I feel like there’s a weird conflicts in how folks mental model of LLM development.
It’s not the model I don’t trust, it’s myself. The model is wrong _all the time_ because - it’s easy to verify the code - it’s hard to verify that I knew what I was talking about when I prompted it.
So the idea that you can broadly speaking take the human out of the loop. I think suggests to me a level of consistency in the contextual environment that would probably never exist.
At some point it’s politics. The model can come up with a better answer than my boss, and then my boss can just ignore it. Taking the human out of the loop broadly speaking implies that we all agree on what we’re trying to optimize.
I get the whole “we don’t have to read the code anymore” Schtick from most product devs, and DHH I guess is at his core a builder / product dev whatever.
But the development of something like rails pushed forward the state of the art in ways that LLMs now replicate.
The point being like - someone has to keep writing programming languages and frameworks and libraries. Like - someone has to be thinking what the code looks like for LLMs to have patterns to match against, right?
> someone has to be thinking what the code looks like for LLMs to have patterns to match against, right?
Assuming no new paradigms on the hardware side that no longer fit into our current programming models, do they? Rails' claim to fame was eliminating "XML sit-ups" to improve the developer experience, but who cares how many "sit-ups" LLMs need to do?
At large enough scale, I suspect it'll become a problem. At the moment part of the appeal is how effortlessly models absorb menial work, but I do wonder if eventually it'll be too wasteful at large scales to sustain it. Maybe not, though.
Rails didn’t really push forward the state of the art, though. Not compared to something like DirectToWeb in WebObjects, where instead of static code generation, it did dynamic site generation with open-ended rules.
Curious about this lawsuit - I assume that there are legal means to “collude” on safety. Car companies coming together to agree on crash test regulations will “slow down” auto manufacturing but I’m pretty sure this mechanism is legal.
If the four companies came together to start an industry organization and agree on safety protocols, I assume that would be legal done correctly.
A mental model I was thinking about was - I remember when Travis Kalanick was talking about using the chatbot to discuss “vibe physics-ing” on the all-in podcast.
And like - I think there’s a presumption you could make that AI models could overfit to asymptote towards just the capabilities and knowledge we currently have.
And that would be amazing! And crazy useful. And there are probably a whole world of complex problems that remain unsolved because they’re adjacent to knowledge we have but they haven’t been invested in.
But can a human reliably tell the difference between “can do 99.999% of the things we currently know how to do which includes a small subset of things we didn’t know we had the capacity to do” and “super intelligent math and science research pushing the frontier of what we know”
A physicist that knows all the things we currently know in excruciating detail feels like it should be able to make the leap beyond the frontier.
But since these are computer models it might just be that it can ride that line extraordinarily well while the line remains firm.
I think it was Kara Swisher and guest who made the observation that the reasons social media as it currently exists may not be long for this world is that part of the reason these lawsuits and laws to restrict access to children are making traction is because adults realize that social media isn’t good for them either. But restricting access for adults is a longer more difficult process for first amendment reasons. The tobacco lawsuits took decades.
“ I have repeatedly argued for strong antitrust enforcement to keep industries competitive, especially Big Tech.”
Has David Sacks actually called for stronger antitrust enforcement? Not that he has total control of this administration but it’s gone pretty hard in the other direction in my observation.
> “I have repeatedly argued for strong antitrust enforcement to keep industries competitive, especially Big Tech.”
> Has David Sacks actually called for stronger antitrust enforcement? Not that he has total control of this administration but it’s gone pretty hard in the other direction in my observation.
Not commentating on this particular case (because I don't know the details), but it's amazing how many public statements from tech people are just absolute shameless lies. The public/PR statement is just whatever it is they think you want to hear, but behind the scenes they just do whatever they want. There's no connection between the two, except by coincidence.
David sacks and the rest of the all in venture bro crew collectively lost their shit when lina khan actually enforced our anti trust laws for the first time in decades. That is a huge reason why silicon valley elites switched to maga
There are nasty things we can do in software that can indeed make debugging difficult (for instance in the “make everything reactive” craze, some random subscriber could trigger from some piece of state changing that isn’t obvious at all and fully asynchronous and in a totally different part of the code).
It seems like, particularly in scholarly works, we should cite AI contributions the same way we cite a third party, with similar consequences around plagiarism. If you’re copying AI whole hog, not quoting and citing it, and not catching basic failures. Is it really “your” work?
It’s not the model I don’t trust, it’s myself. The model is wrong _all the time_ because - it’s easy to verify the code - it’s hard to verify that I knew what I was talking about when I prompted it.
So the idea that you can broadly speaking take the human out of the loop. I think suggests to me a level of consistency in the contextual environment that would probably never exist.
At some point it’s politics. The model can come up with a better answer than my boss, and then my boss can just ignore it. Taking the human out of the loop broadly speaking implies that we all agree on what we’re trying to optimize.