Comment by bongodongobob
21 hours ago
> None of these big tech companies have leveraged AI to build anything remotely interesting from a product perspective. Its truly astounding how bad they are at it.
Oh my God, tell me about it. Our C levels are being fed bullshit by all of our vendors about how AI is going to transform their business. Every few weeks I have to ask "what the fuck does that mean exactly?" "Oh, well, agentic AI and workflows blah blah."
Ok? You want a chatbot? Fine, we're still building a state machine. At best, the LLM is doing expensive NLP to classify the choices.
Something something classify support tickets? Alright, but we're still just doing keyword search, LLMs literally aren't even needed.
I love LLMs and get a lot of use out of them for coding, but I still don't see anywhere that they're going to fit in for core business functions. Anything that is proposed can and should be done without LLMs. I'm just not seeing where they can be useful until they are truly AGI. Until then, it's just expensive NLP.
It's very funny that for pretty much any use case of LLMs, they're either too expensive or too incapable or both! There may be a few uses that make sense, but it seems to be incredibly hard to find the balance.
It blows my mind how many computing professionals truly think this is the case. It doesn't take a tech blogger to draw a trend line through the advancements of the past 2.5 years and see where we're headed. The fact that grifters abound on the edges of the industry is a sign of the radical importance of this unexpected breakthrough, not an indication that it's all a grift.
To engage in some armchair psychology, I think this is in large part due to a natural human tendency for stability (which is all the stronger for those in relatively powerful positions like us SWEs). Knowing that believing A would imply that your mortgage is in jeopardy, your retirement plan up-ended, and your entire career completely obscured beyond a figurative singularity point makes believing ~A a very appealing option...
> It doesn't take a tech blogger to draw a trend line through the advancements of the past 2.5 years and see where we're headed.
People did this with airplanes in the 60s, and based on that trajectory we should be exploring the outer edges of our solar system by now. Turns out the market for supersonic jets was unsustainably small and the cost/risk of space exploration is still very high.
Every sigmoidal curve looks exponential as it starts to enter the linear regime. But eventually the curve turns over, either due to limits in the technology, the marginal cost of the technology, or no clear way to further commercialize it.
I don't know that we've reached that point with AI, but a do know that extrapolating from a trend line is fraught with peril.
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Where's your evidence though? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
The difference is that I can’t sell elasticsearch in my company, but I can sell an LLM.
Yeah, don’t ask..
Why doesn't your company get the use case for Elasticsearch?
Is it because you're trying to pitch it with CTO arguments on capabilities, not COO/CFO arguments like "will permanently replace N humans"?
No, they do get it. They just don’t want to invest time in it, so only through a third party.
But AI is sexy, so LLMs doing document search? Yes please, let’s have some teams dedicate their time and effort to develop it ourselves.
It’s because AGI is going to come, you know, so if we invest now they can replace everybody with AI
Are you laughing as hard as I was when they told me this?
I think there's a lot of really interesting (and profitable) AI products out there. And: there's so many more that can be built. We're only scratching the surface of what the industry has already invented can do. Not in an "AGI Inevitable" capacity; what we have, today, with more context engineering, better user interfaces, better products with deeper AI-first thinking, etc.
My point was more-so that FAANG isn't even scratching the surface; they're punching it bloody with their fists while yelling "look at all this AI we have, see dad we can't be disrupted we're the disrupters we're the disrupters".
It reminds me a lot of Xbox over the past six years, so much so that I think Xbox is a canary for how many business units in these companies will look in five more years.
There's a lot of "promising" and "interesting" stuff, but I'm not seeing anything yet that actually works reliably.
Sooner or later (mostly sooner) it becomes apparent that it's all just a chatbot hastily slapped on top of an existing API, and the integration barely works.
A tech demo shows your AI coding agent can write a whole web app in one prompt. In reality, a file with 7 tab characters in a row completely breaks it.