Comment by lm28469
5 hours ago
> And how does it follow that AI is a net negative when wielded by professionals who are excellent at what they do?
Simple, the 80% of code monkeys who are not good at what they do will cause way more damages than the "professionals who are excellent at what they do". And out fo tech I can guarantee you the vast majority of people use llms to do less, not to do more or do better
It's also easily verifiable, supposedly AI makes everyone a 10x developer/worker, it's been ~3 years now, where are the benefits ? Which company/industry made 10x progress or 10x revenue or cut 90% of their workforce ?
How many man hours are lost on AI slop PRs? AI written tickets which seem to make sense at first but fall apart once you dig deep? AI reports from mckinsey&co which use fake sources?
The big wins I've seen with llm tools is in translation more than the actual code.
We have been able to move our "low cost" work out of India to eastern Europe, Vietnam and the Philippines; pay per worker more, but we need half as many (and can actually train them).
Although our business process was already tolerant of low cost regions producing a large amount of crap; seperate teams doing testing and documentation...
It's been more of a mixed bag in the "high skill" regions, we have been getting more pushback against training, people wanting to be on senior+ teams only, due to the llm code produced by juniors. This is completely new, as it's coming from people who used to see mentoring and teaching as a solid positive in their job.
It's really only in the last year the LLM's have gotten great and can output massive blocks of code that are functional.
LLM's are at least a 10x speed up on the 'producing code' portion of the job, but that's often only a fraction of the overall job. There's lots of time spent planning and in meetings, doing research, corporate red tape, etc.
For writing code and unit tests, generating deployment yaml and terraform, for me it's easily a 30x speed up. I can do in 1 or 2 hours what would have previously taken a week.
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So where are the AI-induced gains?
If it is AGI and you have access to it, pivot from code now. You will make millions or billions on pharmaceutical products in as little as one month. Start making cures for non small cell cancers; those are untapped markets. Reverse aging. Even at $1mill a treatment over ten treatments, you would be sought after. Go! Get off HN! Rule the world.
While I disagree it's AGI, AGI is not omniscience. It just means it general and able to address the same wide range of problems as human intelligence.