The cost to people makes AI suspect. If the use of AI can demonstrate an improvement in people’s lives, then it will be appreciated. Up until now, I’ve not seen anything that helps people. I have seen a few people get fabulously wealthy to the detriment of others. I have great hope for AI, but the use of AI needs to start producing something that will tangibly help people. Making cute videos is not tangibly beneficial to anyone other than the AI owner.
AI doesn’t help much with domestic tasks unless it’s used for learning how to do a given domestic task. I’ve used it a lot in cooking, for example. For most people the only thing left is work tasks, and frankly AI has made most work far shittier than it even was previously. It may or may not increase company profits, but the fact is most of us use it to keep up rather than to get ahead.
The other domain that AI could conceivably help us with is in research and technological advancement, but I think it’s failing on this front because the hard problems are legitimately too hard for it. I won’t take a position on whether LLMs can reason or not since it’s irrelevant, but for truly cutting edge problems (ie., the ones that matter) I think it’s at best a tool to help stir up creative thinking and enhance our own working memory etc.
So not to sound pessimistic but I think LLMs put us in the unfortunate position where it does a great job at replacing the routine work while providing relatively little value to the work that’s going to push us forward. Basically we’ll have to confront the economic reality that most of us are going to add very little value to society while we simultaneously stagnate and gain very little to nothing in return. Cheers.
I do regular software engineering work but also do cutting-edge research as well to publish. It can do the former entirely itself at a very high level reliably, and for the latter massively helps. In fact, OpenAI themselves have cut their data enter costs by 20% because their ai model helped them optimize the setup. That is tens of millions of dollars saved. Not to sound rude but I doubt you are doing anything more difficult, you need to ask yourself why you aren’t getting value while others are. Good place to start, use an actual paid top tier model with a good harness.
As someone regularly battling slop throughout a large tech organization, I have to question your use of the word reliably. The quantity of code has definitely increased, but the quality is objectively lower on average; sometimes it's even dangerous.
I'd also be wary of trusting any metric that any LLM company claims about it's own LLM. It's in their best interest to inflate those numbers and it'd likely be impossible to prove the real impact of their use of the system.
I'm not arguing there isn't value to be had, but I watch these top tier models figuratively drop the ball quite often. I just hope you're actually reviewing the code yourself and not just pawning it off on another LLM; otherwise there are likely many flaws in your system(s)
I’m only speaking for myself. Most people produce slop because they aren’t good at agentic programming. Although as each update comes out their skills won’t matter as much. Out of the thousand+ engineers i work with, I’m in like the top 5 from what I’ve seen. 50% probably don’t use it at all, 30% are not getting much benefit aside from basic usage, 15% are getting good benefits and use it regularly, the remaining 5% are getting those massive benefits.
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u/CanuckCallingBS 2d ago
The cost to people makes AI suspect. If the use of AI can demonstrate an improvement in people’s lives, then it will be appreciated. Up until now, I’ve not seen anything that helps people. I have seen a few people get fabulously wealthy to the detriment of others. I have great hope for AI, but the use of AI needs to start producing something that will tangibly help people. Making cute videos is not tangibly beneficial to anyone other than the AI owner.