Comment by btown
3 months ago
It's said that much of research is data janitorial work, and from my experience that's not just limited to the machine learning space. Every research scientist wishes that they had an army of engineers to build bespoke tooling for their niche, so they could get back to trying ideas at the speed of thought rather than needing to spend a day writing utility functions for those tools and poring over tables to spot anomalies. Giving every researcher a priceless level of leverage is a tremendous social good.
Of course, we won't be able to tell the real effects, now, because every longitudinal study of researchers will now be corrupted by the ongoing evisceration of academic research in the current environment. Vibe-coding won't be a net creativity gain to a researcher affected by vibe-immigration-policy, vibe-grant-availability, and vibe-firings, for all of which the unpredictability is a punitive design goal.
Whether fear of LLMs taking jobs has contributed to a larger culture of fear and tribalism that has emboldened anti-intellectual movements worldwide, and what the attributable net effect on research and development will be... it's incredibly hard to quantify.
> Vibe-coding won't be a net creativity gain to a researcher affected by vibe-immigration-policy, vibe-grant-availability, and vibe-firings, for all of which the unpredictability is a punitive design goal.
Quite literally this is what I’m trying to get at with my resistance to LLM adoption in the current environment. We’re not using it to do hard work, we’re throwing it everywhere in an intentional decision to dumb down more people and funnel resources and control into fewer hands.
Current AI isn’t democratizing anything, it’s just a shinier marketing ploy to get people to abandon skilled professions and leave the bulk of the populace only suitable for McJobs. The benefits of its use are seen by vanishingly few, while its harms felt by distressingly many.
At present, it is a tool designed to improve existing neoliberal policies and wealth pumps by reducing the demand for skilled labor without properly compensating those affected by its use, nor allowing an exit from their walled gardens (because that is literally what all these XaaS AI firms are - walled gardens of pattern matchers masquerading as intelligence).
This is a bit stronger than my point, I should say. I do think that LLMs would have a net benefit to society, by way of their effects on research and innovation... if we could get our political houses in order such that we weren’t negating those effects, and such that we were empowering small businesses and high-tech startups to build with the results of this innovation sustainably.
And in a world where policy is horrid and the effects are mainly negated, things would be even worse if the remaining researchers lost AI as a tool. For better or for worse, fire has been shared with humanity, and we might as well cook.
>Current AI isn’t democratizing anything
I don't work anywhere close with software but I have used chatgpt to program small tools and scripts for me I never would have written myself.
The real boon of AI programming is when normal people use it to program things custom tailored for their use case.
That’s one perspective, but it’s wrong and typical gatekeeping (do you have a software degree by any chance?). People had the same attitude towards open source tooling and low code frameworks - god forbid someone not certified and ordained build a solution in something other than Java...
AI code tools are allowing people to build things they couldn't before due to lack of skillset, time or budget. I’ve seen all sorts of problems solved by semi technical and even non-technical people. My brother for example built a thing with Microsoft copilot that helped automate more in his manufacturing facility (used to be paper).
But yeah, keep yelling at that cloud - the rest of us will keep shipping cool things that we couldn’t before, and faster.
>My brother for example built a thing with Microsoft copilot that helped automate more in his manufacturing facility (used to be paper).
I have harped on this endlessly as a non-programmer working a non-tech job, with 7 "vibe-coded" programs now being used daily by people at my company.
I am sorry, but the tech world is completely missing the forest for the trees here. LLM's are talked about purely as tools that were created to help devs. Some love them, some hate them, but pretty much all of them seem unaware that LLMs allow non-tech people to automate tasks with a computer without having to go through a 3rd-party-created interface.
So yea, maybe Claude is useless troubleshooting your cloud platform. But it certainly isn't useless in helping me forgo a cloud platform by setting up a simple local database to use instead.
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The problem isn't that people can quickly prototype an idea that they've had without contracting an expensive professional, I think this is great. This will give ideas that would never see the light of day a chance. Plus this gives a much better talking point if they do choose to get a professional onboard.
The problem is that it's sold as a complete solution. Use the LLM and you'll get a fully working product. However if you're not an experienced programmer you won't know what's missing, if it's using outdated and insecure options, or is just badly written. This still needs a professional.
The technology is great and it has real potential to change how things are made, but it's being marketed as something it isn't (yet).
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This is one of the best comments about the current AI hype.
The elite really don't see why the proletariat should be interested in, or enjoy the dignity of, actual skill and quality.
Hence the enshitification of everything, and now AI promises to commoditize everything into slop.
Sad because it is the very deoth of society that has birthe
John Rockefeller didn't sit down in a big chair, twirl his mustache, and invent AI to funnel money to the hands of the wealthy. This technology was created by researchers and has been mostly accessible to everyone for as long as it has been around.
All technology has the effect of concentrating wealth, and anyone who insists on using their two hands to fashion things when machines exist that can do it better will always be relegated to the "artisan" bin as time rolls on.
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This could be a comment about the industrial revolution.
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There's too much "close enough" in virtually all these discussions. LLM is not a hand grenade. It's important to keep in mind what LLMs and related tech can be relied upon do or assist with, can't be relied upon to do or assist with, and might be relied on to do in the future.
> rather than needing to spend a day writing utility functions for those tools and poring over tables to spot anomalies
A ridiculous amount of most researchers' time is spent cleaning up data.
> much of research is data janitorial work
In applied research perhaps, Fundamental research is nothing like that in any field including ML.
> Fundamental research is nothing like that in any field including ML
Grant writing.
All experimental or empirical research is like that, is closer to the point.