danroblew (u/danroblew)

danroblew commented on The Generative AI Con wheresyoured.at/longcon/... · Posted by u/nimbleplum40

lukevp · 7 months ago

Why in the world would you want a car?? They are horrible to maintain, difficult to operate, expensive, smell bad, and are slower than horses! -somebody salty about automobiles, circa 1900.

danroblew · 7 months ago

People like the horse joke, but it works with computers in general. The best argument in favor of computers in the 80s was to save paper, otherwise they were expensive and overcomplicated.

danroblew commented on The Generative AI Con wheresyoured.at/longcon/... · Posted by u/nimbleplum40

mylastattempt · 7 months ago

On LLM/ML itself: it seems a lot of cynical people start with some unreasonable idea that "AI" should be able to do what it will perhaps be able to in 10 or 100 years, and are subsequently upset that it is not capable of that yet. It may get there, it may not. But that's on you for starting with a wrong assumption.

Is the AI "business" or "market" overvalued for it's current capabilities? Yeah, I do believe so. Welcome to the financial world, which is completely separated from reality. It's like that in all sectors where something new and exciting is happening, not just IT or AI. People poor money in hoping to be early enough to make a profit. Nothing more, nothing less. The rest is marketing. Some Sam Altman guy promoting the hell out of his own product? That is literally his job, regardless of wether or not he believes it all.

But articles like these are so bizarre to me. The author acts like he has millions at stake and his money manager just won't listen and pull all investments out of AI. Hurry up, the bubble is about to burst, I will lose all my money!

Except that... they don't. They are just "old man yelling at cloud". If you believe AI is the next Metaverse or WeWork, then it will just die off by itself once the bubble pops. Why are you having so many conversations about it, where you seem to be desperately trying to convince people of the bubble/con that is AI. To the point that you're so sick of it, that you write down your arguments so you can point the blinded there instead of having those tiresome arguments.

Genuinely baffled. Spend your energy on something productive rather than destructive, perhaps?

danroblew · 7 months ago

Trillions of dollars, dude. They need to make trillions of dollars to satisfy their investors.

danroblew commented on The Generative AI Con wheresyoured.at/longcon/... · Posted by u/nimbleplum40

BrenBarn · 7 months ago

A huge part of our problems stems from the fact that it's possible to make "companies" whose business model is built on losing money hand over fist until they've brainwashed everyone into thinking their "product" is good. In a sane world these companies would fail and AI would continue develop through small failures and small successes over a period of years or decades. Instead we get a firehose of nonsense just because a small number of wealthy people are willing to gamble.

danroblew · 7 months ago

On the plus side, if all the AI companies collapse there will be a lot of spare hardware.

Open source projects would have a lot more compute to work with.

danroblew commented on The Generative AI Con wheresyoured.at/longcon/... · Posted by u/nimbleplum40

alvah · 7 months ago

Ed occasionally makes good points, but he's very very angry at Big Tech, and his anger often gets in the way of his message. Reading his latest rant reminds me of Karl Denninger railing against Google around the time of their IPO, claiming they would never make enough money to justify an $85 share price (a $1000 investment then would be worth around $375,000 today).

danroblew · 7 months ago

Maybe OpenAI can become an advertising company?

danroblew commented on The Generative AI Con wheresyoured.at/longcon/... · Posted by u/nimbleplum40

simonw · 7 months ago

> When you put aside the hype and anecdotes, generative AI has languished in the same place, even in my kindest estimations, for several months, though it's really been years. The one "big thing" that they've been able to do is to use "reasoning" to make the Large Language Models "think" [...]

This is missing the most interesting changes in generative AI space over the last 18 months:

- Multi-modal: LLMs can consume images, audio and (to an extent) video now. This is a huge improvement on the text-only models of 2023 - it opens up so many new applications for this tech. I use both image and audio models (ChatGPT Advanced Voice) on a daily basis.

- Context lengths. GPT-4 could handle 8,000 tokens. Today's leading models are almost all 100,000+ and the largest handle 1 or 2 million tokens. Again, this makes them far more useful.

- Cost. The good models today are 100x cheaper than the GPT-3 era models and massively more capable.

danroblew · 7 months ago

Cost as in, cost to you? Or cost to serve?

If the cost-to-serve is subsidized by VC money, they aren't getting cheaper, they're just leading you on.

danroblew commented on The Generative AI Con wheresyoured.at/longcon/... · Posted by u/nimbleplum40

lukevp · 7 months ago

I’m a little shocked at how much negativity there is around LLMs among developers. It’s a new tool that requires some learning, and it’s sometimes not so great, but if you’ve used an IDE with real coding assistance built in (eg. VS Code in Edit with Copilot mode - NOT Chat mode, using Claude 3.5), it’s honestly not much worse than a junior dev and 100x faster. And if the code is bad you throw it away and try again 10 seconds later. The amount of speed up I see as a very experienced dev is astronomical. And just like 6 months ago it was awful. How great is it gonna be in a year or two? It doesn’t even have access to running unit tests or reading console errors or IDE hints, and it still generates mostly correct code. Once it gets more deeply embedded it’s just going to improve more and more.

danroblew · 7 months ago

The article is about how the economics of the LLM market is making all tech look bad.

They need trillions of dollars in returns. VC's won't finance tech startups for decades.

I use Cursor sometimes, and VSCode + Continue with llama.cpp, and it's great. That's not worth billions. It's definitely not worth trillions.