> I have 0 doubts some people are seeing 5x productivity boosts because of the stuff that is regularly posted on HN - stuff that used to take months taking days.
I will cede this: it indeed seems like you can throw together a shitty half-working prototype very quickly using LLMs. There's been a deluge of half-working prototypes, but years in and where are all these projects now? No study has concluded anything near a 5x improvement.
Besides, my actual opinion is that even if these actually gave a large productivity improvement, it's wouldn't be worth it. The negatives are simply too large:
- the concentration of power they are pushing for;
- the environmental effects of training;
- the disinformation they spread at scale (which in practice is their primary use-case);
- the adverse effect on a shared reality from the fact that they cannot reliably answer questions, yet are presented as doing so;
- the adverse effect on a shared reality from their sycophancy (do the rich surrounded by yes-men seem in touch with reality?);
- their anti-social nature, as they discourage engaging with other people in favour of solipsism masked by a poor simulacrum of personhood;
- their weakening of labour power because of the managerial class' belief that they will soon replace workers (whether or not they actually can is not particularly relevant);
- the large-scale plagiarism they enable;
- lastly, their weakening of already incredibly lax standards of engineering from our field.
The promise of more software does not even come close to outweighing all of that.
I will cede this: it indeed seems like you can throw together a shitty half-working prototype very quickly using LLMs. There's been a deluge of half-working prototypes, but years in and where are all these projects now? No study has concluded anything near a 5x improvement.
Besides, my actual opinion is that even if these actually gave a large productivity improvement, it's wouldn't be worth it. The negatives are simply too large:
- the concentration of power they are pushing for;
- the environmental effects of training;
- the disinformation they spread at scale (which in practice is their primary use-case);
- the adverse effect on a shared reality from the fact that they cannot reliably answer questions, yet are presented as doing so;
- the adverse effect on a shared reality from their sycophancy (do the rich surrounded by yes-men seem in touch with reality?);
- their anti-social nature, as they discourage engaging with other people in favour of solipsism masked by a poor simulacrum of personhood;
- their weakening of labour power because of the managerial class' belief that they will soon replace workers (whether or not they actually can is not particularly relevant);
- the large-scale plagiarism they enable;
- lastly, their weakening of already incredibly lax standards of engineering from our field.
The promise of more software does not even come close to outweighing all of that.