netdevnet

genius move by Mark, this could make them the google of LLMs

This, code is written by humans for humans. LLMs cannot compete no matter how much data you throw at them. A world in which software is written by AI will likely won't be code that will be readable by humans. And that is dangerous for anything where people's health, privacy, finances or security is involved

I don't know what's your experience with outsourcing. But people outsource full projects not the writing of a couple of methods. With LLMs still unable to fully understand relatively simple stuff, you can't expect them to deliver a project whose specification (like most software projects) contains ambiguities that only an experienced dev can detect and ask deep questions about the intention and purpose of the project. LLMs are nowhere near that. To be able to handle external uncertainty and turn it into certainty, to explain why technical decisions were made, to understand the purpose of a project and how it matches the project. To handle the overall uncertainties of writing code with other's people's code. All this is stuff outsourced teams do well. But LLMs won't be anywhere near good for at least a decade. I am calling it

what do you want done about it? Hallucination is an intrinsic part of how LLMs work. What makes a hallucination is the inconsistency between the hallucinated concept and the reality. Reality is not part of how LLMs work. They do amazing things but at the end of the day they are elaborate statistical machines.

Look behind the veil and see LLMs for what they really are and you will maximise their utility, temper your expectations and save you disappointment

Why don't you give actual concrete testable examples back with evidence where this is the case? Put your skin in the game.

They are partially hype though. That's what people here are arguing. There are benefits but their valuation is largely hype driven. AI is going to transform industries and humanity, yes. But AI does not mean LLM (even if LLM means AI). LLM raw potential was reached last year with GPT-4. From here on, the value will lie on exploiting the potential we already have to generate clever applications. Just like the internet provided a platform for new services, I expect LLMs to be the same but with a much smaller impact

I believe the honeymoon face has loong been finished. Even in the mainstream, last year of the AI year. 2024 has seen nothing substantially good and the only notesworthy thing is this article finally hitting into the public consciousness that we are past of the AI peak and beyond the plateau and freefalling has already begun.

LLM investors will be reviewing their portfolios and will likely begin declining further investments without clear evidence of profits in the very near future. On the other side, LLM companies will likely try to downplay this and again promise the Moon.

And on and on the market goes

Welcome to capitalism. The market forces will squeze max value out of them. I imagine that Anthropic and OpenAI will be in the future fully downsized and acquired by their main investors (Microsoft and Amazon) and will simply becoming part of their generic and faceless AI & ML Teams once the current downwards stage of the hype cycle completes it closure in the next 5-8 years.

a ton of really badly written apps encountered out in the wild when I did some small business IT consultancy made me very averse to VB in general.

A lot of VB has been historically written by people who had no background in writing software. They were jack of all trades, needed some quick and dirty and they learned just enough to have some working code

Production environments are full of PoCs that were meant to be binned

It's shockingly stable. So much so that resolving the root cause isn't considered a priority and so we've had this running for months.

I don't know why my senses tell me that this is wrong even if you can afford it

wait till smooth starts paying back and becomes fast

By that time, you will have probably left the company and someone with less care about code quality will come and undo your work.

Also, like security, it is hard to show to a manager data and graphs showing how much we are saving

Tell that to the customer, as a web/mobile agency, when they ask you to contractually commit to a date for the release of their web app

In the world of professional software development, economic value is king. This rule has marginal declining utility after some point and in some cases it is just not worth it. Think prototyping, tight deadlines, etc. In an ideal world, taking some additional time pays off, in other worlds, it doesn't and gets you in PIP. inb4 you say that's not the kind of company you want to work in, most companies are like these and not everyone can afford to apply and get a place at the 2 companies in your country where code quality is actually valued

We would be fine but rich people's investments would not grow as much or as fast

You are supposed to call it AI now. The word "machine learning" is for GOFAI 2nd gen only. Once all investors have been money drained and the next AI winter begins, then you will be allowed to call it Machine Learning

There is a different between physical toughness and having to endure verbal abuse however tiny you might think it is. At the end of the day, everyone has an emotional blindspot that they consider vital but others consider unimportant

The vendor will always be in control. Worth knowing but feels a bit of an empty statement (like water is wet)

So you are selling an app whose server could be plugged at any time and render the app unusable. How is that any better than a subscription. Imagine paying money for a phone that stops working after one day. By design. You would be furious. And rightfully so

Their goal is not working on what's most useful for most people though. That's the domain of the big AI players. They are small and so specialising works best as that's where they can have an edge as a company.

At the end of the day, the released product needs to be good and needs to be done in a reasonable amount of time. I highly doubt they can do a generic model as well as a more specialised one.

But if you think you know better than them, you could try to contact them even though it looks they are crazy laser focused (their public email addresses are either for investors or employee candidates).

I am not even sure if business properly realizes all this

It definitely doesn't, as in the top directors likely don't. It is likely that they brought in some kind of consultant who sold them this solution to the higher ups against the protests of the lower managers

Do you regularly give away money just because it is a minuscule amount?

It's no secret that Android users are money tight compared to Apple users. It makes sense to start on iOs and gauge subscribers before spending additional resources on making another app

Very impressive for just 4 people. What's the team background and how long have you been working on this?

They are a team of 4. At that size, it's better for them to be focused on one thing than stretched out

Path forward requires solving the core challenge: actually surfacing the content people want to see, not what intermiediaries want them to see

But this will never happen with mainstream search imo. It is not a technical problem but a human one. As long as there is a human in control of what gets surfaced, it is only a matter of time until you revert to tampered search. Humans are not robots. They have emotions and can be swayed with or without their awareness. And this is a form of power for the swayer as much as oil or water are.

The idea that you can have an AI system provide factual and reliable answers to human centric questions is as real as Star Trek itself.

You will never remove the human factor from AI

Your hope might be that a technical solution is found for a human problem but that is unlikely.

It means Apple. See: "Are you sure Apple can’t read them too?".

Next time you insult someone, better use your cognition powers to avoid looking like that which you call others

By that token, you could find non-human animals that are smarter than some percentage of humanity in a few tasks. Are those animals AGI?

Now you could find a software that is smarter than some percentage of humanity in a few tasks. Is that software AGI? Is AlphaGo AGI? Is the Google Deep mind AI gamer AGI?

Not even that. You might want it to win, not care about the outcome or not think that it will win without putting the US through a long depression, in all those cases it makes US officials reluctant to put themselves in such vulnerable position especially given the new rising world powers

At geological or biological timescales, that’s what the emergence of language did

Elaborate on this idea please. Are you saying that human languages are self-replicating abstract entities?