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Of course, Pareto principle is at work here. In an adjacent field, self-driving, they are working on the last "20%" for almost a decade now. It feels kind of od

Of course, Pareto principle is at work here. In an adjacent field, self-driving, they are working on the last "20%" for almost a decade now. It feels kind of odd that almost no one is talking about self-driving now, compared to how hot of a topic it used to be, with a lot of deep, moral, almost philosophical discussions.

satvikpendem 1y ago
> The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time. — Tom Cargill, Bell Labs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety%E2%80%93ninety_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety%E2%80%93ninety_rule
- stpedgwdgfhgdd 1y ago
  In my experience for enterprise software engineering, in this stage we are able to shrink the coding time with ~20%, depending on the kind of code/tests. However CICD remains tricky. In fact when AI agents start building autonomous, merge trains become a necessity…
- baxtr 1y ago
  Love this quote. Kinda sad I didn’t see this earlier in my life.
danny_codes 1y ago
It’s past the hype curve and into the trough of disillusionment. Over the next 5,10,15 years (who can say?) the tech will mature out of the trough into general adoption. GenAI is the exciting new tech currently riding the initial hype spike. This will die down into the trough of disillusionment as well, probably sometime next year. Like self-driving, people will continue to innovate in the space and the tech will be developed towards general adoption. We saw the same during crypto hype, though that could be construed as more of a snake oil type event.
- bugbuddy 1y ago
  Liquidity in search of the biggest holes in the ground. Whoever can dig the biggest holes wins. Why or what you get out of digging the holes? Who cares.
- ameliaquining 1y ago
  The Gartner hype cycle assumes a single fundamental technical breakthrough, and describes the process of the market figuring out what it is and isn't good for. This isn't straightforwardly applicable to LLMs because the question of what they're good for is a moving target; the foundation models are actually getting more capable every few months, which wasn't true of cryptocurrency or self-driving cars. At least some people who overestimate what current LLMs can do won't have the chance to find out that they're wrong, because by the time they would have reached the trough of disillusionment, LLM capabilities will have caught up to their expectations. If and when LLM scaling stalls out, then you'd expect a Gartner hype cycle to occur from there (because people won't realize right away that there won't be further capability gains), but that hasn't happened yet (or if it has, it's too recent to be visible yet) and I see no reason to be confident that it will happen at any particular time in the medium term. If scaling doesn't stall out soon, then I honestly have no idea what to expect the visibility curve to look like. Is there any historical precedent for a technology's scope of potential applications expanding this much this fast?
  - bugbuddy 1y ago
    Could you please expand on your point about expanding scopes? I am waiting earnestly for all the cheaper services that these expansions promise. You know cheaper white-collar-services like accounting, tax, and healthcare etc. The last reports saw accelerating service inflation. Someone is lying. Please tell me who.
    - ipaddr 1y ago
      It's saving healthcare costs for those who solved their problem and never go in which would not be reflected in service inflation costs.
dingnuts 1y ago
The critics of the current AI buzz certainly have been drawing comparisons to self driving cars as LLMs inch along with their logarithmic curve of improvement that's been clear since the GPT-2 days. Whenever someone tells me how these models are going to make white collar professions obsolete in five years, I remind them that the people making these predictions 1) said we'd have self driving cars "in a few years" back in 2015 and 2) the predictions about white collar professions started in 2022 so five years from when?
- ishita159 1y ago
  I think people don't realize how much models have to extrapolate still, which causes hallucinations. We are still not great at giving all the context in our brain to LLMs. There's still a lot of tooling to be built before it can start completely replacing anyone.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - dortlick 1y ago
    It doesn't have to "completely" replace any individual employee to be impactful. If you have 50 coders that each use AI to boost their productivity by 10%, you need 5 fewer coders. It doesn't require that AI is able to handle 100% of any individual person's job.
- doctorpangloss 1y ago
  Okay, but the experts saying self driving cars were 50 years out in 2015 were wrong too. Lots of people were there for those speeches, and yet, even the most cynical take on Waymo, Cruise and Zoox’s limitations would concede that the vehicles are autonomous most of the time in a technologically important way. There’s more to this than “predictions are hard.” There are very powerful incentives to eliminate driving and bloated administrative workforces. This is why we don’t have flying cars: lack of demand. But for “not driving?” Nobody wants to drive!
- n2d4 1y ago
simantel 1y ago
> It feels kind of odd that almost no one is talking about self-driving now, compared to how hot of a topic it used to be Probably because it's just here now? More people take Waymo than Lyft each day in SF.
- imiric 1y ago
  It's "here" if you live in a handful of cities around the world, and travel within specific areas in those cities. Getting this tech deployed globally will take another decade or two, optimistically speaking.
  - prettyblocks 1y ago
    Given how well it seems to be going in those specific areas, it seems like it's more of a regulatory issue than a technological one.
    - imiric 1y ago
      Ah, those pesky regulations that try to prevent road accidents... If it's not a technological limitation, why aren't we seeing self-driving cars in countries with lax regulations? Mexico, Brazil, India, etc. Tesla launched FSD in Mexico earlier this year, but you would think companies would be jumping at the opportunity to launch in markets with less regulation. So this is largely a technological limitation. They have less driving data to train on, and the tech doesn't handle scenarios outside of the training dataset well.
      - fragmede 1y ago
        Can you name any of the specific regulations that robot taxi companies are lobbying to get rid of? As long as robotaxis abide by the same rules of the road as humans do, what's the problem? Regulations like you're not allowed to have robotaxis unless you pay me, your local robotaxi commissioner $3/million/year, aren't going to be popular with the populus but unfortunately for them, they don't vote, so I'm sure we'll see holdouts and if multiple companies are in multiple markets and are complaining about the local taxi cab regulatory commision, but there's just so much of the world without robotaxis right now (summer 2025) that I doubt it's anything mure than the technology being brand spanking new.
camillomiller 1y ago
"I don't get all the interest about self-driving. That tech has been dead for years, and everyone is talking about that tech. That tech was never that big in therms of life... Thank you for your attention to this matter"

satvikpendem 1y ago

> The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time. — Tom Cargill, Bell Labs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety%E2%80%93ninety_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety%E2%80%93ninety_rule

stpedgwdgfhgdd 1y ago
In my experience for enterprise software engineering, in this stage we are able to shrink the coding time with ~20%, depending on the kind of code/tests. However CICD remains tricky. In fact when AI agents start building autonomous, merge trains become a necessity…
baxtr 1y ago
Love this quote. Kinda sad I didn’t see this earlier in my life.

danny_codes 1y ago

It’s past the hype curve and into the trough of disillusionment. Over the next 5,10,15 years (who can say?) the tech will mature out of the trough into general adoption. GenAI is the exciting new tech currently riding the initial hype spike. This will die down into the trough of disillusionment as well, probably sometime next year. Like self-driving, people will continue to innovate in the space and the tech will be developed towards general adoption. We saw the same during crypto hype, though that could be construed as more of a snake oil type event.

bugbuddy 1y ago
Liquidity in search of the biggest holes in the ground. Whoever can dig the biggest holes wins. Why or what you get out of digging the holes? Who cares.
ameliaquining 1y ago
The Gartner hype cycle assumes a single fundamental technical breakthrough, and describes the process of the market figuring out what it is and isn't good for. This isn't straightforwardly applicable to LLMs because the question of what they're good for is a moving target; the foundation models are actually getting more capable every few months, which wasn't true of cryptocurrency or self-driving cars. At least some people who overestimate what current LLMs can do won't have the chance to find out that they're wrong, because by the time they would have reached the trough of disillusionment, LLM capabilities will have caught up to their expectations. If and when LLM scaling stalls out, then you'd expect a Gartner hype cycle to occur from there (because people won't realize right away that there won't be further capability gains), but that hasn't happened yet (or if it has, it's too recent to be visible yet) and I see no reason to be confident that it will happen at any particular time in the medium term. If scaling doesn't stall out soon, then I honestly have no idea what to expect the visibility curve to look like. Is there any historical precedent for a technology's scope of potential applications expanding this much this fast?
- bugbuddy 1y ago
  Could you please expand on your point about expanding scopes? I am waiting earnestly for all the cheaper services that these expansions promise. You know cheaper white-collar-services like accounting, tax, and healthcare etc. The last reports saw accelerating service inflation. Someone is lying. Please tell me who.
  - ipaddr 1y ago
    It's saving healthcare costs for those who solved their problem and never go in which would not be reflected in service inflation costs.

dingnuts 1y ago

The critics of the current AI buzz certainly have been drawing comparisons to self driving cars as LLMs inch along with their logarithmic curve of improvement that's been clear since the GPT-2 days. Whenever someone tells me how these models are going to make white collar professions obsolete in five years, I remind them that the people making these predictions 1) said we'd have self driving cars "in a few years" back in 2015 and 2) the predictions about white collar professions started in 2022 so five years from when?

ishita159 1y ago
I think people don't realize how much models have to extrapolate still, which causes hallucinations. We are still not great at giving all the context in our brain to LLMs. There's still a lot of tooling to be built before it can start completely replacing anyone.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- dortlick 1y ago
  It doesn't have to "completely" replace any individual employee to be impactful. If you have 50 coders that each use AI to boost their productivity by 10%, you need 5 fewer coders. It doesn't require that AI is able to handle 100% of any individual person's job.
doctorpangloss 1y ago
Okay, but the experts saying self driving cars were 50 years out in 2015 were wrong too. Lots of people were there for those speeches, and yet, even the most cynical take on Waymo, Cruise and Zoox’s limitations would concede that the vehicles are autonomous most of the time in a technologically important way. There’s more to this than “predictions are hard.” There are very powerful incentives to eliminate driving and bloated administrative workforces. This is why we don’t have flying cars: lack of demand. But for “not driving?” Nobody wants to drive!
n2d4 1y ago

simantel 1y ago

> It feels kind of odd that almost no one is talking about self-driving now, compared to how hot of a topic it used to be Probably because it's just here now? More people take Waymo than Lyft each day in SF.

imiric 1y ago
It's "here" if you live in a handful of cities around the world, and travel within specific areas in those cities. Getting this tech deployed globally will take another decade or two, optimistically speaking.
- prettyblocks 1y ago
  Given how well it seems to be going in those specific areas, it seems like it's more of a regulatory issue than a technological one.
  - imiric 1y ago
    Ah, those pesky regulations that try to prevent road accidents... If it's not a technological limitation, why aren't we seeing self-driving cars in countries with lax regulations? Mexico, Brazil, India, etc. Tesla launched FSD in Mexico earlier this year, but you would think companies would be jumping at the opportunity to launch in markets with less regulation. So this is largely a technological limitation. They have less driving data to train on, and the tech doesn't handle scenarios outside of the training dataset well.
    - fragmede 1y ago
      Can you name any of the specific regulations that robot taxi companies are lobbying to get rid of? As long as robotaxis abide by the same rules of the road as humans do, what's the problem? Regulations like you're not allowed to have robotaxis unless you pay me, your local robotaxi commissioner $3/million/year, aren't going to be popular with the populus but unfortunately for them, they don't vote, so I'm sure we'll see holdouts and if multiple companies are in multiple markets and are complaining about the local taxi cab regulatory commision, but there's just so much of the world without robotaxis right now (summer 2025) that I doubt it's anything mure than the technology being brand spanking new.

camillomiller 1y ago

"I don't get all the interest about self-driving. That tech has been dead for years, and everyone is talking about that tech. That tech was never that big in therms of life... Thank you for your attention to this matter"