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I find it weird how companies talk out both sides of their mouth on AI. On the one hand it's this magical tool that will make you 10x more efficient at your job

I find it weird how companies talk out both sides of their mouth on AI. On the one hand it's this magical tool that will make you 10x more efficient at your job, and on the other it's something they have to market heavily and shove in your face at every turn - sometimes outright forcing you to engage with it. These two things don't seem compatible - if the tool was that good people would be beating down their doors to get it.

tho2342o349423 1y ago
At this point, pretty much all of the US markets (and the USD) is hinging on "unlimited upside" promised by techbros and their magic AGIs & robots. They probably get orders from all the way up the food chain to keep the show going. Wonder what'll happen to JPY once the Yen-carry unwinds from this massive hype-cycle - will probably hit 70 JPY to the dollar! Currently Sony Bank in Japan offers USD time-deposits at 8% pa. - that's just insanely high for what is supposed to be a stable developed economy.
- chubot 1y ago
  They probably get orders from all the way up the food chain to keep the show going. Honestly I think the same thing happened with self-driving cars ~10 years ago. Larry Page and Google's "submarine" marketing convinced investors and CEOs of automakers and tech companies [1] that they were going to become obsolete, and that Google would be taking all that profit. In 2016, GM acquired Cruise for $1 billion or so. It seems like the whole thing was cancelled in 2023, written off, and the CEO was let go How much profit is Waymo making now? I'm pretty sure it's $0. And they've probably gone through hundreds of billions in funding How's Tesla Autopilot doing? Larry also "negatively inspired" Elon to start OpenAI with other people I think if investors/CEOs/automakers had known how it was going to turn out, and how much money they were going to lose 10 years later, they might not have jumped on the FOMO train But it turns out that AI is a plausible "magic box" that you extrapolate all sorts of economic consequences from (on the other hand, hype cycles aren't necessarily bad; they're probably necessary to get things done. But I also think this one is masking the fact that software is getting worse and more user hostile at the same time. Probably one of the best ways to increase AI adoption is to make the underlying software more user hostile.) [1] I think even Apple did some kind of self-driving car thing at one point.
  - bookofjoe 1y ago
    Apple car project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_car_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_car_project >From 2014 until 2024, Apple undertook a research and development effort to develop an electric and self-driving car,[1] codenamed "Project Titan".[2][3] Apple never openly discussed any of its automotive research,[4] but around 5,000 employees were reported to be working on the project as of 2018.[5] In May 2018, Apple reportedly partnered with Volkswagen to produce an autonomous employee shuttle van based on the T6 Transporter commercial vehicle platform.[6] In August 2018, the BBC reported that Apple had 66 road-registered driverless cars, with 111 drivers registered to operate those cars.[7] In 2020, it was believed that Apple was still working on self-driving related hardware, software and service as a potential product, instead of actual Apple-branded cars.[8] In December 2020, Reuters reported that Apple was planning on a possible launch date of 2024,[9] but analyst Ming-Chi Kuo claimed it would not be launched before 2025 and might not be launched until 2028 or later.[10] In February 2024, Apple executives canceled their plans to release the autonomous electric vehicle, instead shifting resources on the project to the company's generative artificial intelligence efforts.[11][12] The project had reportedly cost the company over $1 billion per year, with other parts of Apple collaborating and costing hundreds of millions of dollars in additional spend. Additionally, over 600 employees were laid off due to the cancellation of the project.[13]
    - andrepd 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - ch4s3 1y ago
        Ahh yes, capitalists noteworthy haters of building trains. If you ignore the private companies that built the NYC subway system(s), all of US freight rail, and invented trains.
        andrepd 1y ago
        It's no coincidence all your examples are over 100 years old lol. The rise of the individual automobile (a very lucrative business proposition in many aspects) was done alongside massive sabotage of competing alternatives, with the disastrous consequences that are today plain. It's also no coincidence America has built no rail in many decades while centrally planned China built a massive HSR network in the past 15 years.
- bookofjoe 1y ago
  FWIW when I lived in Japan in 1968-69 it was 360 JPY to the dollar. I felt like a millionaire!
- bwfan123 1y ago
  I would say the same of the following: 1) crypto: raise funding, buy crypto as collateral, raise more funding with said collateral, rinse and repeat. 2) gpu datacenters: raise funding, buy gpus as collateral, raise more funding, buy more gpus, rinse and repeat. 3) zero day options: average folks want a daily lottery thrill. rinse and repeat. All of the above are fed by fomo and to some extent hype, and ripe for a reckoning.
delusional 1y ago
The critical realization to connect those two ideas is that they don't believe in what they tell you. They are telling you what _needs_ to be true for them to be geniuses.
dijit 1y ago
I agree, if you’ll allow me to diatribe my thoughts about why this could be (without thinking that these are my actual firm opinions); Since right now there is an aire of competition, I would guess that these companies believe its winner-take-all, and are doing their “one monopoly to aid another” to get this market before theres another verb-leader (like chatgpt for llm, or google for search). It could also be that they think that people won’t know how good they are until they try it, that it has to be seen to be believed. So getting people to touch it is important to them. But, I think I agree with you, its so heavy handed that it makes me want to abandon the tools that force it on me.
progval 1y ago
Or they believe that people are too stupid to understand how good their product is.
yunwal 1y ago
The other explanation is that it’s everywhere because AI pushers would like to integrate it with everything in order for it to be its most useful. Most of them don’t own your OS and your password manager, so they push it instead into a million different little places. Doesn’t change the fact that it’s stupid, annoying, and bad design, but I don’t know that outright deception is needed to explain it.
cmiles74 1y ago
The less I know about a thing the more useful an LLM seems to be. I’m working with a new-to-me enterprise code base, the LLM helps me find related (and duplicate) code. Even here it’s usefulness has an expiration date, eventually I’ll know where stuff lives and I’ll use it less and less. Life experience tells me I’m not unique and I suspect the constant cram-AI-into-the-thing is because the vendors are hoping, eventually, they’ll find a use-case for LLMs that sticks.
- giancarlostoro 1y ago
  This is the correct way. Use the LLM dont let it become the only way you work.
- immibis 1y ago
  Yes, they've legitimately good at a few things (e.g. very fuzzy search), but that doesn't justify the amount of investment.
  - goku12 1y ago
    The environmental damage is even worse than the investment. Those who have the money to invest in it usually care only about the returns and not the environment.
    - tempodox 1y ago
      Hardly anyone even mentions it in discussions. Even as far as these tools are actually useful, nobody ever asks whether it’s worth the environmental costs.
      - cshores 1y ago
        For Google's Gemini LLM, the energy impact is negligible, with the average prompt consuming the equivalent energy of just three seconds of a microwave's operation.
        1y ago
pkaeding 1y ago
They aren't really talking out of both sides, it is just all full-court-press marketing.
pylua 1y ago
Is it really that weird that a company would speak from both sides of their mouth ? That is essentially what corporate speak is. That should be the assumed default when a major company says anything.
redox99 1y ago
Why wouldn't they do everything in their power to increase customer base?
- goku12 1y ago
  I don't think that this is an effective strategy to achieve that. At some point, the same customer base is going to feel the AI fatigue and yearn for something cleaner.
hyperpape 1y ago
From Dan Luu (https://danluu.com/wat/ https://danluu.com/wat/): > When I joined this company, my team didn't use version control for months and it was a real fight to get everyone to use version control. Although I won that fight, I lost the fight to get people to run a build, let alone run tests, before checking in, so the build is broken multiple times per day. When I mentioned that I thought this was a problem for our productivity, I was told that it's fine because it affects everyone equally. Since the only thing that mattered was my stack ranked productivity, so I shouldn't care that it impacts the entire team, the fact that it's normal for everyone means that there's no cause for concern. Do not underestimate the ability of developers to ignore good ideas. I am not going to argue that AI is as good as version control. Version control is a more important idea than AI. I sometimes want to argue it's the most important idea in software engineering. All I'm saying is that you can't assume that good ideas will (quickly) win. Your argument that AI isn't valuable is invalid, whether or not your conclusion is true. P.S. Dan Luu wrote that in 2015, and it may have been a company that he already left. Version control has mostly won. Still, post 2020, I talked to a friend, whose organization did use git, but their deployed software still didn't correspond to any version checked into git, because they were manually rebuilding components and copying them to production servers piecemeal.
- rossdavidh 1y ago
  All true, but the argument for AI is that it makes you far more productive as an individual, which if true should be an easy sell. In fact, some developers are quite committed to it, with a fervor I've not seen since the "I'm never going back to the office" fervor a few years ago. Version control is more of a "short term pain for long term gain" kind of concept; it is not surprising some people were hard to convince. But "AI" promises increased productivity as an individual, in the here and now. It should not be a hard sell if people found it to work as advertised.
  - krinchan 1y ago
    As someone who started out a GenAI skeptic, I’ve found the truth is in the middle. I write a TON of one off scripts now at work. For instance, if I fight with a Splunk query for more than five minutes, I’ll just export the entire time frame in question and have GHCP (work mandates we use only GHCP) spit out a Python script that gets me what I want. I use it with our internal MCP tools to review pull requests. It surfaces questions I didn’t think to ask about half the time. I don’t know that it makes me more productive, but it definitely makes me more attentive. It works great for brainstorming design ideas. The code generation isn’t entirely slop either. For the vast majority of corporate devs below Principal, it’s better than what they write and its basic CRUD code. So that’s where all the hyper productive magical claims come from. I spend most of my days lately bailing these folks out of a dead end fox hole GHCP led them into. Unfortunately, it’s very much a huge time sink in another way. I’ve seen a pretty linear growth in M365 Copilot surfacing 5 year old word documents to managers resulting in big emails of outdated GenAI slop that would be best summarized as “I have no clue what I’m talking about and I’m going to make a terrible technical decision that we already decided against.”
tempodox 1y ago
That’s what you get for making yourself dependent on profit-driven entities on a one-sided basis (namely that they have all the power and you have all the risk). Of course they will force the stuff on you that they hope will make them the most profit, up to the limit where you’d eat the switching costs and run away.
- throwawa14223 1y ago
  Firefox also shipped their battery draining ai feature and they don’t have identical motives.
mhh__ 1y ago
I bet this was true of computers back in the day too. The processes that are native to computers are magical but adding computers to the old is actually quite bad e.g. paperwork is better done on paper
- skydhash 1y ago
  You bet wrong. Computers were pricey enough that if you want one, you have to really need it to justify the price. It was not forced on any business.
  - mhh__ 1y ago
    How long ago? I was born after the pedants Millenium so I'm expecting my definition of back in the day is different to yours I think my time frame is firmly after the invention of excel but before the web was it's own thing
  - warmedcookie 1y ago
    Yep, electronics in general too. People today complain about GPU prices, but that was the norm for everything electronic related.
  - brabel 1y ago
    What are you talking about?? There was lots of resistance to computers at office jobs. Even through the 90s lots of people were still avoiding moving away from the old way and companies had to spend lots of money on training because without that people quickly reverted back to their old ways! I remember that and was taught how to provide such training and how to convince people to adopt new tech! It’s always been a challenge.
chickenpotpie 1y ago
When the shopping cart was first introduced to grocery stores, nobody wanted to use it. People preferred to continue lugging around heavy baskets rather than push a cart. Actors had to be hired to walk around the stores pushing them around to convince people it normal and valuable to use them. Sometimes people are resistant to use things that improve their life and have to be convinced to work in their own self interest. https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/14/business/grocery-shopping-carts-history https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/14/business/grocery-shopping-car...
- goku12 1y ago
  There are places around the world where shopping carts were introduced successfully without the accompanying actors to convince the customers to use it. The actual criteria must be whether the new addition boosts or hampers the customers' productivity, at least in the long run. When I first heard about git, I knew that it would be very useful in the future, even if I had to spend some time and effort in mastering it. Same with CI, project planners, release engineering, etc. Nobody had to convince me to use them. But AI just doesn't belong to that category, at least in my experience. It misses results that a simple web/site search reveals. And it makes mistakes or outright hallucinates in ways even junior developers don't. It's in an uncanny valley between the classic non-AI services and plain old manual effort with disadvantages of both and advantages of neither. Again, others may not agree with this experience. But it's definitely not unique to me. The net gain/loss that AI brings to this field is not clear. At least not yet.
_Algernon_ 1y ago
Sunc cost fallacy. If they admit that people don't want it (at least enough to cover the costs of it) share holders will question all the investments into Copilot. So instead they push it down our throats.
alphazard 1y ago
Organizations, once they reach a certain size, are usually not self consistent. Organizations are made up of people, and each person wants different things and has different incentives. It takes an excellent leader to make an organization appear consistent, it's not the default at all. Marketers are trying to keep their jobs, sales people are trying to keep their jobs, etc.
jsheard 1y ago
GitHub isn't even the worst example of this at Microsoft, they didn't just force AI on Office users but also tricked them into paying extra for it. They unilaterally switched all personal and family accounts over to AI-enabled plans that were 30-40% more expensive, and hid the option to revert back to the old plan such that it's only offered as a last resort if you try to cancel your subscription.
j45 1y ago
Just like someone who can figure out how to write code to solve a problem can do it while other programmers say it's not possible and just do it some other way, the same is true of AI. One of the major issues I'm seeing is how much technical people haven't been involved in the application of AI, which leaves non-technical people to pontificate and try. With any new tech, after the hype is gone, what remains, is adopted and used. The internet, social media, smartphones, all seemed foreign. LLMs are no different. They will solve things other things haven't before. LLMs are only as good as the users using it. Users only get better at using AI but putting in the repetitions. It's not a tool that's alive or a psychic.
- cshores 1y ago
  I generally agree, but I think there is a real disconnect. Middle and upper management often do not understand how developers and engineers are actually supposed to use these tools. For example, I work in operations, so most of what I touch is bash, Ansible, Terraform, GitHub workflows and actions, and some Python. Recently, our development team demonstrated a proposed strategy to use GitHub Copilot: assign it a JIRA ticket, let it generate code within our repos, and then have it automatically come back with a pull request. That approach makes sense if you are building web or client-side applications. My team, however, focuses on infrastructure configuration code. It is software in the sense that we are managing discrete components that interact, but not in a way where you can simply hand off a task, run tests, and expect a PR to appear. Large language models are more like asking a genie. Even if you give perfectly clear instructions, the result is often not exactly what you wanted. That is why I use Copilot and Gemini Code Assist in VS Code as assistive tools. I guide them step by step, and when they go off track, I can nudge them back in the right direction. To me, that highlights the gap between management’s expectations and the reality of how these tools actually work in practice.
- nativeit 1y ago
  LLMs are very different. All of the other things you mentioned found wide, eager adoption among the broader public within two years.
  - 1y ago
garyfirestorm 1y ago
I would like to point out that in certain scenarios people are not very smart. For eg. Many car enthusiasts who care about speed and 0-60 will still look down on EVs despite EVs being ridiculously fast and cheap to attain those metrics. 40k EV is faster than 150k Porsche. But these guys will never adopt it.
- vluft 1y ago
  that's not mostly what car enthusiasts care about, especially somebody buying a 150k porsche; they care about handling and road feel and a fat pig of an EV will never match a lighter car (well set up) on that; you can't beat physics when you're slinging that much weight; even set up as well as can be, a 5000lb taycan doesn't come close to the handling feel of a 3250lb 911.
  - hedora 1y ago
    A BMW i3 weighs about 3000 lbs. They’re mostly fiberglass and have a small battery. The center of gravity is probably comparable to the 911 even though it’s tall and goofy looking (all the weight is in the battery, under the seats). The tire geometry causes a bit of oversteering, but they generally corner well, etc.
bigstrat2003 1y ago
You're 100% correct. People love tools which make them more productive. If AI was actually as good as the companies pushing it claim it is, they wouldn't have to push it.
nativeit 1y ago
Yes, this is what’s happening. I think it pretty well speaks for itself. It’s almost entirely hype. It’s got significant utility, just nowhere near enough utility to justify its astronomical costs and wastefulness.
gtsop 1y ago
> if the tool was that good people would be beating down their doors to get it. Microsoft is a software company. They wouldn't have released this to begin with to have an extreme competitive edge!
madeofpalk 1y ago
I don’t think a company marketing a product/feature is an indicator that it’s bad.
kogasa240p 1y ago
Because the current LLM hype bubble is due to Silicon Valley wanting another SaaS service to keep the VC money flowing.
mrandish 1y ago
> if the tool was that good people would be beating down their doors to get it. Yes! "Forced features" are a misguided effort to drive internal usage metrics. There are other ways to let users know about new features, short of forcing it on them obnoxiously.
- johndhi 1y ago
  I think investors like to see an adoption. So companies force users to say it - and then brag that their users love their AI so much they're all using it. It's a rather perverse cycle.

tho2342o349423 1y ago

At this point, pretty much all of the US markets (and the USD) is hinging on "unlimited upside" promised by techbros and their magic AGIs & robots. They probably get orders from all the way up the food chain to keep the show going. Wonder what'll happen to JPY once the Yen-carry unwinds from this massive hype-cycle - will probably hit 70 JPY to the dollar! Currently Sony Bank in Japan offers USD time-deposits at 8% pa. - that's just insanely high for what is supposed to be a stable developed economy.

chubot 1y ago
They probably get orders from all the way up the food chain to keep the show going. Honestly I think the same thing happened with self-driving cars ~10 years ago. Larry Page and Google's "submarine" marketing convinced investors and CEOs of automakers and tech companies [1] that they were going to become obsolete, and that Google would be taking all that profit. In 2016, GM acquired Cruise for $1 billion or so. It seems like the whole thing was cancelled in 2023, written off, and the CEO was let go How much profit is Waymo making now? I'm pretty sure it's $0. And they've probably gone through hundreds of billions in funding How's Tesla Autopilot doing? Larry also "negatively inspired" Elon to start OpenAI with other people I think if investors/CEOs/automakers had known how it was going to turn out, and how much money they were going to lose 10 years later, they might not have jumped on the FOMO train But it turns out that AI is a plausible "magic box" that you extrapolate all sorts of economic consequences from (on the other hand, hype cycles aren't necessarily bad; they're probably necessary to get things done. But I also think this one is masking the fact that software is getting worse and more user hostile at the same time. Probably one of the best ways to increase AI adoption is to make the underlying software more user hostile.) [1] I think even Apple did some kind of self-driving car thing at one point.
- bookofjoe 1y ago
  Apple car project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_car_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_car_project >From 2014 until 2024, Apple undertook a research and development effort to develop an electric and self-driving car,[1] codenamed "Project Titan".[2][3] Apple never openly discussed any of its automotive research,[4] but around 5,000 employees were reported to be working on the project as of 2018.[5] In May 2018, Apple reportedly partnered with Volkswagen to produce an autonomous employee shuttle van based on the T6 Transporter commercial vehicle platform.[6] In August 2018, the BBC reported that Apple had 66 road-registered driverless cars, with 111 drivers registered to operate those cars.[7] In 2020, it was believed that Apple was still working on self-driving related hardware, software and service as a potential product, instead of actual Apple-branded cars.[8] In December 2020, Reuters reported that Apple was planning on a possible launch date of 2024,[9] but analyst Ming-Chi Kuo claimed it would not be launched before 2025 and might not be launched until 2028 or later.[10] In February 2024, Apple executives canceled their plans to release the autonomous electric vehicle, instead shifting resources on the project to the company's generative artificial intelligence efforts.[11][12] The project had reportedly cost the company over $1 billion per year, with other parts of Apple collaborating and costing hundreds of millions of dollars in additional spend. Additionally, over 600 employees were laid off due to the cancellation of the project.[13]
  - andrepd 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - ch4s3 1y ago
      Ahh yes, capitalists noteworthy haters of building trains. If you ignore the private companies that built the NYC subway system(s), all of US freight rail, and invented trains.
      - andrepd 1y ago
        It's no coincidence all your examples are over 100 years old lol. The rise of the individual automobile (a very lucrative business proposition in many aspects) was done alongside massive sabotage of competing alternatives, with the disastrous consequences that are today plain. It's also no coincidence America has built no rail in many decades while centrally planned China built a massive HSR network in the past 15 years.
bookofjoe 1y ago
FWIW when I lived in Japan in 1968-69 it was 360 JPY to the dollar. I felt like a millionaire!
bwfan123 1y ago
I would say the same of the following: 1) crypto: raise funding, buy crypto as collateral, raise more funding with said collateral, rinse and repeat. 2) gpu datacenters: raise funding, buy gpus as collateral, raise more funding, buy more gpus, rinse and repeat. 3) zero day options: average folks want a daily lottery thrill. rinse and repeat. All of the above are fed by fomo and to some extent hype, and ripe for a reckoning.

delusional 1y ago

The critical realization to connect those two ideas is that they don't believe in what they tell you. They are telling you what _needs_ to be true for them to be geniuses.

dijit 1y ago

I agree, if you’ll allow me to diatribe my thoughts about why this could be (without thinking that these are my actual firm opinions); Since right now there is an aire of competition, I would guess that these companies believe its winner-take-all, and are doing their “one monopoly to aid another” to get this market before theres another verb-leader (like chatgpt for llm, or google for search). It could also be that they think that people won’t know how good they are until they try it, that it has to be seen to be believed. So getting people to touch it is important to them. But, I think I agree with you, its so heavy handed that it makes me want to abandon the tools that force it on me.

progval 1y ago

Or they believe that people are too stupid to understand how good their product is.

yunwal 1y ago

The other explanation is that it’s everywhere because AI pushers would like to integrate it with everything in order for it to be its most useful. Most of them don’t own your OS and your password manager, so they push it instead into a million different little places. Doesn’t change the fact that it’s stupid, annoying, and bad design, but I don’t know that outright deception is needed to explain it.

cmiles74 1y ago

The less I know about a thing the more useful an LLM seems to be. I’m working with a new-to-me enterprise code base, the LLM helps me find related (and duplicate) code. Even here it’s usefulness has an expiration date, eventually I’ll know where stuff lives and I’ll use it less and less. Life experience tells me I’m not unique and I suspect the constant cram-AI-into-the-thing is because the vendors are hoping, eventually, they’ll find a use-case for LLMs that sticks.

giancarlostoro 1y ago
This is the correct way. Use the LLM dont let it become the only way you work.
immibis 1y ago
Yes, they've legitimately good at a few things (e.g. very fuzzy search), but that doesn't justify the amount of investment.
- goku12 1y ago
  The environmental damage is even worse than the investment. Those who have the money to invest in it usually care only about the returns and not the environment.
  - tempodox 1y ago
    Hardly anyone even mentions it in discussions. Even as far as these tools are actually useful, nobody ever asks whether it’s worth the environmental costs.
    - cshores 1y ago
      For Google's Gemini LLM, the energy impact is negligible, with the average prompt consuming the equivalent energy of just three seconds of a microwave's operation.
      - 1y ago

pkaeding 1y ago

They aren't really talking out of both sides, it is just all full-court-press marketing.

pylua 1y ago

Is it really that weird that a company would speak from both sides of their mouth ? That is essentially what corporate speak is. That should be the assumed default when a major company says anything.

redox99 1y ago

Why wouldn't they do everything in their power to increase customer base?

goku12 1y ago
I don't think that this is an effective strategy to achieve that. At some point, the same customer base is going to feel the AI fatigue and yearn for something cleaner.

hyperpape 1y ago

From Dan Luu (https://danluu.com/wat/ https://danluu.com/wat/): > When I joined this company, my team didn't use version control for months and it was a real fight to get everyone to use version control. Although I won that fight, I lost the fight to get people to run a build, let alone run tests, before checking in, so the build is broken multiple times per day. When I mentioned that I thought this was a problem for our productivity, I was told that it's fine because it affects everyone equally. Since the only thing that mattered was my stack ranked productivity, so I shouldn't care that it impacts the entire team, the fact that it's normal for everyone means that there's no cause for concern. Do not underestimate the ability of developers to ignore good ideas. I am not going to argue that AI is as good as version control. Version control is a more important idea than AI. I sometimes want to argue it's the most important idea in software engineering. All I'm saying is that you can't assume that good ideas will (quickly) win. Your argument that AI isn't valuable is invalid, whether or not your conclusion is true. P.S. Dan Luu wrote that in 2015, and it may have been a company that he already left. Version control has mostly won. Still, post 2020, I talked to a friend, whose organization did use git, but their deployed software still didn't correspond to any version checked into git, because they were manually rebuilding components and copying them to production servers piecemeal.

rossdavidh 1y ago
All true, but the argument for AI is that it makes you far more productive as an individual, which if true should be an easy sell. In fact, some developers are quite committed to it, with a fervor I've not seen since the "I'm never going back to the office" fervor a few years ago. Version control is more of a "short term pain for long term gain" kind of concept; it is not surprising some people were hard to convince. But "AI" promises increased productivity as an individual, in the here and now. It should not be a hard sell if people found it to work as advertised.
- krinchan 1y ago
  As someone who started out a GenAI skeptic, I’ve found the truth is in the middle. I write a TON of one off scripts now at work. For instance, if I fight with a Splunk query for more than five minutes, I’ll just export the entire time frame in question and have GHCP (work mandates we use only GHCP) spit out a Python script that gets me what I want. I use it with our internal MCP tools to review pull requests. It surfaces questions I didn’t think to ask about half the time. I don’t know that it makes me more productive, but it definitely makes me more attentive. It works great for brainstorming design ideas. The code generation isn’t entirely slop either. For the vast majority of corporate devs below Principal, it’s better than what they write and its basic CRUD code. So that’s where all the hyper productive magical claims come from. I spend most of my days lately bailing these folks out of a dead end fox hole GHCP led them into. Unfortunately, it’s very much a huge time sink in another way. I’ve seen a pretty linear growth in M365 Copilot surfacing 5 year old word documents to managers resulting in big emails of outdated GenAI slop that would be best summarized as “I have no clue what I’m talking about and I’m going to make a terrible technical decision that we already decided against.”

tempodox 1y ago

That’s what you get for making yourself dependent on profit-driven entities on a one-sided basis (namely that they have all the power and you have all the risk). Of course they will force the stuff on you that they hope will make them the most profit, up to the limit where you’d eat the switching costs and run away.

throwawa14223 1y ago
Firefox also shipped their battery draining ai feature and they don’t have identical motives.

mhh__ 1y ago

I bet this was true of computers back in the day too. The processes that are native to computers are magical but adding computers to the old is actually quite bad e.g. paperwork is better done on paper

skydhash 1y ago
You bet wrong. Computers were pricey enough that if you want one, you have to really need it to justify the price. It was not forced on any business.
- mhh__ 1y ago
  How long ago? I was born after the pedants Millenium so I'm expecting my definition of back in the day is different to yours I think my time frame is firmly after the invention of excel but before the web was it's own thing
- warmedcookie 1y ago
  Yep, electronics in general too. People today complain about GPU prices, but that was the norm for everything electronic related.
- brabel 1y ago
  What are you talking about?? There was lots of resistance to computers at office jobs. Even through the 90s lots of people were still avoiding moving away from the old way and companies had to spend lots of money on training because without that people quickly reverted back to their old ways! I remember that and was taught how to provide such training and how to convince people to adopt new tech! It’s always been a challenge.

chickenpotpie 1y ago

When the shopping cart was first introduced to grocery stores, nobody wanted to use it. People preferred to continue lugging around heavy baskets rather than push a cart. Actors had to be hired to walk around the stores pushing them around to convince people it normal and valuable to use them. Sometimes people are resistant to use things that improve their life and have to be convinced to work in their own self interest. https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/14/business/grocery-shopping-carts-history https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/14/business/grocery-shopping-car...

goku12 1y ago
There are places around the world where shopping carts were introduced successfully without the accompanying actors to convince the customers to use it. The actual criteria must be whether the new addition boosts or hampers the customers' productivity, at least in the long run. When I first heard about git, I knew that it would be very useful in the future, even if I had to spend some time and effort in mastering it. Same with CI, project planners, release engineering, etc. Nobody had to convince me to use them. But AI just doesn't belong to that category, at least in my experience. It misses results that a simple web/site search reveals. And it makes mistakes or outright hallucinates in ways even junior developers don't. It's in an uncanny valley between the classic non-AI services and plain old manual effort with disadvantages of both and advantages of neither. Again, others may not agree with this experience. But it's definitely not unique to me. The net gain/loss that AI brings to this field is not clear. At least not yet.

_Algernon_ 1y ago

Sunc cost fallacy. If they admit that people don't want it (at least enough to cover the costs of it) share holders will question all the investments into Copilot. So instead they push it down our throats.

alphazard 1y ago

Organizations, once they reach a certain size, are usually not self consistent. Organizations are made up of people, and each person wants different things and has different incentives. It takes an excellent leader to make an organization appear consistent, it's not the default at all. Marketers are trying to keep their jobs, sales people are trying to keep their jobs, etc.

jsheard 1y ago

GitHub isn't even the worst example of this at Microsoft, they didn't just force AI on Office users but also tricked them into paying extra for it. They unilaterally switched all personal and family accounts over to AI-enabled plans that were 30-40% more expensive, and hid the option to revert back to the old plan such that it's only offered as a last resort if you try to cancel your subscription.

j45 1y ago

Just like someone who can figure out how to write code to solve a problem can do it while other programmers say it's not possible and just do it some other way, the same is true of AI. One of the major issues I'm seeing is how much technical people haven't been involved in the application of AI, which leaves non-technical people to pontificate and try. With any new tech, after the hype is gone, what remains, is adopted and used. The internet, social media, smartphones, all seemed foreign. LLMs are no different. They will solve things other things haven't before. LLMs are only as good as the users using it. Users only get better at using AI but putting in the repetitions. It's not a tool that's alive or a psychic.

cshores 1y ago
I generally agree, but I think there is a real disconnect. Middle and upper management often do not understand how developers and engineers are actually supposed to use these tools. For example, I work in operations, so most of what I touch is bash, Ansible, Terraform, GitHub workflows and actions, and some Python. Recently, our development team demonstrated a proposed strategy to use GitHub Copilot: assign it a JIRA ticket, let it generate code within our repos, and then have it automatically come back with a pull request. That approach makes sense if you are building web or client-side applications. My team, however, focuses on infrastructure configuration code. It is software in the sense that we are managing discrete components that interact, but not in a way where you can simply hand off a task, run tests, and expect a PR to appear. Large language models are more like asking a genie. Even if you give perfectly clear instructions, the result is often not exactly what you wanted. That is why I use Copilot and Gemini Code Assist in VS Code as assistive tools. I guide them step by step, and when they go off track, I can nudge them back in the right direction. To me, that highlights the gap between management’s expectations and the reality of how these tools actually work in practice.
nativeit 1y ago
LLMs are very different. All of the other things you mentioned found wide, eager adoption among the broader public within two years.
- 1y ago

garyfirestorm 1y ago

I would like to point out that in certain scenarios people are not very smart. For eg. Many car enthusiasts who care about speed and 0-60 will still look down on EVs despite EVs being ridiculously fast and cheap to attain those metrics. 40k EV is faster than 150k Porsche. But these guys will never adopt it.

vluft 1y ago
that's not mostly what car enthusiasts care about, especially somebody buying a 150k porsche; they care about handling and road feel and a fat pig of an EV will never match a lighter car (well set up) on that; you can't beat physics when you're slinging that much weight; even set up as well as can be, a 5000lb taycan doesn't come close to the handling feel of a 3250lb 911.
- hedora 1y ago
  A BMW i3 weighs about 3000 lbs. They’re mostly fiberglass and have a small battery. The center of gravity is probably comparable to the 911 even though it’s tall and goofy looking (all the weight is in the battery, under the seats). The tire geometry causes a bit of oversteering, but they generally corner well, etc.

bigstrat2003 1y ago

You're 100% correct. People love tools which make them more productive. If AI was actually as good as the companies pushing it claim it is, they wouldn't have to push it.

nativeit 1y ago

Yes, this is what’s happening. I think it pretty well speaks for itself. It’s almost entirely hype. It’s got significant utility, just nowhere near enough utility to justify its astronomical costs and wastefulness.

gtsop 1y ago

> if the tool was that good people would be beating down their doors to get it. Microsoft is a software company. They wouldn't have released this to begin with to have an extreme competitive edge!

madeofpalk 1y ago

I don’t think a company marketing a product/feature is an indicator that it’s bad.

kogasa240p 1y ago

Because the current LLM hype bubble is due to Silicon Valley wanting another SaaS service to keep the VC money flowing.

mrandish 1y ago

> if the tool was that good people would be beating down their doors to get it. Yes! "Forced features" are a misguided effort to drive internal usage metrics. There are other ways to let users know about new features, short of forcing it on them obnoxiously.

johndhi 1y ago
I think investors like to see an adoption. So companies force users to say it - and then brag that their users love their AI so much they're all using it. It's a rather perverse cycle.