Anyone else feel like we're cresting the LLM coding hype curve?
Like a recognition that there's value there, but we're passing the frothing-at-the-mouth stage of replacing all software engineers?
Like a recognition that there's value there, but we're passing the frothing-at-the-mouth stage of replacing all software engineers?
I still don't see how it's useful for generating features and codebases, but as a rubber ducky it ain't half bad.
What has helped has been to turn off ALL automatic AI, e.g. auto complete, and bind it to a shortcut key to show up on request... And forget it exists.
Until I feel I need it, and then it's throw shit at the wall type moment but we've all been there.
It does save a lot of time as a google on steroid, and wtf-solver. But it's a tool best kept in its box, with a safety lock.
That's one way of looking at it.
Another way to look at it is GPT3.5 was $600,000,000,000 ago.
Today's AIs are better, but are they $600B better? Does it feel like that investment was sound? And if not, how much slower will future investments be?
This just smells like classic VC churn and burn. You are given it and have to spend it. And most of that money wasn't actually money, it was free infrastructure. Who knows the actual "cost" of the investments, but my uneducated brain (while trying to make a point) would say it is 20% of the stated value of the investments. And maybe GPT-5 + the other features OpenAI has enabled are $100B better.
But everyone who chipped in $$$ is counting against these top line figures, as stock prices are based on $$$ specifically.
> but my uneducated brain (while trying to make a point) would say it is 20% of the stated value of the investments
An 80% drop in valuations as people snap back to reality would be devastating to the market. But that's the implication of your line here.
I'm sure there's still some improvements that can be made to the current LLMs, but most of those improvements are not in making the models actually better at getting the things they generate right.
If we want more significant improvements in what generative AI can do, we're going to need new breakthroughs in theory or technique, and that's not going to come by simply iterating on the transformers paper or throwing more compute at it. Breakthroughs, almost by definition, aren't predictable, either in when or whether they will come.
E.g. OpenAI went from "AGI has been achieved internally" to lying with graphs (where they cut off graphs at 50% or 70% to present minor improvements as breakthroughs).
The growth can easily be logarithmic
A different way to say it. Imagine if programming a computer was more like training a child or a teenager to perform a task that requires a lot of human interaction; and that interaction requires presenting data / making drawings.
As a parent, this sounds miserable.
GPT-5 and GPT-5-codex are significantly cheaper than the o-series full models from OpenAI, but outperform them.
I won't get into whether the improvements we're seeing are marginal or not, but whether or not that's the case, these examples clearly show you can get improved performance with decreasing resource cost as techniques advance.
But that's exactly the problem!
Right now, AI performs poorly enough that only a small fraction of users is willing to pay money for it, and (despite tech companies constantly shoving it in everyone's face) a large portion of the user base doesn't even want to adopt it for free.
You can't spend hundreds of billions of dollars on marginal improvements in the hope that it'll hopefully eventually become good enough for widespread adoption. Nobody is going to give OpenAI a trillion dollars to grow their user base 50x over the next 15 years. They are going to need to show significant improvements - and soon, or the bubble will pop.
You mean what they have conceded so far to be what they mean. Every new model they start to see that they have to give up a little more.
I get value from it everyday like a lawyer gets value from LexisNexis. I look forward to the vibe coded slop era like a real lawyer looks forward to a defendant with no actual legal training that obviously did it using LexisNexis.
The funny thing is you're clearly within the hyperbolic pattern that I've described. It could plateau, but denying that you're there is incorrect.
You assume the curve is exponential.
We assume the curve is logarithmic.
We are not the same
I'm genuinely curious as to what's going through your mind and if people readily give you this.
I suspect you're asking dishonestly but I can't simply assume that.
You should delete this comment.
It feels like people and projects are moving from a pure “get that slop out of here” attitude toward more nuance, more confidence articulating how to integrate the valuable stuff while excluding the lazy stuff.