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What new non-AI products do you think wouldn't have existed without current AI? Because I don't see the "explosive changes and development of new products" you

by kragen 1y ago

What new non-AI products do you think wouldn't have existed without current AI? Because I don't see the "explosive changes and development of new products" you'd expect if things like Claude Code were a major advance.

apwell23 1y ago
> What new non-AI products do you think wouldn't have existed without current AI? AI slop is a product
- kragen 1y ago
  You mean, like, SEO? It's a product in the same sense that perchloroethylene-contaminated groundwater is a product of dry-cleaning plants.
spicyusername 1y ago
At the moment, LLM products are like Microsoft Office, they primarily serve as a tool to help solve other problems more efficiently. They do not themselves solve problems directly. Nobody would ask, "What new Office-based products have been created lately?", but that doesn't mean that Office products aren't a permanent, and critical, foundation of all white collar work. I suspect it will be the same with LLMs as they mature, they will become tightly integrated into certain categories of work and remain forever. Whether the current pricing models or stock market valuations will survive the transition to boring technology is another question.
- kragen 1y ago
  Where are the other problems that are being solved more efficiently? If there's an "explosive change" in that, we should be able to see some shrapnel. Let's take one component of Microsoft Office. Microsoft Word is seen as a tool for people to write nicely formatted documents, such as books. Reports produced with Microsoft Word are easy to find, and I've even read books written in it. Comparing reports written before the advent of WYSIWYG word processing software like Microsoft Word with reports written afterwards, the difference is easy to see; average typewriter formatting is really abysmal compared to average Microsoft Word formatting, even if the latter doesn't rise to the level of a properly typeset book or LaTeX. It's easy to point at things in our world that wouldn't exist without WYSIWYG word processors, and that's been the case since Bravo. LLMs are seen as, among other things, a tool for people to write software with. Where is the software that wouldn't exist without LLMs? If we can't point to it, maybe they don't actually work for that yet. The claim I'm questioning is that, "within tech, there seem to have been explosive changes and development of new products." What new products? I do see explosive changes and development of new spam, new YouTube videos, new memes (especially in Italian), but those aren't "within tech" as I understand the term.
  - mmargenot 1y ago
    I do agree that there's a lot of garbage and navel-gazing that is directly downstream from the creation of LLMs. Because it's easier to task and evaluate an LLM [or network of LLMs] with generation of code, most of these products end up directly related to the production of software. The professional production of software has definitely changed, but sticky impact outside of the tech sector is still brewing. I think there is a lot of potential, outside of the direct generation of software but still maybe software-adjacent, for products that make use of AI agents. It's hard to "generate" real world impact or expertise in an AI system, but if you can encapsulate that into a function that an AI can use, there's a lot of room to run. It's hard to get the feedback loop to verify this and most of these early products will likely die out, but as I mentioned, agents are still new on the timeline. As an example of something that I mean that is software-adjacent, have a look at Square AI, specifically the "ask anything" parts: https://squareup.com/us/en/ai https://squareup.com/us/en/ai I worked on this and I think that it's genuinely a good product. An arbitrary seller on the Square platform _can_ do aggregation, dashboarding, and analytics for their business, but that takes time and energy, and if you're running a business it can be hard to find that time. Putting an agent system in the backend that has access to your data, can aggregate and build modular plotting widgets for you, and can execute whenever you ask it a question is something that objectively saves a seller's time. You could have made such a thing without modern LLMs, but it would be substantially more expensive in terms of engineering research, time, and effort to put together a POC and bring it production, making it a non-starter before [let's say] two years ago. AI here is fundamental to the product functioning, but the outcome is a human being saving time while making decisions about their business. It is a useful product that uses AI as a means to a productive end, which, to me, should be the goal of such technologies.
    - kragen 1y ago
      Yes, but I'm asking about new non-AI products. I agree that lots of people are integrating AI into products, which makes products that wouldn't have existed otherwise. But if the answer to "where's the explosive changes and development of new products?" is 100% composed of integrating AI into their products, that means current AI isn't actually helping people write software, much. It's just giving them more software to write. That doesn't entail that current AI is useless! Or even non-revolutionary! But it's a different kind of software development revolution than what I thought you were claiming. You seem to be saying that the relationship of AI to software development is similar to the relationship of the Japanese language, or raytracing, or early microcomputers to software development. And I thought you were saying that the relationship of AI to software development was similar to the relationship of compilers, or open source, or interactive development environments to software development. It also doesn't entail that six months from now AI will still be only that revolutionary.

by kragen 1y ago

apwell23 1y ago

> What new non-AI products do you think wouldn't have existed without current AI? AI slop is a product

kragen 1y ago
You mean, like, SEO? It's a product in the same sense that perchloroethylene-contaminated groundwater is a product of dry-cleaning plants.

spicyusername 1y ago

At the moment, LLM products are like Microsoft Office, they primarily serve as a tool to help solve other problems more efficiently. They do not themselves solve problems directly. Nobody would ask, "What new Office-based products have been created lately?", but that doesn't mean that Office products aren't a permanent, and critical, foundation of all white collar work. I suspect it will be the same with LLMs as they mature, they will become tightly integrated into certain categories of work and remain forever. Whether the current pricing models or stock market valuations will survive the transition to boring technology is another question.

kragen 1y ago
Where are the other problems that are being solved more efficiently? If there's an "explosive change" in that, we should be able to see some shrapnel. Let's take one component of Microsoft Office. Microsoft Word is seen as a tool for people to write nicely formatted documents, such as books. Reports produced with Microsoft Word are easy to find, and I've even read books written in it. Comparing reports written before the advent of WYSIWYG word processing software like Microsoft Word with reports written afterwards, the difference is easy to see; average typewriter formatting is really abysmal compared to average Microsoft Word formatting, even if the latter doesn't rise to the level of a properly typeset book or LaTeX. It's easy to point at things in our world that wouldn't exist without WYSIWYG word processors, and that's been the case since Bravo. LLMs are seen as, among other things, a tool for people to write software with. Where is the software that wouldn't exist without LLMs? If we can't point to it, maybe they don't actually work for that yet. The claim I'm questioning is that, "within tech, there seem to have been explosive changes and development of new products." What new products? I do see explosive changes and development of new spam, new YouTube videos, new memes (especially in Italian), but those aren't "within tech" as I understand the term.
- mmargenot 1y ago
  I do agree that there's a lot of garbage and navel-gazing that is directly downstream from the creation of LLMs. Because it's easier to task and evaluate an LLM [or network of LLMs] with generation of code, most of these products end up directly related to the production of software. The professional production of software has definitely changed, but sticky impact outside of the tech sector is still brewing. I think there is a lot of potential, outside of the direct generation of software but still maybe software-adjacent, for products that make use of AI agents. It's hard to "generate" real world impact or expertise in an AI system, but if you can encapsulate that into a function that an AI can use, there's a lot of room to run. It's hard to get the feedback loop to verify this and most of these early products will likely die out, but as I mentioned, agents are still new on the timeline. As an example of something that I mean that is software-adjacent, have a look at Square AI, specifically the "ask anything" parts: https://squareup.com/us/en/ai https://squareup.com/us/en/ai I worked on this and I think that it's genuinely a good product. An arbitrary seller on the Square platform _can_ do aggregation, dashboarding, and analytics for their business, but that takes time and energy, and if you're running a business it can be hard to find that time. Putting an agent system in the backend that has access to your data, can aggregate and build modular plotting widgets for you, and can execute whenever you ask it a question is something that objectively saves a seller's time. You could have made such a thing without modern LLMs, but it would be substantially more expensive in terms of engineering research, time, and effort to put together a POC and bring it production, making it a non-starter before [let's say] two years ago. AI here is fundamental to the product functioning, but the outcome is a human being saving time while making decisions about their business. It is a useful product that uses AI as a means to a productive end, which, to me, should be the goal of such technologies.
  - kragen 1y ago
    Yes, but I'm asking about new non-AI products. I agree that lots of people are integrating AI into products, which makes products that wouldn't have existed otherwise. But if the answer to "where's the explosive changes and development of new products?" is 100% composed of integrating AI into their products, that means current AI isn't actually helping people write software, much. It's just giving them more software to write. That doesn't entail that current AI is useless! Or even non-revolutionary! But it's a different kind of software development revolution than what I thought you were claiming. You seem to be saying that the relationship of AI to software development is similar to the relationship of the Japanese language, or raytracing, or early microcomputers to software development. And I thought you were saying that the relationship of AI to software development was similar to the relationship of compilers, or open source, or interactive development environments to software development. It also doesn't entail that six months from now AI will still be only that revolutionary.