#ai

idea

Large language models are good stochastic parrots that give the impression of intelligence and sentience. However useful they are, they remain a probabilistic model of text generation.

As a corollary, using LLMs does not require data scientists.

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I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again

And then some absolute son of a bitch created ChatGPT, and now look at us. Look at us, resplendent in our pauper's robes, stitched from corpulent greed and breathless credulity, spending half of the planet's engineering efforts to add chatbot support to every application under the sun when half of the industry hasn't worked out how to test database backups regularly

Your managed security provider is probably using some algorithms baked up in a lab software to detect anomalous traffic, and here's a secret, they didn't do much AI work either, they bought software from the tiny sector of the market that actually does need to do employ data scientists

Most organizations cannot ship the most basic applications imaginable with any consistency, and you're out here saying that the best way to remain competitive is to roll out experimental technology that is an order of magnitude more sophisticated than anything else your I.T department runs, which you have no experience hiring for

A second outcome is that it turns out that the current approach does not scale in the way that we would hope, for myriad reasons. There isn't enough data on the planet, the architecture doesn't work they way we'd expect, the thing just stops getting smarter, context windows are a limiting factor forever, etc. In this universe, some industries will be heavily disrupted, such as customer support.

In the case that generative AI goes on some rocketship trajectory, building random chatbots will not prepare you for the future.

If another stupid motherfucker asks me to try and implement LLM-based code review to "raise standards" instead of actually teaching people a shred of discipline, I am going to study enough judo to throw them into the goddamn sun.

I had my fun with Copilot before I decided that it was making me stupider - it's impressive, but not actually suitable for anything more than churning out boilerplate. Nothing wrong with that, but it did not end up being the crazy productivity booster that I thought it would be, because programming is designing and these tools aren't good enough (yet) to assist me with this seriously.