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Comment by harimau777 | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain to me:

I have big problems with how AI companies stole artist's art and I have big concerns with how AI might be overused or misused. However, I don't understand how people can still say that AI is useless. Everyday when I use AI I am impressed with everything it can do. Particularly in coding, AI is useful right now (this may or may not be due to how messy the codebase that I'm working in is).

To be clear, this isn't a rhetorical question. I'm wondering what I am missing that other people are seeing.

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from a coding perspective, it’s about actual value creation. the llms cost money. The subscriptions are a great value subsidized by the frontier model companies.

llms ability to output usable code is insane, I agree. It changed the industry and the shape of what the job means. But the ability to code 10 X more output doesn’t magically create more value. In fact, I am personally skeptical and I’m planning on the first few years of growing pains. These LLMs make the job hard harder, make coordination and collaboration harder. There’s going to be a lot of churn. I quit my last job over the AI mandates.

Subsidized from a capex perspective maybe, but the profit margins for API-priced inference tokens are likely very high.

Also, a lot of people get stuck on the idea that the main use case of LLMs is to generate more production code. I don't see it like that at all anymore. It's just as useful or even more useful as a problem-solving partner, generating throw-away prototypes, conducting experiments, verifying assumptions against code and documentation, performing one-off UI or smoke testing.

It’s constantly goalpost moving.

“It’s totally useless” to “it hallucinates constantly” to “it’s not revolutionary” to “show me where it’s 100x productivity gains” to “if AI is so good then why isn’t OpenAI one shoting all its software and even cloning all software on the planet?”

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