Regardless of my opinions on if you're correct about this, I'm not an ML expert so who knows, I'd be very happy if we cured cancer so I hope you're correct and the video is a cool demo.
I don't believe the risk vs reward on investing a trillion dollars+ is the same when your thesis changes from "We just need more data/compute and we can automate all white collar work"
to
"If we can build a bunch of simulations and automate testing of them using ML then maybe we can find new drugs" or "automate personalized entertainment"
The move to RL has specifically made me skeptical of the size of the buildout.
Yeah I've used it for personal projects and it's 50/50 for me.
Some of the stuff generated I can't believe is actually good to work with long term, and I wonder about the economics of it. It's fun to get something vaguely workable quickly though.
Things like deepwiki are useful too for open source work.
For me though the core problem I have with AI programming tools is that they're targeting a problem that doesn't really exist outside of startups, not writing enough code, instead of the real part of inefficiency in any reasonably sized org, coordination problems.
Of course if you tried to solve coordination problems, then it would probably be a lot harder to sell to management because we'd have to do some collective introspection as to where they come from.
The most frustrating thing to me about this most recent rash of biz guy doubting the future of AI articles is the required mention that AI, specifically an LLM based approach to AGI, is important even if the numbers don't make sense today.
Why is that the case? There's plenty of people in the field who have made convincing arguments that it's a dead end and fundamentally we'll need to do something else to achieve AGI.
Where's the business value? Right now it doesn't really exist, adoption is low to nonexistent outside of programming and even in programming it's inconclusive as to how much better/worse it makes programmers.
I'm not a hater, it could be true, but it seems to be gospel and I'm not sure why.
Mapping to 2001 feels silly to me, when we've had other bubbles in the past that led to nothing of real substance.
LLMs are cool, but if they can't be relied on to do real work maybe they're not change the world cool? More like 30-40B market cool.
EDIT: Just to be clear here. I'm mostly talking about "agents"
It's nice to have something that can function as a good Google replacement especially since regular websites have gotten SEOified over the years. Even better if we have internal Search/Chat or whatever.
I use Glean at work and it's great.
There's some value in summarizing/brainstorming too etc. My point isn't that LLMs et al aren't useful.
The existing value though doesn't justify the multi-trillion dollar buildout plans. What does is the attempt to replace all white collar labor with agents.
That's the world changing part, not running a pretty successful biz, with a useful product. That's the part where I haven't seen meaningful adoption.
This is currently pitched as something that will have nonzero chance of destroying all human life, we can't settle for "Eh it's a bit better than Google and it makes our programmers like 10% more efficient at writing code."
I've also "shipped" projects at big tech companies and this level of bootlicking really doesn't deserve to be called "shipping" it's just delivering for your management. Using the term "shipping" is a great scissor statement because it muddies the water.
The mentality from the article is another symptom of the many issues Software Engineering faces as profession.
Namely that a significant portion of us think of ourselves not as engineers, who need to tell management to get fucked occasionally, but as optimizers for accolades from whatever group can dole out rewards. This starts off in academia and continues into the professional world.
Certain folks just want to build a technical fiefdom for themselves, or get headpats from people who are above them in any given hierarchy.
Yeah this is "how the game is played". Playing this game eventually leads to the death of your organization and is why we have a corporate life cycle in the first place.
Eventually people like this eat an organization from the inside, pushing out anyone with an actual opinion or who optimizing for actually getting things done.
Instead it's just pure mercenary behavior for your managements attention.
Decent bit! I can only speak to my somewhat recent experience but the CS program had like a 30% attrition rate for year 1 + 2 b/c each year had a weeder course
but concept art, try-it-on for clothes or paint, stock art, etc