AI is nothing more than a way for big businesses to automate more work and fire more people.
and do that at the expense of 30+ years of power reduction and efficiency gains, to the point that private companies are literally buying/building/restarting old power plants just to cover the insane power demand, because literally operating a power plant is cheaper than paying the energy costs.
For the common every day person its 3d tv and every other bullshit fad that burned brilliantly for all of 3 seconds before snuffing itself out, leaving people to have had paid for overpriced garbage thats no longer useful.
I admit I understand nothing about ai and haven’t used it in any way nor do I plan to. It feels wrong for me and I believe it might fuck us harder than social media ever could.
But the pictures it creates, the stories and conversations don’t seem like hot air. And I guess, compared to the internet we are at the stage where the modem is still singing the songs of its people. There is more to come.
I heard it can code at a level where entry positions might be in danger to be swapped for ai. It detects cancer visually, recognizes people by the way they walk in China.
Also I fear that vulnerable persons might fall for those conversation bots in a world where there is less and less personal contact.
Gotta admit I’m a little afraid it will make most of us useless in the future.
It makes somewhat passable mediocrity, very quickly when directly used for such things. The stories it writes from the simplest of prompts is always shallow and full of cliche (and over-represented words like “delve”). To get it to write good prose basically requires breaking down writing, the activity, into its stream of constituent, tiny tasks and then treating the model like the machine it is. And this hack generalizes out to other tasks, too, including writing code. It isn’t alive. It isn’t even thinking. But if you treat these things as rigid robots getting specific work done, you can make then do real things. The problem is asking experts to do all of that labor to hyper segment the work and micromanage the robot. Doing that is actually more work than just asking the expert to do the task themselves. It is still a very rough tool. It will definitely not replace the intern, just yet. At least my interns submit code changes that compile.
Don’t worry, human toil isn’t going anywhere. All of this stuff is super new and still comparatively useless. Right now, the early adopters are mostly remixing what has worked reliably. We have yet to see truly novel applications yet. What you will see in the near future will be lots of “enhanced” products that you can talk to. Whether you want to or not. The human jobs lost to the first wave of AI automation will likely be in the call center. The important industries such as agriculture are already so hyper automated, it will take an enormous investment to close the 2% left. Many, many industries will be that way, even after AI. And for a slightly more cynical take: Human labor will never go away because having power over machines isn’t the same as having power over other humans. We won’t let computers make us all useless.
Thanks for easing my mind a little. You definetly did in perspective to labor.
You also reminded me I already had my first encounter with a callcenter AI by telekom and it was just as useless as the human equivalent, they seem to get similar training!
I just hope it won’t hinder or replace interhuman connection on a larger scale cause in this sphere mediocrity might be enough and we are already lacking there.
The albeit small but present virtual girlfriend culture in Japan really shocked me and I feel we are not far away from things like AI-droid wives for example.
The latest llms get a perfect score on the south Korean SAT and can pass the bar. More than pure marketing if you ask me. That does not mean 90% of business that claim ai are nothing more than marketing or the business that are pretty much just a front end for GPT APIs. llms like claud even check their work for hallucinations. Even if we limited all ai to llms they would still be groundbreaking.
Korean SAT are highly standardized in multiple choice form and there is an immense library of past exams that both test takers and examiners use. I would be more impressed if the LLMs could show also step by step problem work out…
I know tons of full stack developers who use AI to GREATLY speed up their workflow. I’ve used AI image generators to put something I wanted into the concept stage before I paid an artist to do the work with the revisions I wanted that I couldn’t get AI to produce properly.
And first and foremost, they’re a great use in surfacing information that is discussed and available, but might be buried with no SEO behind it to surface it. They are terrible at deducing things themselves, because they can’t ‘think’, or coming up with solutions that others haven’t already - but so long as people are aware of those limitations, then they’re a pretty good tool to have.
It’s a reactionary opinion when people jump to the ‘but they’re stealing art!’ – isn’t your brain also stealing art when it’s inspired by others art? Artists don’t just POOF, and have the capability to be artists. They learn slowly over time, using others as inspiration or as training to improve. That’s all stable diffusors do - just a lot faster.
He isnt wrong. This comes from somebody who technically uses ai daily to help develop ( github copilot in visual studio to assist in code prediction based on the code base of the solution ), but AI is marketed even worse than blockchain back in 2017. Its everywhere, in every product, even if it doesnt have ai or has nothing to do with it. Monitor ai shit? Mouse with ai? Hell, ive seen a sketch of a fucking toaster with ‘ai’.
There is shit like microsoft recall, apple intelligence, bing co pilot, office co pilot, …
All of those are just… Nothing special or useful.
There are also chatbots which bring nothing new to the table either.
Everyone and everything wants to market there stuff with ai and its disgusting.
Does that mean that current ai tech cant bring anything to the table? No, it totally can, but 90% of ai stuff out there is, just like linus says, marketing bullshit.
Speaking as someone who worked on AI, and is a fervent (local) AI enthusiast… it’s 90% marketing and hype, at least.
These things are tools, they spit out tons of garbage, they basically can’t be used for anything where the output could likely be confidently wrong, and the way they’re trained is still morally dubious at best. And the corporate API business model of “stifle innovation so we can hold our monopoly then squeeze users” is hellish.
As you pointed out, generative AI is a fantastic tool, but it is a TOOL, that needs some massive changes and improvements, wrapped up in hype that gives it a bad name… I drank some of the kool-aid too when llama 1 came out, but you have to look at the market and see how much fud and nonsense is flying around.
I used copilot until finally getting fed up last week and turning it off. It was a net negative to my productivity.
Sure, when you’re doing repetitive operations that are mostly copy paste and changing names, it’s pretty decent. It can save dozens of seconds, maybe even a minute or two. That’s great and a welcome assist, even if I have to correct minor things around 50% of the time.
But when an error slips through and I end up spending 20 minutes tracking down the problem later, all that saved time vanishes.
And then the other times where my IDE is frozen because the plugin is stuck in some loop and eating every last resource and I spend the next 20 minutes cursing and killing processes, manually looking for recent updates that hadn’t yet triggered update notifications, etc… well, now we’re in the red, AND I’m pissed off.
So no, AI is not some huge boon to developer productivity. Maybe it’s more useful to junior developers in the short term, but I have definitely dealt with more than a few problems that seem to derive from juniors taking AI answers and not understanding the details enough to catch the problems it introduced. And if juniors frequently rely on AI without gaining deep understanding, we’re going to have worse and worse engineers as a result.
In a way he’s right, but it depends! If you take even a common example like Chat GPT or the native object detection used in iPhone cameras, you’d see that there’s a lot of cool stuff already enabled by our current way of building these tools. The limitation right now, I think, is reacting to new information or scenarios which a model isn’t trained on, which is where all the current systems break. Humans do well in new scenarios based on their cognitive flexibility, and at least I am unaware of a good framework for instilling cognitive flexibility in machines.
Mr. Torvalds is truly a generous man, giving the current AI market an analysis of 10% usefulness is probably a decimal or two more than will end up panning out once the hype bubble pops.
That’s about right. I’ve been using LLMs to automate a lot of cruft work from my dev job daily, it’s like having a knowledgeable intern who sometimes impresses you with their knowledge but need a lot of guidance.
Same here but this one was especially painful since it was the closest match with my experience I’ve ever encountered in 20ish years and now I know that they will never give me the time of day again and; based on my experience in silicon valley; may end up on a thier blacklist permanently.
Blacklists are heavily overrated and exaggerated, I’d say there’s no chance you’re on a blacklist. Hell, if you interview with them 3 years later, it’s entirely possible they have no clue who you are and end up hiring you - I’ve had literally that exact scenario happen. Tons of companies allow you to re-apply within 6 months of interviewing, let alone 12 months or longer.
The only way you’d end up on a blacklist is if you accidentally step on the owners dog during the interview or something like that.
Being on the other side of the interviewing table for the last 20ish years and being told that we’re not going to hire people that everyone unanimously loved and we unquestionably needed more times that I want to remember makes me think that blacklists are common.
In all of the cases I’ve experienced in the last decade or so: people who had faang and old silicon on their resumes but couldn’t do basic things like creating an ansible playbook from scratch were either an automatic addition to that list or at least the butt of a joke that pervades the company’s cool aide drinker culture for years afterwards; especially so in recruiting.
Yes they’ll eventually forget and I think it’s proportional to how egregious or how close to home your perceived misrepresentation is to them.
I think I’ve probably only ever been blacklisted once in my entire career, and it’s because I looked up the reviews of a company I applied to and they had some very concerning stuff so I just ghosted them completely and never answered their calls after we had already begun to play a bit of phone tag prior to that trying to arrange an interview.
In my defense, they took a good while to reply to my application and they never sent any emails just phone calls, which it’s like, come on I’m a developer you know I don’t want to sit on the phone all day like I’m a sales person or something, send an email to schedule an interview like every other company instead of just spamming phone calls lol
Agreed though, eventually they will forget, it just needs enough time, and maybe you’d not even want to work there.
In addition, there have been these studies released (not so sure how well established, so take this with a grain of salt) lately, indicating a correlation with increased perceived efficiency/productivity, but also a strongly linked decrease in actual efficiency/productivity, when using LLMs for dev work.
After some initial excitement, I’ve dialed back using them to zero, and my contributions have been on the increase. I think it just feels good to spitball, which translates to heightened sense of excitement while working. But it’s really just much faster and convenient to do the boring stuff with snippets and templates etc, if not as exciting. We’ve been doing pair programming lately with humans, and while that’s slower and less efficient too, seems to contribute towards rise in quality and less problems in code review later, while also providing the spitballing side. In a much better format, I think, too, though I guess that’s subjective.
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He is correct. It is mostly people cashing out on stuff that isn’t there.
AI is nothing more than a way for big businesses to automate more work and fire more people.
and do that at the expense of 30+ years of power reduction and efficiency gains, to the point that private companies are literally buying/building/restarting old power plants just to cover the insane power demand, because literally operating a power plant is cheaper than paying the energy costs.
For the common every day person its 3d tv and every other bullshit fad that burned brilliantly for all of 3 seconds before snuffing itself out, leaving people to have had paid for overpriced garbage thats no longer useful.
Just like Furbys
I admit I understand nothing about ai and haven’t used it in any way nor do I plan to. It feels wrong for me and I believe it might fuck us harder than social media ever could.
But the pictures it creates, the stories and conversations don’t seem like hot air. And I guess, compared to the internet we are at the stage where the modem is still singing the songs of its people. There is more to come.
I heard it can code at a level where entry positions might be in danger to be swapped for ai. It detects cancer visually, recognizes people by the way they walk in China. Also I fear that vulnerable persons might fall for those conversation bots in a world where there is less and less personal contact.
Gotta admit I’m a little afraid it will make most of us useless in the future.
It makes somewhat passable mediocrity, very quickly when directly used for such things. The stories it writes from the simplest of prompts is always shallow and full of cliche (and over-represented words like “delve”). To get it to write good prose basically requires breaking down writing, the activity, into its stream of constituent, tiny tasks and then treating the model like the machine it is. And this hack generalizes out to other tasks, too, including writing code. It isn’t alive. It isn’t even thinking. But if you treat these things as rigid robots getting specific work done, you can make then do real things. The problem is asking experts to do all of that labor to hyper segment the work and micromanage the robot. Doing that is actually more work than just asking the expert to do the task themselves. It is still a very rough tool. It will definitely not replace the intern, just yet. At least my interns submit code changes that compile.
Don’t worry, human toil isn’t going anywhere. All of this stuff is super new and still comparatively useless. Right now, the early adopters are mostly remixing what has worked reliably. We have yet to see truly novel applications yet. What you will see in the near future will be lots of “enhanced” products that you can talk to. Whether you want to or not. The human jobs lost to the first wave of AI automation will likely be in the call center. The important industries such as agriculture are already so hyper automated, it will take an enormous investment to close the 2% left. Many, many industries will be that way, even after AI. And for a slightly more cynical take: Human labor will never go away because having power over machines isn’t the same as having power over other humans. We won’t let computers make us all useless.
Thanks for easing my mind a little. You definetly did in perspective to labor.
You also reminded me I already had my first encounter with a callcenter AI by telekom and it was just as useless as the human equivalent, they seem to get similar training!
I just hope it won’t hinder or replace interhuman connection on a larger scale cause in this sphere mediocrity might be enough and we are already lacking there.
The albeit small but present virtual girlfriend culture in Japan really shocked me and I feel we are not far away from things like AI-droid wives for example.
No AI is a very real thing… just not LLMs, those are pure marketing
The latest llms get a perfect score on the south Korean SAT and can pass the bar. More than pure marketing if you ask me. That does not mean 90% of business that claim ai are nothing more than marketing or the business that are pretty much just a front end for GPT APIs. llms like claud even check their work for hallucinations. Even if we limited all ai to llms they would still be groundbreaking.
Korean SAT are highly standardized in multiple choice form and there is an immense library of past exams that both test takers and examiners use. I would be more impressed if the LLMs could show also step by step problem work out…
Claud 3.5 and o1 might be able to do that; if not, they are close to being able to do that. Still better than 99.99% of earthly humans
Honestly, he’s wrong though.
I know tons of full stack developers who use AI to GREATLY speed up their workflow. I’ve used AI image generators to put something I wanted into the concept stage before I paid an artist to do the work with the revisions I wanted that I couldn’t get AI to produce properly.
And first and foremost, they’re a great use in surfacing information that is discussed and available, but might be buried with no SEO behind it to surface it. They are terrible at deducing things themselves, because they can’t ‘think’, or coming up with solutions that others haven’t already - but so long as people are aware of those limitations, then they’re a pretty good tool to have.
It’s a reactionary opinion when people jump to the ‘but they’re stealing art!’ – isn’t your brain also stealing art when it’s inspired by others art? Artists don’t just POOF, and have the capability to be artists. They learn slowly over time, using others as inspiration or as training to improve. That’s all stable diffusors do - just a lot faster.
He isnt wrong. This comes from somebody who technically uses ai daily to help develop ( github copilot in visual studio to assist in code prediction based on the code base of the solution ), but AI is marketed even worse than blockchain back in 2017. Its everywhere, in every product, even if it doesnt have ai or has nothing to do with it. Monitor ai shit? Mouse with ai? Hell, ive seen a sketch of a fucking toaster with ‘ai’.
There is shit like microsoft recall, apple intelligence, bing co pilot, office co pilot, …
All of those are just… Nothing special or useful. There are also chatbots which bring nothing new to the table either.
Everyone and everything wants to market there stuff with ai and its disgusting.
Does that mean that current ai tech cant bring anything to the table? No, it totally can, but 90% of ai stuff out there is, just like linus says, marketing bullshit.
If you are just blatantly copying art, well yeah you’re stealing it.
Let me guess. Dumped by an art girl and anxious about the $600 you invested?
Speaking as someone who worked on AI, and is a fervent (local) AI enthusiast… it’s 90% marketing and hype, at least.
These things are tools, they spit out tons of garbage, they basically can’t be used for anything where the output could likely be confidently wrong, and the way they’re trained is still morally dubious at best. And the corporate API business model of “stifle innovation so we can hold our monopoly then squeeze users” is hellish.
As you pointed out, generative AI is a fantastic tool, but it is a TOOL, that needs some massive changes and improvements, wrapped up in hype that gives it a bad name… I drank some of the kool-aid too when llama 1 came out, but you have to look at the market and see how much fud and nonsense is flying around.
AI can give me a blueprint for my logic. Then I, as a developer, make the code run. Cuts my scripting time in half.
Rofl. As a developer of nearly 20 years, lol.
I used copilot until finally getting fed up last week and turning it off. It was a net negative to my productivity.
Sure, when you’re doing repetitive operations that are mostly copy paste and changing names, it’s pretty decent. It can save dozens of seconds, maybe even a minute or two. That’s great and a welcome assist, even if I have to correct minor things around 50% of the time.
But when an error slips through and I end up spending 20 minutes tracking down the problem later, all that saved time vanishes.
And then the other times where my IDE is frozen because the plugin is stuck in some loop and eating every last resource and I spend the next 20 minutes cursing and killing processes, manually looking for recent updates that hadn’t yet triggered update notifications, etc… well, now we’re in the red, AND I’m pissed off.
So no, AI is not some huge boon to developer productivity. Maybe it’s more useful to junior developers in the short term, but I have definitely dealt with more than a few problems that seem to derive from juniors taking AI answers and not understanding the details enough to catch the problems it introduced. And if juniors frequently rely on AI without gaining deep understanding, we’re going to have worse and worse engineers as a result.
Yeah, he’s right. AI is mostly used by corps to enshittificate their products for just extra profit
it is basically like how self improvement folks are using quantum
In a way he’s right, but it depends! If you take even a common example like Chat GPT or the native object detection used in iPhone cameras, you’d see that there’s a lot of cool stuff already enabled by our current way of building these tools. The limitation right now, I think, is reacting to new information or scenarios which a model isn’t trained on, which is where all the current systems break. Humans do well in new scenarios based on their cognitive flexibility, and at least I am unaware of a good framework for instilling cognitive flexibility in machines.
I dunno about him; but genuinely I’m excited about AI. Blows my mind each passing day ;)
Mr. Torvalds is truly a generous man, giving the current AI market an analysis of 10% usefulness is probably a decimal or two more than will end up panning out once the hype bubble pops.
That’s about right. I’ve been using LLMs to automate a lot of cruft work from my dev job daily, it’s like having a knowledgeable intern who sometimes impresses you with their knowledge but need a lot of guidance.
watch out; i learned the hard way in an interview that i do this so much that i can no longer create terraform & ansible playbooks from scratch.
even a basic api call from scratch was difficult to remember and i’m sure i looked like a hack to them since they treated me as such.
I mean, interviews have always been hell for me (often with multiple rounds of leetcode) so there’s nothing new there for me lol
Same here but this one was especially painful since it was the closest match with my experience I’ve ever encountered in 20ish years and now I know that they will never give me the time of day again and; based on my experience in silicon valley; may end up on a thier blacklist permanently.
Blacklists are heavily overrated and exaggerated, I’d say there’s no chance you’re on a blacklist. Hell, if you interview with them 3 years later, it’s entirely possible they have no clue who you are and end up hiring you - I’ve had literally that exact scenario happen. Tons of companies allow you to re-apply within 6 months of interviewing, let alone 12 months or longer.
The only way you’d end up on a blacklist is if you accidentally step on the owners dog during the interview or something like that.
Being on the other side of the interviewing table for the last 20ish years and being told that we’re not going to hire people that everyone unanimously loved and we unquestionably needed more times that I want to remember makes me think that blacklists are common.
In all of the cases I’ve experienced in the last decade or so: people who had faang and old silicon on their resumes but couldn’t do basic things like creating an ansible playbook from scratch were either an automatic addition to that list or at least the butt of a joke that pervades the company’s cool aide drinker culture for years afterwards; especially so in recruiting.
Yes they’ll eventually forget and I think it’s proportional to how egregious or how close to home your perceived misrepresentation is to them.
I think I’ve probably only ever been blacklisted once in my entire career, and it’s because I looked up the reviews of a company I applied to and they had some very concerning stuff so I just ghosted them completely and never answered their calls after we had already begun to play a bit of phone tag prior to that trying to arrange an interview.
In my defense, they took a good while to reply to my application and they never sent any emails just phone calls, which it’s like, come on I’m a developer you know I don’t want to sit on the phone all day like I’m a sales person or something, send an email to schedule an interview like every other company instead of just spamming phone calls lol
Agreed though, eventually they will forget, it just needs enough time, and maybe you’d not even want to work there.
In addition, there have been these studies released (not so sure how well established, so take this with a grain of salt) lately, indicating a correlation with increased perceived efficiency/productivity, but also a strongly linked decrease in actual efficiency/productivity, when using LLMs for dev work.
After some initial excitement, I’ve dialed back using them to zero, and my contributions have been on the increase. I think it just feels good to spitball, which translates to heightened sense of excitement while working. But it’s really just much faster and convenient to do the boring stuff with snippets and templates etc, if not as exciting. We’ve been doing pair programming lately with humans, and while that’s slower and less efficient too, seems to contribute towards rise in quality and less problems in code review later, while also providing the spitballing side. In a much better format, I think, too, though I guess that’s subjective.
I agree with Mr. Torvalds
“duh.”
100% hyped by the people who’ve watched a few youtube videos and now claim they’re an expert