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The problem with LLMs as interoperability is they only work sub 100% of the time. Yes they help but the point of the article is what if we spent 100billion on A

The problem with LLMs as interoperability is they only work sub 100% of the time. Yes they help but the point of the article is what if we spent 100billion on APIs? We absolutely could build something way more interoperable and that’s 100% accurate. I think about code generation in this space a lot because I’ve been writing Gleam. The LSP code actions are incredible. There’s no “oh sorry I meant to do it the other way” you get with LLMs because everything is strongly typed. What if we spent 100billion on a programming language? We’ve now spent many hundreds of billions on tools which are powerful but we’ve also chosen to ignore many other ways to spend that money.

simonw 1y ago
If you gave me $100 billion to spend on API interoperability, knowing what I know today, I would spend that money inventing LLMs.
- roxolotl 1y ago
  For $100 billion you could get public standards for APIs of all kinds implemented. I don’t think people understand just how much money that is. We’re talking solve extreme hunger and create international api standards afterwards money.
  - simonw 1y ago
    Having lurked around in the edges of various standardization processes for 20+ years I don't think this is a problem that gets fixed by money. You can spend an enormous amount of money building out a standard like SOAP which might then turn out not to have nearly as much long-running as the specification authors expected.
    - roxolotl 1y ago
      That’s totally fair. Money though is a representation of desire and the reality is people don’t have interest in solving these problems. We live in a society where there’s much more interest in creating something that might be god than solving other problems. And that’s really the main point of the article. But also even if the W3C spent $10m a year for the 10 years SOAP was being actively developed according to Wikipedia that would still be 1/1000 of the 100billion we’re talking about. So we really have no idea what this sort of money could do if mobilized in other ways.
  - h2zizzle 1y ago
    Yeah. Much of that money is going to physically building data centers, in the middle of an affordable housing crisis. "Look, I just need a few billion, to build a server farm, to build the machine god, who will tell us how to solve the homelessness and housing insecurity." If it works? That'd be neat. Right now, it sounds like crackhead logic.

simonw 1y ago

If you gave me $100 billion to spend on API interoperability, knowing what I know today, I would spend that money inventing LLMs.

roxolotl 1y ago
For $100 billion you could get public standards for APIs of all kinds implemented. I don’t think people understand just how much money that is. We’re talking solve extreme hunger and create international api standards afterwards money.
- simonw 1y ago
  Having lurked around in the edges of various standardization processes for 20+ years I don't think this is a problem that gets fixed by money. You can spend an enormous amount of money building out a standard like SOAP which might then turn out not to have nearly as much long-running as the specification authors expected.
  - roxolotl 1y ago
    That’s totally fair. Money though is a representation of desire and the reality is people don’t have interest in solving these problems. We live in a society where there’s much more interest in creating something that might be god than solving other problems. And that’s really the main point of the article. But also even if the W3C spent $10m a year for the 10 years SOAP was being actively developed according to Wikipedia that would still be 1/1000 of the 100billion we’re talking about. So we really have no idea what this sort of money could do if mobilized in other ways.
- h2zizzle 1y ago
  Yeah. Much of that money is going to physically building data centers, in the middle of an affordable housing crisis. "Look, I just need a few billion, to build a server farm, to build the machine god, who will tell us how to solve the homelessness and housing insecurity." If it works? That'd be neat. Right now, it sounds like crackhead logic.