Regardless of my opinions on if you're correct about this, I'm not an ML expert so who knows, I'd be very happy if we cured cancer so I hope you're correct and the video is a cool demo.
I don't believe the risk vs reward on investing a trillion dollars+ is the same when your thesis changes from "We just need more data/compute and we can automate all white collar work"
to
"If we can build a bunch of simulations and automate testing of them using ML then maybe we can find new drugs" or "automate personalized entertainment"
The move to RL has specifically made me skeptical of the size of the buildout.
Yeah I've used it for personal projects and it's 50/50 for me.
Some of the stuff generated I can't believe is actually good to work with long term, and I wonder about the economics of it. It's fun to get something vaguely workable quickly though.
Things like deepwiki are useful too for open source work.
For me though the core problem I have with AI programming tools is that they're targeting a problem that doesn't really exist outside of startups, not writing enough code, instead of the real part of inefficiency in any reasonably sized org, coordination problems.
Of course if you tried to solve coordination problems, then it would probably be a lot harder to sell to management because we'd have to do some collective introspection as to where they come from.
The most frustrating thing to me about this most recent rash of biz guy doubting the future of AI articles is the required mention that AI, specifically an LLM based approach to AGI, is important even if the numbers don't make sense today.
Why is that the case? There's plenty of people in the field who have made convincing arguments that it's a dead end and fundamentally we'll need to do something else to achieve AGI.
Where's the business value? Right now it doesn't really exist, adoption is low to nonexistent outside of programming and even in programming it's inconclusive as to how much better/worse it makes programmers.
I'm not a hater, it could be true, but it seems to be gospel and I'm not sure why.
Mapping to 2001 feels silly to me, when we've had other bubbles in the past that led to nothing of real substance.
LLMs are cool, but if they can't be relied on to do real work maybe they're not change the world cool? More like 30-40B market cool.
EDIT: Just to be clear here. I'm mostly talking about "agents"
It's nice to have something that can function as a good Google replacement especially since regular websites have gotten SEOified over the years. Even better if we have internal Search/Chat or whatever.
I use Glean at work and it's great.
There's some value in summarizing/brainstorming too etc. My point isn't that LLMs et al aren't useful.
The existing value though doesn't justify the multi-trillion dollar buildout plans. What does is the attempt to replace all white collar labor with agents.
That's the world changing part, not running a pretty successful biz, with a useful product. That's the part where I haven't seen meaningful adoption.
This is currently pitched as something that will have nonzero chance of destroying all human life, we can't settle for "Eh it's a bit better than Google and it makes our programmers like 10% more efficient at writing code."
eh it’s bc you’re never fired for making the same mistakes as everyone else
imagine this approach fails and you have to go to your board? They’re going to flat you alive and call you an idiot who should’ve done what everyone else was doing since it was obvious
but if you do what everyone else is doing? Well the macro changed obviously!
EDIT: I’ve worked at big tech companies where this was a meme, where the execs would do whatever meta/google did but six months later
NYC doesn’t have any physical gates, but living in manhattan in particular, has a high financial gate, keeping out people who can’t afford it.
Generally people paying 5k+ rents aren’t committing violent crime, homeless sweeps actually happen here and it’s not really possible to sleep on the street.
If you live in an exclusive neighborhood, it’s pretty clean and safe.
there’s angst cheaper rent would change that
EDIT: In a lot of ways NYC’s wealthy and the upper middle class that mostly lives in manhattan have mutual interests the biggest being public safety
interesting interview if you’re interested in more
Insane how much low hanging fruit there is for Audio models right now. A team of two picking things up over a few months can build something that still competes with large players with tons of funding
I had to get organized in college because I was doing a lot of additional coursework and still working. Previously I was completely disorganized in terms of planning.
Honestly the best way to do it isn't even a "system" it's to take the most lightweight level of organization and applying it to things you use.
For me the main organizational tool is just google calendar, using an all day event to denote due dates/trip planning/reminders, but even a daily note with what you're looking to do and important dates could be useful.
All these """systems""" have never caught on for me. It takes a lot of time to understand to the system and adjust instead of building a habit of surfacing information.
Get the system out of the way and just start putting stuff down. I get a ton of stuff done now that I couldn't without organizing things particularly when it comes to planning trips or work.
> Unfortunately for airlines, passengers don’t package their luggage in nicely uniform cardboard boxes. If they did, then the airlines could benefit directly from the recent takeoff in manipulator tech for warehouses. But airline luggage is way more wacky and irregular. If robots are going to handle it, they need to reason about how to grasp each item, handle its deformability, stack it in a stable way, and do all of this quickly, safely, and reliably.
Curious if you guys have put any thought into seeing if there's an operational change you could introduce to airlines, that would result in the tech side being a lot easier?
Palletizing logistics for consumer airtravel would be interesting...
Cool data/idea, and anecdotally lines up with my experiance at BigCos from a coworker perspective.
But in my experiance employee perf evals are more political than data based.
At the end of the day a lot of mgmt at BigCo, esp these days, wants that 10% quota for firing as a weapon/soft layoff and the "data" is a fig leaf to make that happen. More generously it's considered a forcing function for managers to actually find underperformers in their orgs, even if they don't exist. Either way it's not really based on anything other than their own confirmation bias.
IME the scrutiny of perf evaluation is basically tied to the trajectory of the company and labor market conditions. Even companies with harder perf expectations during the good times of ~2021 relaxed their requirements.
I've also "shipped" projects at big tech companies and this level of bootlicking really doesn't deserve to be called "shipping" it's just delivering for your management. Using the term "shipping" is a great scissor statement because it muddies the water.
The mentality from the article is another symptom of the many issues Software Engineering faces as profession.
Namely that a significant portion of us think of ourselves not as engineers, who need to tell management to get fucked occasionally, but as optimizers for accolades from whatever group can dole out rewards. This starts off in academia and continues into the professional world.
Certain folks just want to build a technical fiefdom for themselves, or get headpats from people who are above them in any given hierarchy.
Yeah this is "how the game is played". Playing this game eventually leads to the death of your organization and is why we have a corporate life cycle in the first place.
Eventually people like this eat an organization from the inside, pushing out anyone with an actual opinion or who optimizing for actually getting things done.
Instead it's just pure mercenary behavior for your managements attention.
As someone who also graduated during the pandemic an moved across the country.
Maybe man, but honestly it just isn't the same as actually getting to say goodbye to your friends.
Out of all of the things that went poorly that year, ppl missing their graduations is definitely pretty low on that list, but on a personal level it just really sucked having your entire social circle just disappear out of your life basically randomly.
but concept art, try-it-on for clothes or paint, stock art, etc