tomlue

That is a fair point. You could look at enterprise adoption though, also very high, and not cheap at all.

"This time is different" has been correct for every major technological shift in history. Electricity was different. Antibiotics were different. Semiconductors were different.

Gen AI reached 39% adoption in two years (internet took 5, PCs took 12). Enterprise spend went from $1.7B to $37B since 2023. Hyperscalers are spending $650B this year on AI infra and are supply-constrained, not demand-constrained. There is no technology in history with these curves.

The real debate isn't whether AI is transformative. It's whether current investment levels are proportionate to the transformation. That's a much harder and more interesting question than reflexively citing a phrase that pattern-matches to past bubbles.

how sure are you that an llm won't be better at reviewing code for safety than most humans, and eventually, most experts?

I think maybe you missed that my response was to this comment:

> How can you be grateful enough to want to send someone such a letter but not grateful enough to write one?

I already said in other comments that the OP was a different situation.

I agree about the abuse, and the OP is probably a good example of that. Do you have any ideas on how to curtail abuse?

Ideas I often hear usually assume it is easy to discern AI content from human, which is wrong, especially at scale. Either that, or they involve some form of extreme censorship.

Microtransactions might work by making it expensive run bots while costing human users very little. I'm not sure this is practical either though, and has plenty of downsides as well.

Yeah it can be a risk or a benefit for sure.

I agree that struggle matters. I don’t think deep understanding comes without effort.

My point isn’t that those hours were wasted, it’s that the same learning can often happen with fewer dead ends. LLMs don’t remove iteration, they compress it. You still read, think, debug, and get things wrong, just with faster feedback.

Maybe time will prove otherwise, but in practice I have found they let me learn more, not less, in the same amount of time.

Totally agree, but also, I still spend tons of time struggling and working on things with LLMs, it is just a different kind of struggle, and I do think I am getting much better at it over time.

> I know that the intellectually resilient of society, will still be able to thrive, but I'm scared for everyone else - how will LLMs affect their ability to learn in the long term?

Strong agree here.

I think you are right that it is a spectrum, and maybe that's enough to settle the debate. It is more about how you use it than the tool itself.

Maybe one more useful consideration for LLMs. If a friend writes to me with an LLM and discovers a new writing pattern, or learns a new concept and incorporates that into their writing, I see this as a positive development, not negative.

Forgive a sharp example, but consider someone who is disabled and cannot write or speak well. If they send a loving letter to a family member using an LLM to help form words and sentences they otherwise could not, do you really think the recipient feels cheated by the LLM? Would you seriously accuse them of not having written that letter?

This feels like the essential divide to me. I see this often with junior developers.

You can use AI to write a lot of your code, and as a side effect you might start losing your ability to code. You can also use it to learn new languages, concepts, programming patterns, etc and become a much better developer faster than ever before.

Personally, I'm extremely jealous of how easy it is to learn today with LLMs. So much of the effort I spent learning the things could be done much faster now.

If I'm honest, many of those hours reading through textbooks, blog posts, technical papers, iterating a million times on broken code that had trivial errors, were really wasted time, time which if I were starting over I wouldn't need to lose today.

This is pretty far off from the original thread though. I appreciate your less abrasive response.

> I’m sorry, but this really gets to me. Your writing is not improved. It is no longer your writing.

Photographers use cameras. Does that mean it isn't their art? Painters use paintbrushes. It might not be the the same things as writing with a pen and paper by candlelight, but I would argue that we can produce much more high quality writing than ever before collaborating with AI.

> As an aside, exposing people with dementia to a hallucinating robot is cruelty on an unfathomable level.

This is not fair. There is certainly a lot of danger there. I don't know what it's like to have dimentia, but I have seen mentally ill people become incredibly isolated. Rather than pretending we can make this go away by saying "well people should care more", maybe we can accept that a new technology might reduce that pain somewhat. I don't know that today's AI is there, but I think RLHF could develop LLMs that might help reassure and protect sick people.

I know we're using some emotional arguments here and it can get heated, but it is weird to me that so many on hackernews default to these strongly negative positions on new technology. I saw the same thing with cryptocurrency. Your arguments read as designed to inflame rather than thoughtful.

This is disingenuous

good point. My response was to the comment not the OP

If I spend hours writing and rewriting a paragraph into something I love while using AI to iterate, did I write that paragraph?

edit: Also, I think maybe you don't appreciate the people who struggle to write well. They are not proud of the mistakes in their writing.