This reminds me of crypto’s “have fun being poor”. Except now it’s “have fun being left behind/being unemployed”. The more things change the more things stay the same.
A bit different when you actually see the results.
A guy I went to highschool with complains endlessly about AI generated art and graphics (he's an artist) and like you, just wants to bury his head in the sand.
Consumers don't care if art is generated by AI or humans and in a short period of time, you won't be able to tell the difference.
With the money being poured into AI by all major tech companies, you will be unemployed if you don't keep up with AI.
We care. If I get a video recommendation on YouTube and it is AI-created, I blacklist the channel. I will never listen to AI music. Even articles, the only way I will keep reading someone's writing is if I never find out they don't use it. I consume media and art to commune with my fellow man, not to look at pretty bitmaps and read just strings of prose.
> "Consumers don't care if art is generated by AI or humans"
Maybe not yet. The real "art" consumers were always very sensitive and asking for originality (thus scarcity). It is an essential principle of the art that it is a result of thousands/millions of deliberate choices. If you use machine for creation, you less choices. You delegate most of your talented/crazy/hard choices to the model (which is based on such choices of already talented but combines them in a random way). The result is thin, diluted even it seems like deliberate. In my opinion the most art lovers will continue to seek for the dense art made by human, asking for some kind of proof. :) The real art will be even more appreciated. I guess.
If the last few years of the AI hype cycle has taught me anything is there's massive late movers advantage.
Anyone who spent time learning the AI tools over that period of time has basically wasted their time. Working with agents is nothing like prompt engineering. I imagine whatever comes after will be nothing like agents etc. Sounds like those who try to keep up with AI will be equally unemployed.
If the HN community is an example of this, they will be left behind regardless because they will avoid all tooling and the benefits that comes along with it.
I suppose I shouldn't care too much. Less competition for people like me that have embraced the change.
Thing is short/medium term VC subsidies require lots of users to embrace AI. If they don't the money dries up and you end up paying the full price for these models. Which are currently heavily discounted (this is an understatement). How much are you currently paying for your usage 20$/m? 200$/m? How does that look when it's 2000$/m? 20000$/m?
It's false comparison compilers are deterministic. The only probabilistic behavior I've seen has been for performance (query planning/branch prediction).
I mean you're not wrong the serious people drop into assembly when they need too. Even if you work in a context where you can't or don't drop down into assembly being able to make your own compilers is incredibly useful.
Sure, compilers are deterministic and LLMs are not. If you're asserting that a probabilistic process can't get you to a deterministic outcome, Monte Carlo integration would like to have a word.
My point was that comparing the rise of AI tooling to the rise of HLL compilers is a much better comparison than comparing it to crypto.
HLL compilers were originally seen as crutches and inferior tools and that "real" programmers used assembly. Compiler-generated code was derided as inefficient and ugly.
And it was! In the early days, a good programmer who knew the machine could outdo the compiler. But that didn't stop a huge expansion of new programmers who could write COBOL and FORTRAN but never learned assembly. And the compilers got better over time. These days it's a rare wizard who can outdo a compiler's optimizations, and it takes multiple orders of magnitude longer for those rare humans to achieve it.
LLM tooling isn't going away. Even in these very early days, it enables non-programmers to construct basic applications that work, using English requests! And the tools have gotten better on almost a monthly basis.
You can like them or not like them, just like the early programmers could like or not like compilers. But dismissing them as analogous to empty crypto hype is a bad comparison.
My comparison wasn't about the tech. It was about the proponents of said tech. A lot of people who push AI use the same sorts of arguments that people used to push crypto.
A guy I went to highschool with complains endlessly about AI generated art and graphics (he's an artist) and like you, just wants to bury his head in the sand.
Consumers don't care if art is generated by AI or humans and in a short period of time, you won't be able to tell the difference.
With the money being poured into AI by all major tech companies, you will be unemployed if you don't keep up with AI.