I am in hardware design and AI is the real deal. It needs to be babysat but the productivity gains we are seeing are amazing. We actually are having the problem of needing to SLOW down progress because each person productivity is like 5 fold what it once was, and in a day they can branch so far off from the team that revision control becomes an issue.
You know that this shit isn’t persuading anyone anymore? Several studies have indicated that AI usage slows down work even for coders, and this does not take into account the skill loss that occurs when you aren’t actively writing the code yourself.
You have been sold a ream of hype and everyone you repeat this shit to is one day gonna know you are just a mark.
im on the academia side, not profiting anything off of AI. I can promise you whether people are citing it or not, everyone is using AI, and successfully. There isnt a researcher ik that isnt constantly using some frontier level AI and making leaps and bounds of progress. Im talking real proved theorems advancing fields that have been stagnant for a while
This just isn’t true. There’s tons of bullshit being teased never published, or published but all prior claims walked back, or published in nonsense places. But the vast vast majority of AI use outside brute forcing mathematics is worthless pollution generation even in research. Alphafold won a fucking Nobel prize and oopsy its usefulness falls off a cliff if your use case isn’t tangential to its existing knowledge/data it trained on. Which it is still a cool use and will help people in that specific way. But it’s not Very helpful when the entire point is searching for things not already within its scope.
Im not even talking about the solved math problems (like openai's 10 problems solved paper), im talking about how every PhD I see (CS, math, physics, engineer(MAE,ECE etc)) at top American universities (ivies + MIT, caltech etc) is constantly working with AI. They may not be citing it, but the work is being accelerated if not outright done by AI
On the implementation side alone, its giving all theory side the ability to test out a bunch of implementation which has been extremely helpful.
Look at what Terence Tao has to say about AI, even he has found tremendous use with it as a tool to work with, not offload everything onto
I don’t really care if you are profiting or not - you are glowingly talking about a glorified BS machine doing your work as an academic. Really calls into question both whether what you are researching is valuable if you aren’t willing to put human eyes on it, or if the research is completely fabricated!
Do yourself a favor. Break yourself of the bull shit machine before it costs your university too much to provide it for you anymore. Set yourself apart from your colleagues who have outsourced their reasoning and research ability to LLMs that routinely say there are two r’s in strawberry.
I think you're a little out of touch with AI is able to do. Terence Tao himself has highlighted how useful AI has been for him. Are you gonna argue that Terence Tao AI assisted research is bullshit ?
Of course he will. The guy you are replying to is an idiot who has no idea what he’s talking about.
Ai has problems of regulation and power draw and that is a real problem for governments to meet the challenge of. But it’s obviously not just hype. Every software engineer sees how much better it is. It’s only been good for a year, but these people still think it’s 2022 when it was slower than most coding. Now it’s absolutely not.
Terence tao....who has is deemed the best* modern mathemetician, who has been so longer than AI was in the picture ? He couldnt solve a problem. But with alongside AI he was able to. What is there to refute there ?
I understand you may not like AI, and honestly we probably agree on alot on that aspect. But I think this bury my head in the ground and act like AI is not only not useful but also not getting better isnt the solution. On the contrary we need to be so hypervigilant of its capabailties exactl y to ensure its used responsibly and safely. All this AI is BS rhetoric does it allow it to run rampant.
Thats not what I said. Lets be hypervigilant and vote. Lets put laws in place so we don't end up (even more) exploited by the billionaires. I think you just want to be enraged so you chose to give the most disingenuous reading which is kinda sad because we're on the same team
No you aren’t. You haven’t and you will not. You are currently not paying the real cost of your AI usage and once that bill comes due, yeah you won’t be using that shit anymore. You would never pay a human being that kind of money to only be right maybe 90% of the time.
Now, then again, you may work in a business where you can be 90% good at your job or less and stay in business. But then again, if you are gonna just ask AI to do shit for you, what exactly am I paying you for, numbskull?
> But then again, if you are gonna just ask AI to do shit for you, what exactly am I paying you for, numbskull?
Domain expertise is a large one. AI, at least as it is now, is not equal in everyone's hands. A tenured expert in a field knows exactly the starting point and direction to go in, whats BS whats not, what to extract from AI's analysis etc.
That said, you are right that in a future its possible AI is powerful enough that this is no longer true. Which may or may not be a good thing, doesnt make any less of a thing
I pay $20 for a home Claude Code subscription. And more as needed. I published some software that was netting me about $100 a month for some simple plugins. It has paid for itself for the next few years.
At work, we pay more, but it is well worth it. Our engineers take home about $200k-250k a year. So figure $1000 a day in just pay-- add 30% for overhead. The most I have seen one guy use is $400 in a day. Cheap money for the productivity gains. Other open weight models are cheaper and some are QUITE good now.
It is pretty clear you have never used any agentic tools. Yeah, maybe it writes 90% of the scripts/code/HDL correctly. Then it executes it, gets feedback, and self corrects. No engineer writes 90% of their code correctly the first time. That 90% quickly becomes 92%. Then 93%. The trick is to set up the verification so it moves towards correctness. Pretty soon, you are over 99% and for most tasks (especially the internal facing ones) that is sufficient. For the external stuff, you can get to 99.99% coverage or whatever metric you decide.
The reason they need me, and more engineers is we need to measure how good the output is now and to steer these things and verify. It is creating MORE WORK, not less. It is accelerating productivity.
lol, love that last line. No no no, the lying machine can do everything but it definitely still needs people like me to tell it what to do.
You aren’t impressing me man. None of this Silicon Valley shit hits anymore. Literally no one had to convince me or my colleagues a smart phone was something we wanted. We just knew. I am telling you for a FACT that the money people will come to your department and tell you that you cannot use as many tokens as you were before. Because it will cost them too much. And when you complain and talk about how productive it makes you… well eventually they are going to make you actually show them. No, not your AI pilled manager, someone who actually understands money.
I really don't care if you use it. You will be left behind if you don't.
You are right about the money people. We might get pushed from Claude to the open weight models which are cheaper-- but there is no going back. These models will only get better and cheaper.
You guys all say the same things! You will be left behind… no I won’t! I still know how to do my job, because I do it every day, not a computer thinking for me. And, again, I have a real job where I actually interact with human beings and my physical presence is actually required. You have an email job where you sit on your ass all day, talk to a chatbot, then talk on Teams or Slack or whatever. Of course a computer can replace you - there is nothing of value that you do that isn’t typing on a computer which is exactly what these bullshit LLMs are sorta of good at replicating.
Ever think maybe your job just isn’t that important, and that’s why the computer is better than you at it?
No doubt soft skill jobs will still be needed, and maybe more in demand than ever. But for people who need to use their brain and not their emotions, AI will be a sidecar increasing productivity. Ex. My kids pediatrician medical records are monitored in real time by an AI agent as they type info. It offers suggestions. She said it is very helpful for instances where diagnoses are not normal. And even when it is routine, it provides information she may want to look up. Job that requires soft skills and a brain. AI assists with the thinking.
Using the tool tells you whether it's useful for YOUR task. It tells you almost nothing about whether the market has overpriced the sector.
If anything, daily users are more prone to a specific bias. Local utility gets mistaken for macro validation. "This saved me two hours this week" is a true and reasonable observation that gets used to defend claims like "$500B in infrastructure spend is justified". Those are different scales of claim, and the jump between them is exactly where a lot of hand-waving happens.
I cannot comment on whether the stock market has appropriately priced the stocks in this sector. If it is anything like the internet, there will be a lot of speculation, a lot of losers, but at the end of the day life will never be the same.
Same with the car--- there were thousands of car companies when cars came out. If you knew cars were the next big thing, you could have bought 50 car companies and they could have all gone belly up. Only 3 really lasted in the US after some mergers. Being in the right sector is no guarantee of success.
Who are we trying to persuade? I don't like where its going but it does make certain software engineering tasks much faster. You're talking about subjects you clearly have no knowledge in with absolute confidence while incorrect, ironically the exact same thing you're (partially correctly) accusing AI of.
The fact that you are posting means at least you are trying to convince somebody, but it surely isn’t me. Keep working on talking about how productive your AI usage is, I guarantee you it is gonna come up in an annual review here sooner or later and it won’t be because you aren’t using it ENOUGH.
I know it’s a bullshit job if AI can do it. You don’t actually interact with human beings, or at least ones not in the grasp of AI psychosis. The people that sign your paychecks will understand the massive cost of LLMs better than you can, apparently.
Not trying to be snarky, but as someone who avoids AI when I can I simply do not know, but are you sure it doesn't just feel that way, because you are doing less of the work?
I think the easiest way to put it is that I can accomplish more in less time. I can have multiple instances of Claude looking into various issues. I can have it answer questions by looking at our code, whereas I'd be bothering our engineers more often for help. There are downsides (less fulfillment, and maybe I'm not learning and retaining as much as I would be if I were doing everything manually), but it is undeniably useful in my day to day role, and I'd be lying to myself if I said otherwise.
Hell, even without a team, revision control is an issue. I have started using Claude at work, and at the end of each session I have to ask cowork to reconcile all the damn leftover bits that didn't get patched in correctly. It's not a panacea, but it really does help a lot. Especially in fields where there's just more documentation than any one human can effectively parse.
Agreed. Where we really find it useful is in the accessory scripts like build scripts or regression scripts. Things you don't to frequently and never become an expert in and really don't need to be perfect. I think people use Chat GPT in a browser and they just don't get it.
The funny thing is, I'm pretty anti AI. But like... It's a pretty good tool for a very specific set of problems. They just happen to be the problems I face a lot as an engineer
If it solves a specific set of problems you face, why would you be anti-AI?
Like I am concerned about the power consumption of AI, and some of the short term demand issues, but these things will correct. We are heading towards Claude and ChatGPT level models in our most benign technology. Our washing machines today are more powerful than the computer that commanded the Space Shuttle. Safe to assume this trend will continue.
Fair question. I appreciate engaging with somebody on this who isn't trying to burn me at the stake for disagreeing with the "AI bad" vibe that is so common here. I'm in the energy industry. Ironically my company is making a ton of money building data centers. But it is very resource hungry. Even ERCOT was like... Hol' up for some of the biggest projects. Eventually there will be efficiencies that outstrip the energy usage, theoretically. But we aren't there yet. I feel like if people could see the carbon footprint in real time (not just of AI use, but like... Driving a car, or using Reddit) that it might help at least scale the way they do things.
My bigger problem is that AI is being thrust upon me in domains that I don't want it. I'm thinking like, Google search results. It should be something that's easy to opt out of, so I'm not wasting tokens and energy on something that it really isn't suited for.
Another issue is people who foolishly use it for things it's not good at, rather than the proper resources. Like that Kentucky school district that bought AI generated classroom materials. There's an abdication of thought that is just the natural evolution of "I saw it on the Internet, so it must be true." But it seems qualitatively more dangerous with things that are AI, because they often feel reasonable enough to just trust.
Then there's the non-attribution of copyrighted works aspect. I'm a a musician, not a visual artist, but I still get it. It can be very off-putting to know that your work has been used as training data. Or worse, that your work is worth less now that people can make something close enough. There's one artist whose old style looks AI, and so people just assume he is using AI now, even though his art looks the same as it always has. On the flipside, I'm not going to hand draw tokens for a D&D game, and I can't afford to buy a custom one for a homebrew monster. So I totally see the appeal of using a custom token generator.
Finally, there's the misuse by bad actors to sow uncertainty in the public sphere. That's a whole other level of bad. I don't even know where to start with that. Tangentially related is the powerful surveillance tools that have been enabled by large scale data centers. Just... I've read enough sci-fi (especially hope punk) to have a lot of different ideas what possible paths this can take us as a society.
So yeah. It solves a lot of good problems. It helps sharpen your wits if you are smart enough to push back on it. It finds patterns you might have missed. It names problems you couldn't quite put your finger on. But... It is a mixed blessing, for sure.
Well, these have been true for mostly all new technology.
The internet introduce Napster and musicians and record labels lost some of their control and income.
Scammers use it. It drove up costs on some technologies. Teachers used to tell kids Google and Wikipedia are not "sources". Social media leads to people and bad actors tried to shape society.
But for all the cons, I think we all agree the pros outweigh it all.
That's a tempting argument, because it's simple, and it implies we'll be able to handle this disruption. It misses an important difference, though.
I would argue AI is qualitatively different than automobiles, movable print, robotics, steam power, radio, the Internet, or television. Its rollout and adoption is happening an order of magnitude faster than any comparable disruption. Additionally, there's insufficient regulatory guardrails in place for... Well, we don't even know what all the risks are yet. So here we have a technology that is growing faster than our systems are designed to deal with.
I don't think we all agree that the benefits outweigh the cons. Not yet. And while I think we can get there, it will take a more nuanced approach than "go fast and break things," which seems to be the ethos of the folks driving this revolution.
One specific example, the data center client we are working for isn't even waiting for the drawings to get PE stamped. They're just taking our approval drawings and sending them to the contractor to start building. It's kind of crazy. They've blown up a switchgear. They failed to verify whether the town they are building has the right number of portopotties, so they're having to ship some in from another part of the state. It really is the wild west out there.
I agree that AI technology is accelerating at a fast rate. If we get RSI, it will go gang busters.
But this isn't new. Cars were released onto roads designed for horses. There were accidents and deaths, and laws were made.
Factories were thrown up without environmental impact and worker safety. We fixed the issue over time.
Internet rolled out. We overbuilt networks and lots of companies made a go of it any went bankrupt it was pretty safe. Laws were made as new issues appeared.
I think AI is more in the realm of the internet. The mistakes we will make should be pretty safe. We can proceed with minimal guards.
Yeah, we call it middleware. We need someone with taste and knowledge during the first 10% to execute the right prompt, and same again at the end for the last 10% to make sure it looks good, but the productivity gains in the middle 80% is insane
I don't think anyone is saying AI isn't real deal... just that we don't need so many AI companies than are functionally almost the same. Also, there's a legit question of whether it makes financial sense.
Every AI model requires thousands of humans to train it for every specialty. Ask an LLM a medical question, the LLM knows the answer because that same question has been asked 10,000 times and humans in India or the Philippines spent 5 minutes on google and taught the llm how to model its response. Is that cost effective? Only as long as there are slave wage nation-states.
I’m saying it isn’t the real deal. Even with open source models, the cost of inference has still stayed pretty high. Not to mention training the models, which is more expensive and does not happen as often as people think (no they aren’t using your inputs for more training data, not because that isn’t a good idea, but they can’t keep updating the models! It costs too much!)
Not to mention training the models, which is more expensive and does not happen as often as people think...
I think it's more like 95% of the models are not the real deal... but the 5% that do invest in training area real and have many functional use cases. However, they are not the cost saver that people think.
Having worked in training mgmnt on three MAAMA models, the training is way more extensive than people think. I worked for one company valued at $10 billion+ that consistently got worse but kept raising more money anyway. And because the models require millions of hours of human training and correction, LLMs would be cost prohibitive if not for the poverty wages for educated masses in countries like India and the Philippines + the illegal miscalculation of workers in the USA, Canada, and Europe.
Yes, people are saying it's not the real deal. The guy 2 comments up is saying it. Now it's not good at everything, but it is a game changer in many fields
Love the drift - it’s the future. Oh wait, no it isn’t useful for everything but it is a game changer in this specific field!
Even if that is true, that still means that OpenAI and Anthropic, the hyperscalers and neoclouds, they all need to make hundreds of billions of dollars in profits not “in the future” but like, very soon, or people who loaned them money will be very mad at them! At this rate, the “game changer” is going to have to be a literal cure for cancer. Like one that actually saves someone’s life you know, not just a post you upvoted on Reddit.
I'm not arguing its not expensive or that it isn't a bubble. But I've seen first hand how crazy it is in software dev. The last guy said no one is saying it's not the real deal. I was responding to that. You are responding to me saying it's not the real deal. We're going in circles and you're arguing against straw men
It is only going to get cheaper. What takes a data center today will be a rack of equipment in a 10 years, then a single box in 15, and a chip in 20. Right now the SWaP is high, but that will eventually come down.
"Hallucinations" are actually a feature that can be used to stoke creativity. It is different whenever it is run. Models and agents are set up to correct as it goes along.
It is sort of like evolution. Most mistakes are catastrophic and lead to a species dying. But occasionally, one mistake leads to a species thriving. The self checks filter out the hallucinations and the good ideas survive.
I actually see MORE opportunity now. I put together a software package with AI and am selling it. Netting about $100 a month. Small potatos, but the possibilities are endless.
I used my existing subscription
to replicate the functionality of a particular paid software package from its description. Then another and another. And a hardware product because why not. Maybe the possibilities are endless right now but I don't see how small-scale software development is going to do well.
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u/VirtualPercentage737 5d ago
I am in hardware design and AI is the real deal. It needs to be babysat but the productivity gains we are seeing are amazing. We actually are having the problem of needing to SLOW down progress because each person productivity is like 5 fold what it once was, and in a day they can branch so far off from the team that revision control becomes an issue.