Disillusioned after AI?

I feel it. I'll add that I'm also rather scared of how AI's compute and data hungry nature is de-democratizing tech and...reality in a big way. A handful of giga-scale companies hold all the cards. The actual technology behind AI is mostly a small set of clever tricks for encoding data in a way that neural nets can work efficiently on, the nets themselves aren't magic and the process of making them is well understood, but unless you have the money to shell out for tens of thousands in hardware and have access to literally everyone's private data to train on you're just going to be very second tier for eternity.

> There’s an odd feeling that whatever I am going to build will just get gobbled away by some big tech company.

I have been wrestling with this exact feeling (and everything you posted) since the first day they released chatGPT to the public. As a software engineer / Maker, I can't possibly overstate how essential it is for me to be in the flow, writing software, building things and finding novel solutions to problems. If you take this away from my day-to-day job I have no idea what I would do with myself. I know I would be absolutely miserable.

People who are blindly "enthusiastic" and expressing their excitement about being able to "build things they never built before" "with such ease" are totally missing the mark. They're just being short-sighted and can't think about the logical implication of what it means when (in a few years) Products can be created simply by telling a computer what you wish for. Here is what happens then:

(1) The value and uniqueness of all products drops to near-0

(2) You can't create a business out of these "products" because anyone else can build them

(3) The only one profiting is the person or entity that owns the AI platform you're building your products on.

Why are people not revolting against companies who's mission statement is to "build AGI" is beyond me. it's just humans being completely oblivious as always. it's not like we haven't seen this with climate change.

> Maybe it’s me but the advances in AI are just leaving me feeling disillusioned as a builder.

I think we're living a big evolution in tech and as a developer myself I think it will take time to really adopt those tools (and not fear them). For now, to be honest I don't see any big advantage using AI for code generation. However I think today stuff like ChatGPT are great dev rubber ducks. Sometime it helps you think and put you on the right path.

> There’s an odd feeling that whatever I am going to build will just get gobbled away by some big tech company.

I could be wrong but for now we're still in the hype train, AI companies are showing off everything they can to impress and raise as much money as possible (because their own subsistance is based on huge amount of money they're not able to generate by themselves). Don't get me wrong, what they are showing us is extremely impressive. But today I tend to think those tools will give more credit to the builders that will imagine and build apps and tools with something AI eats but doesn't have... Creativity, Taste and Imagination.

I might be a fool to believe that but If I compare that to cooking, even if you have restaurants where that only re-heat stuff that taste good, people still appreciate a good meal prepared with love by a real chef :)

So my only advice here is: be a chef, build what you think makes sense to you, be happy at what you're doing. Learn, try, brake and build but just don't stop doing it.

Something that I've found worth pointing out to other builders is that you don't need to build an AI product outright to sell to consumers (re: your comment about your ideas being gobbled up by big tech). Building internal AI/ML tools to solve your own business/workflow/whatever problems is often the better route for folks to leverage the advances in that technology. The best AI you build is likely the one your users don't even know exists.

This also has a beneficial side effect of showing you first-hand just how bad this tooling is currently and how far away it is from replacing builders wholesale. And to be clear, I'm not just talking about leveraging closed proprietary APIs for these efforts, I'm actually more referring to building your own training and inference stacks from scratch. The pedagogical impact alone can make up most of the ROI for your time spent.

I feel that Google IO today was rather sad. There was a couple things I'd use. But there was weirdly nothing I'd pay money for? I can't square in my mind the amount of money and hype in this industry with how, like, 30% excited I am for the things they make. I found the iPad keynote a few days ago more exciting and potential-invoking; seeing them present these devices from the perspective of "look at how you can draw with it" "look at people make music with it" "You can manage your business from it" and I was left with a small ember of excitement, like, maybe I should get one of these (and then you realize that I've felt that every time this happens and bought one and it never happens, but hey that's mostly a Me Problem).

Google showcases Veo or whatever it is with a small, boring, stupid spot with Donald Glover, and I feel nothing. OpenAI demos GPT-4o and all I can think is "damn that TTS is horny". Asking AI to make art for you does not scratch the dull itch all humans have to create. Asking an AI to create is not creation; its management. Even using it as part of the process implies a larger, more comprehensive creative process the AI sits within, which none of these companies, Google, OpenAI, Runway, clearly know anything about.

My take in general is: Big Tech lost the mandate of heaven like six years ago, OpenAI had it for a bit but at this point they've also lost it. Its actually kinda the case that no one has it right now. My innate response is to feel depression at Everything AI we're seeing happen, but with a little bit of effort I find that feeling sits right next to excitement; that I'm probably not the only one feeling this, that what these companies are doing is actually literally boring, its loved most by Elon thread-bros on XXXwitter, and that the world by-and-large is actually kinda holding its breath right now. Its the same feeling I had during crypto; that this can't be It, please God this can't be the thing that drives humanity forward for the next twenty years; and crypto wasn't; and AI probably won't be either. Doesn't mean it won't be useful, but it does mean that there will be a next thing, and I'm most excited to help build that.

I'm going back to basics. The other day I've implemented a raycaster (wolf 3d), after that I took a shot at the shunting yard algorithm... I honestly don't give a ff about llms, video and music generation using AI. It's all sad at this point

In a world of IKEA, people still perfect the craft of handmade furniture.

In the era of the camera, people kept painting. Some still paint landscapes — others were driven to create new forms of expression.

Poets still exist in the era of tweets, and directors shoot on 35mm in the age of TikTok.

Change is constant — but there's always joy in finding something you love and diving deeply into it.

I'm not disillusioned I'm just being realistic. As opposed to the Dotcom boom, AI is top down rather than bottom up.

Very few startups are finding success and if they do it's short lived because it gets replaced or integrated natively by newer capabilities from existing major players.

There will be success stories but I haven't seen many novel ideas created using new AI tech that are not just an overlay on top of an LLM that people aren't willing to pay for.

I think the right state of mind is to explore and keep thinking about real world applications, even though at the moment it's basically just every existing saas inserting AI into their existing products.

> The demos just become more cringey, the messaging more duplicitous and fake-authentic.

Completely agree, and this is a sign that they're just riding the hype train. Why does that make you feel disillusioned? What do you want to build or are building that would get gobbled away?

Even before AI, I always considered my work to be like a Tibetan sand painting. As soon I was off the project it may have just been wiped away. Quite a few things I built never launched or never got adoption. You're never guaranteed success at anything.

I feel it. I imagine it's how someone like David Foster Wallace felt when postmodernism overtook the culture at large and seeped into every nook and cranny.

I have certainly become more of a recluse on the internet. I'm still figuring things out... at this time I think I'll pull more inwards. Do my own thing. Create my own art. Maybe I'll see you on the flip side? Maybe not.

You are forgetting one point about the current AI technology. No creativity. Yes you can ask models to generate music, video, images. But they are rehashing the content of somebody else. Asking to create a video of Michael Jackson dancing at the style of Fred Astaire with music similar to a Metallica song, is rehashing, not creativity. There is nothing in the current GenAI that is not a rehash.

It will stop when they run out of data, or when the training data needs to be isolated from the datasets created by GenAI.

So create something based on human creation. Sell it to the LLM trainers. It's the new business model....

I find it more interesting you view "AI" as a threat at all, instead of leveraging it to your advantage. Did Squarespace/Wix kill frontend development? Did any low code/no code solution kill development at all?

> whatever I am going to build will just get gobbled away by some big tech company

This has been happening since the industry existed. X company copies/acquires Y and things go to die. New things pop up, the cycle repeats.

Sounds like you're going through a rough patch.

I'm not feeling disillusioned. I'm impressed with what's been accomplished and how fast things are moving.

I went through Stanford CS in the mid-1980s, just as the "AI Winter" was starting. The expert system guys were claiming Strong AI Real Soon Now, but expert systems didn't do much of anything. Now that was disillusioning. All those smart, famous people in AI going nowhere and in denial about it.

This time it works. Sure, LLMs aren't really that bright, but they've blown through the Turing test and can do most of the work of the chattering classes. If only they knew when they were totally wrong. Even more impressive to me is that machine learning now works for robot balance and coordination. Even automatic driving works now. That gives hope that "common sense" might emerge. We badly need that, because we can't trust current systems with anything important.

The AI/LLM boom has really hurt my interest in developing new programming languages. I worry that even if I come up with a new language that's a significant step forward, the lack of an existing corpus for it would limit the ability of tools like Copilot to work with it, which would discourage adoption.

I get where you're coming from, though it has me neither excited nor scared. I think interests will just get pushed around a bit, and I feel like we still inherently crave human-created things in one way or another. For example, it used to be cool when someone would make a nice movie of photos of their trip with titles and effects and share it. Now... it takes seconds, is automated, my feed is filled with such "reels", and I don't watch any of them. Instead, that plain, typo-filled but authentic text update catches my eye. Things that highlight personal craft will be demanded. Look to any number of parallels in the physical world.

It feels like the tail end of a culturally stagnant generation. I'm hoping it's potent enough to trigger an aesthetic revival.

I am now able to build things I could never do before. I have never felt more excited about what I am able to complete.

Personally, as a developer who has been doing this for more than 25 years, I am excited, enthralled, and chomping at the bit to see what's next. Every day is like christmas, and I'm not even kidding. I have been having the mental time of my life playing with arenas, reading research papers, experimenting with agents, pitting one model against another, watching 'the sand learn to talk' and seeing everything take off. This is something I never thought I'd live to see.

There is a lot of concern about AI just building code, or creating music, or creating art, writing articles for you. I agree with this concern but to balance ...On the writing side, most people in my circle don't like how AI writes. It's clear how AI writes is not how we would say things. It lacks original insight. This is where humans come in.

To the developer who likes to come up with creative solutions to problems, if your solution has not been done before and it has not been done many times over the AI is not going to invent your idea. At least not today's AI! :-)

You won't get any sort of heartfelt response here. Talk to her instead.

One possible issue with the increasing adoption of AI is the potential for humans to lose their critical thinking and problem-solving skills. As we come to rely more heavily on AI systems for assistance, there is a risk that individuals may become less self-reliant and less skilled at addressing complex issues on their own. This could lead to a gradual erosion of human intellectual capabilities, as we offload more of our cognitive tasks to AI.

Another concern is the potential disappearance of entry-level positions for junior developers due to AI-driven automation. As AI systems become more sophisticated and capable of performing tasks once reserved for human programmers, the job market may undergo a significant shift. This could make it increasingly difficult for newcomers to the field to gain a foothold and establish their careers.

> The demos just become more cringey, the messaging more duplicitous and fake-authentic.

This part sounds like you are going through a rough patch. Like you are feeling down, not sure why, and are digging around for reasons.

What you are saying is legit. What you are feeling is legit. But, it would be worth doing some deep chill soul-searching to figure out if these really are the reasons. Maybe you need a hike in the woods. Maybe you want a job better mission behind it. Maybe I'm full of shit.

Either way, best to laugh at cringey demos. Learn how to use AI. What is good for and what it's not. Use it or don't. Just build stuff people need either way.

Was in an ML PhD program. Cut my losses and left with my Master's. It was a combination of:

1) I just don't think I have the intellect or ideas to excel in the field as I would need to.

2) Current-day academic process was antithetical to how I wanted to work. An absolute slog.

3) AI started to reach peak exuberance near when I quit, such that I looked at the job market and saw nothing but scammy startups milking VCs for easy cash, with dozens and dozens of candidates lined up for unrealistic salaries. Everyone everywhere was and still is misinterpreting what these models are and what they can actually do.

The trough of disappointment is going to be apocalyptic for this one. Once NNs are making decisions that face tough legal accountability and auditing, they are going to be dropped like a tungsten rod from God.

I'm now in a pretty comfortable job doing analysis in an engineering field, so it all worked out for me. I love the work and problems I have to solve; while the pay isn't top-tier, I'm comfortable with steadily improving my software engineering and analysis skills, rather than running the grant treadmill or competing in the ML researcher job market.

A lot of low-lying fruit has surely been plucked by AI models in the fields of Code Generation, NLP and Computer Vision, and a lot of this is now shrink-wrapped as fine-tunable or zero-shot models behind APIs or abstracted in HF pipelines. IMHO, there are plenty of rapid advances yet to be made in focusing coding and ML engineering in more esetoric fields that require specialized domain knowledge (eg Cheminformatics, Quant Finance).

There was a point in time, if you had a popular windows app, Microsoft would build their own version of it and ship it to the masses.

Excel, Word, Flight Simulator, Internet Explorer etc

LMMs trained on ungodly amounts of internet and private data could be that.

You and I should be worried. It’s a dog eat dog world out there.

A definition of AGI is “do what humans do”. Better, faster, cheaper.

Best course of humanity is that this takes a few decades to be as good as humans. If it’s rapid, it’s going to be very disruptive.

I hope LLMs gobble up my code. Amplify my code's use by presenting it in a new way where others can solve their problems faster

Not just you. And not just you "going through a rough patch," although there could be some overlap. I think my optimism for the future is cut down a bit by announcements like these, too. That does affect my overall life outlook.

Perhaps I'm just in the same boat - shouldn't be drawing any sort of emotional support from that.

> If you don't like how the new technology is pulling the rug out from under your reality, it is you who has the problem.

I didn't want to reply to anybody in particular so as to mitigate the provocation since this is HN. But this feels like a common sentiment among transhumanist etc types. Or maybe I'm imagining, but I bet a lot of us are feeling this way so I thought I'd call it out. I have no expectation of receiving any understanding. The future is not for people like us.

It's NOT AI, it is what we called it "Expert Systems" way back in the 90s

all LLMs are good at doing that type of pattern matching and assistance.

I think the only solution is to confront the deep root of this issue: you've grown your identity around the current system and your worth as citizen within it, a period of unexpected upheaval is extremely scary. I can definitely relate, especially since the Wall Street Fat Cats (retro is cool) are in an extremely advantageous position vis-a-vis AI. They see how AI isn't just a new internet fad, it's the culmination of computing - and they're investing to match that assessment.

But just because we have long battle ahead of us doesn't mean it's over. Hackers built the internet and AI and Silicon Valley for all its fucked-up idiosyncrasies, and I think we (/our predecessors) should be proud of that.

This will make me lose any authority I have, but I unironically suggest watching Mr. Robot, a dramatic fiction about an individual "hacker"-type in times of great technological upheaval, and IMO it puts forth a compelling analysis of the various ethical and practical barriers that present themselves therein. For example, "how to influence technology without working at a giant company"

its motivated me, I think the real question is whether the thing you're a builder of is intended to make money. because for making money this has been great.

for trying to do a passion project for accolades on your originality, with money as an afterthought, I can see that seeming more pointless

for an analogy: grocery stores don't need to be original, you can put one right across the street from another and we still need more grocery stores.

Feels like an opportunity to me - when big tech is whiffing small builders have a chance to fill the gap

Why? This stuff is garbage.

Go build something that doesn't suck. They're not even trying to compete with that.

Wondering why this got shadow banned from the front page?

Aren't you a part of a tech company?

I was already disillusioned before ;)

Yes.

Yes I‘ve had that too big time. Currently it goes better especially since Yann LeCun debunked a lot of the OpenAI AGI fearmongering. There is for example no such thing as general intelligence, people can be orders of magnitude better or worse in certain domains AND it seems AI is just approaching human-level and passing it only a little. Not some kind of magical AGI which can do everything in seconds.

Also related: https://youtu.be/nkdZRBFtqSs

Meh. AI is like having a super senior developer on your team to ask questions of. They don’t always give the correct answer.

I think I was never convinced so I can't be disillusioned...

In general terms: big tech know IT have started to be spread enough to makes people thinking back at classic desktops, hosting own services and so on, making their business model rooted on lock-in and others ignorance in a threat status. They have successfully pushed laptops, but have failed to go further with netbooks and mobile "the cloud-integrated platform", Chromebooks prove to be a limited success, people still want to own their own data even if far less than we all need. Emails are almost a synonym of webmails now, but even with modern antispam sheriffs they are still a success, modern socials after usenet have gained a big success but ultimately lost much of their popularity, hw is cheap enough to own a small machine room at home in most of the west world for most people and some https://tech.ahrefs.com/how-ahrefs-saved-us-400m-in-3-years-... or https://tech.ahrefs.com/how-ahrefs-gets-a-billion-dollar-wor... have started to talk how cheap and effective is owning something... ML systems are a potential solution being not a small show. They are also very nice to hide any sort of nasty things, isolating people without them easily notice and so on.

Aside the dream to "talk to computers like humans" or having "smart devices" who follow us easing our life till the point of being able to became another species transferring our consciousness in something we built in a factory to finally reach the immortality, the pure intellect is still a thing as it was since ever.

Bottomline: we are in declining and aging society where schools was reformed to generate legions of useful idiots https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/i-was-usef... because they are easy to manage like Ford model workers, unfortunately they are not just workers, the lowest base of the society but ALL LEVEL of the social pyramid and while became ignorant is easy became literate it's not.

It's about time we need to know to use computers, the myth of a chimp able to operate was and still is a myth, the myth we can make eye candy UIs not demanding users knowledge is and was a myth. We see CLIs coming back in nth forms, we will see DocUIs coming back, and big tech is desperate who to make them back since we need them but without giving power to the users and without loosing their digital dominance. I can't predict the future, but I'm pretty convinced we see again bat tech take ground while not fully succeed.

Wouldn't intelligent AI agents enable average people to build amazing things?