HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47114579
All I know is, whenever I read testimonies from people whose companies suddenly decided to force LLM usage for productivity to be "AI first", having colleagues opening PR's who are only machine reviewed with implementations they cannot justify themselves outside of "Claude wrote it", makes me burnout just reading them. And it's only going to get worse until it becomes better, but not for the developers.
Honestly, the one thing that I could see justify all the investment companies make for LLM-assisted coding is the full automation of software production. I can only see the current state of things as the "end game" for them, only if they suddenly decide to jack up pricing to tap directly on the corporate budget and not the individual developer's budget.
What is this document?
What is the context?
https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com/post/3mfkc63h6222l
> "Here is an annotated version of the Citrini Memo with my own intro. It is analyslop - scare-fiction written to ingratiate AI boosters and analysts/traders with tales of ultra-automation and socialist data center policies. Shameful that the markets reacted at all."
It doesn't have any material effect on this article, but it says something about his ethics.
It's one thing to dislike or even detest something, but to constantly claim it is worthless and without use when people are already benefitting from it everyday is nothing short of delusion.
Rarely do I read something that starts off with such promise!
>i'm going to change your diaper and burp you
>Carlito is a very good boy Go piss in your diaper you big baby
>He doesn't care. He is a big baby who filled up his diaper with pee pee and poo poo
>you are a big baby and i am going to change your diaper and burp you <
>To be clear I call executives of multi trillion dollar companies scumbags and if you can't deal with that I'm not sure what to do. Burp you? Change your diaper?
>I am going to change your diaper and burp you
>Yeah man it's real authoritarian to say your second name is doodoo. Go change your diaper you big baby
>Yeah because you're a big baby with a big full diaper
>Hello sir this is your uber outside. I have your order from the diaper store
Despite the vulgarity, it is exceptionally illuminating to how much some of these slop pieces are just a mere pretension of rhetoric. I see this pretty consistently with a lot of the material I come across on the job that's gone through the LLM meat-grinder.
Also, the comment made me giggle like a little kid.
It is a problem when your doomsday timeline for obsolescence is behind the minute you publish. The memo itself was fantasy doomer porn on day 1.
I'm lucky to have worked in the field for a long time, and be able to spend a lot of tokens. In the last month it's become clear to me that the tech works. The science is done, and what's left is engineering.
There are a lot of risks and mitigations and theory to build, but it's all solvable. The tech isn't mature, but neither was the Internet 30 years ago. And we built transatlantic cables and ran new wires to everyone's house.
People I care about, engineers with 20 years of experience, are having mental health breakdowns, caused by Zitron's work. They insist the tech will never work, and avoid learning about it, becoming progressively more paranoid and isolated. I'm trying to be supportive and help them start to recover, but it's slow going.
If someone is having a crisis about this, I hope they start talking to a therapist. I don't need them to agree with me, but I do need them to not harm themselves.
They can always learn the technology later, when and if it proves itself to be useful :) I personally don't understand the hype, even after using Claude and other AI tools - but perhaps that will change in the future.
[0] https://lovable.dev/blog/how-a-startup-replaced-a-salesforce...
[1] https://seekingalpha.com/news/4144652-klarna-shuts-down-sale...
The unit cost is going down and has gone down by more than 20-30x over the years. Sure, the fixed cost of training is going up but that's because of the implied returns. Once the returns to training don't happen, it would simply reduce modulo cutoff date updates. The companies have a choice to just stop training and focus on inference cost reduction.
What am I missing here? Unless the consumers decide that they are no longer willing to pay the same amount as before and their expectations are rising with prices falling, what else?
"AI fake, AI poo poo, AI going away!" is the only argument he ever had. Nothing more.
returnInfinity•1h ago
He has been a perpetual bear
vv_•1h ago
simianwords•1h ago
Lariscus•1h ago
delaminator•1h ago
coldtea•1h ago
If it worked, there'd be no people using it.
Kye•1h ago
coldtea•16m ago
simianwords•1h ago
danielbln•1h ago
ubercore•1h ago
noosphr•1h ago
dash2•1h ago
rwmj•38m ago
cleaning•1h ago
jbreckmckye•1h ago
His argument is not "this tech doesn't work", but rather "these businesses aren't economically viable"
And that the smoke and mirrors accounting and perpetual thirst for more billions indicates just how unviable it is
Whilst he does dunk on LLM capabilities, the framing is the business angle - can Anysphere etc. actually form a moat and make a profit?
simianwords•1h ago
Why? because of cost?
jbreckmckye•1h ago
His style is acerbic and (imo) excessive sometimes. But he's also one of a minority of journos actually looking at the numbers and adding them up. Which seems to be a rarity
hiddencost•59m ago
jbreckmckye•53m ago
danlitt•25m ago
What on earth do you mean by this? Who is getting taken advantage of?
simianwords•37m ago
jbreckmckye•34m ago
And why is the error bar so large?
simianwords•32m ago
> The rate of decline varies dramatically depending on the performance milestone, ranging from 9x to 900x per year
JanneVee•24m ago
We are facing a situation that the short term effects are on memory and storage prices going up and lack of jet engines. Long term we wont be able to build actual buildings and ships without financing it with even more debt than today and everyone in the economy is going to service that debt through the price.
simianwords•12m ago
simianwords•42m ago
> You cannot "fix" hallucinations (the times when a model authoritatively tells you something that isn't true, or creates a picture of something that isn't right), because these models are predicting things based off of tags in a dataset, which it might be able to do well but can never do so flawlessly or reliably.
ChatGPT is fairly reliable.
>Deep Research has the same problem as every other generative AI product. These models don't know anything, and thus everything they do — even "reading" and "browsing" the web — is limited by their training data and probabilistic models that can say "this is an article about a subject" and posit their relevance, but not truly understand their contents. Deep Research repeatedly citing SEO-bait as a primary source proves that these models, even when grinding their gears as hard as humanely possible, are exceedingly mediocre, deeply untrustworthy, and ultimately useless.
This is untrue in spirit.
> You can fight with me on semantics, on claiming valuations are high and how many users ChatGPT has, but look at the products and tell me any of this is really the future.
Imagine if they’d done something else.
Imagine if they’d done anything else.
Imagine if they’d have decided to unite around something other than the idea that they needed to continue growing.
Imagine, because right now that’s the closest you’re going to fucking get.
This is what he said in 2024. He really thought ChatGPT is not in the future.
There are so many examples and its clear that he's not good faith and has consistently gotten the spirit wrong.
energy123•21m ago
Look at Gemini 3.1 Pro on the AA-Omniscience Index, which measures hallucinations. It's 30, previous best was 11.
https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/omniscience
With the amount of talent working on this problem, you would be unwise to bet against it being solved, for any reasonable definition of solved.
luke-stanley•43m ago