Absolutely! We’re in an interesting time, and LLMs are certainly over-hyped.
With that said, I’d argue that most software today is _average_. Not necessarily bad by design, but average because of the (historic) economies of software development.
We’ve all seen it: some beloved software tool that fills a niche. They raise funding/start to scale and all of a sudden they need to make this software work for more people.
The developers remove poweruser features, add functionality to make it easier to use, and all of a sudden the product is a shell of its former self.
This is what excites me about LLMs. Now we can build software for 10s or 100s of users, instead of only building software with the goal (and financial stability) of a billion users.
My hope is that, even with tons of terrible vibe coded atrocities littering the App Store/web, we’ll at least start to see some software that was better than before, because the developers can focus on the forest rather than each individual tree (similar to Assembly -> C -> Python).
You are getting confused here...
LLMs are terrible at doing software engineering jobs. They fall on their face trying to work in sprawling codebases.
However, they are excellent at writing small bespoke programs on behalf of regular people.
Becky doesn't need ChatGPT to one-shot Excel.exe to keep track of the things she sells at the craft fair that afternoon.
This is a huge blind-spot I keep seeing people miss. LLM "programmers" are way way more useful to regular people than they are to career programmers.
This smells like "Self-checkouts", "perfect bespoke solution so that everyone can check their own groceries out, no need to wait for a slow/expensive _human_ to get the job done, except you end up basically just doing the cashiers job and waiting around inconveniently whenever you want to get some beer
I'm also pretty anti-social and actually prefer the robotic banter of quickly checking out with a person to the anxious nightmare of just trying to buy something real quick and now waiting because the machine hates life more than me.
Oh and many of the folks doing the bagging at some of the stores are disabled, and I dunno - I hope we're taking care of people in those jobs.
Instead of a guard there's a scanner by the exit gate where you scan your ticket. In my case just a small stub since the actual ticket is sent digitally.
I think it works so smoothly, much better than before this system was introduced. My recent experience buying groceries in Belgium was very similar.
And the scanner to exit is terrible for fire safety and accessibility. Also I've seen it break with the result that you had to trigger the alarm to leave.
It does not work smoothly at all, but perhaps you live in a different sweden than I.
I use this method of shopping whenever available.
And for items like bread or so you need to navigate a number of menus to find it.
And of course you are asked if you are a member, if you'd like to become a member, if you want to do a donation, and a number of other useless questions.
Yes you do need to be a member to use the system, but that's a very small price to pay for the convenience and speed of avoiding all lines and stress of the regular checkout.
Going from "a supermarket near my home" to "every single supermarket in sweden" is kinda of a big leap.
Try ICA in Olskroken or Godhemsgatan for example…
I Most supermarkets have self checkout, but even that isn't omnipresent (and it's usually slower).
The other problem is that, like self checkout, it often requires human intervention (buying alcohol or high value items, for examples) still requires human intervention. This can require a long wait at the end. I once got so sick of waiting that I left my shopping and walked away and went somewhere else.
That's exactly why she asks an LLM to do it for her. A program like this would be <1k LOC, well within even the current LLM one-shot-working-app domain.
The lower barrier to entry might mean the average quality of software goes WAY down. But this could be great if it means that there are 10x as many little apps that make one person happy by doing only as much as they need.
The above is also consistent with the quantity of excellent software going way up as well (just slower than the below-average stuff).
Fortunately AI helps with that too.
It doesn’t give you full control, but I believe it gives you enough control to do what I proposed for most consumers.
We have these really amazing computers with very high-quality software but still, so many processes are manual because we have too many hops from tool to tool. And each hop is a marginal increase in complexity, and an increase in risk of things going wrong.
I don't think AI will solve this necessarily, and it could make it worse. But, if we did want to improve it, AI can act as a sort of spongy API. It can make decisions in the face of uncertainty.
I imagine a world where I want to make a doctor's appointment and I don't open any apps at all, or pick up the phone. I tell my AI assistant, and it works it out, and I have all my records in one place. Maybe the AI assistant works over a phone line, like some sort of prehistoric amalgamation of old technology and new. Maybe the AI assistant doesn't even talk to a receptionist, but another AI assistant. Maybe it gives me spongy human information, but speaks to other's of it's kind in more defined interfaces and dialects. Maybe, in the future, there are no applications at all. Applications are, after all, a human construction. A device intended to replace labor, but a gross approximation of it.
>However, they are excellent at writing small bespoke programs
For programmers I predict a future of a million micro services.
Sprawling has always been an undesirable and unnecessary byproduct of growing code bases, but there's been no easy solution to that. I wonder if LLMs would perform better on a mono repo of many small services than one sprawling monolith.
It still happens but it's not a favorite experience anymore. It's just a source of loathing for MBA culture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparatchik
Been saying that for years. Private equity is perhaps analogous to the Politburo.
Cloud providers make more money the more they can get people to use inefficient designs with more moving parts to rack up more charges. Bonus if it also locks you into managed services. Double bonus if those are proprietary. Complexity benefits cloud hosts.
Microservices, like all patterns, sometimes make sense. Like all patterns they often get overused.
But end users often only need a tiny fraction of what the software is fully capable of, leaving a situation where you need you need to purchase 100% to use 5%.
LLMs can break down this wall by offering the user the ability to just make a bespoke 5% utility. I personally have had enormous success doing this.
Sure, an LLM might be able to guide you through the steps, and even help when you stumble, but you still have to follow a hundred little steps exactly with no intuition whether things will work out at the end. I very much doubt that this is something many people will even think to ask for, and then follow-through with.
Especially since the code quality of LLMs is nowhere near what you make it out to be. You'll still need to bear with them and go through a lot of trial and error to get anything running, especially if you have no knowledge of the terms of art, nor any clue of what might be going wrong if it goes wrong. If you've ever seen consumer bug reports, you might have some idea of the quality of feedback the LLM may be getting back if something is not working perfectly the first time. It's very likely to be closer to "the button you added is not working" than to "when I click the button, the application crashes" or "when I click the button, the application freezes for a few seconds and then pops up an error saying that input validation failed" or "the button is not showing up on the screen" [...]
I’m radiologist, I’ve been paying for software that sped up my reporting like 200 usd per month. I’ve remade all the functionality I need in one evening with cursor and added some things that I’ve found missing from the original software.
So far I have created 7 programs that are now used daily in production. One of them replaces a $1k/yr/usr CAD package, and another we used to bring in a contractor to write. The others a miscellaneous apps for automating/simplifying our in houses processes. None of the programs are more than 6k LOC.
Kinda. They're good, and I like them, but I think of them like a power tool: just because you can buy an angle grinder or a plasma cutter from a discount supermarket, doesn't mean the tool is safe in the hands of an untrained amateur.
Someone using it to help fix up a spreadsheet? Probably fine. But you should at least be able to read the code to the level you don't get this deliberate bad example to illustrate the point:
#!/usr/bin/python3
total_sales = 0.0
def add_sale(total_sales, amount):
total_sales = total_sales + amount
print("total_sales: " + str(total_sales))
[0] To my knowledge, no desktops are built to max out their power supply for an extended time; this is a simplification for illustration purposes.
At some point you’ll need to measure in terms of $ earned per W-H, or just $out/$in.
Money is irrelevant to energy efficiency.
My point was twofold, “the average query” becomes less meaningful as the variance increases. Sure one can _in principle_ report W-h spent on your account or query, but I think it will get more opaque and hard to predict. Average becomes less useful when agents can do an unpredictable amount of work with increasingly large bounds.
Second, and this was perhaps worthy of expanding in my post - I think in the radical abundance world that Altman is describing, energy and efficiency stops being something that people talk about. Fusion, space based solar farms, whatever, it’s easy to imagine solving this stuff. And I think you can even imagine this happening sooner if for example one provider stamps a “100% renewable datacenter” option on their AI product. Then you might not care about energy efficiency at all; in which case you just care about profit.
One aspect about modern generative AI that has surprised me is that it should have resulted in a new age of creatively surreal shitposts, but instead we have people Ghiblifying themselves and pictures of Trump eating tacos.
That's how electricity is most commonly priced. What else would you want?
I still find the Technology Connections video counterintuitive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOK5xkFijPc
A watt needs a time unit to be converted to joules because a watt is a measure of power, while a joule is a measure of energy.
Think of it like speed and distance:
A watt is a RATE of energy use, just like speed (e.g., miles per hour) is a RATE of travel.
A joule is a total amount of energy, just like distance (e.g., miles) is a total amount of travel.
If you're traveling 60 mph but you don't specify for how long... You won't know how far you went, how much gas you used, etc.
There are situations where Watts per se matter, eg if you build a datacenters in an area that doesn't have enough spare electricity capacity to generate enough watts to cover you, and you'd end up browning out the grid. Or you have a faulty burner and can't pump enough watts into your water to boil it before the heat leaks out, no matter how long you run it.
what he has left unsaid, is that electricity demand will rise substantially
good luck heating your home when you're competing with "superintelligence" for energy
Most art is just meh and earns billions.
I don’t see AI stealing art. Most modern arts have a huge social component.
The body uses 25w resting and thus the brain is about 5w.
Source: biology degree but like I said please take with the same amount of weight as a hallucinating LLM.
Resting energy usage in humans is ~1200–1500 kcal/day, or about 60–70 watts, depending on the person. Logic holds, estimate is just low
Sure, we'll all get a subscription and subject ourselves to biometric verification in order to continue our profession.
OpenAI's website looks pretty bad. Shouldn't it be the best website in existence if the new Übermensch programmers rely on "AI"?
What about the horrible code quality of "AI" applications in the "scientific" Python sphere? Shouldn't the code have been improved by "AI"?
So many questions and no one shows us the code.
I used to believe this wasn't worth considering (because while training is energy-intensive, once the model is trained we can use it forever.) But in practice it seems like we switch to newer/better models every few months, so a model has a limited period of usefulness.
> (is watt-hours the right unit of measurement here?)
Yes, because we want to measure energy consumed, while watts is only a measure of instantaneous power.
This isn't correct: people want good software and good art, and the current trajectory of how LLMs are used on average in the real world unfortunately run counter to that. This post doesn't offer any forecasts on the hallucination issues of LLMs.
> As datacenter production gets automated, the cost of intelligence should eventually converge to near the cost of electricity. (People are often curious about how much energy a ChatGPT query uses; the average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours
This is the first time a number has been given in terms of ChatGPT's cost-per-query and is obviously much lower than the 3 watts still cited by detractors, but there's a lot of asterisks in how that number might be calculated (is watt-hours the right unit of measurement here?).