Hacker News Reader

Comment by josefritzishere | Hacker News Reader

After watching the AI roll out for a couple years now I'm much more confident that it's just a scam. There is no net positive ROI on AI. It's not good enough, and the "mass job destruction" scenario offsets any marginal gains by eliminating the market for basically all products. That doesn't mean that mediocre C-suites won't try but it only takes 1-2 quarters to feel the burn and back track.

View on HN

I recently tried to get customer service. I think it was from the DMV for my state. The website asked me to use the AI bot first. Completely useless. It took a phone call with a human to somewhat resolve the issue.

Dunno, the pencil sound effect as they let you speak to AI is quite calming. Now we need and efficient way to penalise claimants getting impatient or even rude at AI.

It's a rather useful tool... and it absolutely has been overhyped repeatedly and sold as a panacea.

If you believe AI will 10x you're developers you've drunk the kool-aid, if you believe AI will have no impact on your developers then you're being stubbornly ignorant.

What we're seeing is that AI is enabling us to reduce product headcount, but increase the scope of ownership for teams. We used to require each product keep at least 3 people on it to ensure that knowledge doesn't get lost with a departure, but now we're comfortable allowing an individual engineer drive it and allow AI to accelerate onboarding for a replacement when needed. This means that the teams can now handle 3x the products and our wish lists are getting shorter over time.

Sorry, but you aren't familiar with frontier models if you think it's not "good enough". The latest models are quite a bit more capable than most people in many regards already.

No, they aren't. Not even at the one thing (programming) which they are supposed to be best at. People are always claiming "frontier models are so much better" but that is a false claim.

Which "frontier models" are you familiar with in a programming context?

I'm a staff engineer and the amount of work and even troubleshooting the latest crop of LLMs can do at my behest is jaw-dropping.

I perused your comment history, and you refer to models as 'ChatGPT', which doesn't really inspire much confidence that you know what you're talking about.

People keep telling you that you're behind and using old technology and that the most recent models are really good and a sea-change because, well - they are.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com