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> Ed Zitron doesn't say that AI doesn't work Ive seen him say it does work pretty consistently? He also talks about other things that are more interesting, but

by 8note 1mo ago

> Ed Zitron doesn't say that AI doesn't work Ive seen him say it does work pretty consistently? He also talks about other things that are more interesting, but he still says it doesnt work

ashkankiani 1mo ago
If you watch his latest interviews you can see him talking about how he finds it useful for simple cases like in the Bloomberg terminal for generating code for queries, but it still has fundamental limitations for doing anything autonomously. As someone who has used LLMs heavily at work and at home in various serious experiments, I agree. It still requires heavy babysitting and a lot of its limitations wrt context length are fundamental, not something that’s going to be easy to overcome.
- preg_match 1mo ago
  I also agree but the autonomous part comes from coding. We build autonomous systems with code, so it AI is really good at writing code (it is), we increase automation. Not with the AI itself, but with what it produces. Which is good, for many reasons: - environmental costs go down. Algorithms are cheap, LLM inference and training is not. - code is deterministic - code can be read and understood by professionals - code can be deployed trivially, whereas deploying an LLM costs huge infrastructure So using an LLM to help write code is the best of both worlds. You get velocity increase from the LLM, with none of the hallucination or environmental downsides at deployment time.
selfhoster1312 1mo ago
From anything i read/watched of him, the shorthand is "it doesn't work". When taking more than a few words to explain, it means it's not replacing humans altogether, because the output is low-quality and needs human quality control. In the end, he's not arguing LLMs are not working (as in returning 500 in your browser), but that the promise of autonomous agents replacing humans for increased productivity is a lie and doesn't work. I overall agree with his interpretation, but i'm afraid he might be wrong in the conclusion that noone is going to replace human labor with shittier agent slop. As long as we humans don't really have regulations and choice for proper quality of service, companies might just in fact enshittify everything with slop and make more profits while we suffer from lower-quality products and support.

by 8note 1mo ago

> Ed Zitron doesn't say that AI doesn't work Ive seen him say it does work pretty consistently? He also talks about other things that are more interesting, but he still says it doesnt work

ashkankiani 1mo ago

If you watch his latest interviews you can see him talking about how he finds it useful for simple cases like in the Bloomberg terminal for generating code for queries, but it still has fundamental limitations for doing anything autonomously. As someone who has used LLMs heavily at work and at home in various serious experiments, I agree. It still requires heavy babysitting and a lot of its limitations wrt context length are fundamental, not something that’s going to be easy to overcome.

preg_match 1mo ago
I also agree but the autonomous part comes from coding. We build autonomous systems with code, so it AI is really good at writing code (it is), we increase automation. Not with the AI itself, but with what it produces. Which is good, for many reasons: - environmental costs go down. Algorithms are cheap, LLM inference and training is not. - code is deterministic - code can be read and understood by professionals - code can be deployed trivially, whereas deploying an LLM costs huge infrastructure So using an LLM to help write code is the best of both worlds. You get velocity increase from the LLM, with none of the hallucination or environmental downsides at deployment time.

selfhoster1312 1mo ago

From anything i read/watched of him, the shorthand is "it doesn't work". When taking more than a few words to explain, it means it's not replacing humans altogether, because the output is low-quality and needs human quality control. In the end, he's not arguing LLMs are not working (as in returning 500 in your browser), but that the promise of autonomous agents replacing humans for increased productivity is a lie and doesn't work. I overall agree with his interpretation, but i'm afraid he might be wrong in the conclusion that noone is going to replace human labor with shittier agent slop. As long as we humans don't really have regulations and choice for proper quality of service, companies might just in fact enshittify everything with slop and make more profits while we suffer from lower-quality products and support.