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I think the bigger "AI hype vs. Reality" gap is about the productivity numbers people casually throw around, like "10x as productive" or even 100x. For example

I think the bigger "AI hype vs. Reality" gap is about the productivity numbers people casually throw around, like "10x as productive" or even 100x. For example, here are YC partners quoting a company in a batch claiming "100x speedup" in coding performance compared to the previous month: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IACHfKmZMr8&t=1837s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IACHfKmZMr8&t=1837s You can tell this claim is false, because that level of productivity increase would be glaringly obvious to an outside observer; it wouldn't need to be self-reported. A YC summer batch is 84 days culminating in Demo Day. So a 100x speed improvement would be like a team spending less than 1 day of coding and ending up with something that's on par with Demo Day in terms of functionality. Maybe the design would be wrong, but that wrong design would be just as fully-featured as a Demo Day app. So if 100x were true, the partners in that video would be talking about how the new batch dynamic is "They get breakfast with a customer, learn something new, have an epiphany, and then later the same day they have their entire app rewritten based on what they learned, and that scratch-rewrite is already at a Demo Day level of functionality." The partners aren't talking about that dynamic because it's not happening. So clearly the self-reported 100x is inaccurate. Even 10x would result in partners saying "Whoa, in this batch people have a Demo Day-quality app in production by the end of week 1 instead of week 12." The partners have a huge sample size on how much teams get done in what time period, so it would be glaringly obvious to them if this batch were shipping 10x as fast as previous batches. That external observation would be the headline if it were what the partners were actually seeing. Since that's not the headline, it's clearly not what they're seeing, so 10x can't be the number either.

__gcd 2y ago
To be fair if your benchmark is against demo day, at some point Amdahl's law kicks in regardless of how many multiples you have on engineering. Not sure if I believe the multiple of 10x or 100x anyway, but a better metric is “number of customer feedback loops” is a better metric than “can complete one (1) demo day in X time”. My (non YC) impression is that people are hitting more loops. Also multiples “up” versus “down” are not symmetric. Airplanes are around 10x faster than cars, but that doesn’t mean I’ll be getting to work in 60 seconds.
- Jensson 2y ago
  If you can't do something extremely impressive with the equivalent of hundreds worth of full time engineers then there is something wrong with you as a founder. Note that real engineers helps you come up with new features and test your product and all that and not just add code, adding code was never a bottleneck on just about any problem ever. So Amdahl's law applies in terms of the time to add code, not in terms of engineers, they don't do the work of 100 engineers, at best they take 100x less time to add lines of code when they know what they wanna make. But that isn't particularly game changing, as adding code is not the hard or even time consuming part.
mdaniel 2y ago
I see your problem (at least according to Yegge's theory): the batch applicants are just too senior. If they were more junior, only then would they benefit from the 100x multiplier. The olds are just too far removed from the enlightened way, you see
- daveguy 2y ago
  Not sure if this is a joke, but it's hilarious either way.

__gcd 2y ago

To be fair if your benchmark is against demo day, at some point Amdahl's law kicks in regardless of how many multiples you have on engineering. Not sure if I believe the multiple of 10x or 100x anyway, but a better metric is “number of customer feedback loops” is a better metric than “can complete one (1) demo day in X time”. My (non YC) impression is that people are hitting more loops. Also multiples “up” versus “down” are not symmetric. Airplanes are around 10x faster than cars, but that doesn’t mean I’ll be getting to work in 60 seconds.

Jensson 2y ago
If you can't do something extremely impressive with the equivalent of hundreds worth of full time engineers then there is something wrong with you as a founder. Note that real engineers helps you come up with new features and test your product and all that and not just add code, adding code was never a bottleneck on just about any problem ever. So Amdahl's law applies in terms of the time to add code, not in terms of engineers, they don't do the work of 100 engineers, at best they take 100x less time to add lines of code when they know what they wanna make. But that isn't particularly game changing, as adding code is not the hard or even time consuming part.

mdaniel 2y ago

I see your problem (at least according to Yegge's theory): the batch applicants are just too senior. If they were more junior, only then would they benefit from the 100x multiplier. The olds are just too far removed from the enlightened way, you see

daveguy 2y ago
Not sure if this is a joke, but it's hilarious either way.