Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster | Hacker News Reader

Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster

theatlantic.com

116 pointslatexr91 comments

Comparing how traditional tech companies scale to how frontier AI companies scale doesn't seem very fair to me. AI is still relatively new territory, in comparison traditional software companies benefit from decades of investment in cloud infrastructure, networking, and hardware. I'm certain those technologies also went through periods of heavy investment before they became scalable.

The author also talks about advances like smartphones as though they arrived without significant challenges or trade-offs. Every major technological shift has come with some cost, e.g environmental, shortages, investments.

I'd argue most things are difficult to scale in the beginning. Just because today's LLMs are expensive and resource intensive doesn't mean the technology is fundamentally flawed, it may simply mean the current approach isn't the one we'll end up with. But naturally, someone working on another approach would have something to criticise about others.

Finally, I'm not convinced by the claim that we're "stuck" with LLMs just because they're heavily marketed. They create value for many people, which is why they've been adopted so quickly. As the author points out, investors care about economics. I'm sure people would listen if someone developed a cheaper/more sustainable technology that delivered the same value.

Right, if you came out with a technology that worked just as well as LLMs at half the power people/companies would jump at it from the absolutely massive savings in hardware and power. AI companies are looking at every other method they can, and inventing new ones, none of them have worked as well as the transformer so far.

> They create value for many people, which is why they've been adopted so quickly.

A lot of that adoption is completely useless crap tho. Like ai in vacuum cleaner that ads absolutely nothing useful to anything. AI buttons intentionally at places I randomly click at, so that I am forced to open it. Google search that defaults to ai, so that we have to use it after then nerfed real search.

There are useful usages of LLMs. But huge bulk of the adoption is companies realizing they wont get investors money if they dont add ai button, it does not have to be useful.

Yeah there's a huge part of it that is "the investors want tulips, so we will plant tulips"

Thanks. You're comment made me laugh.

Which happens for every new technology. Blue LED's in everything, capacitive buttons on everything, car buttons replaced with ipads, et cetera. Some of the random placements will prove out useful but most won't and will disappear.

Frankly, no, totally not. And not nearly to this extend. I have seen enough of "new technologies" to know that it was not as crazy at it is now with AI. The hysterical doom trolling, the hype, the tokenmaxxing, the personification of it, all of that is off the charts compared to anything I have seen in the past.

Yes, but corporations didn't bet the Capex of the entire GDP of the world on it

"They create value for many people"

They create value for many people because these people are not paying the cost of the tool;

I think LLMs, with only a few exceptions, have mostly created the illusion of value. It’s undeniable I can write code, troubleshoot and document much faster than in the pre LLM era, but putting a dollar value to that it’s not particularly easy. One group of people being 100x faster at one task doesn’t mean the organization as a whole runs at 100x the speed, in fact in most cases where the bottle neck is somewhere else, the productivity gains of the 100x group have little to no impact, or even a negative impact in some cases due to token overspending.

How about sole proprietors?

that would be interesting to see with a large longitudinal study

any new technology also introduces new bottlenecks, so i wonder if its a 2 steps forwards 1 step backwards (or vice versa) situation (e.g llm summarized my email conversation to be more clear but left out a key detail; now i have to rework my proposal and i lost 1 week of income etc)

Resnet’s solve the regression problem.

Yup. We're just all re-learning Amdahl's Law.

The rentier class needs a very strong correction. A lot of the conversation focused on what AI is and isn't is often just a proxy for frustration at the structural problems in our society which are in large part due to the inability for hard-working people to live good quality lives because of the incredible greed of the few.

WOAH! Communism in my homefront? That's an NSPM-7 violation there, buddy.

https://archive.ph/20260715223901/https://www.theatlantic.co...

Approaching an AI version of https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Shoe_Event_Horizon

It is, in some ways, but no matter your opinion, AI in engineering will continue unabated.

Wrote about this recently (from a vibe coding perspective) [1]. This applies to corporations, too, as they're betting their futures on fewer engineers, more AI.

[1] https://graybearding.bearblog.dev/they-got-something-on-the-...

The ultra wealthy will out compete you for the resources you need if we don’t start taxing them has been a discussion from the left for quite some time. It seems to keep coming true in new and disastrous ways, we are going to see more and more extreme concentrations of capital and power distort things and pretty soon it won’t just be middle and poor people who cannot afford anything, the whole value chain is being redesigned around things billionaires want and what could be better for them than agents who replace all the white collar workers. You might think you’re safe from this, I don’t.

It’s worth remembering that during the industrial revolution in Britain, the fastest growing country the world had ever seen, most people were in abject poverty. This tech revolution might end up being worse.

Yup. This is a policy problem.

Instead of just rejecting the future like a Roman fatalist because you've decided that it's just going to be someone else controlling you, maybe a better plan is to adopt emerging technology when it comes into play (like for example when the Internet came into play) and use it to start your own company, or make yourself more productive, or disrupt an industry that desperately needs it.

I shouldn't have to explain the benefits of productivity improvements and computer technology to people on Hacker News, but the place for some reason has been hijacked by neo luddites from Reddit that apparently have nothing better to do than troll about AI on a web site that is literally dedicated to an industry they don't like. Sam Altman literally used to run Y Combinator. Why not use that energy you're wasting to adopt emerging technology instead of bashing it?

There are places that recognized manufacturing was going to go away, transitioned a service economy, and did well economically, and places that ignored reality and are now in disrepair. Now's a great time to decide if you want to be Seattle or Cleveland. Don't fight the future. And don't think it's a billionaires fault when certain places are more successful then others because they didn't ban AI and datacenters while other places squandered the opportunity because they didn't confront the pitchfork mob driven into a frenzy by yellow journalism.

I love AI and have built many projects with PyTorch and use LLMs daily for all my work and am building a startup in my spare time here: https://veloa.com/

Being concerned about how AI will concentrate power doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s extremely useful.

"All everybody has to do is work and there will be no unemployment" --throwaway323929

Wow, you just solved economics!

Your argument is so incredibly reductive as to be nonsensical. The understanding of the allocation of capital is seemingly below grade school level. Even moreso, your understanding of the business cycle and how it interacts with governments and banks seems to be even more immature.

"manufacturing" didn't "go away", it moved to China so investors could capitalize on lax environmental laws and cheap labor. This engineered trade off of wealth had devastating results to massive parts of the US. On top of that, not every city can become Seattle. There isn't enough 'service economy' to go around and do that, especially as technology tends to concentrate wealth.

This has strong shades of BoJack Horseman's "We solved America's gun problem by giving everyone guns"

Why don't you try doing some work that's actually useful for someone else, instead of just endlessly, ceaselessly posting junk on a web site you don't even like? Are you surprised that nobody wants to pay you to do this? Provide something of value to others and you will be rewarded for that.

I'm sorry you don't live in an alternative universe where you can just post low value opinions on HN all day and get rewarded handsomely for that, but I don't think you should be surprised why you can't figure out how to make a successful life while you do it in the present one. And I don't feel like working more to subsidize you to do that via handouts, and almost nobody else does either. Good luck.

> disrupt an industry that desperately needs it.

Why is the primary tech people impulse to disrupt, destroy and harm other industries? Maybe that is why we dont produce useful tech anymore. The primary impulse is always hostile, rarely something like "lets create and sell a useful thing for them".

> adopt emerging technology when it comes into play (like for example when the Internet came into play) and use it to start your own company, or make yourself more productive,

Funny, the strategy of creating a company entirely dependent on mercy of another company, vulnerable to destruction with any simple change in TOS has been criticized on HN previously.

Sometimes the other industries are just bad, like Uber for taxis or Airbnb for hotels. Now the disrupted industries have gotten somewhat better but only due to competition.

And disruption doesn't always mean destruction, it's just a word that is used, not to necessarily be taken literally.

Hotels did not got better. They are about the same. Uber sold rides under pruce for years and then pushed expensis on deivers.

In my city, Uber is just like any other taxi company.

>;And disruption doesn't always mean destruction, it's just a word that is used, not to necessarily be taken literally.

It means exactly that tho. When tech people talk about disruption, they dont talk about creating better products, they are not interested in what the rest of the world needs or want. When tech people talk about disruption, focus is alwas on, well, disruption as a goal on itself.

It is never mutual prosperity vision, it is about using VC money to create monopoly and then raising prices to milk the situation to the max.

We dont even see articles about how to make more useful products on HN. Nor about how to solve real world problems. We, as a culture, just dont do that.

I'd rather take an Uber, with an app and no tip or meter without redzoning than any taxi, same with Airbnb and having a full kitchen everywhere I go. So the disruption was in fact good for many facets of society. It is useful, otherwise so many would not, well, use it.

I see your comment is not popular but I agree. I think it’s because it’s easier to take value than it is to create it from scratch. One requires empathy, creativity, the other only requires greed. Or maybe it is a zero-sum game.

> Why is the primary tech people impulse to disrupt, destroy and harm other industries? Maybe that is why we dont produce useful tech anymore. The primary impulse is always hostile, rarely something like "lets create and sell a useful thing for them".

I think you misunderstand what disruption means in this context? Disruption means pursuing the same market as some incumbents, with the express goal of serving that market better/faster/more efficiently.

The impulse is hostile to the incumbents, but (in principle) good for the market: the market is getting competition, and competition is one way to make things cheaper/better/etc.

Obviously what this looks like varies by market, but the principle is very different from how you're presenting it

it's really funny when people advise the fix for widespread sociological problems as "just become an entrepreneur and disrupt an industry bro"

I mean, that is the essence of how to fix the problems in a capitalist society?

One of the core tenets of capitalism is that one person's profits are another person's opportunity. If the latter can do the work/obtain the capital to break into the industry, they can capture some of those profits by offering competition at a lower price point.

I don't think the person you're bagging on is saying it's easy to do; but they are saying that if people feel strongly about changing something, perhaps they should try doing it themselves, instead of just complaining about it and wishing someone else (i.e. government) will fix it for them

> I mean, that is the essence of how to fix the problems in a capitalist society?

So... we're just gonna forget that governments exist?

We gonna assume rivers would've stopped burning in the US if only there had just been more startups working on making rivers stop burning?

Superfund-as-a-Service

> So... we're just gonna forget that governments exist?

... No?

I'm not sure anything I said implied otherwise. I mean, I literally mentioned government in my second paragraph...

It's better than siting on a web site dedicated to technological development you don't like and complaining.

Why are you surprised you got laid off? Go do something with your life.

Did you adopt cryptocurrency in 2022? What were your results?

If AI was utilized to eliminate the "shitty" jobs I'd be more enthusiastic about it. AI Robots that clean toilets so humans don't have to? Yes, please. (Yes, I get it that at present its probably still cheaper to employ a human wage slave to do this job -> the economic argument).

But at present AI seems to be just eliminating the junior programmer positions. That is, the apprentices. Once the more experienced engineers retire and die off who will replace them? AI? Who will have the knowledge and expertise to know what is crap software is and what isn't?

Right.

Luckily the universe has decided to solve this problem quite early on by having the tech industry fuck itself in the face first.

Won't anyone think of the software engineers? It's funny how hypocritical the tech worker world is when the very jobs they work are in the business of automating professions away. But when it comes for my profession? Oh the horror.

If any of you guys who use the phrase "neo-luddite" had any grasp of who the Luddites were, what their concerns were, and why such campaigns did what they did, you'd be getting ready to fight the future too. Whichever side you're on.

Maybe try to understand the future neo-Luddites before you have to fight them off. Libertarianism made your salaries good but it made them affordable semi-automatic weapons.

It seems to me that it's a bit more likely to be a Captain Swing than a Ned Ludd who emerges, anyway.

I would argue that it is rent-seeking and asset accumulation that is a big problem. If the wealthy elite invested in production rather than consuming assets that would improve things. I don't share his politics but someone like Elon Musk at least invests in production whereas Blackrock is heavily into asset accumulation.

However, part of the problem of why the wealthy elite don't invest in production is because of the Petro-dollar. When the USA moved to the Petro-dollar that is when the economy started to go K-shaped. The British Empire had the same problem. The Chinese absolutely do NOT want to become the World's reserve currency as they know the same fate will befall them. Perhaps the USA should have listened to Keynes with his Bancor currency after all.

They are neither investing in production nor consuming assets really. Any billionaire's yacht is an insignificant fraction of the world's resources. What matters is capital misallocation - they are investing in things that aren't productive that they think are productive and because they have too much money to invest, a too great share of society's resources are going towards those unproductive investments and productive activities are seeing shortages (e.g. the RAM crisis in PC and console gaming).

It's very interesting how every comment I've made recently along these lines has been downvoted without any replies. I'd like to know why people think it's incorrect.

This is why capital accumulation, of the extreme kind we see today in the USA, is wrong. Not because greed is a sin (although, it is, and most of these guys are going to burn in hell), but because it turns the country into functionally the USSR bureaucracy. We are basically doing central planning in huge swathes of the economy and surprise surprises, it’s not working.

1000% I honestly believe this is why the US is such an economic powerhouse - the rich there deploy capital in a way that assumes optimistic win-win outcomes when they invest in startups! In the UK the investors are trying to get much higher percentages at half the valuation and it’s terrible for everyone even the investors to have people with 25% the upside of US companies.

Due to said industrial revolution, people's quality of life went up a thousandfold, same as in China and other countries now adopting capitalist principles.

Not true, that was WW2 and high taxation on the rich that created the middle class. The Industrial Revolution was 1750 onwards so maybe you’re okay with it taking nearly 200 years to get a good settlement for working people but I am not!

If you look at most of the world, Nigeria or India say you’ll see disgraceful levels of poverty and a small number of people who are ultra wealthy. This is where we are heading in the west if we can’t prevent the rich from inflating and buying all the assets you will own nothing and rent everything from them.

India and Nigeria made many economic mistakes. My comparison is China and Vietnam who reduced poverty manifold in a single generation.

So as long as nobody makes major economic mistakes it's fine?

Yes? Of course making mistakes in any system leads to ruin.

Not at all quickly. People's lives got immediately worse — well within a working lifetime. Life expectancy fell and infant mortality worsened for well over a hundred years. In particular the quality of life for people displaced by the second agricultural revolution degraded radically. It took until the early 1900s for people in cities in the west to be as healthy as a pre-industrial revolution farm worker.

China did it in a generation. It is not like it was before, we have the economic tools and knowledge to accelerate it.

1978 is two generations ago, really, and things are not better for everyone now. Working days are long, six days a week, pay is poor enough that people are living in dormitories or company housing, effectively indentured still.

And the question with the AI thing is: when you take some chunk of labour out of the employment market entirely (such is the promise of AI across all sectors — hire fewer people), where will the "economic tools" come from. Because you'll trigger demand collapse.

It is a fantasy. And even then, you're talking about a technological change that will ruin a very large number of people's livelihoods and economic security for decades as if it is just something someone will have to fix.

That's true, but any system has issues, there is no silver bullet. And yes, with the rate AI is going, among others, it is something someone will have to fix, I don't see what the alternative of not fixing it would look like.

> The ultra wealthy will out compete you for the resources you need if we don’t start taxing them has been a discussion from the left for quite some time.

Europe has done this and look how advanced it is! While Americans talk to computers, we have flying cars, colonies on Mars, and even a cure for cancer. We just had the courage to go forward with that one socialist trick and look how it all worked out so wonderfully!

The top marginal tax rate in the US was 90% for most of the post WWII 20th century and that didn’t seem to hurt anyone. Invented transistors, went to the moon, built interstate highway system, mass construction of nuclear power, and became the world leader in manufacturing

Today we have low tax rates and can’t make chips, still working on that moon landing, can’t build high speed rail, can’t build nuclear, and are trying to tariff our way back to a manufacturing sector

They haven’t even come close to taxing billionaires. Europe has loads of problems with bureaucracy and a lack of dynamism, I’m not persuaded a tax on billionaires is actually workable and suspect we will try WW3 instead…

I mean, we do have affordable healthcare and usable trains (in some countries)...

I will never understand this fixation on trains. I will take a plane over a train any time. Not only is it faster and more convenient, it's also much safer.

As for healthcare, it depends on the country. I am European and I haven't used public healthcare in my entire adult life because 1) It f***g sucks 2) the waiting lists are so long you might die before you get treated 3) the bedside manner is so awful I'd rather be roasted by a stand up comedian

I never got the logic of "I don't like this thing, so why does it exist?"

Others might not have a choice than to take the train or use public healthcare (or maybe you or me too, depending on how life turns out), and for that I'm glad they are of decent quality.

Then there are the CO2 emissions of planes, but that's another topic...

> I never got the logic of "I don't like this thing, so why does it exist?"

Nice straw man. I never said trains should not exist. I was merely talking about the fixation on trains, which is palpable in Europe.

There are more numerous cases where cities happen to be situated fairly close together in Europe, where trains actually are a more sensible travel option, hence the fixation there.

Planes instead make more sense the further you must travel.

I mean, depending on circumstances, it takes nearly the same amount of time to travel from Chicago to St. Louis by plane as it does by car. Something shorter than that and it can actually take longer to get there by plane than it does by car. I mean no one takes a plane to travel to a city that's only 30 minutes away by car - as it often takes longer to get through airport security and board a plane than that.

3 years ago I was traveling from northern Poland to southern Poland by train - the only option unless you have a car. It so happened that my family was flying from Toronto to Warsaw at the exact same time. They arrived before I did and were much more comfortable than I was, too. Not to mention the safety aspect.

Of course if we're talking about cities that are 20-30 minutes away by car, then flying would not be reasonable.

You call strawman on someone else and show up with anecdata... And even anecdata with so little information as to be useless.

In all honesty one of the biggest problems in all these discussion is that there is no Europe healthcare / trains /...

Spain has the second most rail in the world per Capita and together with France are one of the best experiences (Japan and China in their own league) while Germany is currently shit and definitely not up to its "reputation".

Public healthcare in Belgium (personal experience, doctors / 1000 people etc) is amongst the best in the world while I guess based on your comment the one in poland is not that good ?

Nevermind the USA that has places like Appalachia and San Francisco

> You call strawman on someone else and show up with anecdata

Anecdotal is just that - sample size of one. Straw man is a dishonest manipulation technique to bring someone down.

> In all honesty one of the biggest problems in all these discussion is that there is no Europe healthcare / trains /...

Yes!

> Public healthcare in Belgium (personal experience, doctors / 1000 people etc) is amongst the best in the world while I guess based on your comment the one in poland is not that good ?

Healthcare in Poland is very poor and has been that way for a while. In fact, it's currently in the spotlight as it's on the verge of collapse and controversies are brought up to light to assign a convenient scapegoat.

I'd say bring someone down is a bit exagerated (distraction is more common) and not assuming the good fate we're supposed to have. Could also be him feeling that it is relevant / applicable ...

The classical saying is “The plural of anecdote is not data.”... hence you should in general on hn bring some actual data based facts (hence me not just using personal experience but also mentioning doctors/1000 metric)

But anyway glad we agree on Europe not 1 and sad to hear about bad healthcare in Poland, hope you get some politicians who actually care to fix it.

https://archive.ph/xo7RG

i dont think the comparison to traditional vc saas is very good

yes, in traditional venture you want cost per marginal user to decrease and leverage your platform at scale

but improving llms shifts the frontier of their capability and unlocks entirely new use cases. so far, every mega training run has resulted in a model that has paid itself off profitably fully loaded. perhaps the TAM of intelligence has no ceiling?

not to say that we shouldnt be investing in efficient models, but the efficiency comes after we create another mega shoggoth that we can make more efficient

you think companies are not focusing on efficiency but in reality they are both almost fully correlated. if you make a model more efficient, you get to make it do more reasoning and we know that the upper limit for reasoning is very very high.

we have real proof - GPT 5.6 Luna is 50% cheaper than 5.5. And this keeps repeating.

https://x.com/PalmerLuckey/status/2077216959930728889

Ya'll are not ready for AI to just keep getting better and better. The slop-midwit-doomerism you are being fed as part of some last ditch copium that your SE identity matters and is going to be needed prevents you from seeing what is inevitable. You can't beat em. Try joining em.

The month to month changes and improvements across free tools is noticeable. A number of skills SE and other roles are built on (or people started with) like more simple scripting and automation work are reachable by a BA with proper requirements, some background with development/coding, and access to AI tools.

It's a continuation of both low code development tools and the ongoing compaction of development groups through DevOps. AI is enabling (vibe) code development by non devs. It's enabling a BA or even direct business rep to take requirements into a prototype or example.

LLMs are out of the box and will continue developing. How/If you use them is up to you.

I can't imagine a successful civilization where non-computing energy usage isn't a rounding error.

I can. AI says it will solve all problems, like curing cancer. Suppose it does. Now there are no more problems and no reason to run the AIs, at which time computing energy will fall rapidly.

The alternative is that there will always be problems, and we could spend as much as possible trying to compute solutions, but they will not be found.

Maybe we'll all upload ourselves to the Dyson sphere, so there will be nothing left but computation.

42.

> Now there are no more problems and no reason to run the AIs,

Are you sure we are talking about the same species?

Creating fake problems is not a caracteristic I would give to "a successful civilization" :)

Each solution generates new problems. That's the general physics of intelligence in our universe. Also label of "fake" is completely arbitrary. Because someone might call cancer a fake problem, because people shouldn't live too long and they need a reason to die.

A colleague of mine is fan of AI and we have, from time to time, serious discussion about that topic

Last week, I asked him in all seriousness: considering that everything you say is correct .. why the hell does you product still sucks ?!

He answered me: because of people

Perhaps people is the only problem that need solving :(

I think AI is going to enable a new future where most software products will have userbase of 1. And then they are not going to suck.

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