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Andrew Ng: Building Faster with AI [video]

302 points by sandslash 1y ago

blobgen 1y ago
[dead]
skipants 1y ago
I’m 20 minutes into the video and it does seem mostly basic and agreeable. Two arguments from Ng that really stuck out that is really tripping my skepticism alarm are: 1) He mentions how fast prototyping has begun because generating a simple app has become easier with AI. This, to me, has always been quick and never the bottleneck for any company I’ve been at, including startups. Validating an idea was simple enough via wireframing. I can maybe see it for selling an idea where you need some amount of fidelity yo impress potential investors… but I would hope places like YC can see the tech behind the idea without seeing the tech itself. Or at least can ignore low fidelity if a prototype shows the meat of the product. 2) Ng talks about how everyone in his company codes, from the front desk to the executives. The “everyone should code” idea has been done and shown to fail for the past 15 years. In fact I’ve seen it be more damaging than helpful because it gave people false confidence that they could tell engineers how to do their job rather than a more empathetic understanding.
- apwell23 1y ago
  even prototyping hasn't become "fast" because you cannot purely vibecode even a prototype.
- marcosdumay 1y ago
  On point 1, it's worse than that. Adding detail and veracity to a prototype is well known to bring negative value. Prototypes must be exactly a sketchy as the ideas they represent, otherwise they mislead people into thinking the software is built and your ideas can't be changed.
  - macNchz 1y ago
    I’ve always said this as well, having done lots and lots of early stage building and prototyping, and suffering plenty of proto-duction foibles, however my view has shifted on this a lot in the last year or so. With current models I’m able to throw together fully working web app prototypes so quickly and iterate often-sweeping UI and architectural changes so readily that I’m finding it has changed my whole workflow. The idea of trying to keep things low-fidelity at the start is predicated on the understanding that changes later in the process are much more difficult or expensive, which I think is increasingly no longer the case in many circumstances. Having a completely working prototype and then totally changing how it works in just a few sentences is really quite something. The key to sustainability in this pattern, in my opinion, is not letting the AI dictate project structure or get too far ahead of your own understanding/oversight of the general architecture. That’s a balancing act to be sure, since purely vibe-coding is awfully tempting, but it’s still far too easy to wind up with a big ball of wax that neither human nor AI can further improve.
  - NotMichaelBay 1y ago
    I don't think this reasoning holds up anymore now that somewhat polished prototypes are so cheap to create and change. Maybe not everyone is aware of that yet but eventually it will be common knowledge.
- mteoharov 1y ago
  At my company everybody codes, including PMs and business people. It can definitely be damaging done in the long run without any supervision from an actual programmer. This is why we assign an engineer to review every PR of a vibe coded project and they don’t really need all of the context to detect bs approaches that will surely fail. About prototyping - its much faster and i dont know how anyone can argue this. PMs can get a full blown prototype for an MVP working in a day with AI assistance. Sure - they will be thrown in the trash after the demo, but they carry out their purpose of proving a concept. The code is janky but it works for its purpose.
  - willahmad 1y ago
    > This is why we assign an engineer to review every PR of a vibe coded project and they don’t really need all of the context to detect bs approaches that will surely fail. I see this trend in many companies as well, just curious, how do you make sure engineering time is not wasted reviewing so many PRs? Because, some of them will be good, you only need couple of your bets to take off, some definitely bad
    - mteoharov 1y ago
      Its commonly understood that whoever is reviewing the PR shouldn't concern themselves with all of the project’s context (business or any other). It really takes a glance at the PR to see what the author wanted to create and you can pick up on bad directions the AI took and so you just help the person navigate these choices. Of course if the project has to actually grow into a product at some point you would have to rewrite good chunks of it.
  - sensanaty 1y ago
    Good lord I think I'd rather eat a shotgun than be forced to review a billion garbage PRs made by PMs and other non-technical colleagues. It's bad enough reviewing PRs backenders write for FE features badly with AI (and vice versa), I cannot even imagine the pits of hell this crap is like. What happens when inevitably the PR/code is horrid? Do they just keep prompting and pushing out slop that some poor overworked dev is now forced to sit through lest he get PIP'd for not being brainwashed by LLMs yet?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- torginus 1y ago
  The “everyone should code” idea has been done and shown to fail for the past 15 years - I pretty much completely agree, and this idea shows the outsized importance on programming as some kind of inherently superior activity, and bringing the ability to program to the masses as some kind of ultimate good. If you've worked long enough and had interacted with people with varied skillsets, people who don't code aren't only there for show, in fact, depending on the type of company you work at, their jobs might be genuinely more important for the company's success than yours.
  - zikzak 1y ago
    I spent a very frustrating 20 minutes with someone this week (a nice person I like, which is why I spent this time) explaining that the Python code chatgpt had provided them would just copy files from one folder to another and was no different from using Windows drag and drop copy. It would not do any of the things they thought (lots of parsing and file renaming that it took a while for them to articulate). We also discussed how the corporate IT would not be installing a Python interpreter on their computer. Oh what's that? Let me explain. And so on. ChatGPT didn't help, in this situation, as it turned out.
nikolayasdf123 1y ago
not a single word about overwhelming replacement of humans with AI. nothing about countless jobs lost. nothing about ever increasing competition and rat-race. (speaking of software, but applies to all industries). his rose-glasses view is somewhere in between optimism-in-denial to straight-up lunacy. if this is the leader(s) we have been following, this should be a wake up call.
- lbrito 1y ago
  How dare you insinuate that there might be negatives in a new technology. Outrageous. AI good.
GBF1GBF1 1y ago
[flagged]
mehulashah 1y ago
This talk is deceptively simple. The most sage advice that founders routinely forget is what concrete idea are you going to implement and why do you think it will work? There has be a way to invalidate your idea and as a corollary you must have the focus to collect the data and properly invalidate it.
- nextworddev 1y ago
  Hey Mehul, crossed paths with you at AWS. Good to see you are doing your own thing now. We could connect sometime
  - mehulashah 1y ago
    Happy to. DM me.
cachecrab 1y ago
1 product manager to 0.5 engineers for a project? That seems... off.
sensanaty 1y ago
> 1 product manager to 0.5 engineers I would love to have access to whatever this guy is smoking, cause that is some grade-A mind rotted insanity right there. I can count on half of 1 hand the number of good PMs I've had trough my career who weren't a net negative on the projects/companies, and even they most definitely cannot build jackshit by throwing a bunch of LLM-hallucinated crap at the wall and seeing what sticks. But sure, the devs are the ones that are going to be replaced by the clueless middle managers who only exist to waste everyone's time.
- blurbleblurble 1y ago
  Or is it the other way around? Project managers who can't actually competently execute won't be able to hang? In the end, what if technically sharp designers and well rounded developers actually end up pushing out incompetent managers? Could be wishful thinking but you never know.
  - blurbleblurble 1y ago
    Case in point: https://old.reddit.com/r/ProductManagement/comments/1lw9r9h/i_messed_up_my_google_pm_vibe_coding_interview/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ProductManagement/comments/1lw9r9h/... (the comments are especially revealing)
    - dimal 1y ago
      That is completely bizarre. I’ve been wondering what’s happening to programmer interviews now that AI makes all the standard formats pointless. I never imagined that they would ADD coding to the process for other roles. Having PMs vibe coding in an interview? That’s idiotic.
      - sensanaty 1y ago
        We've recently come under new management, and the interview process for ICs has changed about a week ago and is similarly absurd to me. For the frontend role, we have candidates awkwardly read through an AI-generated document that is split up extremely awkwardly and in general has that AI tone to it which makes it hard to read through because it's extremely generic, non-specific and devoid of any useful details or indeed thought put into it. The new head of engineering also wants to be a part of every single one of these, and also wants FOUR OTHER PEOPLE in the interview alongside him. Did I mention already that they have to read through a 6-page document that they have never seen or been informed about live in front of 5 people, including their future manager? In the interview itself, the head of engineering then asks the candidates to use Cursor (and yes, specifically cursor and only cursor, the guy is fucking obsessed with cursor to the point where I wouldn't be surprised if he's somehow getting paid to shove it everywhere) as much as they possibly can. He refuses to answer their questions should they have any, and tells them to direct all questions to Cursor instead. There was one person who realized very early on that what we're basically asking for is about as simple of a thing as you can possibly imagine, basically a textarea, a button and a list that is dynamically generated (just phrased in the most obtuse possible way, for some reason). He completed this task manually with no Cursor in maybe 5 minutes, 15 if you count the 10 minutes to read through the monstrosity of an AI-generated task. He got points docked by our head of engineering for "Not using AI properly and inefficiently spending time manually coding" which is hilarious because literally nobody who relied on Cursor during the interview got even close to where this guy got. It has so far been a very predictable disaster, with some extremely talented and promising people sending us emails afterwards to the effect of "This has been the worst interview experience of my life, and I don't care how I did, I'm withdrawing my candidacy. As an official GDPR request, please delete everything and anything you might have on me". Head of engineering is steadfast though, and has called pretty much everyone we've interviewed so far "A bad apple, not a great culture fit because of lack of enthusiasm for AI tooling". There is absolutely no logic to anything currently happening. It is simply one of the most massive hype bubbles in human history, and VCs, C-levels, middle and upper management are DESPERATE for the marketing hype to be seen as the reality and for the untold billions poured into these systems to be the successes they were initially sold as. There's no humility here, there's no thought being put into any of it, it's extremely cult-like and people are just trying any random idiotic idea that crosses their mind because they have a sycophantic black box that will shower them in infinite praise for every idea they lazily shit out onto the text input area of their favorite LLM tool. They are DESPERATE to fire the expensive, cocky engineers who think they're irreplaceable, and god damn it if they won't burn the entire world down for the chance to be proven right.
bgwalter 1y ago
[flagged]
- whattheheckheck 1y ago
  He literally builds companies and hires ceos to run them Google it
  - melenaboija 1y ago
    > He literally builds companies Like with actual mortar, brick by brick?
- reactordev 1y ago
  He doesn’t have to at this point, he just throws money at younger ones that will build it. I want an Andrew Ng Agent.
  - Bluestein 1y ago
    ... in essence, an "A-Ngent".- (I'll see myself out ...)
  - arkmm 1y ago
    Not affiliated, but someone's already working on that for you: https://www.realavatar.ai/ https://www.realavatar.ai/
  - reactordev 1y ago
    I'm serious, the man's a genius...
- hoegarden 1y ago
  Baidu.
  - bgwalter 1y ago
    The video's description is about building startups through vibe coding, not using "AI" like self-driving or chatbots in startups. Additionally, Baidu wasn't a startup when he joined in 2014.
mrbonner 1y ago
You become a millionaire by selling books (courses) of how to become millionaire to others.
- rubslopes 1y ago
  Relevant video https://youtu.be/CWMAOzH20mY?si=Kr8vp1vo_PpRNJ8-&utm_source=MTQxZ https://youtu.be/CWMAOzH20mY?si=Kr8vp1vo_PpRNJ8-&utm_source=...
  - Koshcheiushko 1y ago
    Thanks
DataDaemon 1y ago
when there is a gold rush, just sell courses how to mine gold
- azan_ 1y ago
  He sold courses (great ones!) long before there was AI-gold rush. He's one of the OG players in online education and I think he deserves praise, not blame for that.
w10-1 1y ago
Not sure why this has drawn silence and attacks - whence the animus to Ng? His high-level assessments seem accurate, he's a reasonable champion of AI, and he speaks credibly based on advising many companies. What am I missing? (He does fall on the side of open models (as input factors): is that the threat?) He argues that landscape is changing (at least quarterly), and that services are (best) replaceable (often week-to-week) because models change, but that orchestration is harder to replace, and that there are relatively few orchestration platforms. So: what platforms are available? Are there other HN posts that assess the current state of AI orchestration? (What's the AI-orchestration acronym? not PAAS but AIOPAAS? AOP? (since aspect-oriented programming is history))
- tomrod 1y ago
  No need to add AI to the name, especially if it works. PaaS and IaaS are sufficient.
- lloeki 1y ago
  > AOP? (since aspect-oriented programming is history) AOP is very much alive, people that do AOP have just forgotten what the name is, and many have simply reinvented it poorly.
  - nivertech 1y ago
    AOP always felt like a hack. I used it with C++ early on, and it was a preprocessor inserting ("weaving") aspects in the function entries/exits. Mostly was useful for logging. But that can be somewhat emulated using C++ constructors/destructors. Maybe it can be also useful for DbC (Design-by-Contract) when sets of functions/methods have common pre/post-conditions and/or invariants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect-oriented_programming#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect-oriented_programming#Cr...
    - lloeki 1y ago
      > AOP always felt like a hack. I used it with C++ Colour me surprised that a language which is the practical definition of bolted-on features has an implementation that feels like a bolted-on hack ;) > early on Also the "early" AOP was very much focused on a formal definition and a specific approach, further entrenched by how Java did it. But you don't need to do AOP "by the letter" to do AOP: as long as you have cross-cutting concerns that you sprinkle over your code you're doing AOP, even if you're not calling that pointcut and stuff. Python decorators, C# attributes, Ruby's whole "monkey patching" (e.g alias method chaining pattern, or simply modules combined with the ancestor system and message passing) are all pretty much variations that fit well with the AOP paradigm. I'd argue that a lot of people are doing AOP without ever realising it.
pchristensen 1y ago
I have had reservation about Ng from a lot of his past hype, but I thought this talk was extremely practical and tactical. I recommend watching it before passing judgement.
croes 1y ago
I haven’t watched the video yet, but title does sound like quantity over quality. Why faster and not better with AI?
- pinkmuffinere 1y ago
  I think this is an interesting question, and I’d like to genuinely attempt an answer. I essentially think this is because people prefer to optimize what they can measure. It is hard to measure the quality of work. People have subjective opinions, the size of opportunities can be different, etc, making quality hard to pin down. It is much easier to measure the time required for each iteration on a concept. Additionally, I think it is generally believed that a project with more iterations tends to have higher quality than a project with less, even putting aside the concern about measuring quality itself. Therefore, we put aside the discussion of quality (which we’d really like to improve), and instead make the claim that we can actually measure (time to do something), with the strong implication that this _also_ will tend to increase quality.
  - croes 1y ago
    I think speed isn’t our problem. Most of the time the problem it‘s quality but everyone only seems eager to ship as fast as possible. Move fast and break things already happened and now we are adding more speed. „Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." Or for the more sophisticated https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Physicists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Physicists Energy consumption and data protection were a thing and then came AI and all of a sudden it doesn’t matter anymore. Between all the good things people create with AI I see a lot more useless or even harmful things. Scams and fake news get better and harder to distinguish to a point where reality doesn’t matter anymore.
- markerz 1y ago
  I think quality takes time and refinement which is not something that LLMs have solved very well today. They are very okay at it, except for very specific targeted refinements (Grammerly, SQL editors). However, they are excellent at building from 0->1, and the video is suggesting that this is perfect for startups. In the context of startups, faster is better.
androng 1y ago
https://toolong.link/v?w=RNJCfif1dPY&l=en https://toolong.link/v?w=RNJCfif1dPY&l=en
Keyframe 1y ago
strong MLM energy vibe in that talk.
imranq 1y ago
My two takeaways is you build 1) Having a precise vision of what you want to achieve 2) Being able to control / steer AI towards that vision Teams that can do both of these things, especially #1 will move much faster. Even if they are wrong its better than vague ideas that get applause but not customers
- enos_feedler 1y ago
  Are you a student of Robert Fritz? He says this exactly. The only two things you need is 1) a vision and 2) ability to see present reality clearly. Beyond this it’s all about the skill to nudge a creation towards the vision without being prescribed to a process. The art is knowing when to just use the status quo tool or try something new at any point during the nudging is key. Based on his teachings I can easily see vibe coding fitting into creation process quite easily. Where it becomes tricky is “seeing current reality clearly”. If you have been vibe coding for two weeks and perhaps a weak programmer or worse no technical ability, can you actually see reality at that point? Probably not. It requires understanding the software structure. Maybe. Its all up in the air right now. But I truly believe that LLMs make software creation more like creating art.
- void-star 1y ago
  Yes this! The observation that being specific versus general in the problems you want to solve is a better start-up plan is true for all startups ever, not just ones that use LLMs to solve them. Anecdotal/personal startup experiences support this strongly and I read enough on here to know that I am not alone…
  - techpineapple 1y ago
    What's the balance between being specific in a way that's positive and allows you to solve good problems, and not getting pigeonhold and not being able to pivot? I wonder if companies who pivot are the norm or if you just here of the most popular cases.
fjjckj 1y ago
[flagged]
gsbsbdbdbdbdb 1y ago
[flagged]

302 points by sandslash 1y ago

[dead]

I’m 20 minutes into the video and it does seem mostly basic and agreeable. Two arguments from Ng that really stuck out that is really tripping my skepticism alarm are: 1) He mentions how fast prototyping has begun because generating a simple app has become easier with AI. This, to me, has always been quick and never the bottleneck for any company I’ve been at, including startups. Validating an idea was simple enough via wireframing. I can maybe see it for selling an idea where you need some amount of fidelity yo impress potential investors… but I would hope places like YC can see the tech behind the idea without seeing the tech itself. Or at least can ignore low fidelity if a prototype shows the meat of the product. 2) Ng talks about how everyone in his company codes, from the front desk to the executives. The “everyone should code” idea has been done and shown to fail for the past 15 years. In fact I’ve seen it be more damaging than helpful because it gave people false confidence that they could tell engineers how to do their job rather than a more empathetic understanding.

apwell23 1y ago
even prototyping hasn't become "fast" because you cannot purely vibecode even a prototype.
marcosdumay 1y ago
On point 1, it's worse than that. Adding detail and veracity to a prototype is well known to bring negative value. Prototypes must be exactly a sketchy as the ideas they represent, otherwise they mislead people into thinking the software is built and your ideas can't be changed.
- macNchz 1y ago
  I’ve always said this as well, having done lots and lots of early stage building and prototyping, and suffering plenty of proto-duction foibles, however my view has shifted on this a lot in the last year or so. With current models I’m able to throw together fully working web app prototypes so quickly and iterate often-sweeping UI and architectural changes so readily that I’m finding it has changed my whole workflow. The idea of trying to keep things low-fidelity at the start is predicated on the understanding that changes later in the process are much more difficult or expensive, which I think is increasingly no longer the case in many circumstances. Having a completely working prototype and then totally changing how it works in just a few sentences is really quite something. The key to sustainability in this pattern, in my opinion, is not letting the AI dictate project structure or get too far ahead of your own understanding/oversight of the general architecture. That’s a balancing act to be sure, since purely vibe-coding is awfully tempting, but it’s still far too easy to wind up with a big ball of wax that neither human nor AI can further improve.
- NotMichaelBay 1y ago
  I don't think this reasoning holds up anymore now that somewhat polished prototypes are so cheap to create and change. Maybe not everyone is aware of that yet but eventually it will be common knowledge.
mteoharov 1y ago
At my company everybody codes, including PMs and business people. It can definitely be damaging done in the long run without any supervision from an actual programmer. This is why we assign an engineer to review every PR of a vibe coded project and they don’t really need all of the context to detect bs approaches that will surely fail. About prototyping - its much faster and i dont know how anyone can argue this. PMs can get a full blown prototype for an MVP working in a day with AI assistance. Sure - they will be thrown in the trash after the demo, but they carry out their purpose of proving a concept. The code is janky but it works for its purpose.
- willahmad 1y ago
  > This is why we assign an engineer to review every PR of a vibe coded project and they don’t really need all of the context to detect bs approaches that will surely fail. I see this trend in many companies as well, just curious, how do you make sure engineering time is not wasted reviewing so many PRs? Because, some of them will be good, you only need couple of your bets to take off, some definitely bad
  - mteoharov 1y ago
    Its commonly understood that whoever is reviewing the PR shouldn't concern themselves with all of the project’s context (business or any other). It really takes a glance at the PR to see what the author wanted to create and you can pick up on bad directions the AI took and so you just help the person navigate these choices. Of course if the project has to actually grow into a product at some point you would have to rewrite good chunks of it.
- sensanaty 1y ago
  Good lord I think I'd rather eat a shotgun than be forced to review a billion garbage PRs made by PMs and other non-technical colleagues. It's bad enough reviewing PRs backenders write for FE features badly with AI (and vice versa), I cannot even imagine the pits of hell this crap is like. What happens when inevitably the PR/code is horrid? Do they just keep prompting and pushing out slop that some poor overworked dev is now forced to sit through lest he get PIP'd for not being brainwashed by LLMs yet?
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
torginus 1y ago
The “everyone should code” idea has been done and shown to fail for the past 15 years - I pretty much completely agree, and this idea shows the outsized importance on programming as some kind of inherently superior activity, and bringing the ability to program to the masses as some kind of ultimate good. If you've worked long enough and had interacted with people with varied skillsets, people who don't code aren't only there for show, in fact, depending on the type of company you work at, their jobs might be genuinely more important for the company's success than yours.
- zikzak 1y ago
  I spent a very frustrating 20 minutes with someone this week (a nice person I like, which is why I spent this time) explaining that the Python code chatgpt had provided them would just copy files from one folder to another and was no different from using Windows drag and drop copy. It would not do any of the things they thought (lots of parsing and file renaming that it took a while for them to articulate). We also discussed how the corporate IT would not be installing a Python interpreter on their computer. Oh what's that? Let me explain. And so on. ChatGPT didn't help, in this situation, as it turned out.

nikolayasdf123 1y ago

not a single word about overwhelming replacement of humans with AI. nothing about countless jobs lost. nothing about ever increasing competition and rat-race. (speaking of software, but applies to all industries). his rose-glasses view is somewhere in between optimism-in-denial to straight-up lunacy. if this is the leader(s) we have been following, this should be a wake up call.

lbrito 1y ago
How dare you insinuate that there might be negatives in a new technology. Outrageous. AI good.

GBF1GBF1 1y ago

[flagged]

mehulashah 1y ago

This talk is deceptively simple. The most sage advice that founders routinely forget is what concrete idea are you going to implement and why do you think it will work? There has be a way to invalidate your idea and as a corollary you must have the focus to collect the data and properly invalidate it.

nextworddev 1y ago
Hey Mehul, crossed paths with you at AWS. Good to see you are doing your own thing now. We could connect sometime
- mehulashah 1y ago
  Happy to. DM me.

cachecrab 1y ago

1 product manager to 0.5 engineers for a project? That seems... off.

sensanaty 1y ago

> 1 product manager to 0.5 engineers I would love to have access to whatever this guy is smoking, cause that is some grade-A mind rotted insanity right there. I can count on half of 1 hand the number of good PMs I've had trough my career who weren't a net negative on the projects/companies, and even they most definitely cannot build jackshit by throwing a bunch of LLM-hallucinated crap at the wall and seeing what sticks. But sure, the devs are the ones that are going to be replaced by the clueless middle managers who only exist to waste everyone's time.

blurbleblurble 1y ago
Or is it the other way around? Project managers who can't actually competently execute won't be able to hang? In the end, what if technically sharp designers and well rounded developers actually end up pushing out incompetent managers? Could be wishful thinking but you never know.
- blurbleblurble 1y ago
  Case in point: https://old.reddit.com/r/ProductManagement/comments/1lw9r9h/i_messed_up_my_google_pm_vibe_coding_interview/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ProductManagement/comments/1lw9r9h/... (the comments are especially revealing)
  - dimal 1y ago
    That is completely bizarre. I’ve been wondering what’s happening to programmer interviews now that AI makes all the standard formats pointless. I never imagined that they would ADD coding to the process for other roles. Having PMs vibe coding in an interview? That’s idiotic.
    - sensanaty 1y ago
      We've recently come under new management, and the interview process for ICs has changed about a week ago and is similarly absurd to me. For the frontend role, we have candidates awkwardly read through an AI-generated document that is split up extremely awkwardly and in general has that AI tone to it which makes it hard to read through because it's extremely generic, non-specific and devoid of any useful details or indeed thought put into it. The new head of engineering also wants to be a part of every single one of these, and also wants FOUR OTHER PEOPLE in the interview alongside him. Did I mention already that they have to read through a 6-page document that they have never seen or been informed about live in front of 5 people, including their future manager? In the interview itself, the head of engineering then asks the candidates to use Cursor (and yes, specifically cursor and only cursor, the guy is fucking obsessed with cursor to the point where I wouldn't be surprised if he's somehow getting paid to shove it everywhere) as much as they possibly can. He refuses to answer their questions should they have any, and tells them to direct all questions to Cursor instead. There was one person who realized very early on that what we're basically asking for is about as simple of a thing as you can possibly imagine, basically a textarea, a button and a list that is dynamically generated (just phrased in the most obtuse possible way, for some reason). He completed this task manually with no Cursor in maybe 5 minutes, 15 if you count the 10 minutes to read through the monstrosity of an AI-generated task. He got points docked by our head of engineering for "Not using AI properly and inefficiently spending time manually coding" which is hilarious because literally nobody who relied on Cursor during the interview got even close to where this guy got. It has so far been a very predictable disaster, with some extremely talented and promising people sending us emails afterwards to the effect of "This has been the worst interview experience of my life, and I don't care how I did, I'm withdrawing my candidacy. As an official GDPR request, please delete everything and anything you might have on me". Head of engineering is steadfast though, and has called pretty much everyone we've interviewed so far "A bad apple, not a great culture fit because of lack of enthusiasm for AI tooling". There is absolutely no logic to anything currently happening. It is simply one of the most massive hype bubbles in human history, and VCs, C-levels, middle and upper management are DESPERATE for the marketing hype to be seen as the reality and for the untold billions poured into these systems to be the successes they were initially sold as. There's no humility here, there's no thought being put into any of it, it's extremely cult-like and people are just trying any random idiotic idea that crosses their mind because they have a sycophantic black box that will shower them in infinite praise for every idea they lazily shit out onto the text input area of their favorite LLM tool. They are DESPERATE to fire the expensive, cocky engineers who think they're irreplaceable, and god damn it if they won't burn the entire world down for the chance to be proven right.

bgwalter 1y ago

[flagged]

whattheheckheck 1y ago
He literally builds companies and hires ceos to run them Google it
- melenaboija 1y ago
  > He literally builds companies Like with actual mortar, brick by brick?
reactordev 1y ago
He doesn’t have to at this point, he just throws money at younger ones that will build it. I want an Andrew Ng Agent.
- Bluestein 1y ago
  ... in essence, an "A-Ngent".- (I'll see myself out ...)
- arkmm 1y ago
  Not affiliated, but someone's already working on that for you: https://www.realavatar.ai/ https://www.realavatar.ai/
- reactordev 1y ago
  I'm serious, the man's a genius...
hoegarden 1y ago
Baidu.
- bgwalter 1y ago
  The video's description is about building startups through vibe coding, not using "AI" like self-driving or chatbots in startups. Additionally, Baidu wasn't a startup when he joined in 2014.

mrbonner 1y ago

You become a millionaire by selling books (courses) of how to become millionaire to others.

rubslopes 1y ago
Relevant video https://youtu.be/CWMAOzH20mY?si=Kr8vp1vo_PpRNJ8-&utm_source=MTQxZ https://youtu.be/CWMAOzH20mY?si=Kr8vp1vo_PpRNJ8-&utm_source=...
- Koshcheiushko 1y ago
  Thanks

DataDaemon 1y ago

when there is a gold rush, just sell courses how to mine gold

azan_ 1y ago
He sold courses (great ones!) long before there was AI-gold rush. He's one of the OG players in online education and I think he deserves praise, not blame for that.

w10-1 1y ago

Not sure why this has drawn silence and attacks - whence the animus to Ng? His high-level assessments seem accurate, he's a reasonable champion of AI, and he speaks credibly based on advising many companies. What am I missing? (He does fall on the side of open models (as input factors): is that the threat?) He argues that landscape is changing (at least quarterly), and that services are (best) replaceable (often week-to-week) because models change, but that orchestration is harder to replace, and that there are relatively few orchestration platforms. So: what platforms are available? Are there other HN posts that assess the current state of AI orchestration? (What's the AI-orchestration acronym? not PAAS but AIOPAAS? AOP? (since aspect-oriented programming is history))

tomrod 1y ago
No need to add AI to the name, especially if it works. PaaS and IaaS are sufficient.
lloeki 1y ago
> AOP? (since aspect-oriented programming is history) AOP is very much alive, people that do AOP have just forgotten what the name is, and many have simply reinvented it poorly.
- nivertech 1y ago
  AOP always felt like a hack. I used it with C++ early on, and it was a preprocessor inserting ("weaving") aspects in the function entries/exits. Mostly was useful for logging. But that can be somewhat emulated using C++ constructors/destructors. Maybe it can be also useful for DbC (Design-by-Contract) when sets of functions/methods have common pre/post-conditions and/or invariants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect-oriented_programming#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect-oriented_programming#Cr...
  - lloeki 1y ago
    > AOP always felt like a hack. I used it with C++ Colour me surprised that a language which is the practical definition of bolted-on features has an implementation that feels like a bolted-on hack ;) > early on Also the "early" AOP was very much focused on a formal definition and a specific approach, further entrenched by how Java did it. But you don't need to do AOP "by the letter" to do AOP: as long as you have cross-cutting concerns that you sprinkle over your code you're doing AOP, even if you're not calling that pointcut and stuff. Python decorators, C# attributes, Ruby's whole "monkey patching" (e.g alias method chaining pattern, or simply modules combined with the ancestor system and message passing) are all pretty much variations that fit well with the AOP paradigm. I'd argue that a lot of people are doing AOP without ever realising it.

pchristensen 1y ago

I have had reservation about Ng from a lot of his past hype, but I thought this talk was extremely practical and tactical. I recommend watching it before passing judgement.

croes 1y ago

I haven’t watched the video yet, but title does sound like quantity over quality. Why faster and not better with AI?

pinkmuffinere 1y ago
I think this is an interesting question, and I’d like to genuinely attempt an answer. I essentially think this is because people prefer to optimize what they can measure. It is hard to measure the quality of work. People have subjective opinions, the size of opportunities can be different, etc, making quality hard to pin down. It is much easier to measure the time required for each iteration on a concept. Additionally, I think it is generally believed that a project with more iterations tends to have higher quality than a project with less, even putting aside the concern about measuring quality itself. Therefore, we put aside the discussion of quality (which we’d really like to improve), and instead make the claim that we can actually measure (time to do something), with the strong implication that this _also_ will tend to increase quality.
- croes 1y ago
  I think speed isn’t our problem. Most of the time the problem it‘s quality but everyone only seems eager to ship as fast as possible. Move fast and break things already happened and now we are adding more speed. „Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." Or for the more sophisticated https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Physicists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Physicists Energy consumption and data protection were a thing and then came AI and all of a sudden it doesn’t matter anymore. Between all the good things people create with AI I see a lot more useless or even harmful things. Scams and fake news get better and harder to distinguish to a point where reality doesn’t matter anymore.
markerz 1y ago
I think quality takes time and refinement which is not something that LLMs have solved very well today. They are very okay at it, except for very specific targeted refinements (Grammerly, SQL editors). However, they are excellent at building from 0->1, and the video is suggesting that this is perfect for startups. In the context of startups, faster is better.

androng 1y ago

https://toolong.link/v?w=RNJCfif1dPY&l=en https://toolong.link/v?w=RNJCfif1dPY&l=en

Keyframe 1y ago

strong MLM energy vibe in that talk.

imranq 1y ago

My two takeaways is you build 1) Having a precise vision of what you want to achieve 2) Being able to control / steer AI towards that vision Teams that can do both of these things, especially #1 will move much faster. Even if they are wrong its better than vague ideas that get applause but not customers

enos_feedler 1y ago
Are you a student of Robert Fritz? He says this exactly. The only two things you need is 1) a vision and 2) ability to see present reality clearly. Beyond this it’s all about the skill to nudge a creation towards the vision without being prescribed to a process. The art is knowing when to just use the status quo tool or try something new at any point during the nudging is key. Based on his teachings I can easily see vibe coding fitting into creation process quite easily. Where it becomes tricky is “seeing current reality clearly”. If you have been vibe coding for two weeks and perhaps a weak programmer or worse no technical ability, can you actually see reality at that point? Probably not. It requires understanding the software structure. Maybe. Its all up in the air right now. But I truly believe that LLMs make software creation more like creating art.
void-star 1y ago
Yes this! The observation that being specific versus general in the problems you want to solve is a better start-up plan is true for all startups ever, not just ones that use LLMs to solve them. Anecdotal/personal startup experiences support this strongly and I read enough on here to know that I am not alone…
- techpineapple 1y ago
  What's the balance between being specific in a way that's positive and allows you to solve good problems, and not getting pigeonhold and not being able to pivot? I wonder if companies who pivot are the norm or if you just here of the most popular cases.

fjjckj 1y ago

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gsbsbdbdbdbdb 1y ago

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