Comment by pja
3 months ago
Yep. I find the hype around AI to be wildly overblown, but that doesn’t mean that what it can do right now isn’t interesting & useful.
If you told me a decade ago that I could have a fuzzy search engine on my desktop that I could use to vaguely describe some program that I needed & it would go out into the universe of publicly available source code & return something that looks as close to the thing I’ve asked for as it can find then that would have been mindblowing. Suddenly I have (slightly lossy) access to all the code ever written, if I can describe it.
Same for every other field of human endeavour! Who cares if AI can “think“ or “do new things”? What it can do is amazing & sometimes extremely powerful. (Sometimes not, but that’s the joy of new technology!)
Why do you think what you describe being excited about does not warrant the current level of AI hype? I agree with your assessment and sometimes I think there is too much cynicism and not enough excitement.
the current level of AI hype amongst a lot of people, but especially investors and bosses, is that you can already give an AI a simple prompt and get it to spit out a fully functional, user-ready application for you. and we're so incredibly far off that.
the things that AI is able to do are incredible, but hype levels are just totally detached from reality.
> is that you can already give an AI a simple prompt and get it to spit out a fully functional, user-ready application for you.
But it can already do that. Isn't that the whole "one-shotting" thing?
The problem is, of course, that it won't be optimized, maintainable or have anyone responsible you can point to if something with it goes wrong. It almost certainly (unless you carefully prompted it to) won't have a test suite, which means any changes (even fixes) to it are risky.
So it's basically a working mockup generator.
I am so, so tired of "semi-technical" youtubers showing off new models with one-shots. The vast majority of actual devs who use this stuff need it to work over long-term context windows and over multiple iterations.
2 replies →
I think the cynicism is only on software dev circles, and it’s probably a response to the crazy hype.
Remember the hype isn’t just “wow it’s so cool and amazing and useful”, it’s also “I can’t wait to fire all my dumb meat-based employees”
Because to justify the current hype and spending, these companies have to have a product that will generate trillions of dollars and create mass unemployment. Which they don't have.
The current AI hype is causing a lot of leaders to put their organizations on the path to destruction.
Oh sure, there’s also way too much cynicism in some quarters. But that’s all part of the fun.
They go beyond merely "return something that looks as close to the thing I’ve asked for as it can find". Eg: Say we asked for "A todo app that has 4 buttons on the right that each play a different animal sound effect for no good reason and also you can spin a wheel and pick a random task to do". That isn't something that already exists, so in order to build that, the LLM has to break that down, look for appropriate libraries and source and decide on a framework to use, and then glue those pieces together cohesively. That didn't come from a singular repo off GitHub. The machine had to write new code in order to fulfill my request. Yeah, some if it existed in the training data somewhere, but not arranged exactly like that. The LLM had to do something in order to glue those together in that way.
Some people can't see past how the trick is done (take training data and do a bunch of math/statistics on it), but the fact that LLMs are able to build the thing is in-and-of-itself interesting and useful (and fun!).
I’m aware. But the first part is “find me something in the vector space that looks something like the thing I’m asking for”. Then the rest is vibes. Sometimes the vibes are good, sometimes they are ... decidedly not.
If the results are useful, then that’s what matters. Although I do suspect that some AI users are spending more time pulling the AI one-armed bandit handle than it would take them to just solve their problem the old fashioned way a lot of the time - but if pulling the one-armed bandit gets them a solution to their problem that they wouldn’t work up the motivation to solve themselves then that counts too, I guess.