Well... On HN, the crowd is largely technical and the rhetoric has been that our jobs are no longer useful or required. Seeing 'that' idea fail (in any capacity, efficiency gain and usefulness of the technology aside) is probably some schadenfreude, and a bit of self preservation.

I also believe that a lot of the hype has been unrealistic, so IF there is a bubble and IF it is bursting, I'd hope it to be a wake up call and give investors, companies, and regular people more realistic expectations about what we're working with here.

I am investigative of this scenario, but it can go two ways, if models continue to approve in leaps (IMO):

1 - People build more and more complex implementations, and your "working mess" software DOES still need time to maintain it, is unstable, and they will still want something that "just works" so they hand it off to another person / group. (This would be AI effectively creating "more software + jobs"

2 - People build more and more complex implementations, and AI no longer creates a "working mess" as it improves, it creates "working software" that does not need time to maintain it, is stable, and they do not need to hand it off to another person / group.

I think it's more likely that scenario 1 is going to be the case. I've seen the things people are building around my company. They are enthused, creative, and useful - but need a ton of work, and are continuing on the path of "usable mess", and are now getting fatigue because they need to maintain the tooling they built...

I won't argue against your critique of the method, but the number of customers angry at you in the morning would be many orders of magnitude less.

Don't these sort of conflict with being "aggressively pro AI"?

> how awful everything is to read lately > flooded with AI generated content, all of it terrible > everything sounding identical and everything being a rambling unconcise mess.

I can see the benefits of AI and enjoy using the technology - but, like many have said, it's wreaking havoc on the "content" that's out there nowadays. Gotta take some bad with the good, I suppose.

I can like the concept of the engine, and the leverage it provides, but I hate traffic and get anxious about having an accident on the freeway. And the people behind the industrial revolution have destroyed the climate.

I love computers and the internet, and the internet has ruined a lot of people and things around me.

It's possible to be interested in a new technology and enjoy its leverage while still being extremely apprehensive about how it intersects with game theory and politics. The race to the bottom of the barrel keeps coming for the jugular of every cool new thing.

I’ve been starting to think that a lot of the variance in how people see the world can be explained by whether their attention is drawn to first-order localized effects, or nth-order distributed effects. This is not the same thing as optimism vs. pessimism, but it sure is correlated!

Or just short term gains versus long term pains (or vice versa, depending on how you view it)

I feel like in my life all I ever see is people mortgaging the future for today though. Hey how about that record storm in California?

This sounds intriguing. Can you expand on what your thinking is or link to somewhere I could read more?

It's a multi-mandate to focus on what's best for your yourself and society such as your mind, your body, your chosen family, your friends, your neighborhood/community, your city, state, country, the global population, and more abstract things such as the human condition, when evaluating things such as privilege or fairness or duty.

You often have to make compromises somewhere in the hierarchy, especially in late-stage capitalism where even access to basic needs comes at a moral cost, and as such those compromises sometimes come with a moral duty. I am writing this via a computer built from limited natural resources, some of which have been obtained through what I see as slave labor. I don't eat meat and still have to acknowledge the harm that clearing and maintaining farmland does to wildlife, even if the result could theoretically be a net gain.

When you start viewing situations through the lens of game theory, you realise some compromises are inevitable for the rational individual. But you must acknowledge the individual is not the only concern. As such, I use AI as part of my work, but I opposed the local buildout of a large data center in my community and tried in vain to make the person responsible for the deal understand the issues it could introduce. This isn't NIMBYism, we need a halt on all buildouts until fundamental environmental and accountability concerns are addressed.

And many other aspects of my existence and quality of life, poor and underprivileged as I was growing up, have depended upon US imperialism. I have also produced a ton of waste just existing and owning pets. It's abhorrent.

I continue to ask myself how I can fulfill the moral duty which I have accrued and reduce my dependence on exploitative economic systems, but I also recognize that AI is the new social leverage and we only have so much time to use it to our advantage before it becomes institutionalized and wielded against the people. I also might only find future income stability by evolving with my industry.

Life is complicated.

Well, we have a good understanding of the benefits that the industrial revolution and the computing revolution have given us.

The AI situation is different. The technology is obviously extraordinarily powerful but the benefits to humanity are still nebulous and there are many very obvious harms like the one we're discussing. So to describe yourself as "aggressively pro AI" you must believe that future, as-yet unrealized benefits will outweigh the harms. I don't think that's a crazy thing to believe but it deserves scrutiny and demands elaboration.

> it deserves scrutiny and demands elaboration.

These challenges never go anywhere because it’s essentially a religious conviction. We’re likely in sort of uncharted territory on a macro scale and I reckon people a) either acknowledge that or refuse, and b), either trust or distrust the tech world’s stewardship of this technology. There’s a hundred bazillion data points, and I’m pretty pessimistic about the tech scene at large right now, but I think reasonable people can disagree on this without being factually or logically wrong. But true zealots in the midst of such uncertainty are driven by faith, which can certainly be deftly swayed over time, but definitely can’t be conquered in a debate.

Eh, I think many of the harms of AI are currently also nebulous. It's not as though the harms are all concrete and massive and the benefits are vague and "in the future"

I agree but I see a lot of very concrete harms too. It's been catastrophic for schools, the sloppification of the web has been largely a disaster so far, it's been a disaster for cybersecurity, it's wreaked havoc on the consumer electronics market, it's driven a lot of financial and existential insecurity for students and early career people across various roles, and while I'm not as militant about data centers as some I think their proliferation has been a net negative environmentally (including increased reliance on coal).

This resonates with me and I suspect a lot of others here. As always life is more nuanced that many would have argue.

> Gotta take some bad with the good, I suppose.

Well, it's quite simple if you think about it. Intelligence is all about awareness of the imminence of death and the finite amount of time given to any of us. So, we humans intrinsically evolved to make the most of it. The majority of the tools we create have the ultimate purpose - to save time. Even money is nothing but a way to cut some time. It's not really about time but experiences - we want to have as many and as rich as we can get, and we innately try to cut time somewhere else, so we can use what we saved for better experiences.

Therefore, inventing cars was an easily predictable event. There's not a single hypothetical timeline or dimension where humans don't end up with cars - to transport things and to travel faster. Similarly, it was always simply inevitable - we would have invented something like LLMs, sooner or later.

Cars required significant sacrifices - they are absolutely deadly machines, they kill thousands of people every single day, kill wildlife, endager our own existence, and we're kind of okay with that. I can absolutely assure you, if someone tomorrow invents a gravitational jump travel that allows moving things between continents in minutes, even with a success rate as low as 10%, we would still be using it.

So, yes. We can't un-invent cars and AI, the only way to move forward is to adjust to this new reality and extract the best possible experiences, preferably by not robbing other people of their - i.e., enjoy life while it lasts, it still remains finite.

> Intelligence is all about awareness of the imminence of death and the finite amount of time given to any of us.

You lost me there. Children are pretty intelligent and have no concept of time. I don't see the relation you find obvious and the rest of your points similarly don't follow.

> Therefore, inventing cars was an easily predictable event.

This feels like a benefit of hindsight unless you can call out other obvious and imminent (but not yet existing) inventions.

Yeah, I guess, "intelligence is all about awareness of death" is kind of a bomb of a premise. I admit, not the best thought I spat out through my keyboard. I suppose I mean some narrower sense of intelligence here. On one hand, you're absolutely right - crows, octopuses and toddlers solve problems without any hint of understanding mortality. Yet "children have no concept of time" is incorrect: not only do they have one, but most kids also grasp that death is irreversible and happens to everyone by about age 5-7.

I don't blame you for immediately rejecting the rest of it. But do hear me out: the point about the inevitability of invention does have real support. Historians call it multiple discovery - tons of things have been invented independently - calculus, the telephone, the jet engine, to name a few.

Neural nets, GPUs, and the scale of Internet text made something like LLMs close to inevitable. Of course, we could debate forever whether any of these on its own was ever inevitable. The point is - society tolerates any cost of a useful invention for the benefit of saving time. So it's reasonable to assume this will be the case with AI as well, which is really happening as we speak.

Sometimes less is more

Ironically, this is the case where "nothing is better than more", because I have no idea of what property or context of any of these three comments above you're referring to.

I'm kind of pro AI while also being pro LESS AI.

These are ultimately all software systems where updates can be pushed out with the press of a button. We just found an amazing new tool in the LLM and people are trying out all kinds of ways of using it, many of them dumb or stupid, this is discovery that has to be done, we'll keep doing it and pushing updates.

It doesn't take rose colored glasses really to infer that over time we'll cull the dumbest uses and extrapolate on the best ones. There's a huge difference between using a generic chatbot, even one driven by a SOTA model, vs targeting a specific business task with good guardrails, skills, and tool interfaces that call out to real business logic when the model isn't the right thing. The latter will emerge more and more over time.

> Don't these sort of conflict with being "aggressively pro AI"?

I don't think so. AI is broad, and he's against low quality output enabled by people taking shortcuts using AI.

Using AI doesn't make your output worse, that's almost entirely down to lazyness and a lack of skill. Or people are just choosing to spend less time on the same piece of work instead of doing additional iteration and experimentation (which AI makes a lot more doable).

You can be pro-"thinking AI is going to get really good and solve many problems" (i.e. be the sort of person who would "go long" on AI), while also being anti-"applying AI right now to domains outside of the few it's been specifically optimized for [e.g. coding]" (because in these other domains, AI is yet to approach, let alone surpass, "authentic quality" equivalent to that of a skilled junior professional.)

Only a programmer or a business guy would think just because it becomes capable we would want to see AI produce "content". The effect is the erasure of human culture.

I think there could be room for something like how holodeck programs are shown to be authored in Star Trek, i.e.: the author does all the primary work, and then the system, if a particular work's design allows it, extrapolates from that to fill in the blanks when somebody decides to make Moriarty super-intelligent or put a hundred androids in a Wild West scenario or take part in a go-karting death race with Frankenstein's monster.

But, that comes with with the same kind of cultural acknowledgement, as seen with the characters in Star Trek, that such algorithmically generated material is an experimental diversion, and inherently not worth the same respect or focus as experiencing something authored with intentionality by a person.

Right, deployed thoughtfully, in a way that improves the human condition (especially aboard a ship far from civilization!) there are uses of course. When everyone is offloading their thinking and writing this is effectively erasing the production of culture.

This is somewhat of a dramatic statement. What, exactly, is the mechanism by which human culture is erased because LLMs write some stories or compose some music?

The flood of LLM-produced stories and music. Spam killed email.

> Spam killed email.

Sure, but it didn't kill human culture. As writing didn't either. Nor will AI do it. Technology changes, human culture does the same.

The most powerful people in silicon valley are openly aiming to replace the entire species with robots in space. This is their genocidal aim. The fact that bad things haven't happened yet doesn't mean that directionally, they aren't attempting to replace as much human culture as possible.

It sounds silly! That's because they are completely divorced from the human experience, and they have enough power to really make us all suffer.

I'm sometimes those things. I'm more often a writer and a futurist. I am enough of a writer specifically, to really not want to live in a world where AI-generated prose substitutes for human stories and essays; and I feel empathy toward other creative professions (most of my friends are visual artists) and don't wish to see that kind of thing happen there either. I do think we have to push back on things like that happening. And I do think that people trying to push toward that end for monetary gain are erasing much of the joy of being human.

But that being said. I don't think that our need to push back on that particular use of AI, has anything to do with the need to push back on AI itself. Because that's not the only, or to me even the main, point of (generative) AI.

(It's just that "generating wholesale slop that people end up seeing" is the usage-profile that the AI companies can most-easily intermediate and make money on; and it's also the usage-profile that makes it most obvious that "AI is happening", and so markets AI to people not already using AI. So this is the usage profile that all the AI companies benefit from everyone focusing the conversaton around AI on!)

I think a lot of people have a failure of imagination when they think about the upside of "good" generative AI. Which to me is, specifically, the places where generative AI can be better put to use as a tool in a workflow for human creative labor to pass through, rather than being something that substitutes for said human labor.

The programming example might be the most obvious to people here: generative AI lets you write e.g. a hairy SQL statement in the form of a very long natural-language description of the query, or an example of how you'd do it in an actual imperative/functional programming language, and have that transformed into SQL grammar. So you don't have to try (and fail) to remember the arcana of SQL (e.g. how to use things like correlated subqueries, or window functions with explicit windows, or CUBE), always eventually resorting to looking it up anyway. (This is really a condemnation of SQL for having specific one-off syntax sugar for every single thing it wants to encode, rather than a uniform syntax that can fit in your head / trigger IDE auto-suggest.)

But consider Photoshop's "generative fill" tool. Yes, if you're selecting entire huge regions of the image and running that tool on them, it's going to be "doing original work" and the results will be awful. But that's not the use-case the tool was designed for. It was designed to be a better version of content-aware fill, i.e. PatchMatch. If you select a dust speck or tear on a scan of an old photo and run the generative-fill tool over it, the result will usually just be a better version of what you'd have got by running the content-aware fill tool over it. (And if it's not, you don't need to try to fight the tool; you just drop back to using the other tools in the toolbox. Not every tool is applicable in every situation, and that's okay.)

Or consider that newer versions of Melodyne use generative-AI models to better separate audio stems into their own tracks. The input here is your own manually-performed track. The output here is also your own track. Despite being a generative model, the AI here is only generating an internal byproduct that gets discarded (hypotheses for timbre- and acoustic-matched reference instrument performances) to aid the classifier and reduce stemming error/residue.

(And apparently, the compressed-sensing models used by MRI scanners are getting approximately the same benefit by approximately the same means. Less familiar with this, but it's probably the most important benefit here since improving the fidelity of MRI reconstruction means doctors can be more sure that an opacity is really "something" rather than an artifact, and so will have more confidence to diagnose real problems earlier.)

Or consider generative AI used for automatic human-language translation (where it captures much more of the speaker's original meaning and nuance than previous translation models, at the expense of giving the result "LLM voice.") As AI improves at this task, presumably there will be less "LLM voice" and the result will just sound like what the person themselves would have said if they were bilingual, because... that's the task.

In none of these cases is generative AI "producing content." In these cases, generative AI is subsuming the role not of human labor, but of tools that were already used: of "by-the-book" approaches, of heuristic algorithms, of weaker ML models relied upon by heuristic algorithms, etc. But all of these cases benefit from generative AI being improved.

And, to restate my premise: there are many tasks just like these, where generative AI currently has no place (because replacing or "enhancing" any tool in the task's workflow with gAI would currently make the results worse), where you can expect to see gAI eventually replace or "enhance" some tool in the workflow, once gAI model companies turn their attention and benchmarks to trying to optimize for performance in those sorts of tasks.

Yeah... N=2-3 here but my team prefers having 1 main agent and maybe a couple more finely tuned ones for review / analysis / security... I generally have 2-3 chats going on different tasks but more than that and I lose the plot.

Well, the community never made it a very welcoming place... But, I think a part of this is that it's just faster to throw a Q into ChatGPT. There's no waiting for a response, a major bonus is the non-hostility + willingness to respond to 'stupid' questions.

I think that assuming work can be done more easily in the future should not stop people from doing work that needs to be done in the present.

(If a painter knew that the camera was coming out I would not want them to throw their canvas away)

> (If a painter knew that the camera was coming out I would not want them to throw their canvas away)

That's not a fair comparison because the painter produces different work, whereas tax computations will be the same.

Plus there is little chance it will be done in the future by any large entity because of the entrenched interested in the area.

Hard agree on the prompting rabbit hole.

I've done it a handful of times, I'll get a little ambitious... "Oh, 6.1 Sol can totally handle this" and have it spin up a project, keep going, keep going.

Eventually, I get to a point where I start to do the homework and I have to step way back to "fully understand" the work from the ground up... It sucks, but I've largely stopped losing time to that.

For me, "pair programming" and incremental changes beats the "one shot" approach every single time.

We cannot seem to skip the stage of understanding (as much as some people on my team want to!)

Well... I think the converse to this is the companies that WOULD pay you (slightly less than they currently pay Atlassian) TO replicate those products.

I expect some BRUTAL competition for these larger software companies. My company just recently replaced our CRM with an in-house tool. (Of course, the maintenance / buildout of that is costly, but it's eventually going to be less than we are paying for the third-party CRM)

Honestly, I cannot personally decide whether or not this is Jevon's Paradox in action or not. In theory, that software could be entirely hands off (Claude write me a 1:1 implementation of Salesforce CRM and make it never go down) but in reality, someone is going to want it tweaked, modified, changed, and thus we now have an internal CRM that we own that requires some level of expertise. Maybe it's not a software engineer, but a software engineer is probably the most well equipped to take that process over...

Who knows, though.

Not picking a side, but do you really think that language models should have a political bias? I personally don't interface with AI in a way that engages political / social bias - but if I did I definitely wouldn't want that to be predetermined, whether left or right.

Though, with the safeguards put into place on these models, they are naturally going to have SOME amount of bias, but we should be working to minimize that, no?

There's really no such thing as no bias, because bias in the eye of the beholder.

The worrying thing about using LLMs to do the "thinking" about what to say and how to say it is that you replace a plurality of human biases with the opinions of the small number of people who get to decide how these models are trained. Which will only seem unbiased if the bias baked into the LLM happens to align with your own.

Everything always has bias, and nothing is ever neutral. Claiming something is "unbiased" just means you either don't know or don't care what bias it has.

(ultimately I believe objectivity is somewhat of a lie we tell ourselves, but that's a discussion for another time)

There’s models created by people with heavy right wing affiliation, but it’s harder than you think to bias models consistently because political beliefs are so broad reaching.

Calling out bias however is a standard practice for groups whose beliefs don’t match reality. You see that on political extremes, but also revisionist history, many religious groups, conspiracy theories, etc.

The issue is when people flag neutral information as having a political bias.