Discussion

The AI Great Leap Forward

mholm: Decent sentiment and analogy, but writing this with AI with hackneyed examples undercuts the point

supliminal: What’s the story with Klarna? Any details around it?

IanCal: > Today’s backyard AI looks like AI. It is not AI.Getting real tired of people new to AI thinking only recent LLMs are AI somehow. BoW was a pretty solid technique and that only requires you to learn how to count to one.

mrbungie: We can thank our AI overlords like sama and damodei for that.

madrox: It’s the punchline at the very end of the article. They ended up with a different SaaS vendor.

arisAlexis: The outputs were wrong 2 years ago maybe.

turtletontine: I’m noticing one hallmark of blog posts made by people who talk to LLMs all day: they have 1-3 interesting points hidden in paragraphs upon paragraphs beating the horse dead. Your favorite LLM might tell you every thought is brilliant and all your words are beautiful, but please… edit it down. At the very least, out of respect for other people’s time.

skybrian: If you want to show that that there's a risk of disaster you need to do better than making a silly analogy. Companies will often start expensive projects that fail and then they pick themselves up and move on. Big, profitable companies can afford bigger failures. Google has had a slew of failed projects, and Meta's metaverse stuff tanked, and they're still fine. They can afford to experiment.So which companies are betting so big that it might actually threaten them? Oracle maybe?

outside1234: Seems clear to me that OpenAI at this point is a Ponzi scheme waiting to collapse. This is why they are trying to IPO and dump their shares on the public market before they go bankrupt.

gbnwl: Liked the article in general, but> These apps will win awards at the next all-hands. In two years they’ll be unmaintainable tech debt some poor soul inherits and rewrites from scratch.Huge assumption/prediction that I think is actually just wrong. There's this weird assumption from a certain crowd, never justified or explained, that tech debt accrued by AI is now, and will forever be, impossible for AI to address, and will for some reason require humans to fix. Working at pace with agents I accrue tech debt every day, then go through the code nightly, again with agents, to clean and tidy everything up.The more I see this view espoused the more bizzare it seems. People's assumptions seem to be "if AI couldn't one shot this perfectly the first time, then it's useless to try to have it go back over the codebase and identify and address issues". This doesn't match my personal experience at all, second or third passes over code with CC or Codex are almost always helpful and weed out critical issues, but I'm open to hearing from the rest of the HN crowd on their experiences on this.

deklesen: This also seems to implicitly assume that ai models won't get better - a bet I am not willing to make currently..

hperrin: AIs don’t produce well organized code. They duplicate effort, which is tech debt. Maybe one day they will be able to clear their own tech debt. And who knows, maybe they’ll still be heavily subsidized by VC money then.

apsurd: Tech debt used here is likely a catch all term, and you're disagreeing, reasonably so, with one definition.I think human understanding of the surface area of a company is already very unwieldy. AI balloons the surface area. at some point using more AI to solve AI is reasonable! But to whatever extent a human needs to interface and manage, that to me, is the acrued debt.

deltamidway: Great rant! Claw based propaganda posters makes me smile.

skybrian: Suppose they do somehow collapse. How does that cause wider problems? Their competitors will pick up customers.

e3df: Models get better with money (reinvestment).But if there aren't enough returns soon the money will eventually dry up for OAI and Anthropic and Google will not be trusted with their cash balance.Its amazing how people here think that money is a play-thing and this dance can go on forever. It cant and wont and the fear-induced marketing doesnt work forever either.

sph: Haven’t you heard? Putting in effort is not cool any more. The best they can do is ask an LLM to edit it down.

gbnwl: Agreed. The confidence people have to predict what these tools will be capable of two years down the line, when it's barely been over a year since Claude Code was first released, is astounding.

supliminal: Yeah I read through it but all of that is surface level. Any real insider info?Not sure why I was downvoted. I read the post and the linked articles.

cynicalsecurity: Oh god, don't get me started on this. The article goes full opera-level tragedy, like we're all marching into some corporate gulag where AI eats our souls and the lights go out forever. "The famine comes later" my ass. It's peak doomer porn, written to make you feel like the sky is falling instead of just another round of executive circle jerking.The corporate world has always been 80% lies, fake KPIs and theatre. "Synergies", "disruptive innovation" "digital transformation", same shit since the 90s. Managers don't give a flying fuck about your clever moat. They wake up one day, get a spreadsheet from McKinsey saying "cut 15%" and boom - your undocumented wizardry gets deleted along with your badge. Nothing personal, just Excel doing what Excel does.Yes, the corporate bullshitry has been turbocharged with AI now. But it's nothing new and nothing that much tragic. At the very least the same AI can help me finally release personal projects that have been collecting dust for years. Who knows what the future will bring. I'd be much more worried of oil supply chokehold than of AI turbo circus in the corporate world. No oil means not having enough food tomorrow; or medical supplies. My child might die because of this. But AI temporarily causing perturbations at work is just another round of corporate theatre. Been there many times.Employment danger is real, but not apocalyptic. Some jobs will evaporate, sure. But even as the same articles states, now once thing ("AI know-how") replaced another thing ("domain knowledge siloing"). The corporate machine still needs warm bodies for the messy human parts: sales, talking to customers (customers hate talking to a robot, what a fucking surprise), covering ass. I would say, covering ass is the most important one, along with delegating the project management to someone else below on the corporate hierarchy, so upper management wouldn't have to work and would only keep asking for status updates. They would always need someone to type the actual AI requests. It's not like top management or VP would ever do that, neither they would ever run it automatically, since AI can delete production (happened many times), and they don't want to be the scapegoats.So yeah, the article is overdramatic trash for clicks. AI is just another round of that circus. The "famine" won't be real, it'll be a bunch of overpromises, just as usual. Same as it ever has been.

layer8: If they collapse, then because their value proposition doesn’t add up. It’s unclear why that should be different with their competitors then.

justherefornews: It's called body text or even "bread text" in some languages. It was historically meant to pad the pay for bread (writers got paid per word). Americans still do to this day and writing and blogs reflect it as well.