"The biggest thing we’ve learned from the large language model generation is how many people are excited to replace human beings, and how many people just don’t understand labour of any kind"
Really? I think we've heard C-suite blabbermouths and borderline nontechnical tech CEOs being amplified by social media making these assertions, but boy did the weakly efficient market deliver a relatively swift correction to that mindset, no?
Q: "What would it take to change your point of view?"
A: "[AI] would have to solve all hallucinations forever, which they are completely incapable [of]."
Can you produce a human that is infallible? I'll wait.
My hot take is AI is increasingly less unprofitable as the cost of serving tokens drops and Nvidia's ongoing offers to guarantee profitability is a sign that it isn't stopping anytime soon.
You either believe in the underlying science and technology or you don't. But in a world where AI is a fad like cabbage patch kids and beanie babies, what's next?
> But in a world where AI is a fad like cabbage patch kids and beanie babies
AI will almost certainly not be a fad for software developers, or at the very least for web developers, but it's certainly possible that other industries will look back on "experimental AI days" and chuckle.
Even if there is a financial bubble (that pops), the technology is still not going away.
As for what's next, I dunno. I've heard people talking about similar tech that doesn't use neural nets/etc, but that is out of my wheelhouse.
The possibility of AI sticking around is apparently pretty threatening to the Zitron cult or what seemed like an innocuous response wouldn't be in such negative territory so quickly.
But I think AI is here to stay and it has already proven useful. And sure, we will look back on today's models like we look back upon Gordon Gekko and his giant early cell phone. And I cannot fathom how one can not separate AI the science and technology from AI tech bros and CEOs. I agree the latter are going to go through some things as the AGI fails to arrive on their schedule, but IMO there's no turning back on the technology nor should there be.
> But I think AI is here to stay and it has already proven useful.
Yes, I said as much. I've said this is two other places in this thread, but when they are talking AI being useful, they aren't just talking about for software development. The software industry is seeing far more AI adoption, by a very large margin, than any other industry, and the success of the current companies hinges on it being heavily adopted everywhere. I don't really care to defend Zitron because he does speak out of his lane far too much, especially when it comes to software, and those are the points the HN crowd latches onto. But that's not the bulk of what he talks about.
So then what is the deadline for AI reaching into all these new industries (or are you asserting it will never happen)? And you're right, technical people latch onto him sounding like a horse's ass on technical subjects and why shouldn't they? IMO this isn't the same as Elon's endless empty FSD promises (which I called out the whole danged time from the beginning FWIW), but I get why people assume it is, I just don't agree.
I didn't have a lot sympathy for the guy who described the Internet as a series of tubes yet I believe Al Gore caught far more flack for that bit about inventing the Internet than he deserved given the inventor of the Internet defended that very claim.
So if the bulk of what Zitron's talking about is valid, then what are the main points that aren't self-evident i.e. there's definitely either a buildout or a bubble in CapEx and only time will answer that question, not hot air and blatant market manipulation. What is he bringing to the conversation that we're all missing? Seriously, educate me.
Sorry, you're taking this up way too many notches for me to want to continue this convo. But as I said, I have no interested in defending Zitron in general, I made no claims about him being groundbreaking, and I don't even take him too seriously. I was responding to your points around AI's usefulness and how the discussion is almost always localized around "AI as a software development tool" here on HN. For me he's just a soothing counter-voice to the awful and inescapable hype and doomerism coming straight from the American AI companies themselves (as well as people I've been forced to interact with in the programming community). He does show numbers about why he thinks some of them aren't aren't going to survive. This is all speculative (not sure why I feel I have to say this but I feel I do).
> So then what is the deadline for AI reaching into all these new industries?
Obviously the "deadline" would before the US companies go bust (again, IF they do). And I'm confused about your use of "new" here but I'm going to assume you mean "other existing industries that haven't adopted yet." The discussions around this are that several industries already jumped on AI then walked it back, so it's more that we're already past the "reaching in" stage. I don't have links for you but there have been several articles about companies firing people "because AI" then hiring them back. I suppose AI drive-thru order takers would work as another example. Again, I don't have the numbers on this myself. And again-again, none of this is "in defence of Ed Zitron" or "this is why Ed Zitron is great" or any such thing, but these are the things he talks about (and once again, no, it's nothing groundbreaking).
So saying you like his vibes and feels is cool, thanks, genuinely. FWIW I avoid AI shills and doomers myself and focus on developing my skills working with the technology. The comp for that doesn't suck either.
That, and he has numbers to back up the possible downfall. My issue with AI is how it's used in art and content generation. I resisted it for code for a while, but eventually came around.
> FWIW I avoid AI shills and doomers myself and focus on developing my skills working with the technology.
I did a bit of that but I'm no longer employed and have been taking a break from programming for a few months.
Those sorts of numbers apply to the common folk like you and me IMO.
They do not apply to the billionaire class. They just don't. The CapEx play either pays out when the buildout is justified or it soft lands for them with a bailout like we just saw NVDA do today with OpenAI. No matter what, in the end, we'll be holding any bar tab in our retirement accounts if they're being "managed." How many times must this game play out for the unchanging outcome to settle in?
What I do think is that datacenters will now end up in other less-regulated countries just like California's plastic "recycling" ends up getting burned as garbage in the third world. So there's that I guess.
> Those sorts of numbers apply to the common folk like you and me IMO.
Oh, I understand that. I'm not American, but I know I will still be affected if this all goes bust. I'm not in the best state of mind right now, though, and the thought of everything burning to the ground isn't really concerning me.
Also, interesting article. I was aware about plastics getting shipped to other countries but had no idea they were starting to refuse.
So if it's a 2-5% increase, barely break even, it more than breaks even during an extended power failure if you live somewhere this is likely. There are a lot of things I choose to do to avoid future timelines where 'sus appliances break at the worst possible moment. This would be along the same lines to me. Your mindset may vary YMMV.
In my side hustle time, I use coding agents to explore what if projects I would otherwise never get to build.
At my day job, I use AI to fix config, container, and installation issues so I can spend my time coding instead of struggling to fix mostly other people's mistakes. And really, in this age of python wheels, containers, virtual environments, and fragmented APIs, the cognitive load of doing this by hand would shut me down for the day.
1.5 years in and I haven't burnt out. If anything, I'm ramping up. I'm no longer afraid of adding a web UI, or insane numbers of unit tests, or deploying other people's software.
What I'm not doing is using it to build products, but instead just doing so to augment the supporting stack. All of this is subject to change as the AI landscape evolves.
That's exactly what the article highlight might actually put your "competitors" (if you see others like that) in front of you, as focus and "what you actually did" becomes more important. Might be that while you shipped and experimented with 50 different APIs, your "competitor"/peer just did 3, but they were more carefully considered so the payoff ended up bigger/better, in whatever way that could be.
Same, honestly. I've dabbled in trying to come up with some UI stuff with LLMs, but I'm still not at the point where I'm totally comfortable. At my day job, luckily I have people much more talented than me at design who can provide feedback and guidance. For my personal side projects, I've had some modest success inducing the agent to provide the feedback from a suitable "persona", for lack of a better term (e.g. "Is there any existing standard on how to make this component accessible?", "How intuitive would you expect a non-technical user to find interaction with this?").
I read somewhere that Claude is better at UI than Codex. I haven't tested it yet. I am currently using Codex for a couple of native application projects with Avalonia. The UI isn't really good at all and I can fix it by hand far better than it does with prompts. For example, a table to view database data ended up with huge spaces between rows and columns and it can't seem to grasp how to format a table nicely. So I fixed it by hand, no big deal.
Pick a website you like, and tell claude to use it for inspiration. I do this all the time and the results are pretty impressive and different than what you get out of the box prompting.
> Pick a website you like, and tell claude to use it for inspiration.
I believe you misspelled "rip it off."
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that people are using the tools built by ripping off the collective creative works of humanity to rip off individual things, too.
When other people emulate your behavior because they appreciate the results you got, we used to call that leadership. Something has gone awry that we now call it a ripoff.
im not ripping it off, or at least, i wouldnt consider that. a perfect example is artsy. i like the clean style of the website, and the colors, so if im building a prototype instead of getting the standard shadcn look i get something a bit different. im not building a competing product to artsy, i built a piece of software i run locally to aggregate my taxes everything year.
> At my day job, I use AI to fix config, container, and installation issues so I can spend my time coding instead of struggling to fix mostly other people's mistakes. And really, in this age of python wheels, containers, virtual environments, and fragmented APIs, the cognitive load of doing this by hand would shut me down for the day.
I think it was a mistake to add this much complexity to the world of software in the first place, so I'd view AI as a bandaid to a problem rather than addressing the underyling issue. But on the whole, the cost of all this extra complexity, data centers to run AI to fix layers of crud and buildup don't seem to provide much of a net benefit to society (except to those who are at the top and need to see growth to pad their retirement portfolios).
Oh no disagreement that it was a mistake, but as Ambassador Kosh once stated "The avalanche has started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote."
I would suggest not concluding the end of this movie from the first 5 minutes of the story. But then, I really fought against complexity over my career and lost hard. One can either check out as a fossil of the good old days or adapt to the new reality. 6 months ago, AI was about to replace all the engineers and then reality slapped the C-suite hard on that subject as just one recent plot twist.
It's not 5 minutes into this story, I think. It's been going on for a long time, but really started to become a "conscious entity" with computers - and I do think computers were a mistake.
Your job would be so much harder without those supposedly complex tools. Most of those listed help solve issues with multiple environments. What simple solution is there to that.
Ya this is exactly how I use it, the LLM does everything i don't want to do. Which is basically everything except the exact code im writing. Its very freeing to not have to worry or touch a jira ticket ever again. The LLM just does it for me.
Once you understand enough to spawn independent agents for discrete tasks, it's hard to justify investing brain space into some harness that will likely be obsolete next week, if not tomorrow. And by the time the harness game converges, I suspect most of the high-end models will behave like them! Intrinsically.
I use nanobanana 2 to test changes in paint and flooring/tiling to great success. And the real pro move is taking those images to a designer to tweak the remaining 20% or so.
You just described how people are using AI in general. And I think that last step is actually a huge gap. People will brainstorm or improve their understanding of the task with AI and create something. Ideally they would hand it off to a professional for finalization like you did.
I wish a service existed where I could make something in AI (text, images, whatever), then pass that AI output to an actual human who would use it as a guide to produce an actual product.
I used it recently to explore a few placements of a pool and glass building on my property. It's not authoritative, by any means, but it did answer some questions
And at this level it's barely any different than an architectural render, more for "how could this look" rather than "how will this look"
I would guess the Chinese government has a strong wish to lift all Chinese AI boats and bets. That it sinks western closed weight Frontier Labs in the process would be just be gravy on top, no? Broadly, the difference between mercantilistic capitalism and western late stage capitalism IMO.
I've played with your compiler. It's not very robust yet to production code that leans into all the libraries in the ecosystem. Solve that and you've got a killer app IMO.
Someone needs to stand up a benchmark suite for ROCM, this, and everyone else attempting it to really get the ball rolling here. SemiAnalysis could have a blast with this.
Really? I think we've heard C-suite blabbermouths and borderline nontechnical tech CEOs being amplified by social media making these assertions, but boy did the weakly efficient market deliver a relatively swift correction to that mindset, no?
Q: "What would it take to change your point of view?" A: "[AI] would have to solve all hallucinations forever, which they are completely incapable [of]."
Can you produce a human that is infallible? I'll wait.
Finally: https://martinalderson.com/posts/no-it-doesnt-cost-anthropic...
My hot take is AI is increasingly less unprofitable as the cost of serving tokens drops and Nvidia's ongoing offers to guarantee profitability is a sign that it isn't stopping anytime soon.
https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/nvidia-gpu-debt-backst...
You either believe in the underlying science and technology or you don't. But in a world where AI is a fad like cabbage patch kids and beanie babies, what's next?
reply