This, code is written by humans for humans. LLMs cannot compete no matter how much data you throw at them. A world in which software is written by AI will likely won't be code that will be readable by humans. And that is dangerous for anything where people's health, privacy, finances or security is involved
I don't know what's your experience with outsourcing. But people outsource full projects not the writing of a couple of methods. With LLMs still unable to fully understand relatively simple stuff, you can't expect them to deliver a project whose specification (like most software projects) contains ambiguities that only an experienced dev can detect and ask deep questions about the intention and purpose of the project. LLMs are nowhere near that. To be able to handle external uncertainty and turn it into certainty, to explain why technical decisions were made, to understand the purpose of a project and how it matches the project. To handle the overall uncertainties of writing code with other's people's code. All this is stuff outsourced teams do well. But LLMs won't be anywhere near good for at least a decade. I am calling it
what do you want done about it? Hallucination is an intrinsic part of how LLMs work. What makes a hallucination is the inconsistency between the hallucinated concept and the reality. Reality is not part of how LLMs work. They do amazing things but at the end of the day they are elaborate statistical machines.
Look behind the veil and see LLMs for what they really are and you will maximise their utility, temper your expectations and save you disappointment
They are partially hype though. That's what people here are arguing. There are benefits but their valuation is largely hype driven. AI is going to transform industries and humanity, yes. But AI does not mean LLM (even if LLM means AI). LLM raw potential was reached last year with GPT-4. From here on, the value will lie on exploiting the potential we already have to generate clever applications. Just like the internet provided a platform for new services, I expect LLMs to be the same but with a much smaller impact
I believe the honeymoon face has loong been finished. Even in the mainstream, last year of the AI year. 2024 has seen nothing substantially good and the only notesworthy thing is this article finally hitting into the public consciousness that we are past of the AI peak and beyond the plateau and freefalling has already begun.
LLM investors will be reviewing their portfolios and will likely begin declining further investments without clear evidence of profits in the very near future. On the other side, LLM companies will likely try to downplay this and again promise the Moon.
Welcome to capitalism. The market forces will squeze max value out of them. I imagine that Anthropic and OpenAI will be in the future fully downsized and acquired by their main investors (Microsoft and Amazon) and will simply becoming part of their generic and faceless AI & ML Teams once the current downwards stage of the hype cycle completes it closure in the next 5-8 years.
> a ton of really badly written apps encountered out in the wild when I did some small business IT consultancy made me very averse to VB in general.
A lot of VB has been historically written by people who had no background in writing software. They were jack of all trades, needed some quick and dirty and they learned just enough to have some working code
In the world of professional software development, economic value is king. This rule has marginal declining utility after some point and in some cases it is just not worth it. Think prototyping, tight deadlines, etc. In an ideal world, taking some additional time pays off, in other worlds, it doesn't and gets you in PIP. inb4 you say that's not the kind of company you want to work in, most companies are like these and not everyone can afford to apply and get a place at the 2 companies in your country where code quality is actually valued
You are supposed to call it AI now. The word "machine learning" is for GOFAI 2nd gen only. Once all investors have been money drained and the next AI winter begins, then you will be allowed to call it Machine Learning
There is a different between physical toughness and having to endure verbal abuse however tiny you might think it is. At the end of the day, everyone has an emotional blindspot that they consider vital but others consider unimportant
So you are selling an app whose server could be plugged at any time and render the app unusable. How is that any better than a subscription. Imagine paying money for a phone that stops working after one day. By design. You would be furious. And rightfully so
Their goal is not working on what's most useful for most people though. That's the domain of the big AI players. They are small and so specialising works best as that's where they can have an edge as a company.
At the end of the day, the released product needs to be good and needs to be done in a reasonable amount of time. I highly doubt they can do a generic model as well as a more specialised one.
But if you think you know better than them, you could try to contact them even though it looks they are crazy laser focused (their public email addresses are either for investors or employee candidates).