> Ed Zitron doesn't say that AI doesn't work
Ive seen him say it does work pretty consistently? He also talks about other things that are more interesting, but he still says it doesnt work
Ive seen him say it does work pretty consistently? He also talks about other things that are more interesting, but he still says it doesnt work
As someone who has used LLMs heavily at work and at home in various serious experiments, I agree. It still requires heavy babysitting and a lot of its limitations wrt context length are fundamental, not something that’s going to be easy to overcome.
Which is good, for many reasons:
- environmental costs go down. Algorithms are cheap, LLM inference and training is not.
- code is deterministic
- code can be read and understood by professionals
- code can be deployed trivially, whereas deploying an LLM costs huge infrastructure
So using an LLM to help write code is the best of both worlds. You get velocity increase from the LLM, with none of the hallucination or environmental downsides at deployment time.
I overall agree with his interpretation, but i'm afraid he might be wrong in the conclusion that noone is going to replace human labor with shittier agent slop. As long as we humans don't really have regulations and choice for proper quality of service, companies might just in fact enshittify everything with slop and make more profits while we suffer from lower-quality products and support.