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Comment by scotty79 | Hacker News Reader

You are talking like we had this capabilities for a decades but it's been just a few months of truly capable AI. Virtually all of IT switched to agents that quick. Non IT people just started to make software for themselves. Vision and translation capabilities of LLMs help millions. People talk with AI's now verbally to get advice or to just hear a friendly voice. The math thing is just few weeks old. We are just getting started. How fast did the telegraph meaningfuly changed lives for the better for bulk of people? Radio? TV? Computers? Internet? Cellphones?

Has any technology made an impact on physical world faster?

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Exactly, we're all software engineers here and even for us it took weeks/months to get to a position where we can really leverage LLMs (think platform, security, observability, etc).

Imagine being in charge of a physical factory, sure you might have a 200 USD Claude subscription but you also have a floor full of physical machines that have, if you're lucky, an undocumented debug interface and a paper manual. Not to mention safety inspections, insurance, etc.

You can't vibe code a factory floor. Not yet, perhaps in 5 - 10 years but there are some very hard, non technical, problems that need to be fixed before we'll see meaningful improvement there.

I'm pretty confident with enough context, Opus 7.5 will be able to vibe code a factory floor.

How much time do we have to wait before we are allowed to criticize AI? GitHub copilot has existed for half a decade. Cursor, Claude code, codex, have all existed for over a year and have seen more investment that practically any product in history and have almost 0 barrier to entry. Where is my decade of software progress in 1 year, because that’s what 10x productivity looks like! All I see are the same old broken products and services from basically the same handful of big players, higher costs, and more bugs. Remember when every year iOS and Android saw loads of new features and a radical rethink every few years? And that happened on ancient hardware and in a significantly smaller industry. Where is anything like that happening now?

> How much time do we have to wait before we are allowed to criticize AI?

You are allowed to criticize it, just not because "the progress has been too slow". It was not.

I'll criticize Copilot with you. It's terrible and close to useless and it's a terrible shame that many companies got stuck with it due to being early adopters of this crap. I'm sorry for my friends who are employed by such companies.

Progress between Copilot and something like a gpt-6.1-sol in a good harness is at least as big as few Android versions.

> to just hear a friendly voice

This is far from being proven as a net gain and there are massive lawsuits incoming related to AI recommending suicide to kids and others.

In all fairness, depression and suicide have existed before LLMs.

Safety systems are not optimal but improving everyday and although I doubt we'll ever get a perfect safety system, it seems that we're not very far from a "good" safety system. The days of Google recommending glue on pizza and generating diverse Nazis seem behind us.

Not to mention all the untold good that LLMs have done. Personally I've seen that LLMs are incredibly good at pointing conspiracy nuts and extremists into the right (moderate) direction.

In a polarised world, we definitely need that.

What do you think happens when political ad buyer start buying inception style hints in chat bot answers?

Also, rage baiting also drives up chat bot conversation durations.

The incentives are exactly the same as for Facebook and Google Search.

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