a lot, like World scale, amount of data and that has repetitively been done WITHOUT permissions from authors of that data
huge amount of data must be processed and this is done in enormous datacenters that consume radically MORE than traditional ones without GPUs
energy and cooling for those very specific new datacenters that then becomes unavailable to the local community, energy produced that is often rushed and typically more polluting
So I think it is fundamental to distinguish
“AI” as a theoretical researcher field, public research focusing on processing CERN data, weather forecast, genomics, medicine, etc that is indeed a tool that might produce results that helps us all
versus
commercialized for-profit “AI” with GenAI and LLMs as blackboxes mostly used for spam, scan, low quality code, etc.
When one amalgamates one with the other, knowingly or not, they do the marketing for the later.
Thought this comment from reddit summed it up well
AI is more than a tool, it is a suite of projects that the richest companies in the world have poured trillions of dollars in to and are now flailing to recoup their investment. It has devastating effects on communities around the data centers that make up its infrastructure. When these companies continue to charge forward unregulated, it will have increasingly devastating consequences. A hammer doesn’t consume all the fresh water in an aquifer and make it undrinkable, nor does a screwdriver drive up the costs of energy to unaffordable levels, a spanner does not purchase politicians and corrupt any effort to reign in the harmful effects of a blind advance for the sake of profit generation.
My biggest problem with AI is that currently it is a very shitty tool that outputs nonsense 9 out of 10 times while big tech pretends it is totally awesome, which like you say, makes it being forced on you even more frustrating.
Is it here to stay? Yes I believe so. But it needs a lot of work in a lot of area’s to be truly useful.
I feel like you must be prompting it poorly or using ChatGPT / Copilot?
I’d say in my day to day, AI tooling successfully tackles 90% of my software engineering jobs and with proper context and promoting the output is pretty stellar.
Assuming you’re maintaining a big codebase and not just producing boilerplate, do you find LLMs to be more help than language servers/IDE code snippets?
Definitely more helpful. But I would preface that with proper context building.
It isn’t enough (generally) to just tell it to do the thing. It is far better to to tell it to do a thing, and how, and provide rules, and provide examples, and provide the company’s best practices.
And I realize it takes a bit to get there, but I’m at a point that with enough context provisions, I can generate 10+ files of code for a net new feature that is 99%+ how I would do it in sub 5 minutes.
Do I tell Product that I still need another week? Absolutely.
While I agree it has uses and can be a good tool, it was trained on stolen material/data.
These are unprecedented levels of theft, and its going unpunished.
I do not know what alternatives were available for the learning phase. Simply stating the cost it came at. And that’s not even taking into consideration what its doing to the job market, youth, disinformation, etc.
There’s nothing wrong with ai. It’s a tool. It’s nice to have access to more tools.
The only problem with AI is how it’s being forced on everyone and it’s taking away consumer access to technology.
It’s a VERY specific tool that needs
So I think it is fundamental to distinguish
versus
When one amalgamates one with the other, knowingly or not, they do the marketing for the later.
Thought this comment from reddit summed it up well
https://old.reddit.com/r/duckduckgo/comments/1qerho4/duckduckgo_official_survey_say_yes_or_no_to_ai/nzzs2xb/
My biggest problem with AI is that currently it is a very shitty tool that outputs nonsense 9 out of 10 times while big tech pretends it is totally awesome, which like you say, makes it being forced on you even more frustrating.
Is it here to stay? Yes I believe so. But it needs a lot of work in a lot of area’s to be truly useful.
Skill issue
Lack of skill issue
I feel like you must be prompting it poorly or using ChatGPT / Copilot?
I’d say in my day to day, AI tooling successfully tackles 90% of my software engineering jobs and with proper context and promoting the output is pretty stellar.
I hope I never have to use “your” code.
It goes through two levels of review, we do not accept slop.
Assuming you’re maintaining a big codebase and not just producing boilerplate, do you find LLMs to be more help than language servers/IDE code snippets?
Definitely more helpful. But I would preface that with proper context building.
It isn’t enough (generally) to just tell it to do the thing. It is far better to to tell it to do a thing, and how, and provide rules, and provide examples, and provide the company’s best practices.
And I realize it takes a bit to get there, but I’m at a point that with enough context provisions, I can generate 10+ files of code for a net new feature that is 99%+ how I would do it in sub 5 minutes.
Do I tell Product that I still need another week? Absolutely.
Context is king.
While I agree it has uses and can be a good tool, it was trained on stolen material/data. These are unprecedented levels of theft, and its going unpunished.
I do not know what alternatives were available for the learning phase. Simply stating the cost it came at. And that’s not even taking into consideration what its doing to the job market, youth, disinformation, etc.
I prefer a world without it.
That’s one of the problems.
The other problem is that the billionaires want to use AI to make censorship and kill decisions (see Palantir) to lock up their olygarchy.