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Comment by danielvaughn | Hacker News Reader

We're in a dangerous valley where AI is _just_ good enough to fool some otherwise very smart people. Similar to the old adage of "a little bit of information is a dangerous thing." Lots of CEOs got duped into thinking that model capabilities were far ahead of where they actually were. I'm actually not sure if we're going to get out of the valley without figuring out a surefire way to reliably evaluate these things.

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> Lots of CEOs got duped into thinking that model capabilities were far ahead of where they actually were.

Are these CEOs the "very smart people" you're talking about? To my eyes it's mostly the same crowd that was drooling over crypto and blockchain and the metaverse just a few years ago, and it was clear that was a stupid idea at the time too.

It's not the same crowd. I know some genuinely extremely intelligent people (can't go into specifics) who have gotten bit by AI psychosis. It's been wild to see.

They got duped into it partly because of the enthusiasm and demoware shown by folks like the ones that topped HN with their exhortations about the wonders of AI for coding.

We’re not innocent bystanders here, and it’s important to recognize that. Our hype added to the hype. Our optimism added to the optimism. After layoffs due to Section 172 and interest rates going up, technologists were looking for a reason to be in-demand again, and generative AI as a platform specialization provided that.

We can’t now criticize CEOs for being taken in by the same enthusiasm we pushed for our own purposes.

I don’t claim responsibility for any of that. I’m not part of that “we”. Time and time again I’ve been sceptical of AI on places like Hacker News and I’m hardly alone. As a community I think there is a great variation in opinion.

CEOs are very well compensated for the things they do. If they were led astray by snake oil salesman that does not make Hacker News as a community complicit. They were fooled when they shouldn’t have been and it’s their own fault.

I'm not criticizing CEOs, only mentioning them because they're at the helm and the ones calling the shots at companies. But the psychosis has hit pretty much everyone, of all intelligence ranges.

Also, I'm genuinely excited about AI. It's absolutely incredible. Even with all the problems, I'm more invigorated about being a programmer than at almost any point in my career. You have to embrace the chaos.

I don’t know who you’re including in “we”, but since most CEOs are being paid more for their judgment than HN commenters are, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to hold them to higher standards.

While it's true that HN, as a collective, was participating in that hype, you need to be very careful about trying to extend that to mean that every poster on HN is complicit in it.

Many of us were skeptical from the start, and have done nothing to hype up LLMs.

What about the large contingent of resident wet rags? Can we still shit on the CEOs for not seeing through the BS and guiding their companies effectively?

I have a theory there’s a more nefarious problem that AI changes the incentives around what work is easy to do, in a way that can affect how work hits the bottom line. Aside from the slop problem- people create more documentation more people have to read, etc. it makes it easier for me to say do a bunch of bug fixes or refactors that aren’t in the critical path.

So even if in say 100 person engineering out 10 folks might get 2-3x critical path work. 50 folks Might just add non-critical path work, and the other forty might use it in a way that they end up doing g less critical path work.

But depending on your metrics productivity could look up while the bottom line is unaffected. In which case model quality is a red herring.

AI is a bullshit artist's wet dream. It's bluffing turned up to 11, plausible enough to be believable, especially to the gullible and the greedy who are both succumbing to its psychotic effects.

No one was "duped" CEOs tend to look out 10-20 years in the future. Extrapolating with s, linear, and log curves. If they all look good then they hop on board. Any way you slice it AI will be unimaginable in 20 years, you don't want an engineering culture that focuses on retaining useless skills. Look at mega-caps like Google and Facebook, so called web native companies, are STILL shunned by "real devs" despite looking nothing like they did when they started, because in terms of "real skills" they have release product failure after product failure. They live in a completely different plane of abstraction. Similarly John von Neumann hate assembly he would have loathed C and Unix.

It's all boils down to the same problem: A smart programmer who enjoys optimizing something that's not on the hot path: developer velocity.

>No one was "duped" CEOs tend to look out 10-20 years in the future

Lol.

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