That’s a sign of a problem imho. The hype is so high the directives are to use ai everywhere regardless of fit. I’m a believer of ai but shoehorning it into everything as that currently boosts stock prices seems insane.
* blocking every known LLM url due to fear of leaking information to it
* not wanting to hire expensive data scientists for any in house development
I even asked an Engineering Manager at Meta how much their own team use Llama day to day to multiply their productivity. Their answer was they don't use it at all, and they weren't aware of any internal tooling to utilize it for work
So the big guys are buying GPUs, building out datacenter, developing & training models, etc.. just in case.
Maybe LLMs will change some niche dramatically, maybe it will reshape society, or maybe nothing.
More prior revolutionary developments end up like crypto, voice assistants, IoT, smart homes than the number that end up like smartphones, web, or the PC.
So it's both outperformed what pessimists might have said (never work) and vastly underperformed what the median enthusiast projected (it's always just a few years away). I'd wager we are still teaching teens how to drive even 20 years from now.
LLMs are ~7 years old, so maybe another decade to being useful if we go by self driving cars learning rate?
Quick skim of Meta engineering's blog only turned up this incident response tool they're "enhancing with AI": https://engineering.fb.com/2024/06/24/data-infrastructure/le...
They simultaneously fretted about compliance, and insisted we use an internal wrapper around AI tools, which was not ready for a long time.
That general pattern of security/compliance being at odds with every other part of management happens outside of AI of course.
We had a directive from management to, for political reasons, use AI in the tool as much as possible to show how innovative and forward-thinking the company is. This led to a bunch of poorly-thought-out choices and while the project is in production and has internal users... I don't think it was particularly successful.
Not all of that is due to the "use AI" directive; there were also poor technology and deployment stack choices that made things overly complicated and cost us a bunch of time.
Management seems to see this as their opportunity to catch up on the cheap.
Rather than having modern tech systems and properly staffed engineering department, let's just uh.. have non-technical people do AI hackathons! Also instead of automating excel jockey jobs with server side data pipelines, what if we.. you guessed it.. gave the excel jockeys AI!
I can imagine this playing out in a lot of industries where the underdogs think its a shortcut and yet..
Shoehorning? Definitely bad.
"There's a new technology out there that makes new things possible, let's explore whether it makes sense to integrate it into what we're doing?" - not only is that the correct attitude, in the long run it's the only attitude that keeps companies alive assuming they have exposure to tech.
See the internet/web revolution, the mobile revolution, etc.