5 ms·

I used to type out long posts explaining how LLMs have been enormously beneficial (for their price) for myself and my company. Ironically it's the very MIT repo

I used to type out long posts explaining how LLMs have been enormously beneficial (for their price) for myself and my company. Ironically it's the very MIT report that "found AI to be a flop" (remember the "MIT study finds almost every AI initiative fails"), that also found that virtually every single worker is using AI (just not company AI, hence the flop part). At this point, it's only people with an ideological opposition still holding this view. It's like trying to convince gear head grandpa that manual transmissions aren't relevant anymore.

PunchyHamster 10mo ago
It's been good at enabling the clueless to get to performance of a junior developer, and saving few % of the time for the mid to senior level developer (at best). Also amazing at automating stuff for scammers... The cost is just not worth the benefit. If it was just an AI company using profits from AI to improve AI that would be another thing but we're in massive speculative bubble that ruined not only computer hardware prices (that affect every tech firm) but power prices (that affect everyone). All coz govt want to hide recession they themselves created because on paper it makes line go up > I used to type out long posts explaining how LLMs have been enormously beneficial (for their price) for myself and my company. Well then congratulations on being in the 5%. That doesn't really change the point.
- jama211 10mo ago
  I’m a senior developer and it has been hugely helpful for me in both saving time and effort and improving the quality of my output. You’re making a lot of confident statements and not backing them up with anything except your feelings on the matter.
  - realmadludite 10mo ago
    [dead]
  - llmslave2 10mo ago
    Aren't you doing the same? Assuming you haven't actually measured your productivity or quality of work with & without gen AI.
    - jama211 10mo ago
      That would be a terrible assumption to make then.
YY349238749328 10mo ago
Are you a boss or a worker? That's the real divide, for the most part. Bosses love AI - when your job is just sending emails and attending remote meetings, letting LLM write emails for you and summarize meetings is a godsend. Now you can go from doing 4 hours of work a week to 0 hours! And they let you fantasize about finally killing off those annoying workers and replace them with robots that never stop working and never say no. Workers hate AI, not just because the output is middling slop forced on them from the top but because the message from the top is clear - the goal is mass unemployment and concentration of wealth by the elite unseen by humanity since the year 1789 in France.
- FeepingCreature 10mo ago
  I'm a worker, I love AI and all my coworkers love AI.
  - realmadludite 10mo ago
    [dead]
  - joquarky 10mo ago
    Same here, I just limit my use of genAI to writing functions (and general brainstorming). I only use the standard "chat" web interface, no agents. I still glue everything else together myself. LLMs enhance my experience tremendously and I still know what's going on in the code. I think the move to agents is where people are becoming disconnected from what they're creating and then that becomes the source of all this controversy.
    - CerryuDu 10mo ago
      > I still glue everything else together myself. This is the core difference. Just "gluing things together" satisfies you. It's unacceptable to me. You don't want to own your code at the level that I want to own mine at.
- Workaccount2 10mo ago
  I'm both, I have a day job and run a side business as well. My partner has her own business (full time) and uses AI heavily too. None of these are tech jobs, but we both have used AI to avoid paying for expensive bloated software.
dbcpp 10mo ago
Firstly, it's not really good enough to say "our employees use it" and therefore it's providing us significant value as a business. It's also not good enough to say "our programmers now write 10x the number of lines of code and therefore that's providing us value" (lines of code have never been a good indicator of output). Significant value comes from new innovations. Secondly, the scale of investment in AI isn't so that people can use it to generate a powerpoint or a one off python script. The scale of investment is to achieve "superintelligence" (whatever that means). That's the only reason why you would cover a huge percent of the country in datacenters. The proof that significant value has been provided would be value being passed on to the consumer. For example if AI replaces lawyers you would expect a drop in the cost of legal fees (despite the harm that it also causes to people losing their jobs). Nothing like that has happened yet.
- Workaccount2 10mo ago
  When I can replace a CAD license that costs $250/usr/mo with an applet written by gemini in an hour, that's a hard tangible gain. Did Gemini write a CAD program? Absolutely not. But do I need 100% of the CAD program's feature set? Absolutely not. Just ~2% of it for what we needed.
  - kurikuri 10mo ago
    I agree, the applet which google plageurized through its Gemini tool saves you money. Why keep the middle man though? At this point, just pirate a copy.
    - Workaccount2 10mo ago
      I don't think it's plagiarized, nor would I pirate a copy. The workflow through the Gemini made app is way better (it's customized exactly for our inputs) and totally different than how the CAD program did it. So I wouldn't pirate a copy not even because our business runs above board, but also because the CAD version is actually also worse for our use. This is also pretty fringe stuff, cnc machine files from the 80's/90's. Part of the magic of LLMs is getting the exact bespoke tools you need, tailored specifically to your individual needs.
on_the_train 10mo ago
If it's so great and such a benefit: why scream it from to everyone? Why forced it? Why this crazy rhetoric labeling others at ideological? This makes no sense. If you found gold, just use it and get ahead of the curve. For some reason that never happens.
- trinsic2 10mo ago
  I have never seen a counter-argument to this. Why its being forced on the world? Lets here some execs from these companies answer that. My bet is on silence every time. Microsoft is forcing AI chat applications into the OS and preventing people from removing it. You could easily have a side application that people could enable by choice, yet its not happening, we have to roll with this new technology, knowing that its going to make the world a worse place to live in when we are not able to chose how and when we get our information. Its not just about feeling threatened. its also about feeling like I am going to get cut off from the method I want to use to find information. I don't want a chat bot to do it for me, I want to find and discern information for myself.
  - mixtureoftakes 10mo ago
    oh this is because they want more data to build better ai (that will give them more money and power and probably some other things too)
- kimixa 10mo ago
  I kinda agree. We've been told for years it's a "massive productivity multiplier", and not just an iterative improvement. So you expect to see the results of that. The AAA games being released faster, of higher quality, and at a lower cost to develop. You expect Microsoft (one of the major investors and proponents) to be releasing higher quality updates. You expect new AI-developed competitors for entrenched high-value software products. If all that was true, it doesn't matter what people do or don't argue on the internet, it doesn't matter if people whine, you don't need to proselytize LLMs on the internet, in that world people not using is just an advantage to your own relative productivity in the market. Surely by now the results will be visible anyway. So where are they?
overgard 10mo ago
Manual transmissions are still great! More fun to drive and an excellent anti-theft device.

PunchyHamster 10mo ago

It's been good at enabling the clueless to get to performance of a junior developer, and saving few % of the time for the mid to senior level developer (at best). Also amazing at automating stuff for scammers... The cost is just not worth the benefit. If it was just an AI company using profits from AI to improve AI that would be another thing but we're in massive speculative bubble that ruined not only computer hardware prices (that affect every tech firm) but power prices (that affect everyone). All coz govt want to hide recession they themselves created because on paper it makes line go up > I used to type out long posts explaining how LLMs have been enormously beneficial (for their price) for myself and my company. Well then congratulations on being in the 5%. That doesn't really change the point.

jama211 10mo ago
I’m a senior developer and it has been hugely helpful for me in both saving time and effort and improving the quality of my output. You’re making a lot of confident statements and not backing them up with anything except your feelings on the matter.
- realmadludite 10mo ago
  [dead]
- llmslave2 10mo ago
  Aren't you doing the same? Assuming you haven't actually measured your productivity or quality of work with & without gen AI.
  - jama211 10mo ago
    That would be a terrible assumption to make then.

YY349238749328 10mo ago

Are you a boss or a worker? That's the real divide, for the most part. Bosses love AI - when your job is just sending emails and attending remote meetings, letting LLM write emails for you and summarize meetings is a godsend. Now you can go from doing 4 hours of work a week to 0 hours! And they let you fantasize about finally killing off those annoying workers and replace them with robots that never stop working and never say no. Workers hate AI, not just because the output is middling slop forced on them from the top but because the message from the top is clear - the goal is mass unemployment and concentration of wealth by the elite unseen by humanity since the year 1789 in France.

FeepingCreature 10mo ago
I'm a worker, I love AI and all my coworkers love AI.
- realmadludite 10mo ago
  [dead]
- joquarky 10mo ago
  Same here, I just limit my use of genAI to writing functions (and general brainstorming). I only use the standard "chat" web interface, no agents. I still glue everything else together myself. LLMs enhance my experience tremendously and I still know what's going on in the code. I think the move to agents is where people are becoming disconnected from what they're creating and then that becomes the source of all this controversy.
  - CerryuDu 10mo ago
    > I still glue everything else together myself. This is the core difference. Just "gluing things together" satisfies you. It's unacceptable to me. You don't want to own your code at the level that I want to own mine at.
Workaccount2 10mo ago
I'm both, I have a day job and run a side business as well. My partner has her own business (full time) and uses AI heavily too. None of these are tech jobs, but we both have used AI to avoid paying for expensive bloated software.

dbcpp 10mo ago

Firstly, it's not really good enough to say "our employees use it" and therefore it's providing us significant value as a business. It's also not good enough to say "our programmers now write 10x the number of lines of code and therefore that's providing us value" (lines of code have never been a good indicator of output). Significant value comes from new innovations. Secondly, the scale of investment in AI isn't so that people can use it to generate a powerpoint or a one off python script. The scale of investment is to achieve "superintelligence" (whatever that means). That's the only reason why you would cover a huge percent of the country in datacenters. The proof that significant value has been provided would be value being passed on to the consumer. For example if AI replaces lawyers you would expect a drop in the cost of legal fees (despite the harm that it also causes to people losing their jobs). Nothing like that has happened yet.

Workaccount2 10mo ago
When I can replace a CAD license that costs $250/usr/mo with an applet written by gemini in an hour, that's a hard tangible gain. Did Gemini write a CAD program? Absolutely not. But do I need 100% of the CAD program's feature set? Absolutely not. Just ~2% of it for what we needed.
- kurikuri 10mo ago
  I agree, the applet which google plageurized through its Gemini tool saves you money. Why keep the middle man though? At this point, just pirate a copy.
  - Workaccount2 10mo ago
    I don't think it's plagiarized, nor would I pirate a copy. The workflow through the Gemini made app is way better (it's customized exactly for our inputs) and totally different than how the CAD program did it. So I wouldn't pirate a copy not even because our business runs above board, but also because the CAD version is actually also worse for our use. This is also pretty fringe stuff, cnc machine files from the 80's/90's. Part of the magic of LLMs is getting the exact bespoke tools you need, tailored specifically to your individual needs.

on_the_train 10mo ago

If it's so great and such a benefit: why scream it from to everyone? Why forced it? Why this crazy rhetoric labeling others at ideological? This makes no sense. If you found gold, just use it and get ahead of the curve. For some reason that never happens.

trinsic2 10mo ago
I have never seen a counter-argument to this. Why its being forced on the world? Lets here some execs from these companies answer that. My bet is on silence every time. Microsoft is forcing AI chat applications into the OS and preventing people from removing it. You could easily have a side application that people could enable by choice, yet its not happening, we have to roll with this new technology, knowing that its going to make the world a worse place to live in when we are not able to chose how and when we get our information. Its not just about feeling threatened. its also about feeling like I am going to get cut off from the method I want to use to find information. I don't want a chat bot to do it for me, I want to find and discern information for myself.
- mixtureoftakes 10mo ago
  oh this is because they want more data to build better ai (that will give them more money and power and probably some other things too)
kimixa 10mo ago
I kinda agree. We've been told for years it's a "massive productivity multiplier", and not just an iterative improvement. So you expect to see the results of that. The AAA games being released faster, of higher quality, and at a lower cost to develop. You expect Microsoft (one of the major investors and proponents) to be releasing higher quality updates. You expect new AI-developed competitors for entrenched high-value software products. If all that was true, it doesn't matter what people do or don't argue on the internet, it doesn't matter if people whine, you don't need to proselytize LLMs on the internet, in that world people not using is just an advantage to your own relative productivity in the market. Surely by now the results will be visible anyway. So where are they?

overgard 10mo ago

Manual transmissions are still great! More fun to drive and an excellent anti-theft device.