Even though we are a tiny startup I have a feeling that this applies to many other tech companies as well.

The biggest misconception is that just because chatbots are now more capable that somehow that means that you should replace your UI with one.

For example, AI leveraged SOC is going to be operational within 3-5 years, and there goes 50-70% of jobs in that sector.

Others segments are significantly behind (robo-taxis) and I'm sure there are other segments much further ahead (call center automation), but the change is absolutely coming - not because of LLMs alone, but because the entire ecosystem around ML/AI is a 15 years old now, and there's an entire generation of SWEs that are just as competent as ML PhDs were 15 years ago.

That said, most investment in ML/AI is around applications of ML in automating specific domains.

My argument is against this:

> FOMO investment completely pointless

I have an example of a 10-11 figure TAM industry that is actively in the process of migrating to being majority automated, and there are plenty of other industries in the midst of this as well.

It feels like a Motte-and-bailey type issue. If I point out that the original claim doesn't have enough evidence and is purely speculation, I don't really want to hear about how call center jobs are being affected by LLMs. I don't disagree, but we're not talking about the same thing here.

No one is investing on that assumption. I've been in the PE/VC for a couple years now and I've never heard anyone from Associate to LP say that straight faced and unironically.

I am pretty sure some are. Some very rich people are talking as if AGI will happen soon they for sure are investing into this assuming that billions will turn to trillions, as long as they invest in every AI company they will get it right for one of them.

This happened in the IT bubble as well, most companies were overvalued but the total set of IT companies went on to become many trillion dollars of value, so if you invested in every IT company then you became really rich, they expect the same thing to happen now but even more extreme.

Now I don't expect this to turn to AGI, but many do, and those who do would be stupid if they didn't take that into account for investments.

> I've been in the PE/VC

Are you talking about the calculated VC groups? Or are you talking about eccentric rich individuals? The first group for sure wouldn't it would be career suicide to do it there but some of the second group would since they invest their own money. Think people like Elon Musk etc.

As you imply yourself, robotaxis did not deliver on the grandiose promises of a decade ago. What makes you so sure that the generative stuff will be any different?

That's not what SOC is...

Does this always follow though? Mass automation can just as easily make the existing staff far more effective, making the ROI easier to justify.

But if we look at the 90’s, the lesson is not that companies wasted time on internet strategies they didn’t need. The lesson is that companies that had good internet strategies thrived (Netflix) and those that had bad internet strategies died (Blockbuster).

Agree there’s a lot of FOMO, but unlike your patsies, these companies would not be better served by staying away and ignoring the temptation.

Before this I was building a matching engine for online retail which used (then) state of the art multimodal models to decide which products would match your query to the lowest priced item. The dirty secret here is that we've solved search, it just costs too much to provide it for free. I think we'll soon see an online Costco show up which can provide this service to members and filter all the bullshit dropshippers.

So far this year the main thing slowing down development for us has been the SEC seizing our development boxes for insider trading once a month or so. Which given that each cost $50,000 has been something of a sore point.

What an interesting comment. So, your thesis is that a few players that come out ahead will be worth substantially more than the biggest players now and they will all be using LLMs? What's driving the consolidation? High barrier to entry for making a foundation model for finance?

so are you saying that you are okay with LLM hallucinations causing your company to make possible huge losses, even if rarely ?

I should mention that I am an LLM newbie, or rather a zerobie. all I have is a very high level sketchy overview of the field. but I am a dev with many years background in many areas, though not AI at all, except for reading a little bit now and then about it.

feel free to blast me, but preferably with data-backed statements.

But take a look at GitHub’s Copilot Workspaces for ideas of how transformative AI will be.

I don’t have all the pieces (if I did, I’d be rich, right?), but I think AI will deliver mass customization of goods, software, and content by reducing up front costs to near zero. So if I were looking for good strategies, I’d start with companies that currently spend a lot of money on software or content creation and who are investing in automating that.

This doesn't mean that the human is no longer required, but for certain tasks a company can save a lot of time/money.

So I don't know if they dream to drop a dept of 50 people and replace it with a single machine, but there are some tasks that cannot be outsourced to machines (e.g. decisions impacting the lives cannot be made by automation)

"the existence of automated decision-making, including profiling, referred to in Article 22(1) and (4) and, at least in those cases, meaningful information about the logic involved, as well as the significance and the envisaged consequences of such processing for the data subject."

So good luck 'convincing' the regulator that an LLM can replace mortgage-decisions makers (it is considered a significant activity in a person's life).

That said, I know someone who almost took a job writing the actual text of laws, and they were excited about it because, while they didn’t control the laws in general, comma placement allowed them to subtly change the law’s meaning.

I currently would‘t trust an LLM to understand subtle comma placement.

I can't see any evidences that those aren't really important or useful given your comment, do you have any data to support your argument?

There are examples of where LLMs are useful for information retrieval in that they can take vague queries and produce good summaries, but they're just as likely to produce reasonable-sounding nonsense that needs to be carefully verified.

I've also seen examples where LLMs can produce code that implements well-defined toy problems but when used on a real software system with millions of lines of context they do not produce code that can remain coherent with the system.

From what I've seen LLMs have yet to graduate from "impressive demo" and everyone characterizing them as being a revolution are still describing some potential future state with no real evidence that we'll get there with this technology or any time soon.

I think so much of the hype is about potential larger scale applications but the models just don’t seem reliable enough yet for that.

Bailey:" AI can replace your entire human labor (the most expensive cost of business) by scraping the content made by laborers on the internet without compensation"

Unfortunately, businesses are being sold the Bailey. And the sad part is that some companies aren't even pretending to hide behind the motte. I'm sure some, many businesses won't fall for the hype, but many others will and it will take a huge toll on the workers as a result.

AI (in the general sense) is also obviously useful, but the jury's still out on whether LLMs are the way to get there. Right now their best use-case seems to be cannibalizing the search market. It's not clear whether they can fully displace search engines though, given their stubborn propensity for confabulation.

There is a finite number of hours, dollars, and willpower within an org. Companies are pivoting into becoming AI companies without any understanding of what that means.

It's not that companies shouldn't be wondering if and how LLMs will change their industry, but there's a very real possibility that the answer for the next 20 years is "A bit, but not enough for us to need to drop everything yet. Let's keep watching and see how this pans out."

[0] http://web.archive.org/web/20001109045300/http://www.petco.c...

People said the same things about blockchain—that it would be the foundational tech that would power a new iteration of the Internet, a web3.

Not that LLMs are in the same category, they certainly seem to have more utility in certain contexts than I ever saw in blockchain, but OP is correct that not every hyped technology turns into the next internet.

There are real use cases and value from blockchain, but it is far more niche than the crypto and NFT folks wanted to believe. IMO there was a lot of horse-cart thinking. “Blockchain is so amazing any product built on it will be successful!”

Which I guess gets back to AI. But AI is so much more general purpose than secure public ledgers. One is a screwdriver, the other is a million pound press.

The LLM stuff is an even bigger pot of gold potentially, a workable semantic embedding for semantic queries or other things is another thing that a million improvements can be shaken out of.

it’s actually bizarre to me how much people stand on the “no commercial value!!!” thing, and I have to view some of it as just being the next round of histrionics from the same people who are mad their deviantart got scraped etc.

So many people have been following the hype of foolish tech trends that they can no longer differentiate them from actual ground shifting technology.

It's sad what blockchain hype has done to a supposed tech audience. To this day all nobody can describe an actual large impactuf use for blockchains other than get rich quick. Even with the tech there it does nothing for day to day life.

Duplicating portions of human intelligence has tremendous practical use in every facet of society. The tech just needs to get there.

It's pet rocks vs electricity.

That last part is the only part that skeptics are skeptical of.

GPT-4 is amazing in a lot of ways and shouldn't be discounted, but the grandest predictions of AI's impact depend on the exponential growth we saw in 2022-2023 continuing. What we've seen this year (GPT-4o, increasing cries from the established players for governments to build them a moat) suggests that that's not happening. We seem to have hit a cap on capabilities and have started just making it smaller and faster.

This is great and will be useful, but GPT-4-level tech isn't going to revolutionize everything the way that the hype suggests. We need something more.

And yet practically every big company was falling over itself to have a ‘blockchain strategy’ (remember IBM’s thing?) Sound familiar?

> Duplicating portions of human intelligence has tremendous practical use in every facet of society. The tech just needs to get there.

Trouble is, that’s a _huge_ ‘just’.

They failed to do either one.

AI will transform production , distribution, and consumption at least as much as the Internet did.

AI isn't at that level yet, and I don't know when it will be. When it does get that good, the meaning of wealth changes at least as much as it did in the Industrial Revolution when land took a second seat to capital, and I have no idea what our societies will do any more than Adam Smith could have imagined Communism.

That's a great example. You could also include systemic events like the introduction of the microcomputer, smartphone, and even "Web 2.0." AI looks like it will be a systemic change, we just don't know what that change is yet. Companies that find the winning formula will have a competitive advantage. Companies that ignore it will start a downward spiral that will be difficult to survive.

I'm not judging whether or not building AI is possible, but I do ponder the psychology of it. Let's see...AGI might bring us eternal life, Utopia and a way to avoid having to work ever again...sounds a bit like something from the bible to me.

Well, I mean, that's the fundamental question of the entire AI alignment field and has been for over 20 years :D The question for which the wrong answer means the potential extinction of not merely the human species, but everything that we find valuable in the reachable universe.

Now, let's be very clear that the question is not "Why wouldn't it just invent its own goals and ignore humans?" That's mere anthropomorphizing. What an agent wants to do is by definition the goals output by its goal system. And the goal system is supposed to be designed by us, but we may not be smart enough to design a goal system that won't be disastrous to us if implemented by a superintelligent agent.

I’m not worried about extinction though , I just mea , why build to enslave ? How would you enslave something gore capable than you to recoup the 50 trillion in investments ? I mea. I get

That might happen if the AI has an off switch, knows this, and knows that we'll use that if it goes out of line, and wants to live.

But it isn't necessary.

The point is to construct it to want what we want, in the sense of sharing our values rather than envy, and then there's no conflict in the first place.

We just don't know how to even properly specify what we want.

Every attempt so far to specify what it means to be good has edge cases and loopholes — we don't even all agree on "don't kill" (war, death penalty, suicide assisted or otherwise, abortion, pollution that carries a statistically significant increase in mortality rates where no single death can be definitively proven to have been caused but overall many must have been, meat).

We don’t know what we want…that’s why I think there is some very interesting psychology going on with AI people. Maybe the main driver is boredom ?

There are finite resources on earth, and no bounds on how much energy can be spent thinking about something with AGI other than the will of whoever commands it.

People want to have yachts and McLarens. There will be luxurious ways to consume large slices of the AGI pie that people or countries will not forfeit.

But there's sufficient resources on this world to give ten billion people each their own luxury yacht with a crew of servant robots, and there are people who would gladly use their own wealth to make others better off.

It's going to be a wild ride, no matter what human psychology drives us to do with this future.

When the AI is good enough for them to genuinely replace all human labour, it's good enough for them to be von Neumann replicators; at that point equality is more about human psychology — greed vs charity — than practicalities.

Investors are currently betting on the ones they think going to be the first category and everyone else are trying to get a piece of the money being spent in the industry.

I’m a hiring manager for multiple roles across engineering, product, sales, marketing, and ops.

90% of candidates (regardless of IC vs. manager, regardless of seniority) loves to ask what the company’s AI strategy is, or “how will AI impact your business in the next 5 years?”

It’s easy to say the hype is driven by the execs at the top. Maybe it is. But your average IC is equally interested, in my experience.

[edit] Or at least those are the only people that make it to the stage of talking with the hiring manager.

But that’s a good idea. Next time the question comes up I’m going to try flipping it around to ask how they think our industry will be affected by AI since you’re right, it does feel like a hollow question.

It may be possible that they just want to sound as if they are "aware" of the latest trends, especially considering how often companies talk about it.

And yes, of course some are caught up in the hype; that’s the nature of these hype bubbles.

AI will do the same.

That a bunch of companies couldn't figure out how to use the internet is neither here nor there. There were plenty of factories that never figured out how to use electricity. Doesn't mean that steam power is still viable.

(Nb. someone using the term "AI" in 2024 can mean two things: either they just use it as a shorthand for referring to the currently hot incarnation of "AI", ie. "generative deep learning models with cross-attention layers", or they have no idea what they’ve talking about. And a priori the latter is much more likely.)

Sure, at this point generative deep learning models are somewhat likely be more like the internet and less like blockchains with regard to being an enabling technology. That doesn’t mean the hype cycle is not real.

Steam power is – and has always been – used to produce most of our electricity, BTW, and it’s only now changing, out of necessity.

I think the hype was there because companies needed to update their data to follow standards and update how that data interacts with other companies. The specifics of XML are less relevant - once things are standardized there can be standardized ways of converting to other formats.

Imagine needing to write custom parsers for every API; not needing that enabled SaaS APIs to be much more practical.

(And well, the OP's example of the internet is one that they missed.)

So, does that make the executives stupid for trying to find a legitimate reason to shoe-horn AI into a product?