Oops, fixed but I think you're onto something!

Share examples outside of tech. The simple: we're winning / their losing without context sounds cheeky but doesn't help anyone understand your perspective.

So what has an "LLM" truly improved in your life outside of simplistic automations/code generation/textual work? It's definitely not improved support. The only support interaction that I've noted to be somewhat better was one (of a few) with Amazon where the bot was able to refund a purchase without talking to a real person. But even then it was a case wherein a human would have probably done it just as quick. Is there a win there? Sure: for Amazon but it didn't "delight" me. And a chatbot is the lowest of low hanging fruit all the "optimists" claim an LLM can do so much better than humans or deterministic code.

How would you say LLMs are impacting the markets? Do you think they're useful to the economy thus far? Or are you looking at the spend of a small fraction of companies that could cause a broader recession when the cyclical funding dries up? If you're going to go to open weight models - well those don't appear out of thin air. Is your focus on the win/loss truly that myopic?

Again, your statement seems absurd to me. I think most people can agree there are useful modalities with LLMs. But it's always at a cost and I, like the author of the article, don't think that LLMs are as universally useful as many "optimists" believe. But to say that the pessimists can't actually rationalize their thoughts, when you provide none of your own, is truly foot in mouth garbage.

I do feel that a lot of pessimists I hear keep banging away about hallucinations and untrustworthy outputs. It makes me think they’re willfully ignorant of the progress since they tried ChatGPT 3 several years ago and were underwhelmed.

I’m happy to engage in discourse on the impact and risks to environment, society, jobs, mental health, etc. There’s plenty of room for thoughtful exploration there.

The one thing I have no patience for is that LLMs produce nothing of value or have no technical worth.

People who understand computers and those who do not.

I have to keep reminding myself though, many of those pessimists are people “getting paid to not understand” as the saying goes.

It took 30 seconds with that Davinci model to predict where we are today, where we’ll be next year, and the eventual destruction if not outright extinction of humanity as we know it. Maybe the future is so grim many are simply in the denial stage still.

>> There are LLM optimists and LLM pessimists.

And then there are LLM realists ( Read realpolitik: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Kissinger ).

I hate LLMs to the bone and am a master at "people not using the technology can change their behavior to neutralize the impact of the technology". Coupled with an 150+ IQ, I can tell you this technology won't go away. Cynically and pragmatically I use and will use it to the maximum extent of enslaving and eliminating the drone of drones who worship it. Go ahead, replace your mediocrity and lack of critical thinking with something that surely won't spit you out in a ditch a few years from now!

If you think of LLMs as statistically averaging machines and think of human programmer skill as a bell curve, it helps understand the different experiences with LLMs of different people. Those on the left hand side of the skill curve will see an uplift, those on the right hand side will experience degradation.

The more pertinent question in my mind is.. why does it still matter? Your customers don’t care about elegant code, they care about working products. There is some relation to good code and good customer experience e.g in terms of performance, but in general your customers won’t feel the impact from poor code. That assumes both pieces of code are functional though, and you do need to babysit LLMs to make sure it actually remains functional.

> A focused experienced skilled programmer can do better but the market niche for that kind of code is actually small.

At this point I think the only reason someone would do better without an LLM is an unwillingness to use it effectively. Even if you’re going to write all code by hand and only use an agent for validation and debugging, that’s a significant boost.

These people are weighing in with their opinions in the discussion. I think the pessimists weigh in because if they don't then people will confuse the optimists as being the majority opinion. It's important to have representation of the counter arguments so people don't go along their merry life thinking "everyone thinks this way". It sounds like you are "the pot calling the kettle black" right now, due to the fact that you're whining about the same thing, just on the inverse side. I understand your frustration, but they feel the same thing on the other side of the argument

> who can produce outputs very much on par with "good human standards"

“Can produce”. Is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. It can, but then they also regularly write truly bafflingly bad code that no decent experienced dev would ever produce.

I’ll give you a few examples from last week. I had claude whip up a Kafka consumer. After a lot of back and forth I was pretty confident it worked and then I decided to dig into the code. I spotted some real head scratchers.

When starting up the consumer it wanted to pass a specific rebalance strategy, but then it realized that the library it was using didn’t support that strategy, so it needed to use the default.

Instead of just deleting the config option (and maybe leaving a comment), it created a function that removed that key from the map and used it like:

    foo: “bar”,
    baz: drop_strategy_key(
      strategy: “blort”,
      bit: “bang”
    )

Another frontier model reviewer was supposed to prevent that kind of thing but it didn’t catch it either.

I had 10 public functions that were only called in tests throughout the whole project. Essentially the tests were useless because they weren’t actually testing anything.

Clearly current frontier models are useful. And maybe they produce code that is better than the median dev by many metrics. But I don’t think they are anywhere near consistently producing better quality than a say a 70the percentile dev with 10 years experience.

And even when the quality is better than the median dev, I’m finding that the bugs are not the kind of thing that humans or LLMs are good at spotting.

I don't doubt it can, sometimes, produce output far better than most human can. The problem is: what happens what it don't ...

"OP's complaint is foolish" - I just shared what I thought was an interesting read. That doesn't mean that I hold the same views as the author of the linked post.

You:

  yep. This is the choice quote.
  
  Even most humans cannot produce work to the highest human standards. The fact is, most work does not need to be done to the highest human standards, it simply needs to be done to the lowest possible standard that someone would pay for, at the cheapest price.

  The first point is the question of whether an LLM can do work not markedly inferior to that of a human doing the same task or not. This one is debatable. An LLM absolutely cannot produce work to the highest human standards, or even a good human standard at the moment, and it's unlikely that it ever will.  Most human work, however, is not done at a good standard. At best it's mediocre, and at worst it's downright horrible. The bulk of human knowledge work done in an awful of settings, then, is unfortunately more or less interchangeable with that of an LLM (seriously, so much human work is just awful: I wish I could say otherwise). On this point, then, LLMs probably pass the criterion.

Maybe you heard wrong? Who knows... Ask your neighbor, if not AI! :)

We now have professional mathematicians that are on the record carelessly dismissing major math questions being decided. And I'm not talking about having a subtle discussion about what proofs mean.

So it's not really about trying it out, I think. It's something more emotional.

The reality is that even if they used the tools, they still wouldn't change their mind.

Many people have incredible ability to ignore evidence.

Something like 90% of devs are using LLMs. It's how software gets written now, end of story.

I'm gonna go ahead and make the prediction that this eventually morphs into a kind of religion, like flat earthers.

Nothing that AI will ever be valuable, everything AI does is steal, nothing it creates is new, everything that the big labs publishes is a scam or hype. Oh and "it's just doing X", where you can substitute "X" with some kind of surface level description of how the output layer in an LLM works.

These tenets are already pretty much formed, all it needs is to be formalized by some kind of name or manifesto similar to Q-anon, and we've arrived at a durable state of permanent denial.

There‘s hardly anything to talk about, since most of those anti-AI people use LLMs anyway. It‘s hypocrisy at best. If only that energy could be channeled in doing more about open-weight models-we need more AI-ownership, not less AI. That LLMs will somehow magically disappear should Anthropic or OpenAI go bust, is nothing but wishful thinking.

They need a holy text.

Maybe an Orange Catholic Bible.

I mean, Luddites were hanged for murdering people. We're not quite there yet.

They were not just fighting for their livelihoods, though; the fight was at least as much about dignity and fair treatment.

And they were correct to do so: skilled workers who lost their work and ended up in industrial employment did not have better lives. It took a century to a century-and-a-half for industrial quality of life to get back to pre-industrial quality of life.

Loss of dignity is something that the AI industry is not considering as it renders entire swathes of the economy button-pushers for chatbots.

When loss of livelihood appears it will be too late and at too great a scale to fight back in the workplace; the fightback will be somewhere else.

Silicon Valley tech workers are not the subterranean Munrungs. They are the surface-dwelling Eloi. They just don't know it yet.

I'm pretty sure that an average person has no idea what blockchain is.

I think that's a pretty odd framing, because the upsides are pretty relative and lopsided to those receiving certain benefits. The people who are anti-AI often are those who can acknowledge that AI does cool stuff, but that it's not worth it and doesn't provide any real benefit except by helping people keep up in a frenetic arms race to develop new tech.

Personally, I'm against AI but even if it could never be smarter than us and if it were at the state that it was last year, I'd still be against it due to the environmental cost.

I keep seeing it and it's really bipolar. Boosters think it's the best thing ever and downplays all the issues while antis think it's completely useless and a disaster environmentally and morally.

Good luck saying LLMs are useful but still a net negative in the filter bubble this author is in. No, you also need to think it has zero utility or you're the enemy.

You missed Gnome v KDE