”: - Internet bubble 2001, - Blockchain bubble 2021, - AI bubble 2025, (Omitting 2008 and Covid because they’re not startup-related). Am I wrong or are they bubbling faster?
      - ptero 2y ago
        I think bubbles form and pop all the time. I would add (in the US) home price bubble, biotech bubble (of mid 2010s), cybersecurity bubble and more. Pops are less noticeable when a lot of money is sloshing around so deflating one bubble immediately start inflating something else. Worker bees can switch to the next thing in the same "building next great thing, work is plentiful, money no object" environment. So the bubbliness, IMO, is a function of the macroeconomic state, specifically the amount of money in the economy. Things get sober (and very ugly) when the money printing cycle ends, as it eventually must to avoid sliding into hyperinflation. My 2c.
      - csomar 2y ago
        I think 2008 set the stage that the government will bail out reckless economic activity for the top at the expense of the tax payer. Actions no longer have consequences and you better be big enough to hold the economy hostage to your scheme.
  - bayarearefugee 2y ago
    I'm entirely in agreement with you, I just have a dark sense of humor. I do actually use claude quite a bit recently and I suspect (completely anecdotal, so take it with a boatload of salt) it speeds up my development time by about 25% on average. But its a very lumpy sort of speed up that is sometimes a slow down depending upon how wacky the LLM's answers are. And I find claude 3.7 to be worse than claude 3.5 in many ways which makes me confused about how hyped up it is and further disillusioned about the "common sense" idea people around these parts have that the technology is just going to keep improving significantly year over year. I use it entirely through the web interface and using the lowest price basic monthly subscription fee. I am probably a cost center for Anthropic rather than a profit center, but I don't really see that as my problem to worry about. I'll enjoy the thing while it lasts and then not cry too hard when the house of cards collapses.
    - dingnuts 2y ago
      comments like this are giving me life lol I feel like I'm living in an insane asylum but your experience largely matches mine, except I've been reluctant to open my wallet
  - nyarlathotep_ 2y ago
    Goodness this is such a perfect response. Seeing more and more of this now, where even in "these parts" anything short of "AGI IS HERE" even a few months ago would have you labelled as "Luddite" "skeptic" and "left behind". When is the general public going to start asking questions? It's really not a game--people's 401ks have been propped up by the "Magnificent Seven" (disproportionately by one company) for some time now. What happens "if" these proclamations fail to manifest? How is this all supposed to work out?
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  I think SWE's have a serious blind spot here. I use the (rough) analogy of bowling to help illustrate this. People need to knock over pins in the bowling lane. SWE's are the pro bowlers who can (usually) throw pretty cleans shots to knock over pins. Now bumpers have been invented (LLMs) and regular folks who only have the faintest idea of how to roll a ball are knocking over pins. To the pro's these bumpers are all manner of bad and useless. To the laymen, they are an absolute revolution. I can tell you, with a straight face, the my (non-tech) company has already forgone hiring a pro bowler in at least four instances now because of these bumpers. Just last week we skipped on a $1k/mo CAD SaaS because Claude was able to build the needed narrow-scope tooling in 10 minutes. I'm sure a pro could come in and make that python program 3x as fast and use 60% less memory. But the fact of the matter is that we paid Anthropic $20, and spent 10 minutes to get a working niche manufacturing file interpreter/editor/converter. LLM's are finally bridging the language barrier between computers and humans. Right now the tech exists to make this even more widespread, it's just a matter of time before someone creates a tech-illiterate IDE that users can paste AI generated code into and functioning programs come out the other side. No need to ever even see a terminal or command line. I wouldn't be surprised if this isn't already in the works. "Hey Google, create an app that allows me to take a picture of a house plant, and then allows me to verbally make entries into a diary about that plant" Sure thing! Give me 3 minutes and the app will be on your homescreen and shareable .apk in your documents folder! I'll also cancel the $9.99/mo app that does the same thing for you. (ok probably not this part but you get the idea.)
  - __loam 2y ago
    You're just describing programming without realizing that having a stochastic and imprecise programming language is a leaky abstraction. The problem isn't that a "pro bowler" could come in and do something irrelevant for more money. Professional programmers understand that you shouldn't prematurely optimize things like memory or performance in contexts where that doesn't matter. You're ignoring the most important metric which is correctness. When we write a program, we make it correct then we can optimize it if that's actually important. What's going to happen when you have your non-expert write a program using these tools and it inevitably gets something wrong? Are you prepared to build business process on top of a program whose author can't tell you how it works which might contain bugs? Do you even realize that this is just a recipe for producing mountains and mountains of technical debt? You seem to believe this is going to put programmers out of a job but you're just explaining why they'll need even more of us in the future when these piles of garbage inevitably cost the company money.
coffeefirst 2y ago
Yeah... unfortunately that might be where we are. I have no analogy for this except the railroads of the Gilded Age. Did railroads become a pretty big deal? Yeah. They were also a giant vortex that slurped up endless investment, far more than the real demand could possibly justify. And it ends, well, we know how it ends.
- schnable 2y ago
  Fiber optic and data center build out in the nineties is similar. Overinvestment led to a bust for a period, but the infrastructure was useful and provided the foundation for the next wave of Internet growth. LLMs could be similar.
  - disgruntledphd2 2y ago
    At the very least, lots of software will end up running on GPUs.
shmerl 2y ago
It wouldn't be the first bubble. That doesn't make the above point about questioning it incorrect.
makeitdouble 2y ago
> Hundreds of billions Yes > the growth of the technology industry That's an overblown claim. AI companies failing won't mean technology doesn't advance nor that companies betting against/independently from AI would recind. > the entire US stock market Probably yes > the global economy Probably no
roncesvalles 2y ago
We've become so accustomed to the rip-roaring growth that came from widespread Internet adoption and now that it has piped down, we're desperate to find the next big boom. VR, crypto, blockchain, generative AI. And each time, like degenerate gamblers, we're feeling it, this must be it, the next Big 'Un, the bet that redeems all the bets that went wrong, bigger, riskier, bigger, riskier. But it just won't be, nothing in our lifetime will ever come close to what the Internet boom was. The window for becoming a Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg as easily as they did is closed now, and you just need to live with it. The title of this chapter till the end of our days will remain "After the Internet Boom" and it will chronicle this pathetic desperation.
- schnable 2y ago
  I agree with the sentiment, but LLMs have already had a lot more adoption than VR and Crypto.
  - hatefulmoron 2y ago
    You're right of course, but nobody ever gave me a free VR headset or a few thousand dollars of Monero. OpenAI and Google will both give you, for free, access to an LLM whenever you want. I can do a Google search and help with LLM adoption right now, it will be at the top of the page.
    - gammarator 2y ago
      The NYT sent me a free Google Cardboard once!
intelVISA 2y ago
Don't be silly, if the entire US stock market really was wagered on this technology then you'd better start learning Mandarin.

by __loam 2y ago

bayarearefugee 2y ago

The next time I am angrily typing to claude 3.7 in all caps because he overengineered a bunch of code I didn't even ask him to write in the first place, I'll be sure to let him know his continued failures are risking the entire world economy.

__loam 2y ago
You can be as snarky as you want but the reality is we're years deep into a market cycle that has seen a tremendous amount of capex with very little visible return. How much more productive do you think claude makes you as compared to Google or Stack Overflow? 15%? 50%? 200? Do you think that's enough to satisfy the market or are we all trading on unrealistic expectations? Do you think shareholders are going to like it that they're losing billions a quarter so Anthropic can run a service that helps you write web dev projects marginally faster? Do you even understand the amount of value that's tied up in these questions having a good answer right now?
- enraged_camel 2y ago
  It will be incredible when the bubble pops. Especially if it coincides with the upcoming downturn in the economy.
- weatherlite 2y ago
  I don't think companies like Meta, Alphabet or even Amazon are extremely overvalued. Their growth in revenues and earnings is still very solid, so even if A.I is a no show their earnings should continue to do fine (I'd even add Microsoft to the list). Sure stock price might slow down significanty but it can easily add 10% yearly for the forseeable future. Its much less than what we're used to, but its solid growth that has not much to do with A.I. And I totally agree people should forget about the s&p 500 returns we've seen in the last 15 years going forward, it would probably be less (though I have no crystal ball, but regression to the mean seems likely).
  - n_ary 2y ago
    Actually, all stocks are dead and tech heavy Nasdaq has entered the correction zone this year. It will be a real while before the stocks return to their pre-correction value. The AI hype drivers have lost massive value, hence the desperation will get immense, expect the “AI ready to replace expensive SWE/Lawyer/Entertainers/Creatives” narrative to start any moment now! Of course everything is smoke&mirrors so those will be charged at such premium that the naysayers will not be able to afford it and irrational leaders will buy it and cite immense success to maximise their C level bonuses and will early retire before the tower comes falling down.
    - weatherlite 2y ago
      Correction is one thing but saying "stocks are dead" is hyperbole. Just my poor ass startup is paying Google Cloud around 1 million USD a year to have our operations going. We're quite a cheap company but we're totally dependent on them. And Cloud is a minor part of Google's earnings they have Youtube, Search, Android etc etc. This isn't a bubble, these are real earnings that are probably not going away any time soon. Does it mean Google is bullet proof? No. They may experience a big correction at some point but that has always been the case for all companies. I can make the same case for Meta, Microsoft, to lesser extent Amazon. I'll leave Tesla aside it's indeed too richly valued.
      - n_ary 2y ago
        I meant red(dead). Also losing a lot of valuation after jacking up to that point is not fun. Also a business paying $1M/year in cloud bill is neither poor nor tiny. We have very different definition of tiny and poor. Meta is very well suited in this AI race and will prevail well. Others will cut some loss and throw some ashes sometime soon.
- csomar 2y ago
  You don't stop the car but speed up faster toward the wall. That has been the strategy in the last decade or so. In other words, you invent a new AI-BLOCK-WEB-4.X thing and move the bubble one stage further.
  - eastbound 2y ago
    Just like we study the “Crash of 1929”, our kids will study the “bubbles economy”: - Internet bubble 2001, - Blockchain bubble 2021, - AI bubble 2025, (Omitting 2008 and Covid because they’re not startup-related). Am I wrong or are they bubbling faster?
    - ptero 2y ago
      I think bubbles form and pop all the time. I would add (in the US) home price bubble, biotech bubble (of mid 2010s), cybersecurity bubble and more. Pops are less noticeable when a lot of money is sloshing around so deflating one bubble immediately start inflating something else. Worker bees can switch to the next thing in the same "building next great thing, work is plentiful, money no object" environment. So the bubbliness, IMO, is a function of the macroeconomic state, specifically the amount of money in the economy. Things get sober (and very ugly) when the money printing cycle ends, as it eventually must to avoid sliding into hyperinflation. My 2c.
    - csomar 2y ago
      I think 2008 set the stage that the government will bail out reckless economic activity for the top at the expense of the tax payer. Actions no longer have consequences and you better be big enough to hold the economy hostage to your scheme.
- bayarearefugee 2y ago
  I'm entirely in agreement with you, I just have a dark sense of humor. I do actually use claude quite a bit recently and I suspect (completely anecdotal, so take it with a boatload of salt) it speeds up my development time by about 25% on average. But its a very lumpy sort of speed up that is sometimes a slow down depending upon how wacky the LLM's answers are. And I find claude 3.7 to be worse than claude 3.5 in many ways which makes me confused about how hyped up it is and further disillusioned about the "common sense" idea people around these parts have that the technology is just going to keep improving significantly year over year. I use it entirely through the web interface and using the lowest price basic monthly subscription fee. I am probably a cost center for Anthropic rather than a profit center, but I don't really see that as my problem to worry about. I'll enjoy the thing while it lasts and then not cry too hard when the house of cards collapses.
  - dingnuts 2y ago
    comments like this are giving me life lol I feel like I'm living in an insane asylum but your experience largely matches mine, except I've been reluctant to open my wallet
- nyarlathotep_ 2y ago
  Goodness this is such a perfect response. Seeing more and more of this now, where even in "these parts" anything short of "AGI IS HERE" even a few months ago would have you labelled as "Luddite" "skeptic" and "left behind". When is the general public going to start asking questions? It's really not a game--people's 401ks have been propped up by the "Magnificent Seven" (disproportionately by one company) for some time now. What happens "if" these proclamations fail to manifest? How is this all supposed to work out?
Workaccount2 2y ago
I think SWE's have a serious blind spot here. I use the (rough) analogy of bowling to help illustrate this. People need to knock over pins in the bowling lane. SWE's are the pro bowlers who can (usually) throw pretty cleans shots to knock over pins. Now bumpers have been invented (LLMs) and regular folks who only have the faintest idea of how to roll a ball are knocking over pins. To the pro's these bumpers are all manner of bad and useless. To the laymen, they are an absolute revolution. I can tell you, with a straight face, the my (non-tech) company has already forgone hiring a pro bowler in at least four instances now because of these bumpers. Just last week we skipped on a $1k/mo CAD SaaS because Claude was able to build the needed narrow-scope tooling in 10 minutes. I'm sure a pro could come in and make that python program 3x as fast and use 60% less memory. But the fact of the matter is that we paid Anthropic $20, and spent 10 minutes to get a working niche manufacturing file interpreter/editor/converter. LLM's are finally bridging the language barrier between computers and humans. Right now the tech exists to make this even more widespread, it's just a matter of time before someone creates a tech-illiterate IDE that users can paste AI generated code into and functioning programs come out the other side. No need to ever even see a terminal or command line. I wouldn't be surprised if this isn't already in the works. "Hey Google, create an app that allows me to take a picture of a house plant, and then allows me to verbally make entries into a diary about that plant" Sure thing! Give me 3 minutes and the app will be on your homescreen and shareable .apk in your documents folder! I'll also cancel the $9.99/mo app that does the same thing for you. (ok probably not this part but you get the idea.)
- __loam 2y ago
  You're just describing programming without realizing that having a stochastic and imprecise programming language is a leaky abstraction. The problem isn't that a "pro bowler" could come in and do something irrelevant for more money. Professional programmers understand that you shouldn't prematurely optimize things like memory or performance in contexts where that doesn't matter. You're ignoring the most important metric which is correctness. When we write a program, we make it correct then we can optimize it if that's actually important. What's going to happen when you have your non-expert write a program using these tools and it inevitably gets something wrong? Are you prepared to build business process on top of a program whose author can't tell you how it works which might contain bugs? Do you even realize that this is just a recipe for producing mountains and mountains of technical debt? You seem to believe this is going to put programmers out of a job but you're just explaining why they'll need even more of us in the future when these piles of garbage inevitably cost the company money.

coffeefirst 2y ago

Yeah... unfortunately that might be where we are. I have no analogy for this except the railroads of the Gilded Age. Did railroads become a pretty big deal? Yeah. They were also a giant vortex that slurped up endless investment, far more than the real demand could possibly justify. And it ends, well, we know how it ends.

schnable 2y ago
Fiber optic and data center build out in the nineties is similar. Overinvestment led to a bust for a period, but the infrastructure was useful and provided the foundation for the next wave of Internet growth. LLMs could be similar.
- disgruntledphd2 2y ago
  At the very least, lots of software will end up running on GPUs.

shmerl 2y ago

It wouldn't be the first bubble. That doesn't make the above point about questioning it incorrect.

makeitdouble 2y ago

> Hundreds of billions Yes > the growth of the technology industry That's an overblown claim. AI companies failing won't mean technology doesn't advance nor that companies betting against/independently from AI would recind. > the entire US stock market Probably yes > the global economy Probably no

roncesvalles 2y ago

We've become so accustomed to the rip-roaring growth that came from widespread Internet adoption and now that it has piped down, we're desperate to find the next big boom. VR, crypto, blockchain, generative AI. And each time, like degenerate gamblers, we're feeling it, this must be it, the next Big 'Un, the bet that redeems all the bets that went wrong, bigger, riskier, bigger, riskier. But it just won't be, nothing in our lifetime will ever come close to what the Internet boom was. The window for becoming a Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg as easily as they did is closed now, and you just need to live with it. The title of this chapter till the end of our days will remain "After the Internet Boom" and it will chronicle this pathetic desperation.

schnable 2y ago
I agree with the sentiment, but LLMs have already had a lot more adoption than VR and Crypto.
- hatefulmoron 2y ago
  You're right of course, but nobody ever gave me a free VR headset or a few thousand dollars of Monero. OpenAI and Google will both give you, for free, access to an LLM whenever you want. I can do a Google search and help with LLM adoption right now, it will be at the top of the page.
  - gammarator 2y ago
    The NYT sent me a free Google Cardboard once!

intelVISA 2y ago

Don't be silly, if the entire US stock market really was wagered on this technology then you'd better start learning Mandarin.