It would be exceptionally fascinating, if AI, due to the limitations of how it models information, and the way that it warped incentives, if AI ended up being a net inhibitor of progress than accelerator.
Going fast, and sustained speed, are very different things. I've often felt, in many different areas of life, that a shortcut will pay off in the short term, but if you take nothing but shortcuts then you will do terribly long term.
You have to do the hard thing eventually, or you never get anywhere.
I’m curious like, AI has obviously supercharged this, but I think this has been true for a long time. I think like loosely speaking “apps” were except for a short period at the beginning always worthless. It was something akin to consulting that people paid for. The entrepeneur who built an app around the specific frustrations of some individual hair salons and then scaled that up. not a pretty UI.
This is awesome! I’m going to have to spend some time with this one. I’ve been working on similar experiments, specifically around learning, I wonder how many people have their vibe coded websites with multiple experiments out there. I started building a multi-lesson learning classical music guide:
Nvidia is currently "investing" billions in the companies that buy and support it's products up and down the AI stack. And at the same time, Nvidia is "investing" directly in itself with plans to buyback hundreds of billions of it's own stock.
But as you might suspect, this "circular financing" can't continue indefinitely --- just like with any Ponzi scheme
There was a post today or yesterday where Paul Graham and Nate Silver accused the AP of being woke for saying you shouldn’t anthropomorphize LLMs. But I can imagine there to be quite a few unpredictable consequences to encouraging your customers to project emotions onto your product that humans generally project onto each other.
I’m not sure SV is prepared for what happens when you go down that road.
> There was a post today or yesterday where Paul Graham and Nate Silver accused the AP of being woke for saying you shouldn’t anthropomorphize LLMs.
I searched, but couldn't find this. Do you have a link? Sounds like a totally unhinged response from totally unhinged people. There's nothing "woke" about wanting my word calculator to avoid pretending it's a person.
When I integrate LLMs into my apps that respond to user queries, I deliberately have my system instructions prohibit all self-referential usage of first-person pronouns. The system can only refer to itself as "this system", never "I" or "me".
Any chat bot that pretends to be a person just grosses me out, especially in a customer experience context. Gives off very manipulative and patronizing vibes.
So, Nate Silver is not actually "accusing the AP of being woke". He at most draws an analogy:
> People trying to police language that is perfectly natural in some cases and ending up in a web of contradictions.
It is "very woke 1.0" not in the sense of upholding any actual notion of "social justice" or whatever, but simply in the sense of… well, what I quoted.
And Paul Graham is basically being guilt-by-association'd here, as he made no reference to "wokeness" and simply argued:
> The AP doesn't understand that this ship sailed years ago. What's the use of a style guide that doesn't understand current educated usage?
Basically, they're both taking the stance of linguistic descriptivism — which most "woke" people I've met would actually claim to agree with.
The post title is clickbait and the content is mostly just making arguments about LLMs not actually being living conscious organisms (which I agree with, but it's pretty pithy). Plus it's needlessly culture-war baiting, as evidenced by the choice to cite Nathan J Robinson at the end to make the counter claim (using uncivil language to do so). This framing takes the issue away from the actual matter and makes it about how certain people supposedly have the wrong politics and have supposedly been corrected by people with supposedly the right politics.
I feel like there’s a weird conflicts in how folks mental model of LLM development.
It’s not the model I don’t trust, it’s myself. The model is wrong _all the time_ because - it’s easy to verify the code - it’s hard to verify that I knew what I was talking about when I prompted it.
So the idea that you can broadly speaking take the human out of the loop. I think suggests to me a level of consistency in the contextual environment that would probably never exist.
At some point it’s politics. The model can come up with a better answer than my boss, and then my boss can just ignore it. Taking the human out of the loop broadly speaking implies that we all agree on what we’re trying to optimize.
I wonder if - there are sort of broadly speaking a few different types of learners.
Jensen Huang has been CEO of NVIDIA for 33 years. That is a role
with a very specific type of information environment. He is sort of this weird combination of specialist and - he necessarily has to operate within a certain level of abstraction.
I’m somewhere in the middle, I’m a high achiever but not the highest. I would say I’m above average in my usage of AI at my tech job. The way I’ve learned systems thinking is by being a bit non-specific in what I learn. British history, psychology, software engineering, queuing theory, cooking.
The idea of learning systems but not basic math - the idea of being too discerning in what I’m willing to learn. The entire idea of passing up the ability to learn something like basic math.
So many mental models of the world are developed by engaging with things like basic math. How do you learn systems without learning patterns behind numbers?
If the whole argument is something like it’s now about taste or creativity or being a builder? The way you learn those skills is engagement with all the things. It’s not abandoning all the things to read a book on systems thinking and product management.
It’s not never focus, but if your default position is “maybe I shouldn’t be curious about that”. You’re operating from a deficit.
I get the whole “we don’t have to read the code anymore” Schtick from most product devs, and DHH I guess is at his core a builder / product dev whatever.
But the development of something like rails pushed forward the state of the art in ways that LLMs now replicate.
The point being like - someone has to keep writing programming languages and frameworks and libraries. Like - someone has to be thinking what the code looks like for LLMs to have patterns to match against, right?
> someone has to be thinking what the code looks like for LLMs to have patterns to match against, right?
Assuming no new paradigms on the hardware side that no longer fit into our current programming models, do they? Rails' claim to fame was eliminating "XML sit-ups" to improve the developer experience, but who cares how many "sit-ups" LLMs need to do?
At large enough scale, I suspect it'll become a problem. At the moment part of the appeal is how effortlessly models absorb menial work, but I do wonder if eventually it'll be too wasteful at large scales to sustain it. Maybe not, though.
Rails didn’t really push forward the state of the art, though. Not compared to something like DirectToWeb in WebObjects, where instead of static code generation, it did dynamic site generation with open-ended rules.
I understand this persons frustration, but I feel like…
It I were running YCombinator and I were writing next years request for startups. I would say:
Here are the top twenty household expenses / bill for the average person. Tell us which one you’re going to lower and how.
There are a few variations on questions you ask that get at the same thing, but while I understand the complaint of the poster, I also somewhat understand the dissent.
Why are you selling us this thing that maybe creatively in the right context could have an indirect impact on people’s lives. Solve one of the problems I have in front of me.
It is kinda crazy - I remember Elon musk showing off that you could play video games and watch movies in the Tesla.
And there’s something super dystopian about the idea -
When I was a kid basically four things governed the emotion you felt about a car. What it looked like on the outside, how far the gas pedal was depressed whether or not the window was open and what was playing on the radio.
The experience of driving a car was one of the things we most looked forward to about growing up, and now we’re trying to abstract that away.
And I feel it myself - there is something exciting or stimulating in modern cars about - where the screens are, how big they are, what colors are on them. But how backwards that is to the whole original notion of design.
It is something I often think about in life that, inefficiency is where our humanity is.
This video went way beyond the boundaries of its premise to ask the same kind of questions you did about “where our humanity is”. I often say that when (if) historians look back from 10,000 years in the future there will be general agreement that the period from the late 1950s through the early 2000s will turn out to have been the best patch of human existence — the time when the throttle of possibilities was suddenly wide open and politico-corporate control systems hadn’t yet figured out how to clamp down again. (See also: Iain M. Banks, The State of the Art.)
