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I feel kind of like a Luddite sometimes but I don't understand why EVERYONE is rushing to use AI? I use a couple different agents to help me code, and ChatGPT h
by donatj 1y ago
I feel kind of like a Luddite sometimes but I don't understand why EVERYONE is rushing to use AI? I use a couple different agents to help me code, and ChatGPT has largely replaced Google in my everyday use, but I genuinely don't understand the value proposition of every other companies offerings.
I really feel like we're in the same "Get it out first, figure out what it is good for later" bubble we had like 7 years ago with non-AI ChatBots. No users actually wanted to do anything important by talking to a chatbot then, but every company still pushed them out. I don't think an LLM improves that much.
Every time some tool I've used for years sends an email "Hey, we've got AI now!" my thought is just "well, that's unfortunate"...
I don't want AI taking any actions I can't inspect with a difftool, especially not anything important. It's like letting a small child drive a car.
- amelius 1y ago> It's like letting a small child drive a car. Bad example, because FSD cars are here.
- donatj 1y agoFind me an FSD that can drive in non-Californian real world situations. A foot of snow, black ice, a sand drift.
- gamerDude 1y agoWell Waymo is coming to Denver, so it's about to get tested in some more difficult conditions.
- skybrian 1y agoNot sure it matters. There’s plenty of economic value in selling rides in places with good weather.
- tbrownaw 1y agoI am not in California, and those are not standard road conditions here.
- weregiraffe 1y ago>A foot of snow, black ice, a sand drift. What else, a meter of lava flow? Forest fire? Tsunami? Tornado? How about pick conditions where humans actually can drive.
- throaway1988 1y agohe’s describing conditions that exist for every area in the world that actually experiences winter!
- sejje 1y agoMost places clear the driving surface instead of leaving a foot of snow.
- reaperducer 1y agoGuess who we know you've never lived in a place where it snows.
- throaway1988 1y agoMore like the whole world is covered with snow and they clear enough for you to drive on.
- donatj 1y agoEventually. I live in Minnesota and it can take until noon or later after a big snow for all the small roads to get cleared.
- ModernMech 1y agoSnow (maybe not a foot but enough to at least cover the lane markings), black ice and sand drifts people experience every day in the normal course of driving, so it's reasonable to expect driverless cars to be able to handle them. Forest fires, tsunamis, lava flows, and tornados are weather emergencies. I think it's a little more reasonable to not have expectations for driverless cars in those situations.
- 1y ago
- vbarrielle 1y agoBad counter-example, because FSD has nothing in common with LLMs.
- HarHarVeryFunny 1y agoYeah, and Tesla cross-country FSD just crashed after 60 miles, and Tesla RoboTaxi had multiple accidents within first few days. Other companies like Wayno seem to do better, but in general I wouldn't hold up self-driving cars as an example of how great AI is, and in any case calling it all "AI" is obscuring the fact that LLMs and FSD are completely different technologies. In fact, until last year Tesla FSD wasn't even AI - the driving component was C++ and only the vision system was a neural net (with that being object recognition - convolutional neural net, not a Transformer).
- xiphias2 1y agoJust you switching away from Google is already justifying 1T infrastructure spend. Just think about how much more effective advertisements are going to be when LLMs start to tell you what to buy based on which advertiser gave the most money to the company.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- boxed 1y ago> Just you switching away from Google is already justifying 1T infrastructure spend. How? OpenAI are LOSING money on every query. Beating Google by losing money isn't really beating Google.
- skybrian 1y agoHow do we know this?
- boxed 1y agoStatistically this is obvious. Most people use the free tier. Their total losses are enormous and their revenue is not great.
- skybrian 1y agoNo, it’s not obvious. You can’t do this calculation without having numbers, and they need to come from somewhere.
- blonder 1y agoSam has claimed that they are profitable on inference. Maybe he is lying but I don't think speaking so absolutely about them losing money on that is something you can throw around so matter of fact. They lose money because they dump an enormous amount of money on R&D.
- steveklabnik 1y ago
- ivape 1y agoAI figured out something on my mind that I didn’t tell it about yesterday (latest Sonnet). My best advice to you is to spend time and allow the AI to blow your mind. Then you’ll get it. Sometimes I sit in wonder at how the fuck it’s able to figure out that much intent without specific instructions. There’s no way anyone programmed it to understand that much. If you’re not blown away by this then I have to assume you didn’t go deep enough with your usage.
- emp17344 1y agoI don’t understand what you’re saying. You know the AI is incapable of reading your mind, right? Can you provide more information?
- ivape 1y agoMore information: Use the LLM more until you are convinced. If you are not convinced, use it more. Use it more in absurd ways until you are convinced. Repeat the above until you are convinced.
- piva00 1y agoIs this satire? Really hard to tell in this year of 2025...
- NoGravitas 1y agoYeah, Poe's Law hitting hard here.
- emp17344 1y agoYou haven’t provided more information, you’ve just restated your original claim. Can you provide a specific example of AI “blowing your mind”?
- reaperducer 1y agoYou haven’t provided more information, you’ve just restated your original claim. So he's not just an LLM evangelist, he also writes like one.
- emp17344 1y agoAgreed… I feel increasingly alienated because I don’t understand how AI is providing enough value to justify the truly insane level of investment.
- ForHackernews 1y agoThe same way that NFTs of ugly cartoons apes were a multi-billion dollar industry for about 28 months. Edit: People are downvoting this because they think "Hey, that's not right, LLMs are way better than non-fungible apes!" (which is true) but the money is pouring in for exactly the same reason: get the apes now and later you'll be rich!
- throaway1988 1y agotrue but AI replacing search has a much better chance of profitability than whatever value Nft’s were supposed to provide.
- senordevnyc 1y agoSo just like any investment?
- tim333 1y agoIt's not really like punters hoping to flip their apes to a greater fool. A lot of the investment is from the likes of Google out of their own money.
- ForHackernews 1y agoI don't think Softbank gave OpenAI $40 billion because they have a $80 billion business idea they just need a great LLM to implement. I think they are really afraid of getting left behind on the Next Big Thing That Is Making Everyone Rich.
- squidbeak 1y agoRemember, investment is for the future. It would seem riskier if progress was flat, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
- calrain 1y agoWith the ever increasing explosion of devices capable of consuming AI services, and internet infrastructure being so ubiquitous that billions of people can use AI... Even if a little of everyone's day consumes AI services, then the investment required will be immense. Like what we see.
- eek2121 1y agoIn my eyes, it'd be cheaper for a company to simply purchase laptops with decent hardware specs, and run the LLMs locally. I've had decent results from various models I've run via LMStudio, and bonus points: It costs nothing and doesn't even use all that much CPU/GPU power. Just my opinion as a FORMER senior software dev (disabled now).
- bilsbie 1y agoCan you expand on this?
- pruetj 1y ago> purchase laptops with decent hardware specs > It costs nothing Seems like it does cost something?
- automatic6131 1y agoQuite, the typical 5 year depreciation on personal computing means a top-of-the-line $5k laptop works out to a ~$80/month spend... but it's on something you'd already spend for an employee
- datadrivenangel 1y ago$2k / 5 years is ~$30/mo, and you'll get a better experience spending another $25/mo on one of the AI services (or with enough people a small pile of H100s)
- zippyman55 1y agoSame here. I already have the computer for work, so marginally, it costs nothing and it meets 90 percent of my LLM needs. Here comes the down vote!
- dist-epoch 1y agoElectricity is not free. If you do the math, online LLMs are much cheaper. And this is before considering capabilities/speed.
- camillomiller 1y agoThere is none, zero value. What is the value of Sora 2, if even its creators feel like they have to pack it into a social media app with AI-slop reels? How is that not a testament to how suprisingly andvanced and useless at the same time the technology is?
- fragmede 1y agoIt's in an app made by its creator so they can get juicy user data. If it was just export to TikTok, OpenAI wouldn't know what's popular, just what people have made.
- camillomiller 1y agoOf course, we all know that hoarding user data is a fundamental step towards AGI
- fragmede 1y agoSo there's value then?
- camillomiller 1y ago[flagged]
- fragmede 1y agoI looked it up. It says "being of or like iron". That doesn't seem to be an answer to my question to you.
- threecheese 1y agoBigger companies believe smaller shops can use AI to level the playing field, so they are “transforming their business” and spending their way to get there first. They don’t know where the threat will come from or which dimension of their business will be attacked, they are just being told by the consulting shops that software development cost will trend to zero and this is an existential risk.
- bko 1y agoI think text is the ultimate interface. A company can just build and maintain very strong internal APIs and punt on the UX component. For instance, suppose I'm using figma, I want to just screenshot what I want it to look like and it can get me started. Or if I'm using Notion, I want a better search. Nothing necessarily generative, but something like "what was our corporate address". It also replaces help if well integrated. The ultimate would be build programmable web apps[0], which you can have gmail and then command an LLM to remove buttons, or add other buttons. Why isn't there a button for 'filter unread' front and center? This is super niche but interesting to someone like me. That being said, I think most AI offerings on apps now are pretty bad and just get in the way. But I think there is potential as an interface to interact with your app [0] https://mleverything.substack.com/p/programmable-web-apps https://mleverything.substack.com/p/programmable-web-apps
- mrweasel 1y agoFor AI I'm of the opinion that the best interface is no interface. AI is something to be baked into the functionality of software, quietly working in the back. It's not something the user actually interacts with. The chat interfaces are, in my opinion infuriating. It feels like talking to the co-worker who knows absolutely everything about the topic at hand, but if you use the wrong terms and phrases he'll pretend that he has no idea what you're talking about.
- chilmers 1y agoBut isn't that a limitation of the AI, not necessarily how the AI is integrated into the software? Personally, I don't want AI running around changing things without me asking to do so. I think chat is absolutely the right interface, but I don't like that most companies are adding separate "AI" buttons to use it. Instead, it should be integrated into the existing chat collaboration features. So, in Figma for example, you should just be able to add a comment to a design, tag @figma, and ask it to make changes like you would with a human designer. And the AI should be good enough and have sufficient context to get it right.
- 9rx 1y agoThey thought the same thing in the 70s. Text is very flexible, so it serves a good "lowest common denominator", but that flexibility comes at the cost of being terrible to use.
- jstummbillig 1y ago> I use a couple different agents to help me code, and ChatGPT has largely replaced Google in my everyday use That's a handwavy sentence, if I have ever seen one. If it's good enough to help with coding and "replace Google" for you, other people will find similar opportunities in other domains. And sure: Some are successful. Most will not be. As always.
- maxglute 1y agoSee kids hooked on LLMs. I think most of them will grow up paying for a sub. Like not $15/m streaming sub, $50-100/m cellphone tier sub. Well until local kills that business model.
- dns_snek 1y agoLocal models won't kill anything because they'll be obsolete as soon as these companies stop releasing them. They'll be forgotten within 6-12 months.
- y0eswddl 1y agoI think the reason ads are so prolific now is because the pay-to-play model doesn't work well at such large scales... Ads seem to be there only way to make the kind of big money LLM investors will demand. I don't think you're wrong re: their hope to hook people and get us all used to using LLMs for everything, but I suspect they'll just start selling ads like everyone else.
- maxglute 1y agoBig tech are bigger than ever, they've simply learned to double dip with pay to play and ads. AI is also going to do both, but I think they have stickiness to extract a lot more per month. Like once a generation grows up with AI crutch, they will shell out $$$ to not write their own emails, for the simple fact that they never really learned to write all their own shit in the first place.
- benterix 1y ago> Every time some tool I've used for years sends an email "Hey, we've got AI now!" my thought is just "well, that's unfortunate"... Same, also my first thought is how to turn the damn thing off.
- yegle 1y agoI used BofA chat bot embedded in their app recently because I was unable to find a way to request a pin for my card. I was expecting the chat bot to find the link to their website where I can request the pin, and would consider a deep link within their app to the pin request UI a great UX. Instead, the bot asked a few questions to clarify which account is for the pin and submitted a request to mail the pin, just like the experience talking to a real customer representative. Next time when you see a bot that is likely using LLM integration, go ahead and give it a try. Worst case you can try some jailbreaking prompts and have some fun.
- reaperducer 1y agoMeanwhile, last week the Goldman-Sachs chatbot was completely incapable of allowing me to report a fraudulent charge on my Apple Card. I finally had to resort to typing "Human being" three times for it to send me to someone who could actually do something.
- skhameneh 1y ago> ChatGPT has largely replaced Google in my everyday use This. Organically replacing a search engine (almost) entirely is a massive change. Applied LLM use cases seemingly popped up in every corner within a very short timespan. Some changes are happening both organically and quickly. Companies are eager to understand and get ahead of adoption curves, of both fear and growth potential. There's so much at play, we've passed critical mass for adoption and disruption is already happening in select areas. It's all happening so unusually fast and we're seeing the side effects of that. A lot of noise from many that want a piece of the action.
- tim333 1y agoAre they rushing to use AI? Personally I know one person who's a fan and about 20 who only use it as a souped up Google search occasionally.
- 6510 1y agoIt only needs to be appealing to investors. It can quite obviously do that and then some.
- gilbetron 1y agoThis period feels extremely similar to the early 2000s, where people were saying that the web hadn't really done much and that it seemed to be at an "end". And then Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and pretty much the entirety of the modern web exploded. How tech innovation happens is very different from how people think it happens. There are nice, simple stories told after the fact, but in the beginning and middle it is very messy.