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by IKantRead 1011 days ago
> AI is (still) eating the world.

Citation needed.

I work in this space so am fairly optimistic, but it's worth pointing out we're still mostly talking about AI hype. Nothing has really been eaten at all yet from what I've seen.

The article claims that there are tons of startups in this space, which is true, but that doesn't mean any of these startups have actually solved any major problems yet.

As a reminder, we still haven't "solved" autonomous driving quite yet and we were much further along that road 5 years ago.

Working on shipping LLM driven products everyday, I'm becoming increasingly concerned that there's no way the products proposed can possibly match the hype for them. Which is a bit of a bummer since these models have a lot of potential in the sub-hype space, but I fear backlash in the future will lead us to squander that potential.

2 comments

Consumer of LLMs for a F500 here.

We know it's all hype (We do the same to our customers too, by the by).

The LLMs still give us huge savings and (hopefully soon) some advantages in the marketplace. 15x time savings seems common. Our copy-editing teams are maaaaaybe going to be able to be on track for like the first time ever. Our customer support teams, in test cases, really love the LLMs and their concerns are being worked on (no, actually, really this time!). Field people are also really liking them for rubber ducky exercises. Customers and stock holders are demanding that we have some sort of LLM to interact with.

For such a new tech, I've seen pretty widespread adoption inside the company at honestly record rates. We had issues where our IT banned most of the LLMs internally but there were too many people just grabbing a personal computer/mobile to use them anyways. I want to repeat this: People were going around IT to get more work done. Not playing games, not watching Netflix. Actual real honest work.

I've never even heard of something like that in many years of working in corporate America. All for tens of dollars a month per seat.

Keep doing what you're doing with these things. We can't get enough of them.

Any task in 2023 that requires paying a human in an expensive western country, despite all of the rules and regulations and legal liability and on and on, means someone tried to automate it already and failed. For whatever reason - the ambiguity, the physical dexterity, maybe it’s even union or government rules - it cannot be automated easily.

So in comes LLMs. The developer thinks, “I know, I will just take all the input coming into the screen and put it in a magic LLM box and get the right answer!” Like so many AI startups before them, the failure is written before they even started.

Year 1900: Heavier than air flight will never happen, the failure is written before they even started.