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I've been programming for a few decades. I hate LLMs. They generate oodles of buggy shite that I have to fix by hand. They frequently steal my time and make me

I've been programming for a few decades. I hate LLMs. They generate oodles of buggy shite that I have to fix by hand. They frequently steal my time and make me less productive because people on this site say I have to learn them or retire, and then I waste time looking up the details the bot got wrong. They're a slot machine and the people who think they are good are justifying an addiction and sunk costs. So retire me, I guess. I'm probably younger than you, but I'm almost ready to retire because I'm cheap and I don't buy into expensive fads, so I'm almost ready to cash out of this nightmare except then you realize the valuations of anthropic etc are propping up the whole economy and doing so on the promise that LLMs are going to deliver AGI! LLMs are marginally useful in some contexts. But I have seen absolutely nothing -- nothing -- to justify the costs or the valuations of these companies. They are definitely not AGI and before you accuse me of moving the goalposts, the AI companies are the ones promising this. It's a bubble. It's easy to get started. Good luck building a real product with just AI though. Good luck with that. If you turn out to be right I will happily exit this God forsaken industry. Lord free me from silicon valley; I liked computers. Not this. Not these people.

bluGill 2y ago
The real answer is probably somewhere between the two. There is value in AI - and the versions that will come up in the future will be better. However it isn't nearly as valuable as the advocates say either. I've given up on the current rounds, but I'm still going to keep watching for when they get better. They might or might not get enough better before I retire (I'm likely older than you), but there are a lot of things they can do better. I have no idea how hard those things are.
- parliament32 2y ago
  I'd like to agree with you and remain optimistic, but so much tech has promised the moon and stagnated into oblivion that I just don't have any optimism left to give. I don't know if you're old enough, but remember when speech-to-text was the next big thing? DragonSpeak was released in 1997, everyone was losing their minds about dictating letters/documents in MS Word, and we were promised that THIS would be the key interface for computing evermore. And.. 27 years later, talking to the latest Siri, it makes just as many mistakes as it did back then. In messenger applications people are sending literal voice notes -- audio clips -- back and forth because dictation is so unreliable. And audio clips are possibly the worst interface for communication ever (no searching, etc). Remember how blockchain was going to change the world? Web3? IoT? Etc etc. I've been through enough of these cycles to understand that, while the AI gimmick is cool and all, we're probably at the local maximum. The reliability won't improve much from here (hallucinations etc), while the costs to run it will stay high. The final tombstone will be when the AI companies stop running at a loss and actually charge for the massive costs associated with running these models.

bluGill 2y ago

The real answer is probably somewhere between the two. There is value in AI - and the versions that will come up in the future will be better. However it isn't nearly as valuable as the advocates say either. I've given up on the current rounds, but I'm still going to keep watching for when they get better. They might or might not get enough better before I retire (I'm likely older than you), but there are a lot of things they can do better. I have no idea how hard those things are.

parliament32 2y ago
I'd like to agree with you and remain optimistic, but so much tech has promised the moon and stagnated into oblivion that I just don't have any optimism left to give. I don't know if you're old enough, but remember when speech-to-text was the next big thing? DragonSpeak was released in 1997, everyone was losing their minds about dictating letters/documents in MS Word, and we were promised that THIS would be the key interface for computing evermore. And.. 27 years later, talking to the latest Siri, it makes just as many mistakes as it did back then. In messenger applications people are sending literal voice notes -- audio clips -- back and forth because dictation is so unreliable. And audio clips are possibly the worst interface for communication ever (no searching, etc). Remember how blockchain was going to change the world? Web3? IoT? Etc etc. I've been through enough of these cycles to understand that, while the AI gimmick is cool and all, we're probably at the local maximum. The reliability won't improve much from here (hallucinations etc), while the costs to run it will stay high. The final tombstone will be when the AI companies stop running at a loss and actually charge for the massive costs associated with running these models.