Comment by beoberha
7 months ago
I read the article before reading your comment and was floored at the same thing. They go from “Claudius did a very bad job” to “middle managers will probably be replaced” in a couple paragraphs by saying better tools and scaffolding will help. Ok… prove it!
I will say: it is incredibly cool we can even do this experiment. Language models are mind blowing to me. But nothing about this article gives me any hope for LLMs being able to drive real work autonomously. They are amazing assistants, but they need to be driven.
Agreed! I guess I don't understand as I have seen five year olds running lemonade stands with more business sense than this LLM.
So much talk and so little to actually show is the hallmark of AI companies. Which is a strange thing to stay as LLMs are a fascinating technological achievement. They’re not useless obviously. I’m talking about the major upheaval these CEOs keep portraying to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes for yet another quarter. They’d love you to layoff your employees and buy their services with BS narratives they keep pushing. It seems to be a race to push the BS as far as they can without people demanding big picture results.
I'm glad to see the HN comments returning to some modicum of normality beyond the breathless AI hype cycle.
Is the bubble bursting?
I'm inclined to believe what they're saying. Remember, this was a minor off-shoot experiment from their main efforts. They said that even if it can't be tuned to perfection, obvious improvements can be made. Like, the way how many LLMs were trained to act as kind, cheery yes-men was a conscious design choice, probably not the way they inherently must be. If they wanted to, I don't see what's stopping someone from training or finetuning a model to only obey its initial orders, treat customer interactions in an adversarial way and only ever care about profit maximization (what is considered a perfect manager, basically). The biggest issue is the whole sudden-onset psychosis thing, but with a sample size of one, it's hard to tell how prevalent this is, what caused it, whether it's universal and if it's fixable. But even if it remained, I can see businesses adopting these to cut their expenses in all possible ways.
> But even if it remained, I can see businesses adopting these to cut their expenses in all possible ways.
Adopting what to do what exactly?
Businesses automated order fulfillment and price adjustments long ago; what is an LLM bringing to the table?
It's not about just fulfillment or price-setting. This is just a narrow-scope experiment that tries to prove wider viability by juggling lots of business-related roles. Of course, the more number-crunching aspects of businesses are thoroughly automated. But this could show that lots of roles that traditionally require lots of people to do the job could be on the chopping block at some point, depending on how well companies can bring LLMs to their vision of a "perfect businessman". Customer interaction and support, marketing, HR, internal documentation, middle management in general - think broadly.
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llms mostly can help at customer support/chat if done well.
also embeddings for similarity search
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I believe this is a case of “20% of the work requiring 80% of the effort”. The current progress on LLMs and products that build on top of them is impressive but I’ll believe the blog’s claims when we have solid building blocks to build off of and not APIs and assumptions that break all the time.
The volume of kool aid surrounding this industry is crazy to me. It’s truly ruining an industry I used to have a lot of enthusiasm for. All we have left is snake oil salesmen, like the Salesforce CEO telling lies about no longer hiring software engineers while they have over 900 software engineering roles on their careers page.
This entire blog article talked about this failed almost completely with just about zero tangible success, hand waved away with “clear paths” to fix it.
I’m just kind of sitting here stunned that the basic hallucination problem isn’t fixed yet. We are using a natural language interface tool that isn’t really designed for doing anything quantitative and trying to shoehorn in that functionality by begging the damn thing to coorperate by tossing in more prompts.
I perused Andon Labs’ page and they have this golden statement:
> Silicon Valley is rushing to build software around today's AI, but by 2027 AI models will be useful without it. The only software you'll need are the safety protocols to align and control them.
That AI 2027 study that everyone cites endlessly is going to be hilarious to witness fall apart in embarrassment. 2027 is a year and a half away and these scam AI companies are claiming that you won’t even need software by then.
Insanely delusional, and honestly, the whole industry should be under investigation for defrauding investors.
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I don’t even necessarily disagree but it’s mostly based on vibes than anything from this experiment. They couldn’t let the article stand alone, it had to turn into an AI puff piece
The beginning of the article acted like there was a big accomplishment and lots of promise and then the article proceeded to talk about how it literally wasn’t capable of doing anything. Am I nuts or was it literally just not successful!?
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Its the curse of the -assitant- chat ui
who decided AI should happen in an old abtraction
like using for saving icon a hard disk