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by jdietrich 517 days ago
There are a whole bunch of software problems where "just prompt an LLM" is now a viable solution. Need to analyse some data? You could program a solution, or you could just feed it to ChatGPT with a prompt. Need to build a rough prototype for the front-end of a web app? Again, you could write it yourself, or you could just feed a sketch of the UI and a prompt to an LLM.

That might be a dead end, but a lot of people are betting a lot of money that we're just at the beginning of a very steep growth curve. It is now plausible that the future of software might not be discrete apps with bespoke interfaces, but vast general-purpose models that we interact with using natural language and unstructured data. Rather than being written in advance, software is extracted from the latent space of a model on a just-in-time basis.
1 comments
grey-area 517 days ago
A lot of the same people also recently bet huge amounts of money that blockchains and crypto would replace the world's financial system (and logistics and a hundred other industries).

How did that work out?

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jdietrich 517 days ago
A16z and Sequoia made some big crypto bets, but I don't recall Google or Microsoft building new DCs for crypto mining. There's a fundamental difference between VCs throwing spaghetti against the wall and established tech giants steering their own resources towards something.
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