Bjorkbat

I was actually watching this case precisely because it has implications for generative AI

Honestly, I’d probably agree if such sentiments were expressed by an independent scientist or group of independent scientists.

But no, instead Congress is listening to a guy who’s likelihood of being the subject of a Hulu documentary is increasing with each passing day.

Lol, thanks Nicky Case, I needed that

Scary as the prospect of job losses sounds, I feel like the real threat is that AI copywriting is just going to destroy content marketing altogether as businesses try to outdo each other with more noise and people begin to tune-out of the internet once they realize just how much of it is made by bots.

I think we overestimate how much normal people are plugged into the internet and I don’t think we give enough credit to the idea that trends in internet use might reverse course once they realize every person they talk to is a bot and everything they encounter was made by bots.

Kind of upsetting given that BuzzFeed News was probably the sole good part of BuzzFeed.

All the other stuff people love to hate is staying. Quizzes, listicles, celebrity garbage, they’re keeping that

Depending on how much you believe autism is hereditary you could argue that these couples are going to really cause problems for humanity’s gene pool.

Something kind of funny (but mostly annoying), about this announcement is the people arguing that OpenAI is, in fact, working on GPT-5 in secret.

To my knowledge, NFT/crypto hype never got so bad that conspiracy theories began to circulate (though I’m sure there were some if you looked hard enough).

Can’t wait for an AIAnon community to emerge.

Personally, I think no-code tools are much more of an existential threat than LLMs. Or rather, they should be. Instead, despite the prevalence of tools that seek to democratize software authorship, the demand for software engineers has yet to abate.

As for why, my best theory is that writing code isn’t the hard part, but in fact one of the easier parts of the job, much like how drafting isn’t really the hard part when it comes to engineering or architecture.

That's kind of what I was betting on. I don't see it going away anytime soon, but I also think it's potential impact is being overblown.

With regards to AI image generators, I think people overestimate the importance of illustration skills to visual creatives. Namely, if you look at the top graphic designers, something you pick up on is that they aren't necessarily known for their top-tier illustration skills. Anyone can theoretically make a logo in the style of Paul Rand, yet curiously, hardly anyone ever does.

Even if the person in question is an illustrator, I think what fundamentally makes them valuable as an illustrator is that they know what to draw rather than how to draw.

It's sentiments like these that make me question the notion of certain careers getting disrupted by AI as opposed to simply improved by it.

Incidentally I was about to say that even speculation based on present utility can get a little bit out there. Modern AI is already quite good at generating code snippets, and it already increases developer productivity, but just how much is that going to really change things? Just how much more productive is an AI-augmented software developer? Are LLMs really the thing that was missing from no-code website / app builders?

I wouldn't say it's obvious that this stuff hasn't been scaled to the limit. I mean, sure, you could make bigger LLMs, but I don't think it's a given that LLM performance will increase in performance in a predictable fashion. If anything I think that performance probably resembles an S curve where performance matches improvements in scale before sharply plateauing. When's the plateau?

GPT-4 is a clear improvement over GPT-3, but it's also 6x larger, and so far I haven't quite seen any real evidence to suggest that it's 6x better, other than the fact that it scored better on tests.

You've pretty much nailed what I've been thinking about when comparing generative AI hype to crypto/metaverse hype.

I keep hearing this argument that generative AI has more utility, making it more "real". Sure, but they're missing the point, which is that people made some pretty ridiculous claims about the future utility of crypto / metaverse ($100k bitcoin, metaverse real-estate speculation) rather than the present day possibilities, and they're continuing to make ridiculous claims about the future utility of AI (the end of web development, AGI soon, etc).

The hype isn't about present day possibilities, but about future speculation, and the future speculation can get off-the-rails crazy.

I made a similar comment here on HN, but in a different post, in response to someone arguing that there should be fewer spoken languages and that the death of a language was “a good thing”. A language is more than a means of communication. It’s a culture. It’s a world.

It was a disappointing lesson in how reductive people can be.

Language is pretty foundational to culture. When you lose a language you lose more than a way of speaking, but also the subtleties and emotions behind the "shape" of certain words, not to mention those words that reflect something so unique to that culture that you can't really translate them. The death of a language is the death of a world.

Saying there should be fewer spoken languages is frankly a very unempathetic thing to say.

We also have Genizaros (a kind of Spanish corruption of the word Janissary). They're descended from Native American slaves who were freed by the Spanish in exchange for settling on frontier outposts.

New Mexico's a strange place. Technically "New" Mexico is older than regular Mexico by over two centuries in that New Mexico earned its name as early as 1563.

Very exciting!

On a side-note, I wonder if this decision relates to Stripe’s ambitions to IPO soonish.

Kind of a tangential comment, but something I think about semi-regularly is that AI in a way feels like overkill for removing the programming part of software engineering. When you think about it, it's kind of surprising that we still program using text editors and IDEs instead of an interface that's more graphical. For that matter, it's also kind of surprising that GUI nocode builders have yet to really make an impact on the job market. Webflow exists, and has countless predecessors, and yet it and its competitors aren't really an existential threat to web developers.

His use of the term "shape rotator" kind of helps me articulate my thoughts on the matter. My theory is that attempts to democratize software authorship focus too much on the writing code part, but ultimately do nothing to address the "shape rotator" part, i.e. imagining the problem(s) you're trying to solve as abstract shapes. When I imagine the problem at hand, I construct a kind of mental model of it without really thinking about it all that much.

With that in mind, could our current approach to AI ultimately scale to the point where non-shape-rotators can finally write software as capably, or will it reach a plateau where shape rotators still retain their monopoly on software authorship?

If it's the latter case, then AI might not prove that much of a threat to programming simply because shape rotators seem to really like their text-editors, and really like to program

EDIT: some quick follow-up remarks, but despite feeling that AI art generators are unethical, I also feel at the same time that we're overestimating their potential damage because I think they democratize the wrong thing, which in this case is skill with a paintbrush or similar equivalent, yet they don't really democratize creativity and imagination. I think a lot of AI art is ugly, but I think that's largely due to the fact that the people using AI art generators simply aren't that creative or imaginative. By contrast, people who are creative and imaginative will understand that it's easier to get what they're looking for simply by a more direct, hands-on approach, rather than trying to find "good enough" through a prompt. Sure, people will get good-enough for free in lieu of paying someone more for better, but that's been an issue in the creative industry well before the advent of AI, and often with predictable results. Namely, good-enough doesn't typically create value so much as serve as a placeholder for something deemed essential, i.e. it's good-enough. A restaurant with good-enough branding, or a book with a good-enough book cover, is the same as a restaurant with no-branding or a book with no cover.

You’re implicitly trying to make a prediction on where the technology is going based on present trends, something that the industry has never been good at.

Remember how 3D printing was supposed to be ubiquitous by now? Or how self-driving cars would lead to an economic apocalypse because of how reliant the economy is on truckers? Remember all the predictions of bitcoin going to $100k? Remember how an AI startup called “The Grid” was making news for their AI website builder back in 2016 (edit: 2014)?

Don’t even get me started on VR and mixed reality. Remember Magic Leap?

My takeaway from all this, other than that futurists are hucksters, is that progress is actually quite slow, and relies on sudden, unpredictable breakthroughs. I mean, without the iPhone, we arguably wouldn’t have smartphone apps, the death of Flash, or responsive websites. Arguably, without this single pivotal product, tech as we know it would be a very different place. I know it’s a stretch to some to call the iPhone a breakthrough, but it’s impact has been pretty huge.

The catch is knowing when something is a real breakthrough, and when it isn’t. I genuinely thought that the Oculus was at the time, and yet here we are, years later, and it seems like nothing has changed, aside from incremental improvements in VR display technology and a very niche VR gaming community.

GPT-4 is clearly impressive from a technical standpoint, useful even, but where does it really go from here? Does the technology take off, or does it plateau in its present state?

Is it VR and 3D printers all over again?

Yeah, I was about to say the same thing. The use of technical debt is a bit “funny” in that they’re using it to refer to a deficit of software, whereas it’s more commonly used to refer to less-than-ideal code that will need to be fixed later.

For that reason, I could see AI-generated code leading to more tech debt since its output is, as the authors put it, “cheap enough to waste”. People might get the idea to just have it crank out AI code snippets with no real bearing on what they actually do or no real care to refactor said snippets for reuse / readability until their house of cards collapses.

I'm kind of skeptical of this simply because people were saying the same thing about chatbots back when there was a lot of hype around Messenger. Sure, they weren't as advanced as what we have now, but they were fundamentally capable of the same things.

Not only did the hype not pan out, but it feels as if they were completely forgotten.

In a nutshell that's why I'm still largely dismissive of anything related to GPT. It's 2016-2018 all over again. Same tech demos. Same promises. Same hype. I honestly can't see the big fundamental breakthroughs or major shifts. I just see improvements, but not game-changing ones.

I won't argue with you that they have gotten more colorful, but I feel like they've also lost a lot of originality as well. Advertising in the 60s and 80s seemed more fun and witty, and you had commercial artists like Andy Warhol giving ads a wholly unique style, despite the limitations of the craft back then.

Nowadays, we have Corporate Memphis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis).

Funny really. Despite creative tooling opening up new possibilities, I see the end result as a net loss in quality. Cheap generally wins out over great.

Ever the optimist, I like remind myself that in a world where good loses out to mediocre every single time, it's easier to stand out for being great.

The involuntarily celibate (don't say incel, that'll be a slur tomorrow) consider the word "fucking" to be a triggering term used by the sex-privileged /s

I generally err on the side of skepticism when it comes to LLM-derived innovation, but this has to be my favorite use case yet.

I’m intrigued as well, but especially with regards to how it would perform in the real world given that I’ve also observed that diffusion models aren’t great with vectors.

I suspect the example they used might have been cherry-picked

This touches on a big reason why it's so hard for me to get on board with generative AI. The hype around it is pretty much the same as the hype I saw with NFTs, complete with a community lacking any awareness of just how uninteresting, if not downright bad, their "art" was. We went from bad pixel art to people making some lame picture of two people holding hands in a foggy cyberpunk setting.

The hands aren't the problem. There, I said it. The hands were never a big deal, just the most visible symptom of the actual problem.

The problem is that AI art sucks and these people are too self-deluded to realize that because they want to believe that they have a shot at making that coveted internet money.

Otherwise, honestly, the tech behind AI art is actually pretty fascinating, it's just that the community is absolutely the worst.

Disappointed but not surprised that it suggested the most milquetoast idea possible: affiliate marketing.

The boldness of its orange color palette, obviously

This is really just the latest is a list of reasons why I no longer consider reading by itself to be an intellectual past-time. The line between books and content is "blurring", and has been well-before ChatGPT. You could "write a book" with a modest budget using a team of ghostwriters on Fiverr. Splurge a bit more and you could commission some illustrations from a desperate artist in a country with significantly less purchasing power than the US. Instructional ebooks are little more than blog posts.

I mean, obviously, reading isn't bad, it's just that I have suspicions about anyone who prides themselves of being an avid reader.

That all being said, you'd be surprised by the money that exists out there. Coworker of mine had a wife who wrote erotic fiction in ebook formats. She made about $80,000 a month doing that, though about half of that went to advertising, and another chunk of money went to employing a bunch of ghostwriters, not to mention hiring models to do photoshoots for book covers. Still, that's nearly $1 million every year before taxes and expenses. Can you truly say your startup is doing better?

Call me crazy, but I think that it's premature to think that Microsoft's days of bungling acquisitions are over. They probably will manage to ruin Github, the catch being that it'll happen over a much longer timescale.

Really should have seen that when Atom fell to the sidelines in favor of VS Code.

Admittedly though, I don't see myself using Gitlab anytime soon, if not indefinitely. What makes Github special, arguably, is that it looks less "businessy" and more fun and social.

Another reason why I think the ruination of Github will happen over a longer timescale. Any competitors will likely try to focus on trying to be different (i.e. Gitlab's focus on open source and dev ops) rather than try to focus on on what made Github special and do it better than Microsoft could ever hope to do.

EDIT: just to clarify, this comment relates because forcing teams to use products developed in-house erodes team culture. It's an attempt at assimilation.

Looking forward to when Etsy becomes the new Silk Road. I can shop for hand-crafted gifts for friends and family, and a little black tar heroin for myself, all in one go.

Ah, all these arguments seem to be too much of a reach for me. I have a much simpler theory as to why we think flowers are beautiful.

One of our distant evolutionary ancestors was a small primate that fed on the nectar of flowers, kind of like bees. Speaking of, it probably also lived in hives, hence why humans also tend to live in hives (well, cities, same thing).