cross-posted from: https://ponder.cat/post/1675150
I refuse to sit here and pretend that any of this matters. OpenAI and Anthropic are not innovators, and are antithetical to the spirit of Silicon Valley. They are management consultants dressed as founders, cynical con artists raising money for products that will never exist while peddling software that destroys our planet and diverts attention and capital away from things that might solve real problems.
I’m tired of the delusion. I’m tired of being forced to take these men seriously. I’m tired of being told by the media and investors that these men are building the future when the only things they build are mediocre and expensive. There is no joy here, no mystery, no magic, no problems solved, no lives saved, and very few lives changed other than new people added to Forbes’ Midas list.
None of this is powerful, or impressive, other than in how big a con it’s become. Look at the products and the actual outputs and tell me — does any of this actually feel like the future? Isn’t it kind of weird that the big, scary threats they’ve made about how AI will take our jobs never seem to translate to an actual product? Isn’t it strange that despite all of their money and power they’re yet to make anything truly useful?
My heart darkens, albeit briefly, when I think of how cynical all of this is. Corporations building products that don’t really do much that are being sold on the idea that one day they might, peddled by reporters that want to believe their narratives — and in some cases actively champion them. The damage will be tens of thousands of people fired, long-term environmental and infrastructural chaos, and a profound depression in Silicon Valley that I believe will dwarf the dot-com bust.
And when this all falls apart — and I believe it will — there will be a very public reckoning for the tech industry.
It’s not going to fall apart, genai tools are already increasing productivity in many industries.
Just because you haven’t seen any benefit doesn’t make it false.
Is this benefit in the room with you right now?
It is honestly occasionally okay at doing really simple coding an intern could be trusted to handle.
Sometimes.
And at making soulless porn!
Lol. It’s a simple matter to fix, just show us a benefit
Plenty of examples out there.
I use it to write excel and Powerfx formulas, summarize my client notes for creating statements of work, and creating documentation. Saves me multiple hours per week and some weeks even more than that.
summarize my client notes for creating statements of work
Huhhhhh… Last time I checked AIs were horrible at summarizing stuff: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/02/11/ai-chatbots-are-still-hopelessly-terrible-at-summarizing-news/
Granted, this article is about summarizing news.
Well last time I did this, I won the contract and got paid.
I’ve used it for every contract I’ve had for the last year at least.
How do you know you won because of genAI, did you run the double blind testing experiment?
I didn’t claim I won because of Genai, I won the contract while saving time by using genai.
That’s beneficial for me.
You thought documentation was bad, just wait a few months…
It’s better than the documentation I write myself, it’s not like I don’t read over it and edit it before handing it to a client.
How do you prevent hallucinations and ensure factual accuracy of the output? I have seen plenty of examples where LLMs screw up this. I haven’t seen a fool proof implementation yet. Is there anything new that I’m unaware of?
Code that’s fucked up making its way into the repo was already a known problem, though.
LLMs can save a lot of time depending on what coding task you’re doing. They are not a substitute for thinking and understanding, and they quickly reach a point of diminishing returns where you might as well do it yourself to get to point C once it’s gotten you from A to B, but it’s not like bad code never existed before they came along.
It’s not about being foolproof, I know how to do this stuff myself, this just saves me time. I can look at it and know if it should work, then I test it, just like I would do if I wrote it myself.
Oof.
But you dont need a general Llm for that. You can just use a way smaller and way less energy comsuming one than something like ChatGPT
I don’t use ChatGPT for this, I’m running a 14B parameter model locally.
Best to check these things before saying them so one doesn’t end up with egg on one’s face.
https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-workers-productivity-survey-2024-8
https://medium.com/predict/intel-admits-ai-decreases-productivity-226681d1af18
https://www.worklife.news/technology/ai-is-actually-making-workers-less-productive/
I’m a freelancer, I use it myself, I know it’s increased my productivity because I’m able to get more work done than I was doing before.
I think a lot of companies are trying to force it into jobs that it’s currently not suited to, but I can tell you that even today if things didn’t get any better than they currently are I’d keep running my local 14B parameter model to assist in the tasks that I’ve found it works well for.
“It makes me more productive, therefore those studies about AI and productivity in general are wrong” is a weird response.
GenAI isn’t meant to address every single situation, so it failing to address specific situations is perfectly normal.
I don’t know why anyone is doing generic worker studies when clearly half the people have been handed a hammer, when their job is cutting lumber. Of course it ain’t gonna fucking work for them.
Give people GenAI when their task is suited to GenAI, then do analysis on just those workers for just those tasks.
I never use GenAI to produce research documents, because it isn’t good at that yet. I tested it a few times, found the results lacking, and went back to doing it the way I was before.
I use GenAI to summarize my notes into Statements of Work for clients, because I tested that, and found the results excellent (and hours faster than me doing it the old way)
I use GenAI to create complex powerFx formulas, because again I tested that and it’s quite good and saves me time.
Your original claim was this:
genai tools are already increasing productivity in many industries.
Telling me how you personally use it doesn’t make that claim true.
Am I not in an industry when I do work?
I’m not the only freelancer I know using this and making more money.
Again, this is what you said:
genai tools are already increasing productivity in many industries.
How many industries do you work in? Let’s see a number.
