thats fair, "any generalization is almost always wrong"
but, gen-ai is not introducing a new mode to my day-to-day life. I would liken it to a calculator app. Sure, i use it sometimes, but, it is not changing my day in any significant way yet.
But ecommerce changed the way i shop, and the smartphone changed the way i transact, and consume info and entertainment
unlike dot-com which brought in ecommerce,
or smartphone which put info and entertainment in our pockets,
genai is not doing anything to our daily lives.
productivity improvements in certain usecases are about it.
it is not a giant leap which dot-com or smartphone enabled.
> For example, Steve Jobs used to run an annual retreat for what he considered
> the 100 most important people at Apple, and these were not the 100 people
> highest on the org chart. Can you imagine the force of will it would take to do
> this at the average company? And yet imagine how useful such a thing could be.
> It could make a big company feel like a startup
Nope, not true in my book. I would not like to be in any company that "selects"
a small group of elites to a hawaii or las-vegas "retreat". then, said elites would propagate their new-found retreat wisdom from their cult-leader down to the plebs.
they are purpose building hardware for their specific application. debugging corner cases and making this robust is going to take them a decade. given that nobody else is interested in this non-standard solution, they dont have the benefit of the community debugging it, and improving on it in open-source.
appears to me to be a vanity effort as is the whole dojo project.
agree that anyone making broad generalities like "algos dont matter" is always mistaken. but API design is more about the system, and how it is carved out into components, and what each component does is the algo. so, api and algo are tied together.
compilers eased the production of assembly code. that didnt reduce the need for folks coding at a different layer of abstraction.
you misunderstand how software systems are built. These days, they are "assembled" out of building blocks which have clean interfaces.
similar to how houses are built from prefabricated components. Imagine that the AI is producing these pre-fab parts to order. But the design of the interfaces and assembly is still an art.
if you think of your job as a mason assembling bricks to build components, you are mistaken. you need to think of your job as an artist creating systems that work well built out of pre-fab components.
there is a story of how woz wrote the entire software for the early apple in assembly. nobody does that anymore. because, we have tools that produce assembly like compilers and such. that didnt take away the jobs of software engineers, because, someone had to now produce code at a different layer of abstraction.
imagine you ranting at the compiler 50 years back because it took away your job producing assembly code.
DeepMind is overselling their AI hand when they dont have to.
"whos to say that" - this could be a leading question for any "possibility" in the AI religion.
"whos to say that god doesnt exist" etc. questions for which there are no tests, and hence fall outside the realm of science and in the realm of religion.
LLM have unleashed the dreamer in each and every young coder. Now, there is all sorts of speculation on what these machines can or cannot do. This is a natural process of any mania.
These folks must all do courses in epistemology to realize that all knowledge is built up of symbolic components and not spit out by a probabilistic machine.
Gradually, reality will sync (intentional misspelling) in, and such imaginations will be seen to be futile manic episodes.
This is nice but not very useful to me. What would be more useful in my use case is tooling to audit my cloud accounts periodically and reclaim garbage which is not used or re optimize my usage (smaller instances or databases depending on usage patterns) which directly saves me money.
thats a fair statement to say that humans cannot be the gatekeepers for accuracy or reliability.
but why should the solution involve AI (thats just the latest bandwagon)? formal verification of software has a long history which has nothing to do with AI.
people may be unreliable but the software they produce needs to work reliably.
software system is like legos. they form a system of dependencies. each component in the chain has interfaces which other components depend on. 99% reliability doesnt cut it for software components.
dont build a platform for software on something inherently unreliable. if there is one lesson i have learnt, it is that,
systems and abstractions are built on interfaces which are reliable and deterministic.
focus on llm usecases where accuracy is not paramount - there are tons of them. ocr, summarization, reporting, recommendations.
but, gen-ai is not introducing a new mode to my day-to-day life. I would liken it to a calculator app. Sure, i use it sometimes, but, it is not changing my day in any significant way yet.
But ecommerce changed the way i shop, and the smartphone changed the way i transact, and consume info and entertainment