Technology

A lot of people working in finance were not alive when that movie was taking place and like the movie Wall Street the ones who watched it learned all the wrong lessons.

I automate plenty with it, no you cant be an idiot about it but i can do what used to take me weeks in hours with it.

It doesn't need to fully automate anything to make people more productive. And I think there's ample evidence it can greatly increase productivity in some fields. We're in the bumpy phase of finding out how much human supervision is needed in each field so you're bound to hear about ways it has been misused but everyone I've talked to who uses it professionally thinks it helps them get a lot more done than without it.

It's not reliable enough to actually automate anything

This is half true. It's not reliable enough to automate an entire job but it is reliable enough to automate tasks that would otherwise take a lot of time, usually related to sifting or searching data.

If I need to look through a massive set of data like Google for something thst I can only describe with an explanation, the LLM will do a much faster job actually finding what you need rather thsn spending an hour manually sorting through SEO slop.

You don't even need the cloud models for this, you can slap SearXNG onto a local model at home.

It's basically just an autocomplete search on steroids which is its biggest advantage. Any documentation you need is immediately accessible, which is especially useful if you have zero experience with something niche or new.

Now actually getting the LLM to consistently generate output is a completely different story lol.

We call that vibe coding.

It is useful for programming, I know a lot of people here don't want to hear that, but denying it now is being willfully ignorant. No it isn't good enough that you can tell it "just go do the thing" and then accept what it gives you without checking it, but using it as a tool as a professional can very much improve your work and how quickly you do things.

For me recently I used it to unpick a nasty race condition that was occasionally causing a program I was working on to lock up and couldn't figure out why. It took some back and forth with it but it did help me figure it out when before I had been stumped.

I'm not an expert but my understanding is most of the computation is in the training. The actual queries are not too difficult to manage. So I think that's what makes it more difficult to monetize because you're trying to position yourself as a digital gatekeeper for work that has already been done. Yes, some industries have survived in this position but it limits the amount of profit you can make because there are always ways to copy someone else's homework. So if prices are too high people will opt out because they have other options even if they're slightly less quality or convenience.

Is that a forecast or fanfic?

The last 2 bullets are so damn true. And trying to argue that is just pointless. So I’ve shifted to the money part of it and have asked “how are you preparing for the bubble to burst?” and back it up with that data.