ai4ever

thats fair, "any generalization is almost always wrong"

but, gen-ai is not introducing a new mode to my day-to-day life. I would liken it to a calculator app. Sure, i use it sometimes, but, it is not changing my day in any significant way yet.

But ecommerce changed the way i shop, and the smartphone changed the way i transact, and consume info and entertainment

Such statements are made by management folks who dont code, and somehow think coding can be hand-waved away.

Sure, this tool will improve the productivity of sw engineers, but so did the compiler which came 50 years back.

lol,

they gamed AIME by over-training the hell out of it for marketing purposes and called it done.

meanwhile, back-to-basics is broken.

unlike dot-com which brought in ecommerce, or smartphone which put info and entertainment in our pockets, genai is not doing anything to our daily lives.

productivity improvements in certain usecases are about it. it is not a giant leap which dot-com or smartphone enabled.

PullRequests become BullRequests

indeed, more speculative monies chasing returns.

such a large round implies hardware for yet another foundational model. perhaps with better steering etc..

For example, Steve Jobs used to run an annual retreat for what he considered the 100 most important people at Apple, and these were not the 100 people highest on the org chart. Can you imagine the force of will it would take to do this at the average company? And yet imagine how useful such a thing could be.

It could make a big company feel like a startup

Nope, not true in my book. I would not like to be in any company that "selects" a small group of elites to a hawaii or las-vegas "retreat". then, said elites would propagate their new-found retreat wisdom from their cult-leader down to the plebs.

what caught my attention were the ads.

specifically, the hanes ad.. and i wonder why the hanes brand is still around whereas the motor heater brand is not.

and hotel rooms were $3 per night back then.

agree 100% with this take.

they are purpose building hardware for their specific application. debugging corner cases and making this robust is going to take them a decade. given that nobody else is interested in this non-standard solution, they dont have the benefit of the community debugging it, and improving on it in open-source.

appears to me to be a vanity effort as is the whole dojo project.

agree that anyone making broad generalities like "algos dont matter" is always mistaken. but API design is more about the system, and how it is carved out into components, and what each component does is the algo. so, api and algo are tied together.

compilers eased the production of assembly code. that didnt reduce the need for folks coding at a different layer of abstraction.

you misunderstand how software systems are built. These days, they are "assembled" out of building blocks which have clean interfaces.

similar to how houses are built from prefabricated components. Imagine that the AI is producing these pre-fab parts to order. But the design of the interfaces and assembly is still an art.

if you think of your job as a mason assembling bricks to build components, you are mistaken. you need to think of your job as an artist creating systems that work well built out of pre-fab components.

there is a story of how woz wrote the entire software for the early apple in assembly. nobody does that anymore. because, we have tools that produce assembly like compilers and such. that didnt take away the jobs of software engineers, because, someone had to now produce code at a different layer of abstraction.

imagine you ranting at the compiler 50 years back because it took away your job producing assembly code.

Claims of inventing new materials via AI were debunked...

https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/deepmind-ai-study-c...

DeepMind is overselling their AI hand when they dont have to.

"whos to say that" - this could be a leading question for any "possibility" in the AI religion.

"whos to say that god doesnt exist" etc. questions for which there are no tests, and hence fall outside the realm of science and in the realm of religion.

LLM have unleashed the dreamer in each and every young coder. Now, there is all sorts of speculation on what these machines can or cannot do. This is a natural process of any mania.

These folks must all do courses in epistemology to realize that all knowledge is built up of symbolic components and not spit out by a probabilistic machine.

Gradually, reality will sync (intentional misspelling) in, and such imaginations will be seen to be futile manic episodes.

This is nice but not very useful to me. What would be more useful in my use case is tooling to audit my cloud accounts periodically and reclaim garbage which is not used or re optimize my usage (smaller instances or databases depending on usage patterns) which directly saves me money.

thats a fair statement to say that humans cannot be the gatekeepers for accuracy or reliability.

but why should the solution involve AI (thats just the latest bandwagon)? formal verification of software has a long history which has nothing to do with AI.

let me test it out, and then provide better feedback.

people may be unreliable but the software they produce needs to work reliably.

software system is like legos. they form a system of dependencies. each component in the chain has interfaces which other components depend on. 99% reliability doesnt cut it for software components.

i dont like to discourage or be a naysayer. but,

dont build a platform for software on something inherently unreliable. if there is one lesson i have learnt, it is that, systems and abstractions are built on interfaces which are reliable and deterministic.

focus on llm usecases where accuracy is not paramount - there are tons of them. ocr, summarization, reporting, recommendations.

I am surprised to see this: https://www.404media.co/where-facebooks-ai-slop-comes-from/

dont know how valid this is, but encouraging ai-slop as a business strategy to keep sticky customers !

i had the same reaction.

the clouds are unable to sell gpus/tpus for premium rates, and now are forced to give them as incentives and credits to customers

whats also puzzling is giving away the foundation model

the llamas will be used to pollute the social media reducing their value to advertizers

agree 100% with this nice comment from a fellow dot-com crash observer.

Many HackerNews readers are young'uns who are seduced by FANG salaries, and the latest AI/ML bandwagon. They dont have the perspective one gets having seeing the highs and the lows.

I can bet there will be another rude awakening around the corner which will wipe out the "pretenders". After the dot-com bust, many pretenders left the silicon valley with anecdotes of leased BMWs abandoned at SFO airport.

After the AI/ML hype deflates, there is likely to be a similar separation. Folks in it for real will be separated from the folks who came in for the riches.

And for the history-buffs this rhymes with the CA gold-rush circa late 1800s - some found it, most didnt, levis profited selling denims to them.

FANG envy and fomo. ladder climbing.

dont compare yourself with others. focus on your art. be a craftsman at whatever you do. eventually opportunities will beckon or not, and either is fine.

software vendors should be required to face consequences of shipping a poor product.

one possibility is: clawback or refunds for past payments equal to business damage caused by the flawed product.

why is openai/anthropic letting this crisis go to waste ?

where are tweets from sama and amodei on how agi is going to fix these issues ?

what would be funny is if crowdstrike demanded ransom from their castomars.

security is a great business - you play on people's fears, your product does not have to deliver the goods.

like the lock maker, you sell a lock, the thief breaks it, but it is not your problem, and you sell a bigger badder lock the next year which promptly gets broken.

as a business, you dont have any consequences for how your product works or doesnt work, what a great business to be in !!

they are busy writing a giant "architecture of generative AI" whitepaper. give them a pause, they are dreaming a future agentic world of half-assed chatbots.

while the world burns with botched software updates.

Being an old-timer in the valley, I was shocked to see the pay-packages from FANGs starting in about 2012 or so when facebook went IPO.

The monopolies and new-age SAAS companies (meta,google,netflix, salesforce, servicenow) went crazy in the comp for sw engineers, and the others had to play catchup. Specifically, the companies used RSUs which could be hidden in non-gaap earnings statements. gaap earnings were ignored in the zero-interest era for high growth sw firms.

The more established (low-growth) firms from a previous era (cisco, ibm, hp) saw the unsustainability of the comp structure, but could not do anything.

architecture astronauts let loose on unified field theories.. talking warm and fuzzy - big bold ideas.

let them, i say, until, the tide shifts to something else tomorrow, and a new generation of big-picture thought leaders take over dumping their insufferable text on the populace.

isnt AGI around the corner for the last year or so ?

about time we are tired of this sh* .