this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2024
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Huh?
The smartphone improvements hit a rubber wall a few years ago (disregarding folding screens, that compose a small market share, improvement rate slowed down drastically), and the industry is doing fine. It's not growing like it use to, but that just means people are keeping their smartphones for longer periods of time, not that people stopped using them.
Even if AI were to completely freeze right now, people will continue using it.
Why are people reacting like AI is going to get dropped?
Because novelty is all it has. As soon as it stops improving in a way that makes people say "oh that's neat", it has to stand on the practical merits of its capabilities, which is, well, not much.
I’m so baffled by this take. “Create a terraform module that implements two S3 buckets with cross-region bidirectional replication. Include standard module files like linting rules and enable precommit.” Could I write that? Yes. But does this provide an outstanding stub to start from? Also yes.
And beyond programming, it is otherwise having positive impact on science and medicine too. I mean, anybody who doesn’t see any merit has their head in the sand. That of course must be balanced with not falling for the hype, but the merits are very real.
The merits are real. I do understand the deep mistrust people have for tech companies, but there's far too much throwing out of the baby with the bath water.
As a solo developer, LLMs are a game-changer. They've allowed me to make amazing progress on some of my own projects that I've been stuck on for ages.
But it's not just technical subjects that benefit from LLMs. ChatGPT has been a great travel guide for me. I uploaded a pic of some architecture in Berlin and it went into the history of it, I asked it about some damage to an old church in Spain - turned out to be from the Spanish civil war, where revolutionaries had been mowed down by Franco's firing squads.
Just today, I was getting help from an LLM for an email to a Portuguese removals company. I sent my message in English with a Portuguese translation, but the guy just replied back with a single sentence in broken English:
"Yes a can , need tho mow m3 you need delivery after e gif the price"
The first bit is pretty obviously "Yes I can" but I couldn't really be sure what he was trying to say with the rest of it. So I asked ChatGPT who responded:
Thanks to LLMs, I'm able to accomplish so many things that would have previously taken multiple internet searches and way more effort.
Okay now justify the cost it took to create the tool.