Is AI actually helpful?

[Emma_O]

From my personal experience, AI has value in stubbing out fundamental functionality, i.e., a wrapper for a micro service based on a class I have already designed. For anything more complex, the cost of refactoring what it creates is too high. I've gotten similar reports from colleagues. In general, where coding is concerned, I feel it creates too much technical debt that a real person then has to go clean up. Technical debt is far more expensive than clean design up front.

When it comes to specific problems with business logic, I don't think AI can have much appreciable value unless the company invests heavily in their own private LLM based on their specific business functionality. I was discussing this with my older brother who is very high up in a financial services company. His take is that, in his world, is that the risks of putting their information into an LLM are just too great. It would make too much protected information public by default. WE were laughing at the risk a certain large multinational bank(WF) was taking by trying it by implementing an Google Cloud solution. Personal information hacks are too common already. Can you imagine having all of your banking history on the cloud, protected by Google? Not me.

"...Technical debt is far more expensive than clean design up front...."

I've often had similar thoughts, about a lot of things, not just AI, or coding . Mostly, I just dislike having to do anything twice. And its often my own screw-ups, LOL.

 

[Lifestyle66]

There are many problems with AI:
1. ChatGPT is coming up to its fourth anniversary of its release. In that time, there have been no successful startups whose business is not AI but is enabled by AI. I'm talking about something akin to ID software or eBay during the Internet age
2. Many of the uses of AI are nice, but not something people will pay big bucks for. They fall into the "It's a nice feature" category. Yesterday, I listened to an AI investor/advocate, and one of the success stories he mentioned for AI is transcripting video calls. Having a generated transcript of a Zoom call is nice, but I'm not sure I'd ever pay money for it. It's a nice feature of Zoom calls
3. The vast, vast majority of AI users aren't paying for it. That's not sustainable. At some point, people will have to pay for AI to generate images, write papers, etc. Once that happens, the use of AI will collapse. Someone mentioned NetFlix as an example of something like AI. Netflix was never free for years. Yes, you might have gotten a free month, but that was it.
4. For people who are actually paying for AI, they are paying heavily subsidized rates. Companies like OpenAI are basing their rates on what they hope their costs will be sometime in the future and not now. In the meantime, they are burning cash like crazy. They could easily go into a death spiral if they had to raise their rates to something closer to their costs
5. New AI companies seem to catch up quickly to established AI companies, and there doesn't seem to be much of a cost of switching AI providers. Chinese Open Source LLM models are almost as good as ChatGPT and are much cheaper. So pioneers like OpenAI are unlikely to ever recover their costs of developing the technology
6. The only way the unprecedented investments make sense is if there are huge layoffs because AI has taken over people's jobs
7. People hate AI. People hate data centers that power AI. People are only beginning to organize to move against data centers and AI in general, but it'll probably get ugly once they do

I think you're making many assumptions here just based on hating the term "AI".

How many people speak into their phone to ask a question and get a quick answer? Do they hate AI? They don't even know they're using one!

And if you've used Google search, you've used an AI without knowing or acknowledging it.

Hating data centers???, that's a NIMBY attitude. Everyone WANTS the capabilities. They just don't want to be the one whose back yard hosts it, seeing the monstrosity out their kitchen window!

As for the costs and who pays for it, every time you look at a "free" web page, you get ads along with it and they capture your browsing history to customize those ads. When people ask the AIs questions, the interface designers ARE doing exactly the same by customizing where their AI gets it's data for the answer, and they are directing those answers to prop up companies paying for that first look answer (just like Google searches prioritized their search lists in their early days!!!)

There was a time when primitive people complained about "The Internet, e-mail, and what's all that 'www' stuff?" But now almost all the old folk and nay-sayers are just as tied to and dependent on the technology as the first adopters.

"Oh, for the "Good ole days", the lost art of written letters and the Pony Express!"

EDIT: BTW, there is NO intelligence in the AIs. They are massive databases with decision tree logic and statistical analysis of probable word combinations to generate a response. They do NOTHING until someone kluges together the "What If" devices, scenarios, and prompts to spur them to action. But they ARE just massive databases running on exceedingly fast hardware.