Hacker News Reader

Comment by olivermarks | Hacker News Reader

I read this by Dana Blankenhorn this morning which I think a few people in France need to read.

This AI Boom Will Bust | The Slope of Enlightenment is Coming

https://danafblankenhorn.substack.com/p/this-ai-boom-will-bu...

'In the end today’s AI boom is an evolution. It evolves from the huge databases built by the Cloud Czars, from the technology used to search those data stores, and from the ability of Graphics Processing Units to turn out results quickly.'

The French like to go in early in tech, minitel is a good example, but they almost invariably get leapfrogged by subsequent waves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel

In the AI era who owns the data and data sanctity is an upcoming legal quagmire that the big players will win. I don't see France ever being a big player in this world.

View on HN

The French atomic bomb, nuclear plants, high speed trains, and planes are not getting leapfrogged though ;)

French innovation is quirky but brilliant IMO - minitel was years ahead pre internet.

For some reason French innovation doesn't spread much beyond France. Concorde (I love that plane so much) was an Anglo French project. A lot of my friends parents in the UK midlands were involved with at massive project, but it never scaled to fleets and eventually withered away after an astonishing amount was spent developing it in the '60s ($2.8 billion in that era's valuations).

Not denegrating French innovation here at all, I just don't think the rigid ENA/Ecole Polytechnique elites are practical or competent in understanding how to exploit and build on great ideas by their countrymen.

> Not denegrating French innovation here at all, I just don't think the rigid ENA/Ecole Polytechnique elites are practical or competent in understanding how to exploit and build on great ideas by their countrymen. I don't disagree that these schools still need to evolve a bit, but you'd be surprised at how much they've already moved in that area. I know multiple people from Polytechnique are heavily involved in entrepreneurship and/or AI.

I think my point is that ENA / Ecole Polytechnique people are arguably harming French innovative abilities. Many US entrepreneurs are grass roots college dropout types...

Which is better because of, reasons? US culture is different from European one, and France always has been peculiar.

Well... We're talking tech unicorns here. France ain't exactly know for it's tech companies. There's what, eight EU (not french, but entire EU) tech companies in the top 100 tech companies worldwide?

The biggest EU one is german (not french), it's SAP. At least two french ones are basically french militaro-industrial complex / fake-private actually state-owned ones, being "big" by virtue of sucking french taxpayers money.

I don't know what France's culture is (although I'm a native french speaker and typing this from France) but "producing tech unicorns" certainly ain't part of it.

Tech unicorns are those start-ups with valuations above 1 billion, not the top 100 (top by what what measure, revenue, profit, market cap, number of employees?).

Also, a nations economy doesn't depend on the number of VC backrd tech unicorns. That France economy has quite some issues ain't news, the perceived lack of tech unicorns (if there ever was a pseudo-SV centric view of things, that's a front runner), is none of them.

@hef19898 Not 'better' just different culturally. The US installs ivy league types at well funded startups just as the french install their ENA/Ecole Polytechnique elites in their state funded 'startups' but somehow the French dynamic doesn't work nearly as well as the US one.

Airbus, Dassault, just from top of my head.

Also, the US Navy is buying a French/Italian frigate design to replace, sorry, I meant support the littoral combat ships that don't work. The only reason Australia cancelled the contract for French is that, all of a sudden, they got nuclear ones.

Agree on France, the EU is particularly rigorous in its oversight of AI also. In terms of the boom/bust in the article, historical patterns are useful to keep in mind, but they don't dictate what will happen.

I can categorically say I'm a productive ChatGPT user as of today. This might not apply to every industry, but for developing/refactoring there is already a GDP-boost with ChatGPT's name on it. Come to think of it, the AI hype-cycle has been in effect for some time already no? Maybe this is the productivity stage...

>I can categorically say I'm a productive ChatGPT user as of today. This might not apply to every industry, but for developing/refactoring there is already a GDP-boost with ChatGPT's name on it.

Really? I asked ChatGPT to code review my code and it halucinated issues that did not exist.

I also had the idea to give it 100 lines of code to refactor but after I got the response I realized that will can't trust that it did not fucked up so I decided to do the cleanup myself.

I can use it as a faster Google search to answer me soem questions, but I need to always check the answers.

Both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 have gotten considerably worse in quality for me since the May 24 update. Yesterday I asked GPT-4 to refactor some code I'd written in haste with a lot of duplication etc - a typically perfect task for a LLM - and it just gave me the same code back, without comments

My hope is that Intellij guys will move faster with their tools now that there is presure from copilot. There are still plenty of code refactorings that could be automated and are not and also there are obvious bugs that their code analysis do not catch(though I understands JS is a shit language to analyze).

When this open LLM could run on my local machine, I could at least use them to find stuff for me, I work on a big old project, I know there is soem functin or code that does X somewhere but I no longer remember th e files or function names. So a smarter search would be helpful.

Yes! I have been hammering feedback on PyCharm otherwise I’ll just switch to VS

Maybe someone at this small office software shop in Seattle, the one I constantly forget the name of, you know the that invested some table change into an unknown AI thing, should read that, too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com