Ed Zitron has the economics of AI basically right. Most technologies arrive by digging an enormous financial crater, followed by a contraction period in which everyone insists the crater is actually a revolutionary new business model, before the survivors eventually buy up whatever remains.
What likely resonates is AI really does feel like a science experiment. There is clearly real value here. The problem is that the economic value has yet to catch up with the technological value. And yet the claims coming from AI companies have the unmistakable energy of a state-fair entrepreneur standing beside a suspicious knife yelling, “You have never seen anything like this before, it slices it dices...!”
I think Ed goes too far when he compares LLMs to garbage. He’s tried them, had a handful of bad experiences, and apparently decided the entire technology belongs in the round file. But much of what humans do is essentially trial and error with better PR: apply some logic, see what happens, adjust, try again, and continue until you eventually solve the problem.
If you can get an LLM to reliably do that, you can solve certain classes of problems dramatically faster.
The fact that pirated books en-mass were used to train LLMs is legally irrelevant, oh do tell - why is that? The whole point of an LLM is to train a neural network based on content - without the content the net is entirely noise. Anthropic/OpenAI, etc. do not exist without training data. Its akin to taking millions of courses online that are intended to be paid for, but never paying.
What was the most fun and least fun you had while learning Swift for this project?
I remember having trouble making a Swift UI for my C app because I forgot to disable sandboxing in Xcode project settings. Spent a frustrating two hours debugging
At some point in their career the problem they're trying to solve will overwhelm even their own abilities - it just hasn't happened yet, but when it does, they'll be in for a reckoning.
All of the tooling, and processes, documentation, and code modularization that it takes us mortals to build complex things - this guy likely does in his sleep without it, until there's a problem he'll face where he can't anymore. He hasn't learned the curse of the gifted. You might have met this guy in high school - didn't need to study for his tests, aced most of his classes, then he specialized in college and ran into trouble because he never bothered to build such rigor into what he set out to achieve, it came naturally - and the longer that problem occurs the harder it becomes to learn the kinds of things that us mere mortals require.
My advice, if you can't manage him in house, manage him out
Musk bought Twitter with the same results a redneck buys a jacuzzi at the county faire - it was an expensive impulse purchase and the moment after buying it all your left with is regret
This seems very much like the episode of Veep'Boxes of lies' where they try to hide their nefarious deeds alongside the real day to day inter-workings of the vice presidents office but inundating the public with data.
This is a common strategy in litigation as well - if someone complains that you have pricked them with a needle, dump haystacks on your opponent's doorstep while also insisting on your right to a speedy trial.
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