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by 8organicbits 706 days ago
It's strange because as a senior engineer I'm telling everyone that genAI is not ready, has glaring quality, safety, and security issues, is underpriced by VCs planning to crank prices later, and even if the magic was real offers less promise than tried and true conventional solutions we haven't tried yet.

AWS should be spending significant time explaining how their giant portfolio of conventional tools are improving. If they have stopped, they've lost focus. But hopefully it's just the marketing team focused on magic beans.
2 comments
Aeolun 705 days ago
> I'm telling everyone that genAI is not ready, has glaring quality, safety, and security issues

The problem being that nobody listens of course. You still have to build heaps of genAI crud because leadership is so excited about it.

Then you end up building a free text box to automatically determine one of 4 different problems the customer can have, and scratch your head wondering why we don’t just provide 4 options instead of letting the customer write a whole story...

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roncesvalles 706 days ago
>AWS should be spending significant time explaining how their giant portfolio of conventional tools are improving.

See but that won't work because leaders are dumb. The central tension of civilization is that the smart ones are needed down in the boiler/operating room to solve complex low-level problems, and whoever's left must steer the ship.

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Aeolun 705 days ago
It’d be nice to think of it like that, but I think the leaders just have completely different incentives.

It doesn’t cost them anything to re-route resources from the keep the lights on work, and has a potentially massive career impact if they’re the first ones to do something sensible with genAI.

Even if most of the work fails it’s still worth it. It’s to their benefit to hype AI beyond all reason because it justifies the resources they spend on it.

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roncesvalles 705 days ago
Then again, you'd think leadership is something more than just responding in an uncritical straight line to hype and incentives.
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CapeTheory 706 days ago
Never thought of it in those terms, but I'm afraid you've nailed it.

We're really fucked, aren't we?

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