I get what the optimism is about in theory. Parsing unstructured data is something we can now do that we couldn't before. It adds a whole new vector to the span of software, a big piece of capability that software now has whose emergent, unforeseen consequences we can't predict.
I'm just not quite sure I buy this. It feels to me like there's a light motte-and-bailey going on, where supposedly AI is going to be a paradigm shift that changes the very notion of what's possible, but the actual proposals are mostly about LLMs being a finite-multiplier enhancement for the existing ability of software to model and optimize processes.
In particular, a big fraction of the concrete proposals seem to be about making business processes more efficient. Are businesses generally constrained by this to begin with? Like businesses don't seem to be sprinting at the edge of software technology to get as much efficiency as they can, buying diminishing returns from existing tech and waiting eagerly for the next wave of improvements. Judging by revealed preferences, it just doesn't seem like a very high priority for them.
Taking your automated library example, that sounds very cool from a hacker/tinkerer perspective and I'm sure it would result in some efficiency improvements, but it just doesn't seem like, no offense to anyone, a problem that needs urgent attention. How does this significantly improve the situation for anyone involved?
Of course it's true that we don't know what we don't know, and I don't disagree that often technology changes the world in unpredictable ways or even that current AI could possibly lead to this. At risk of being the dropbox-is-just-rsync guy, I'm just skeptical about the following pattern:
(1) some new tech gets invented that's supposedly the next internet;
(2) no one can quite explain or plausibly hypothesize how; but
(3) in the meantime, a wave of companies start building "platforms" and selling shovels to people who will supposedly later build the actual useful thing.
I suppose with a blanket statement like "nothing is happening" I'm practically begging to be contradicted :)
Some of this stuff looks very cool. Have we started getting RL to work generally? I remember my last impression being that we were in the "promising idea but struggling to get it working in practice" phase but that was some time ago now.
I suppose we'll see. I use a Mac and iPhone and the internet like everyone else and personally I find almost all the AI stuff they're pushing to be annoying, unnecessary and not solving any actual problems I have. Like believe me, I'm the laziest person alive and if AI is going to make my life easier, it's like, where do I sign up? ChatGPT does make my life better and accordingly I happily pay them the twenty bucks every month. But every time I try one of these AI thingies it ends up being a disappointment. Time will tell if the emperor's clothes come off at some point, or if I'm just a grumpy luddite.
I remember when bitcoin was taking off, and everyone instantly started saying "bitcoin may not win but one thing is for sure, the **blockchain** is here to stay." Then 15 years went by and the crypto market is basically bitcoin, which won as a store of value, and then a long tail of shitcoins that were "unlocked by the blockchain as a platform."
AI feels to me like it's in a similar state. ChatGPT was a genuinely exciting breakthrough, and because of the previous example of web, everyone instantly wants to see "LLMs as a platform" take off. This has not happened whatsoever. I literally only use ChatGPT. I don't even use Copilot because it's janky and doesn't solve any real problems for me. I guess I sometimes use the RAG-based applications (like docs pages now support a ChatGPT interface), but these are basically ChatGPT with some extra context injected in-- so, ChatGPT. You talk to any of these AI companies and they all admit they're just using the AI label to fundraise and behind the scenes it's either a CRUD app or the thinnest GPT integration in front. I literally don't use any other AI applications. They're all annoying and flooding the web and it is pure clutter everywhere that adds no benefit ever, all because everyone wants to see "LLMs as a platform."
I grew up being a huge fan of YC, and I would respect them so much more if they would take the contrarian (but in my humble opinion correct) view and say actually, judging by the structural evidence and actual results, it's not clear what exactly AI has to offer right now, and we're going to return to PG's founding philosophy and continue funding unsexy and unpopular but ultimately actually important things.
I probably should've defined "real value" more carefully. My framework here is basically the idea of technology as humanity's "skill tree," the total set of stuff we're able to do. Back when RCT (and Doom before that) were written, we genuinely weren't sure if such things could be created, and their creation represented a novel step forward. The vibe in software feels like we're long past the stage of doing things like that, like we're not even attempting to do things like that. I can only think of two things in recent history: whatever strand of AI culminated in ChatGPT, which is genuinely impressive, and Bitcoin, which ostensibly was created by one guy.
My theory is not that individual genius accomplishes more than a group, but that whether a field is currently more suited for individual single-brain productivity or assembly-line cooperation is a signal of whether that field is nascent, at its peak, or in decline. I genuinely think software technology has not advanced in a long time. Computers got really fast, which allowed us to build a mountain of abstractions on top, and now you can throw together web apps, and there is no shortage of companies running around with that hammer and banging on everything. But the actual boundaries of what is possible with software have not moved in a while.
Most of the software nowadays (in addition to being terribly slow and broken, by the way) feels like stuff that doesn't actually need to exist. It doesn't advance the boundaries of technology or humanity's skill tree in any way. It's a "nice to have" — it might have some social value or make some business process more efficient or whatever — but no one looks at it and goes, wow, we couldn't do that before.
Someone is going to bring up AI and LLMs, and about that, I will just say that ChatGPT was a real accomplishment... but after that, I have not seen any use cases of LLMs that represent a genuine step forward. Like smart contracts, it's a solution in desperate search of a problem, a technology in search of a breakout app. You feel like there's just no way it doesn't have wide reaching implications, and everyone around you (especially VCs) talks about the "possibilities unlocked" — but two years in and we haven't seen a single actually interesting use case. (Again, of course they're being incorporated to optimize some business process or whatever. But who cares?)
Meanwhile, as far as the day to day reality of software engineering goes, if you work professionally as an engineer, your job is more or less wrangling microservices in one form or another. If you're at a big company this is probably literal, but even if you're at a startup the bigco transplants start doing microservice stuff basically on arrival, and a bunch of the "best practices" and frameworks and tools are meant to mimic microservices type thinking (making things more complicated rather than less).
As a final note, I grew up being a giant fan of YC and PG's essays, so I will make a comment about the latest batch of YC startups. It seems to me that a bunch of them basically exist to make some process more efficient. But then you wonder, why does that process need to exist in the first place? Like there was one startup helping you to optimize your AWS costs or something, but why is software written in such a way to begin with that you have all these microservices and towers of abstractions and untrackable infrastructure? Like you look at these startups solving a problem of solving a problem... and then you get to the root problem, and the whole thing is just a giant castle in the sky. I think this describes much of the motivating thrust of software today.
I know absolutely nothing about math, but... I'm thinking about the history of software, where back in the day you had all these amazing projects like RollerCoaster Tycoon basically being written by one guy. Then software engineering became modularized in a way that sounds kind of similar to what is described in the interview, and now you have hordes of people who churn out React for a living (like myself) and software engineering is now a giant assembly line and the productivity (or skill required) per individual has dropped to near zero.
I guess I have the impression that when fields are in their heyday, the best work is done by some genius fitting like a hundred things in one brain, and when that gets replaced by an assembly line, the field has basically stopped producing anything of real value. Anyone in math (or otherwise) want to tell me why that's completely wrong?
I'm just not quite sure I buy this. It feels to me like there's a light motte-and-bailey going on, where supposedly AI is going to be a paradigm shift that changes the very notion of what's possible, but the actual proposals are mostly about LLMs being a finite-multiplier enhancement for the existing ability of software to model and optimize processes.
In particular, a big fraction of the concrete proposals seem to be about making business processes more efficient. Are businesses generally constrained by this to begin with? Like businesses don't seem to be sprinting at the edge of software technology to get as much efficiency as they can, buying diminishing returns from existing tech and waiting eagerly for the next wave of improvements. Judging by revealed preferences, it just doesn't seem like a very high priority for them.
Taking your automated library example, that sounds very cool from a hacker/tinkerer perspective and I'm sure it would result in some efficiency improvements, but it just doesn't seem like, no offense to anyone, a problem that needs urgent attention. How does this significantly improve the situation for anyone involved?
Of course it's true that we don't know what we don't know, and I don't disagree that often technology changes the world in unpredictable ways or even that current AI could possibly lead to this. At risk of being the dropbox-is-just-rsync guy, I'm just skeptical about the following pattern:
(1) some new tech gets invented that's supposedly the next internet;
(2) no one can quite explain or plausibly hypothesize how; but
(3) in the meantime, a wave of companies start building "platforms" and selling shovels to people who will supposedly later build the actual useful thing.