Comment by cogman10
16 hours ago
The problem is in the middle of such a change it's hard to recognize if this is a real change or if this is another Wankel motor.
Plenty a visual programming language has tried to toot their own horns as being the next transformative change in everything, and they are mostly just obscure DSLs at this point.
The other issue is nobody knows what the future will actually look like and they'll often be wrong with their predictions. For example, with the rise of robotics, plenty of 1950s scifi thought it was just logical that androids and smart mechanic arms would be developed next year. I mean, you can find cartoons where people envisioned smart hands giving people a clean shave. (Sounds like the making of a scifi horror novel :D Sweeney Todd scifi redux)
I think AI is here to stay. At very least it seems to have practical value in software development. That won't be erased anytime soon. Claims beyond that, though, need a lot more evidence to support them. Right now it feels like people just shoving AI into 1000 places hoping that they can find an new industry like software dev.
> Sounds like the making of a scifi horror novel :D
See ‘Service Model’. YMMV on whether you consider it horror.
> Plenty a visual programming language has tried to toot their own horns as being the next transformative change in everything, and they are mostly just obscure DSLs at this point.
But how many of your non-nerdy friends were talking about them, let alone using them daily?
The practical value is there, if they managed to keep the price at the current levels or lower.
But if they don't and if I have to think twice about how much every request's going to cost, the cost-benefit analysis will look differently fast.
Yeah that's another rub. The current price is basically there in the hopes that in the future they can find revenue streams to maintain their current pace.
But even if the big companies ultimately go belly up, I think the open models are good enough that we'll likely see pretty cheap AI available for a while, even if it's not as good as the STOA when the bankruptcies roll through.
I once owned a Maxda RX2 ... my second car, IIRC. The Wankel motor wasn't revolutionary, but it was pretty good.