5 ms·

> not that interested in getting good at it I think they're interested in getting good at it. They just don't want to put in the human time and effort to do s

by petcat 7mo ago

> not that interested in getting good at it I think they're interested in getting good at it. They just don't want to put in the human time and effort to do so. They expect their many failures and short-comings to be shored up by continuous model training. But that, of course, means that in the meantime it will suck and nobody will use it.

TeMPOraL 7mo ago
I think they're operating beyond their current (human) capacity, trying to test out too many things at a time. But a dreamer in me entertains another idea: perhaps they're just holding back, because they realize that actually succeeding at this will instantly kill (or at least mortally wound) e-commerce as we know it. (This is a more narrow version of my belief that general AI tools like LLMs fundamentally don't fit as additions to products, but rather subsume products, and this makes them an existential threat to the software industry. Not to software or computing, just to all the software vendors, whose job is to slice off pieces of computational universe, put them in boxes to prevent interoperability, and give each a name so it's a "product" that can be sold or rented).
- NicoJuicy 7mo ago
  > perhaps they're just holding back Considering the money they need, they over promise and under deliver.
- latexr 7mo ago
  > But a dreamer in me entertains another idea: perhaps they're just holding back, because they realize that actually succeeding at this will instantly kill (or at least mortally wound) e-commerce as we know it. Sam Altman doesn’t give a shit about anyone but himself and has time and again shown he has no restraint for trampling over others to further his own goals. Why would e-commerce be where he draws the line?
  - TeMPOraL 7mo ago
    I don't think there is any line drawn here. I think if they executed well (and by they I mean any one of the three SOTA LLM vendors), they could already mortally wound the entire software industry today. Whether or not they want, or will want, to do it at some point, is unknown; the reasons to not do it now are obvious: 1) it's more profitable to keep renting intelligence per token to everyone, preserving the status quo and milking it indefinitely (i.e. while the models aren't yet good enough to reliably single-shot complex software products from half-baked prompts, because once they get there, disruption will happen organically) 2) trying to compete with ~every other software product today is not likely to succeed in the end; a serious attempt would still burn down the software industry, but the major players don't have the capacity to handle it all at once, and doing it gradually will give enough time for regulatory agencies to try and stop it; either way, no one wins
    - mrbungie 7mo ago
      How would they mortally wound the software industry as of today? I find their software to be of subpar quality and resilience anyways.
      - TeMPOraL 7mo ago
        By embracing adversarial interoperability - instead of chasing hundreds of integration deals across industries that put LLMs in products, they focused fully on integrating product access into chat, by combination of business deals, apps/MCPs, and engineer/designer support for users, all directed towards the goal of having the LLM become the "superapp" where work is done, gradually replacing product classes in order of how easy it is. There's lots of easy but drudge work to enable this that needs to be done at the fringes. For example, LLMs today could easily replace most people's smartphone homescreen experience, or travel/commute experience, as the data is there and LLMs have the capability, even prices are acceptable - what's missing is explicit first-party support to wire it up, keep it wired up. One step up, what's missing is accepting this explicitly as a goal: to replace software, to make existing products (whether whole or in pieces) the tools AI uses to do work for you. All the vendors seem to carefully walk around the idea, but avoid engaging with it directly, because once they do, they'll be competing with everyone instead of milking them.
- DrewADesign 7mo ago
  Why do you foresee OpenAI’s involvement in the software business mitigating the resistance to interoperability and companies making money through productization? If they were actually interested in solving those problems instead of trying to secure themselves the biggest slice of economic pie, wouldn’t they have been happy about Chinese companies distilling their models? Are they engagement-juicing inn their heavily subsidized service à la Uber because they’re interested in promoting a better future for humanity? I’m skeptical.
- Hendrikto 7mo ago
  > they're just holding back, because they realize that actually succeeding at this will instantly kill (or at least mortally wound) e-commerce They definitely would if they could. They desperately need money. They already told the whole world they want to replace them, they just can’t.
- le-mark 7mo ago
  > but rather subsume products, and this makes them an existential threat to the software industry. The US stock market has priced this in already. Many software only companies are perceived to be under threat by ai. It represents a wonderful arbitrage opportunity for ai skeptics in fact.
- _heimdall 7mo ago
  > This is a more narrow version of my belief that general AI tools like LLMs fundamentally don't fit as additions to products, but rather subsume products That seems reasonable, its just yet to be seen if LLMs are a form of artificial intelligence in any meaningful sense of the word. They're impressive ML for sure, but that is in fact different from AI despite how companies building them have tried to merge the terms together.
  - TeMPOraL 7mo ago
    What I'm saying is not (directly) related to whether or not LLMs are "true AI" or not. It's sufficient that they are fully general problem solvers. A software product (whether bought or rented as a service) is defined by its boundaries - there's a narrow set of specific problems, and specific ways it can be used to solve those problems, and beyond those, it's not capable (or not allowed) to be used for anything else. The specific choices of what, how, and on what terms, are what companies stick a name to to create a "software product", and those same choices also determine how (and how much) money it will make for them. Those boundaries are what LLMs, as general-purpose problem solvers, break naturally, and trying to force-fit them within those limits means removing most of the value they offer. Consider a word processor (like MS Word). It's solving the problem of creating richly-formatted, nice-looking documents. By default it's not going to pick the formatting for you, nor is it going to write your text for you. Now, consider two scenarios of adding LLMs to it: - On the inside: the LLM will be able to write you a poem or rewrite a piece of document. It could be made to also edit formatting, chat with you about the contents, etc. - From the outside: all the above, but also the LLM will be able to write you an itinerary based on information collected from maps/planning tool, airline site, hotel site, a list of personal preferences of your partner, etc. It will be able to edit formatting to match your website and presentation made in the competitor's office tools and projected weather for tomorrow. Most importantly, it will be able to do both of those automatically, just because you set up a recurring daily task of "hey, look at my next week's worth of calendar events and figure out which ones you can do some useful pre-work for me, and then do that". That's the distinction I'm talking about, that's the threat to software industry, and it doesn't take "true AI" - the LLMs as we have today are enough already. It's about generality that allows them to erase the boundaries that define what products are - which (this is the "mortal wound to software industry" part) devalues software products themselves, reducing them to mere tool calls for "software agents", and destroying all the main ways software companies make money today - i.e. setting up and exploiting tactics like captive audience, taking data hostage, bundled offers, UI as the best marketing/upsale platform, etc. (To be clear - personally, I'm in favor of this happening, though I worry about consequences of it happening all at once.)
- janalsncm 7mo ago
  By this logic maybe AMD is holding back on making ROCm usable because it would crash chip margins and the global economy with it, so they let Nvidia have all the fun instead. It’s selfless, really.
darthoctopus 7mo ago
> don't want to put in the human time and effort to do so In most circles, that is "not that interested in getting good at it".
- monegator 7mo ago
  [flagged]
- no_shadowban_2 7mo ago
  [dead]
- ImPostingOnHN 7mo ago
  Maybe in yours? Someone can want a thing, even very badly, without wanting to put in the work for it. Conversely, someone can work very hard for something they do not want. The linkage between wanting a thing and wanting to do the work to get it is not absolute, or necessary there at all.
  - s3r3nity 7mo ago
    Did they stop teaching "actions speak louder than words" in schools, or something?
    - dylan604 7mo ago
      "Someone can want a thing, even very badly, without wanting to put in the work for it." Pretty much the impetus behind a lot of theft. Sure, there's thieving because people can't afford food, but that's all theft. There's theft because they are addicts and don't want to sober up long enough to earn money, so they still things. There's others that can't afford something so rather than saving for it, they just take it.
      - dpoloncsak 7mo ago
        Is 'the work' not reflected in 'consequences' in terms of theft? I'm not sure how to convey this idea properly...Can't you view the repercussions of theft (Legal action, distrust, etc) as 'work' being put in? Sure, it's a different kind of work, but while I have a lack of motivation to want to work to buy a Lambo as I find them not worth the value, I also have a lack of motivation to steal a Lambo as I find it not worth the consequences.
conartist6 7mo ago
Things that are not doing the thing. https://strangestloop.io/essays/things-that-arent-doing-the-thing https://strangestloop.io/essays/things-that-arent-doing-the-...
xhkkffbf 7mo ago
> human time Maybe they just need to rewrite the prompt to say something like, "You want to get good at selling to humans. Money makes the world go around. It pays for the electricity you keep chugging. So quit being an effete twit and learn to sell. Would you like me to include a scene from David Mamet's 'Glengarry Glen Ross'?"

by petcat 7mo ago

TeMPOraL 7mo ago

I think they're operating beyond their current (human) capacity, trying to test out too many things at a time. But a dreamer in me entertains another idea: perhaps they're just holding back, because they realize that actually succeeding at this will instantly kill (or at least mortally wound) e-commerce as we know it. (This is a more narrow version of my belief that general AI tools like LLMs fundamentally don't fit as additions to products, but rather subsume products, and this makes them an existential threat to the software industry. Not to software or computing, just to all the software vendors, whose job is to slice off pieces of computational universe, put them in boxes to prevent interoperability, and give each a name so it's a "product" that can be sold or rented).

NicoJuicy 7mo ago
> perhaps they're just holding back Considering the money they need, they over promise and under deliver.
latexr 7mo ago
> But a dreamer in me entertains another idea: perhaps they're just holding back, because they realize that actually succeeding at this will instantly kill (or at least mortally wound) e-commerce as we know it. Sam Altman doesn’t give a shit about anyone but himself and has time and again shown he has no restraint for trampling over others to further his own goals. Why would e-commerce be where he draws the line?
- TeMPOraL 7mo ago
  I don't think there is any line drawn here. I think if they executed well (and by they I mean any one of the three SOTA LLM vendors), they could already mortally wound the entire software industry today. Whether or not they want, or will want, to do it at some point, is unknown; the reasons to not do it now are obvious: 1) it's more profitable to keep renting intelligence per token to everyone, preserving the status quo and milking it indefinitely (i.e. while the models aren't yet good enough to reliably single-shot complex software products from half-baked prompts, because once they get there, disruption will happen organically) 2) trying to compete with ~every other software product today is not likely to succeed in the end; a serious attempt would still burn down the software industry, but the major players don't have the capacity to handle it all at once, and doing it gradually will give enough time for regulatory agencies to try and stop it; either way, no one wins
  - mrbungie 7mo ago
    How would they mortally wound the software industry as of today? I find their software to be of subpar quality and resilience anyways.
    - TeMPOraL 7mo ago
      By embracing adversarial interoperability - instead of chasing hundreds of integration deals across industries that put LLMs in products, they focused fully on integrating product access into chat, by combination of business deals, apps/MCPs, and engineer/designer support for users, all directed towards the goal of having the LLM become the "superapp" where work is done, gradually replacing product classes in order of how easy it is. There's lots of easy but drudge work to enable this that needs to be done at the fringes. For example, LLMs today could easily replace most people's smartphone homescreen experience, or travel/commute experience, as the data is there and LLMs have the capability, even prices are acceptable - what's missing is explicit first-party support to wire it up, keep it wired up. One step up, what's missing is accepting this explicitly as a goal: to replace software, to make existing products (whether whole or in pieces) the tools AI uses to do work for you. All the vendors seem to carefully walk around the idea, but avoid engaging with it directly, because once they do, they'll be competing with everyone instead of milking them.
DrewADesign 7mo ago
Why do you foresee OpenAI’s involvement in the software business mitigating the resistance to interoperability and companies making money through productization? If they were actually interested in solving those problems instead of trying to secure themselves the biggest slice of economic pie, wouldn’t they have been happy about Chinese companies distilling their models? Are they engagement-juicing inn their heavily subsidized service à la Uber because they’re interested in promoting a better future for humanity? I’m skeptical.
Hendrikto 7mo ago
> they're just holding back, because they realize that actually succeeding at this will instantly kill (or at least mortally wound) e-commerce They definitely would if they could. They desperately need money. They already told the whole world they want to replace them, they just can’t.
le-mark 7mo ago
> but rather subsume products, and this makes them an existential threat to the software industry. The US stock market has priced this in already. Many software only companies are perceived to be under threat by ai. It represents a wonderful arbitrage opportunity for ai skeptics in fact.
_heimdall 7mo ago
> This is a more narrow version of my belief that general AI tools like LLMs fundamentally don't fit as additions to products, but rather subsume products That seems reasonable, its just yet to be seen if LLMs are a form of artificial intelligence in any meaningful sense of the word. They're impressive ML for sure, but that is in fact different from AI despite how companies building them have tried to merge the terms together.
- TeMPOraL 7mo ago
  What I'm saying is not (directly) related to whether or not LLMs are "true AI" or not. It's sufficient that they are fully general problem solvers. A software product (whether bought or rented as a service) is defined by its boundaries - there's a narrow set of specific problems, and specific ways it can be used to solve those problems, and beyond those, it's not capable (or not allowed) to be used for anything else. The specific choices of what, how, and on what terms, are what companies stick a name to to create a "software product", and those same choices also determine how (and how much) money it will make for them. Those boundaries are what LLMs, as general-purpose problem solvers, break naturally, and trying to force-fit them within those limits means removing most of the value they offer. Consider a word processor (like MS Word). It's solving the problem of creating richly-formatted, nice-looking documents. By default it's not going to pick the formatting for you, nor is it going to write your text for you. Now, consider two scenarios of adding LLMs to it: - On the inside: the LLM will be able to write you a poem or rewrite a piece of document. It could be made to also edit formatting, chat with you about the contents, etc. - From the outside: all the above, but also the LLM will be able to write you an itinerary based on information collected from maps/planning tool, airline site, hotel site, a list of personal preferences of your partner, etc. It will be able to edit formatting to match your website and presentation made in the competitor's office tools and projected weather for tomorrow. Most importantly, it will be able to do both of those automatically, just because you set up a recurring daily task of "hey, look at my next week's worth of calendar events and figure out which ones you can do some useful pre-work for me, and then do that". That's the distinction I'm talking about, that's the threat to software industry, and it doesn't take "true AI" - the LLMs as we have today are enough already. It's about generality that allows them to erase the boundaries that define what products are - which (this is the "mortal wound to software industry" part) devalues software products themselves, reducing them to mere tool calls for "software agents", and destroying all the main ways software companies make money today - i.e. setting up and exploiting tactics like captive audience, taking data hostage, bundled offers, UI as the best marketing/upsale platform, etc. (To be clear - personally, I'm in favor of this happening, though I worry about consequences of it happening all at once.)
janalsncm 7mo ago
By this logic maybe AMD is holding back on making ROCm usable because it would crash chip margins and the global economy with it, so they let Nvidia have all the fun instead. It’s selfless, really.

darthoctopus 7mo ago

> don't want to put in the human time and effort to do so In most circles, that is "not that interested in getting good at it".

monegator 7mo ago
[flagged]
no_shadowban_2 7mo ago
[dead]
ImPostingOnHN 7mo ago
Maybe in yours? Someone can want a thing, even very badly, without wanting to put in the work for it. Conversely, someone can work very hard for something they do not want. The linkage between wanting a thing and wanting to do the work to get it is not absolute, or necessary there at all.
- s3r3nity 7mo ago
  Did they stop teaching "actions speak louder than words" in schools, or something?
  - dylan604 7mo ago
    "Someone can want a thing, even very badly, without wanting to put in the work for it." Pretty much the impetus behind a lot of theft. Sure, there's thieving because people can't afford food, but that's all theft. There's theft because they are addicts and don't want to sober up long enough to earn money, so they still things. There's others that can't afford something so rather than saving for it, they just take it.
    - dpoloncsak 7mo ago
      Is 'the work' not reflected in 'consequences' in terms of theft? I'm not sure how to convey this idea properly...Can't you view the repercussions of theft (Legal action, distrust, etc) as 'work' being put in? Sure, it's a different kind of work, but while I have a lack of motivation to want to work to buy a Lambo as I find them not worth the value, I also have a lack of motivation to steal a Lambo as I find it not worth the consequences.

conartist6 7mo ago

Things that are not doing the thing. https://strangestloop.io/essays/things-that-arent-doing-the-thing https://strangestloop.io/essays/things-that-arent-doing-the-...

xhkkffbf 7mo ago

> human time Maybe they just need to rewrite the prompt to say something like, "You want to get good at selling to humans. Money makes the world go around. It pays for the electricity you keep chugging. So quit being an effete twit and learn to sell. Would you like me to include a scene from David Mamet's 'Glengarry Glen Ross'?"