> very clear and extremely rapid improvement in a startlingly short amount of time.
We're almost 6 months into all this AI-code madness and I've yet to see that "rapid improvement" you mention. As in software products that are genuinely better compared to 6 months ago, or new software products (and good software products at that) which would have not existed had this AI craze not happened.
Way more than six months. You may be talking about how the world looks from your vantage point, as well you should. But there’s a reason why the world doesn’t allocate trillions of dollars of capital based on that.
I really value skeptical people and skepticism generally. But what I think skeptical people would prefer to consider themselves is: rational and reasonable, with their beliefs well calibrated.
You’re not the only one to think that literally nothing major or significant has happened with AI but that’s simply wrong. Every major tech company - the ones poised to get the first best rewards, have already gotten good incremental revenue from AI via ads ranking/recommendations (Google, Meta, etc.), good productivity increases due to scale of workforce and advanced in house tooling. You won’t see these numbers and you don’t have to believe them. But I have seen them and I believe them, and I, like you, hate bullshit.
Classic argumentum ad populum fallacy. The world allocated the equivalent of trillions to the dotcom bubble shortly before it became the dotcom bust, mortgage CDOs before the 2008 debt crisis, and the cryptocurrency mania before its bubble popped. The world has allocated vast sums of money to rather stupid things many, many times in the past.
> Every major tech company - the ones poised to get the first best rewards, have already gotten good incremental revenue from AI via ads ranking/recommendations (Google, Meta, etc.)
That's just software evolving. It happened before LLMs, it would happen without LLMs.
> good productivity increases due to scale of workforce and advanced in house tooling.
Exactly same case.
But I don’t really understand: the ask is for evidence AI is generating meaningful returns and it demonstrably is, even while we have integrated these tools only partially. “Just software evolving” um yes, I agree, just that now this happens faster and more efficiently. It is also more than that: models that power advertising and content recommendation at TikTok, Google, Facebook, Instagram, etc are not just “software evolving” it is meaningful improvements to models that are only possible with good AI.
Yes, it is meaningful improvements but AI changes working profitable software. It is more difficult to create exponential value from that compared to new platforms like the internet or mobile. Git and then github, for example, have a much bigger impact on increasing software development productivity than AI, with a fraction of the investment.
Are you saying AI is tackling the wrong bottlenecks? I’m not sure what you mean by “AI changes profitable software”. Maybe you mean: AI will not create something new, only do the existing things we do?
I agree the foundations: git, GitHub, compilers, etc. are arguably are “a fraction of the price” and today they have arguably more impact (though not sure by which measure). But literally since January we have been rolling out our replacements, I don’t really see how that wouldn’t be an earth shattering impact. You talk about GitHub and that’s fine but ignore the fact that huge swaths of the profession aren’t even directly using any of these tools anymore.
I’m not sure what you imagine the promise of AI to be, and without that I can’t really be specific in any refutation I would just say coding is only the beginning. It is the most powerful and also the easiest thing to solve first. Improved coding performance also improves generalization and performance on non-coding tasks, so that’s a nice bonus, and we’re maybe 5 years away from decent embodied systems which after an inflection point of consumer adoption will quickly get better via data flywheels and on policy learning. Basically there are very few bottlenecks that will not be touched.
Can you name literally any other technology that had hundreds of millions of users within the first six months of being invented?
Six months after the internet was invented, you could send email between a few universities.
Six months after the computer was invented, they still hadn't actually built one.
The first transcontinental railroad, took about six YEARS just to build.
GPT did not have hundreds of millions of users when it was invented almost a decade ago…
If you want to move the goal posts, that's fine, acknowledge it: the original claim I'm responding to was "We're almost 6 months into all this AI-code madness"
If you want to set GPT as the target, that's even easier! In that decade it has passed the Turing Test, solved novel open math problems, generates audio, video, and music, and can write coherent code. Again, there is no technology that has improved more rapidly than LLMs.
I’d say the internet did, since it literally connected people across the globe in real time, which actually provided the technology that allows LLMs and other similar tech to exist in the first place.
I think it’s pretty clear the internet has had 10x the impact of LLMs so far. Maybe 100x
The internet has been around since the 80s…ChatGPT came out 4 years ago. The internet took decades to build out the infrastructure. Inflation adjusted capex for AI infrastructure already far surpasses that of the internet. You’re talking about a technology that doesn’t just make things easier it replaces entire swaths of work. Under some weird measurement you may be right but I mean cmon.
You are actually nuts
If you don’t have anything to refute you don’t have to reply with an insult, it’s not a great look. Feels like you’ve run out of meaningful things to say? Maybe you disagree with something substantive? We’ll never know!
It's wild how unfamiliar you are with the history of the internet - ARPANET was like 1969. Even if we go with AOL in 1985, "decades" to build out the infrastructure is still a very reasonable declaration.