Comment by steveBK123
8 hours ago
For the people arguing that the output is the code and the faster we generate it the better..
I do wonder where all the novel products produced by 10x devs who are now 100x with LLMs, the “idea guys” who can now produce products from whole clothe without having to hire pesky engineers.. where is the one-man 10 billion dollar startups, etc? We are 3-4 years into this mania and all I see on the other end of it is the LLMs themselves.
Why hasn’t anything gotten better?
Marketing is the moat llms haven't been able to overcome. Being able to create a Word clone is easier but the difficulty of selling it is as hard or harder than ever.
Show me an llm that can sell my product and find market fit.
In reality llms are taking away profitable tools and keeping the revenue themselves.
Right Very Rory Sutherland kind of thought - marketing doesn’t make sense. It is alchemy.
If I told you the drink tastes bad, is an off putting color, comes in a small bottle, and is expensive you wouldn’t believe it would work. But Red Bull made billions.
There's definitely folks working on automatically marketing via LLMs, but I have my doubts that it wont just numb people further to marketing as we are close to saturation.
My thought/worry on a lot of the LLM agentic workflow personal assistant stuff is it is just ripe for fraud. The money is more on the adversarial side.
People think they'll just have a personal bot out there buying airline tickets, hotel rooms, jeans, new phone, etc. Meanwhile as soon as you have agents like this out in the wild, the capital will flow to bad actors creating bots to game those bots.
The world is PvP unfortunately. There is more money to be made skimming agents trying to buy stuff than there is in getting people to pay for a personal assistant agent subscription.
It's like why a lot of ad-based stuff doesn't offer a premium option for people to pay to opt out (ex Youtube). The people who can afford to pay and avoid search/social media/etc advertising are exactly the people you can make a lot of money advertising to.
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I'm waiting for Anthropic to realise they can just set a few thousand agents loose to do just that, and monopolize the entire software market overnight. I'm not sure why they haven't done this yet.
You jest, but it's a good question.
When people talk about the 'plateau of ability' agents are widely expected to reach at some point, I suspect a lot of it will boil down to skyrocketing costs and plummeting accuracy past a certain point of number of agents involved. This seems to me like a much harder limit than context windows or model sizes.
Things like Gas Town are exploring this in what you might call a reckless way; I'm sure there are plenty of more careful experiments being conducted.
What I think the ultimate measure of this new tech will be is, how simple of a question can a human put to an LLM group for how complex of a result, and how much will they have to pay for it? It seems obvious to me there is a significant plateau somewhere, it's just a question of exactly where. Things will probably be in flux for a few years before we have anything close to a good answer, and it will probably vary widely between different use cases.
Because a lot of valuable software is the implicit / organizational / human domain knowledge .. not the trillions of lines of code LLms all scraped and trained on.
There is a lot of software that is just code, though; especially at the foundational level.
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Going 100x faster is the problem. As they say, “slow is smooth, and smooth is fast,” when going for product market fit this is very important (and understated, in my opinion). It doesn’t help that your thread is spinning out at a hundred yards a second when what you’re doing is trying to thread the needle.
Could be possible that the 10x devs working at 100x are just starting down the homestretch…
The 10x dev doesn’t just set out to build a hello world app, ya know.
I think its telling that the two main places I've seen the biggest in-roads in FinTech in terms of LLMs has been:
1) Stuff that was astonishingly not automated yet. I am talking about somebody opening up excel on one screen, and a website/pdf/whatever on the other.. and type stuff in to your excel sheet. So stuff where there wasn't any code involved previously, possibly due to diminishing returns of how adhoc it was to automate, skills mismatch, organizational politics or other reasons.
2) Lot of former BigData / crypto / SaaS guys who were in product/sales roles suddenly starting AI startups to help your company AI better. The product is facilitating the doing of AI.