this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2024
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There is this seeming need to discredit AI from some people that goes overboard. Some friends and family who have never really used LLMs outside of Google search feel compelled to tell me how bad it is.
But generative AIs are really good at tasks I wouldn't have imagined a computer doing just a few year ago. Even if they plateaued in place where they are right now it would lead to major shakeups in humanity's current workflow. It's not just hype.
The part that is over hyped is companies trying to jump the gun and wholesale replace workers with unproven AI substitutes. And of course the companies who try to shove AI where it doesn't really fit, like AI enabled fridges and toasters.
This is literally the hype. This is the hype that is dying and needs to die. Because generative AI is a tool with fairly specific uses. But it is being marketed by literally everyone who has it as General AI that can "DO ALL THE THINGS!" which it's not and never will be.
The obsession with replacing workers with AI isn't going to die. It's too late. The large financial company that I work for has been obsessively tracking hours saved in developer time with GitHub Copilot. I'm an older developer and I was warned this week that my job will be eliminated soon.
So the company that is obsessed with money that you work for has discovered a way to (they think) make more money by getting rid of you and you're surprised by this?
At least you've been forewarned. Take the opportunity to abandon ship. Don't be the last one standing when the music stops.
I never said that I was surprised. I just wanted to point out that many companies like my own are already making significant changes to how they hire and fire. They need to justify their large investment in AI even though we know the tech isn't there yet.
Like which one? Because it's now 2 years we have chatGPT and already quite a lot of (good?) models. Which shakeup do you think is happening or going to happen?
Computer programming has radically changed. Huge help having llm auto complete and chat built in. IDEs like Cursor and Windsurf.
I’ve been a developer for 35 years. This is shaking it up as much as the internet did.
@remindme@mstdn.social 1 year. Let me know about the seachange of new 10x transform based programmers that have automated me out of a job.
@horse_battery_staple Ok, I will remind you on Friday Dec 26, 2025 at 7:49 AM PST.
I quit my previous job in part because I couldn't deal with the influx of terrible, unreliable, dangerous, bloated, nonsensical, not even working code that was suddenly pushed into one of the projects I was working on. That project is now completely dead, they froze it on some arbitrary version.
When junior dev makes a mistake, you can explain it to them and they will not make it again. When they use llm to make a mistake, there is nothing to explain to anyone.
I compare this shake more to an earthquake than to anything positive you can associate with shaking.
I hardly see it changed to be honest. I work in the field too and I can imagine LLMs being good at producing decent boilerplate straight out of documentation, but nothing more complex than that.
I often use LLMs to work on my personal projects and - for example - often Claude or ChatGPT 4o spit out programs that don't compile, use inexistent functions, are bloated etc. Possibly for languages with more training (like Python) they do better, but I can't see it as a "radical change" and more like a well configured snippet plugin and auto complete feature.
LLMs can't count, can't analyze novel problems (by definition) and provide innovative solutions...why would they radically change programming?
Computers have always been good at pattern recognition. This isn't new. LLM are not a type of actual AI. They are programs capable of recognizing patterns and Loosely reproducing them in semi randomized ways. The reason these so-called generative AI Solutions have trouble generating the right number of fingers. Is not only because they have no idea how many fingers a person is supposed to have. They have no idea what a finger is.
The same goes for code completion. They will just generate something that fills the pattern they're told to look for. It doesn't matter if it's right or wrong. Because they have no concept of what is right or wrong Beyond fitting the pattern. Not to mention that we've had code completion software for over a decade at this point. Llms do it less efficiently and less reliably. The only upside of them is that sometimes they can recognize and suggest a pattern that those programming the other coding helpers might have missed. Outside of that. Such as generating act like whole blocks of code or even entire programs. You can't even get an llm to reliably spit out a hello world program.
I never know what to think when I come across a comment like this one—which does describe, even if only at a surface level, how an LLM works—with 50% downvotes. Like, are people angry at reality, is that it?
With as much misinformation that's being spread about regarding LLMs. It would only lose more people's comprehension to go into anything more than a generalization.
The problem is people are being sold AGI. But chat GPT and all these other tools don't even remotely qualify for that. They're really nothing more than a glorified Alice chatbot system on steroids. The one neat new trick to all this is that they've automated the training a bit. But these llms have no more comprehension of their output or the input they were given than something like the old Alice chatbot.
These tools have been described as artificial intelligence to layman for decades at this point. It makes it really hard to change that calcified opinion. People would rather believe that it's some magical thing not just probability and maths.
They are bullshit machines, trained to output something that users think is the right output.
This is easy to say about the output of AIs.... if you don't check their work.
Alas, checking for accuracy these days seems to be considered old fogey stuff.
Goldman Sachs, quote from the article:
Generative AI can indeed do impressive things from a technical standpoint, but not enough revenue has been generated so far to offset the enormous costs. Like for other technologies, It might just take time (remember how many billions Amazon burned before turning into a cash-generating machine? And Uber has also just started turning some profit) + a great deal of enshittification once more people and companies are dependent. Or it might just be a bubble.
As humans we're not great at predicting these things including of course me. My personal prediction? A few companies will make money, especially the ones that start selling AI as a service at increasingly high costs, many others will fail and both AI enthusiasts and detractors will claim they were right all along.
See now, I would prefer AI in my toaster. It should be able to learn to adjust the cook time to what I want no matter what type of bread I put in it. Though is that realky AI? It could be. Same with my fridge. Learn what gets used and what doesn't. Then give my wife the numbers on that damn clear box of salad she buys at costco everytime, which take up a ton of space and always goes bad before she eats even 5% of it. These would be practical benefits to the crap that is day to day life. And far more impactful then search results I can't trust.
There's a good point here that like about 80% of what we're calling AI right now... isn't even AI or even LLM. It's just.... algorithm, code, plain old math. I'm pretty sure someone is going to refer to a calculator as AI soon. "Wow, it knows math! Just like a person! Amazing technology!"
(That's putting aside the very question of whether LLMs should even qualify as AIs at all.)
In my professional experience, AI seems to be just a faster way to generate an algorithm that is really hard to debug. Though I am dev-ops/sre so I am not as deep in it as the devs.
I remined of the time researchers used an evolutionary algorithm to devise a circuit that would emit a tone on certain audio inputs and not on others. They examined the resulting circuit and found an extra vestigial bit, but when they cut it off, the chip stopped working. So they re-enabled it. Then they wanted to show off their research at a panel, and at the panel it completely failed. Dismayed they brought it back to their lab to figure out why it stopped working, and it suddenly started working fine.
After a LOT of troubleshooting they eventually discovered that the circuit was generating the tone by using the extra vestigial bit as an antenna that picked up emissions from a CRT in the lab and downconverted it to the desired tone frequency. Turn of the antenna, no signal. Take the chip away from that CRT, no signal.
That's what I expect LLMs will make. Complex, arcane spaghetti stuff that works but if you look at it funny it won't work anymore, and nobody knows how it works at all.
As a devops person, I’m constantly jumping back and forth to whatever programming language and tools each team uses. Sometimes it takes a bit to find the context, and I’m hoping ai can help. Unfortunately, allowing the ai to see code is currently off limits by corporate policy, so it only helps in those situations where I need to generate boilerplate
You better believe that AI-powered toaster would only accept authorized bread from a bakery that paid top dollar to the company that makes them. To ensure the best quality possible and save you from inferior toast, of course.
Lol, enshitification should at least take a few months... I hope.
You really wouldn't.
I was so hoping that was toasty the toaster! Waffles? How about a bagel?
I agree with your wife: there’s always an aspirational salad in the fridge. For most foods, I’m pretty good at not buying stuff we won’t eat, but we always should eat more veggies. I don’t know how to persuade us to eat more veggies, but step 1 is availability. Like that Reddit meme
It's been years... maybe we don't need the costco size for the love of pete.
So true.