This, code is written by humans for humans. LLMs cannot compete no matter how much data you throw at them. A world in which software is written by AI will likely won't be code that will be readable by humans. And that is dangerous for anything where people's health, privacy, finances or security is involved
I don't know what's your experience with outsourcing. But people outsource full projects not the writing of a couple of methods. With LLMs still unable to fully understand relatively simple stuff, you can't expect them to deliver a project whose specification (like most software projects) contains ambiguities that only an experienced dev can detect and ask deep questions about the intention and purpose of the project. LLMs are nowhere near that. To be able to handle external uncertainty and turn it into certainty, to explain why technical decisions were made, to understand the purpose of a project and how it matches the project. To handle the overall uncertainties of writing code with other's people's code. All this is stuff outsourced teams do well. But LLMs won't be anywhere near good for at least a decade. I am calling it
what do you want done about it? Hallucination is an intrinsic part of how LLMs work. What makes a hallucination is the inconsistency between the hallucinated concept and the reality. Reality is not part of how LLMs work. They do amazing things but at the end of the day they are elaborate statistical machines.
Look behind the veil and see LLMs for what they really are and you will maximise their utility, temper your expectations and save you disappointment
A support ticket is a good middle ground. This is probably the area of most robust enterprise deployment. Synthesizing knowledge to produce a draft reply with some logic either to automatically send it or have human review. There are both shitty and ok systems that save real money with case deflection and even improved satisfaction rates. Partly this works because human responses can also suck, so you are raising a low bar. But it is a real use case with real money and reputation on the line.
They are partially hype though. That's what people here are arguing. There are benefits but their valuation is largely hype driven. AI is going to transform industries and humanity, yes. But AI does not mean LLM (even if LLM means AI). LLM raw potential was reached last year with GPT-4. From here on, the value will lie on exploiting the potential we already have to generate clever applications. Just like the internet provided a platform for new services, I expect LLMs to be the same but with a much smaller impact
I believe the honeymoon face has loong been finished. Even in the mainstream, last year of the AI year. 2024 has seen nothing substantially good and the only notesworthy thing is this article finally hitting into the public consciousness that we are past of the AI peak and beyond the plateau and freefalling has already begun.
LLM investors will be reviewing their portfolios and will likely begin declining further investments without clear evidence of profits in the very near future. On the other side, LLM companies will likely try to downplay this and again promise the Moon.
Welcome to capitalism. The market forces will squeze max value out of them. I imagine that Anthropic and OpenAI will be in the future fully downsized and acquired by their main investors (Microsoft and Amazon) and will simply becoming part of their generic and faceless AI & ML Teams once the current downwards stage of the hype cycle completes it closure in the next 5-8 years.
> a ton of really badly written apps encountered out in the wild when I did some small business IT consultancy made me very averse to VB in general.
A lot of VB has been historically written by people who had no background in writing software. They were jack of all trades, needed some quick and dirty and they learned just enough to have some working code
This might be classic "that's not a bug, it's a feature", territory.
I love the idea that somebody could just get something working - it is fantastic that was possible, and a shame that we've lost it a bit.
The fact that a professional might look at the code produced and die a little inside is where a lot of bad rep comes from, but hey, working software is better than no software, particularly in the days when that software probably is running on a single machine that is not connected to the internet, and when it is, it's only connected a couple of hours a day via dial-up modem.
