10 ms·

A lot of the conclusions they're drawing in this post about the "agentic era" seem quite misguided and some don't really seem to make sense. I have no doubt Gi

• deleted 4mo ago
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• ai_fry_ur_brain 4mo ago
  Let these people keep betting their companies, futures and net competency on text autocomplete. The future is bright for me and everyone else that isn't falling for it.
  • u_fucking_dork 4mo ago
    Calling it text autocomplete is played out and really just makes you look bad at this point.
    • solid_fuel 4mo ago
      It's literally text autocomplete. You can dress it up however you want but it takes input text and outputs the most likely next sequence.
      • argee 4mo ago
        Reminds me of when microwaves first came out. Investors decided to go all in on "vibe cooking" (lit. cooking with vibrations) complete with microwave ranges (no conventional oven), until the public wizened up to the fact that there was in fact no cooking (Maillard reaction) involved in their vibe cooking. Took about 15-20 years but microwaves finally took their rightful place as a utility appliance rather than what they were touted as (a centerpiece). Pick up a microwave cookbook from the 50s for some laughs.
        • nunez 4mo ago
          There are still cooking functions on microwaves! And they still come with recipe books!
          • lazide 4mo ago
            Hope never dies.
        • abalashov 4mo ago
          This is an unexpectedly apt comparison, and I appreciated it.
        • altmanaltman 4mo ago
          [flagged]
        • usef- 4mo ago
          I sure hope you're not mocking the classic "Microwave cooking for one" book! The mallard reaction is very possible in microwaves, but they use microwave-specific crockery. I think the vision was possibly killed by people not wanting to maintain a second set of crockery. See here for a fun write-up: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8m6AM5qtPMjgTkEeD/my-journey-to-the-microwave-alternate-timeline https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8m6AM5qtPMjgTkEeD/my-journey...
          • ghaff 4mo ago
            But I think the argument that microwaves are basically for heating things up and for essentially steaming a lot of vegetables. (I'll do one ear of corn in the microwave with pepper and spices.) I do have a thick microwave cookbook from the 70s or 80s but I've mostly only ever used it for vegetable cooking times. And probably less since I started roasting vegetables in the oven a lot of the time. I have cooked some of the other recipes but not for a very long time. Understand that a lot of people don't have a lot of choice but I use mine (actually have a 4 in 1 when I had to replace the old one after it burst into flames and that's somewhat useful as a second oven).
          • 4mo ago
      • jaccola 4mo ago
        “But they’ve added RL so…!!!” You are obviously right and I see examples of it everywhere. E.g I asked Claude opus 4.7 (the latest/greatest) the other day “is a Rimworld year 60 days?”. The reply (paraphrased) “No, a Rimworld year is 4 seasons each of 15 days which is 60 days total”. Equally, it gets confused about what is a mod or vanilla since it is just predicting based on what it read on forums, which are clearly ambiguous enough (to a dumb text predictor).
        • fancy_pantser 4mo ago
          Maybe there was more in the context before that question? I just copy-pasted that question into Opus 4.7 and it replied: Yes. A RimWorld year is 60 days, split into four 15-day quadrums (Aprimay, Jugust, Septober, Decembary), each corresponding to a season.
          • merb 4mo ago
            And that is the reason why it is only autocomplete. You probably had less context than the poster before, so it could not mix stuff up. The poster before either had more memory or the search searched through more topics. And btw it’s really hard to only give access to some things.
            • xyzal 4mo ago
              Not even deterministic autocomplete.
              • noir_lord 4mo ago
                Good job a handful of companies aren’t investing a trillion+ dollars in that. Can you imagine how silly they’d look when everyone realised.
                • xyzal 4mo ago
                  "Everyone is doing it ⇒ it must be right." See also: bloodletting, leaded gasoline and parachute pants.
      • nunez 4mo ago
        By design. At least until we move away from attention being at the core of LLMs
        • solid_fuel 4mo ago
          It's not attention that's the problem, it's how we train networks offline with backprop. LLMs are the most successful form of neural network we have, and that's because they are token prediction machines. Token predictors are easy to train because we're surrounded by written text - there's data nicely structured for use as training data for token prediction everywhere, free for the taking (especially if you ignore copyright law and robots.txt and crawl the entire web). We can't train an LLM to have a more complex internal thought loop because there's no way to synthesize or acquire that internal training data in a way where you could perform backprop training with it. Even "train of thought" models are reducing complex thoughts to simple token space as they iterate, and that is required because backprop only works when you can compute the delta between <input state> and <desired output state>. It can't work for anything more complicated or recursive than that.
      • u_fucking_dork 4mo ago
        Your house is literally just a box. You can dress it up however you want but it has 4 walls and a lid.
        • estimator7292 4mo ago
          [dead]
        • jghefner 4mo ago
          The secret to woodworking is that everything is a box. The secret to AI is that everything is token matching.
        • solid_fuel 4mo ago
          Mine has like, 8 walls, but sure. It's a box. Crucially, it was sold as a box. Not a thinking machine. Your attempt at an analogy will make sense when someone tries to install a house as middle management at some company.
          • rcxdude 4mo ago
            I'm pretty sure it was sold as a house. That you understand that you can think of it as a box doesn't make it not a house. That's the point of the analogy.
          • u_fucking_dork 4mo ago
            If you ignore all the complexity and discard every detail, it’s literally just a box. Yet curiously you aren’t living in a cardboard box, or an aluminum shed. Point being, which you know and are being willfully ignorant about, is that it’s more complex than that. And you’ve neatly discarded the detail that they’re multi modal. I will freely admit though, analogy is useless when interacting with someone who has already made up their mind.
            • solid_fuel 4mo ago
              Well that’s the problem with arguing through analogy, when you’re wrong you just come out looking like a Fucking Dork. Truly your analogy isn’t wrong, it’s just that you are wrong. A house is a box and it needs walls on each side and a roof like a box. But it’s good to remember that it’s supposed to be a box. That might sound overly reductive, but it’s important to keep the fundamentals in mind in case someone tries to sell you a bowl like it was a house. A bowl does not have a lid, and will not keep the elements out. Similarly, people keep trying to sell token prediction machines as if they are capable of thought. They are not. They predict the next token, nothing more. Yet people keep trying to sell them as if they can think.
      • Imustaskforhelp 4mo ago
        For a good reminder for people on the limitations of AI (or well OAI gpt 5.3 default model for non paying users), I did an experiment recently (Just a week-ish ago): https://smileplease.mataroa.blog/blog/how-many-e-are-in-strawberry/ https://smileplease.mataroa.blog/blog/how-many-e-are-in-stra... image: https://mataroa.blog/images/b5c65214.png https://mataroa.blog/images/b5c65214.png but it says that there are 3 e's in strawberry ;) Now this is literally something which occurs because of it being text autocomplete and the inherent issue of token based Large language models. So you are literally right :D My point is that AI can have its issues and it can have its plus points (just like text autocomplete but some suggest its on steroids) The issue to me feels like we are hammering it in absolutely everything and anything, perhaps it should be used more selectively, y'know, like perhaps a tool?
        • tux 4mo ago
          Yes, AI should be used as a tool for very specific things. Ones it’s trained on everything it’s completely useless. Anyone who is trying to use it for everyone will fail. I predict by 2030 (if not much sooner) ai bubble will burst. The only good outcome will be all this hardware used will be lequdated for pennies. Mark this prediction it will happen ;-)
          • skeptic_ai 4mo ago
            If you’re so sure just make a leveraged bet and become a millionaire. Put your food where your mouth is if you’re so convinced
            • ipaddr 4mo ago
              Knowing it will fail is one thing but knowing when and how things blow up is another.
          • koiueo 4mo ago
            I definitely hope you're right > Mark this prediction it will happen But this historically is a very strong predictor of a poor prediction
      • tux 4mo ago
        AI is a text autocomplete. This is tge best AI definition i heard and agree with 100% Thank you.
        • somenameforme 4mo ago
          It's literally how they work. I think the magic that none of us really expected is that our languages, human and computer, are absurdly redundant. But I think it makes sense, in hindsight at least. When we say things it's usually not to add novel or unexpected information that comes out of nowhere, but to elaborate or illustrate a point that could often be summed up in 5 words. This response is perfect sample of such.
          • foobiekr 4mo ago
            A lot of people suspected that most programs were absurdly redundant and for a very long time. The real issue is that the languages do not really allow for producing code that can be easily shared. Some of the functional languages do, but mostly in ways that are completely irrelevant and useless in practice for such a goal. Programmers writing their fiftieth mostly identical CRUD handler may not have noticed but a lot of other people did.
        • locknitpicker 4mo ago
          > AI is a text autocomplete. This is tge best AI definition i heard and agree with 100% Thank you. To believe that first you would have to ignore tool calling, ReAct loops, and the whole agent feature. That would be silly.
          • spartanatreyu 4mo ago
            > To believe that first you would have to ignore tool calling, ReAct loops, and the whole agent feature. That would be silly. How? It all still functions with text prediction
            • locknitpicker 4mo ago
      • mirekrusin 4mo ago
        Your comment was also completion.
        • solid_fuel 4mo ago
          And what would that make yours? I think, therefore I am. You parrot, therefore you are... ?
          • esafak 4mo ago
            So you're saying humans essentially do the same thing. We agree!
            • solid_fuel 4mo ago
              I’m saying you certainly do. Most people I know have an internal experience and a far richer mental model than a glorified markov chain.
        • somenameforme 4mo ago
          This retort doesn't make any sense. Take humanity back perhaps 40k years ago and language did not even yet exist. Our token base was 0. Put an LLM in that scenario and it will endlessly cycle on nothing and produce nothing, stuck in a snapshot in time. Put humans in that situation, and soon enough you get us. This is like saying that somebody speaking Chinese is just playing the Chinese Room [1] experiment. The only reason it's less immediately obviously absurd here is because the black box nature of LLMs obfuscates their relatively basic algorithmic functionality and let's people anthropomorphize it into being a brain. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
          • SideburnsOfDoom 4mo ago
            > Take humanity back perhaps 40k years ago and language did not even yet exist. This is not quite accurate. The human lips, throat etc have evolved to be better at producing speech, which indicates that it's not that recent. And that it was a factor in the success of groups who could do it better than others. It likely started "no later than 150,000 to 200,000 years ago." sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_speech#Evolution_of_the_speech_organs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_speech#Evolution_of_... https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5525259/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5525259/
      • usef- 4mo ago
        Is "text autocomplete" supposed to be an insult? To text auto-complete a physicist I would have to understand physics as well as them. To text-autocomplete your words I would need to model your brain.
        • daemin 4mo ago
          Text autocomplete is just a descriptor of the technology. To do text auto-completion all you need to know if the probabilities of words appearing after other words, no understanding of those words or the meanings behind them is necessary.
          • usef- 4mo ago
            You do need some kind of understanding to correctly know what's coming next
      • scronkfinkle 4mo ago
        Calling the technology "text auto complete" is not productive to the discussion. Less than a decade ago the idea that a computer could take a fuzzy human-readable description and turn it into executable code was science fiction, but now it's common place. As is the ability to write long form text, and be so hard to distinguish from real that placing an em dash in your text will cause an uproar on this forum. You can describe things by their fundamental functions and make many things sound elementary but I find it counter productive given the capabilities we've seen from this technology
        • spartanatreyu 4mo ago
          > Calling the technology "text auto complete" is not productive to the discussion. If pointing out the flawed approach to making something more productive isn't productive, then what do you consider to be productive? > Less than a decade ago the idea that a computer could take a fuzzy human-readable description and turn it into executable code was science fiction Cobol was sold to people on the idea that anyone could create something with fuzzy human readable description that would result in executable code. That was back in the 60s. What lessons did we learn? 1) Leaving things to the people who make fuzzy human readable descriptions turns out to be a terrible way to have things implemented. 2) Slowly and deliberately thinking things through before, during, and after implementation always leads to better results. It's a lesson that keeps needing to be re-learned by people who don't/can't look at things through a historical lens. It was the same with cobol, as it was with programming in spreadsheets in the 80s, as it was with the nocode movement in the 00s, as it is now again with LLMs in the 20s, and it will be again with a future generation in the 40s. --- > As is the ability to write long form text, and be so hard to distinguish from real that placing an em dash in your text will cause an uproar on this forum. Long form text generation that is hard to distinguish from human authored text also goes back to the 60s. That's when we got the first instances of the Eliza effect. > You can describe things by their fundamental functions and make many things sound elementary but I find it counter productive given the capabilities we've seen from this technology The capabilities we've seen are: - Text prediction/generation - Inducing the Eliza effect
          • shimman 4mo ago
      • locknitpicker 4mo ago
        > It's literally text autocomplete. You can dress it up however you want but it takes input text and outputs the most likely next sequence. Last year this level of ignorance and cluelessness was amusing. Nowadays it's just sad and disappointing. It's like looking at a computer and downplaying it as something that just flips switches on and off.
        • siva7 4mo ago
          Gitlab is looking to lay off people like him. All major tech companies are currently raiding to fire such employees.
          • LtWorf 4mo ago
            Yeah they all want to fire the guys who can make sense of the mess the vibe coders are doing and try to stop it. It will be interesting in the next few years. Assuming we won't be in the 3rd world war thanks to the USA and will have much bigger concerns.
            • locknitpicker 4mo ago
              > Yeah they all want to fire the guys who can make sense of the mess the vibe coders are doing and try to stop it. You're grossly inflating the level of contribution from your average software developer. Are we supposed to believe that the same people who generated the high volume of mess that plagues legacy systems are now somehow suddenly exemplary craftsmen? Also, it takes a huge volume of wilful ignorance and self delusion to fool yourself into believing that today's vibecoders are anyone other than yesterday's software developers. The criticism you are directing towards vibecoding is actually a criticism of your average developer's output reflecting their skill and know-how once their coding output outpaces or even ignores any kind of feedback from competent and experienced engineers. What I see is a need to shit on a tool to try to inflate your sense if self worth.
              • LtWorf 4mo ago
                I've seen which developers became vibecoders. They were the people I'd have wished to get rid of. The ones who never acknowledge a mistake even if the process is crashing; the ones who put "return true" in a test so that the test doesn't execute and will insist that you broke their code if you remove the return true and when the test actually runs it fails; the ones who read a blog post about some new thing and decide we need to do like that; the ones who will write code that fails and then be nowhere to be seen when there is customer support to do.
      • skeptic_ai 4mo ago
        Your brain is also an autocomplete at this point. Notice how you write each word, one after the other, flawlessly
      • akoboldfrying 4mo ago
        Sufficiently good text autocomplete is indistinguishable from intelligence to an impartial observer, and that's the only honest criterion for intelligence.
        • phoronixrly 4mo ago
          Can't tell if sarcasm
          • akoboldfrying 4mo ago
            I'm a little shocked that people discussing this topic could be so far apart! I'm completely serious. Have you ever thought about how you would determine if an arbitrary given entity is intelligent or not? I think you'll agree it would require some kind of test. You might agree that the test would have to involve bidirectional interaction (since otherwise it would be impossible to distinguish an actual person from a recording of one).
    • nullsanity 4mo ago
      [dead]
    • tomjen3 4mo ago
      I've used this text autocomplete to autocomplete me a Python setup and to autocomplete automatically running it. It that scrapes Hn it works. Ironically, it's why I'm here.
      • wiseowise 4mo ago
        Why would you scrape HN when they offer free, generous API?
        • phoronixrly 4mo ago
          Autocomplete only 'knew' how to output a scraper...
          • u_fucking_dork 4mo ago
            Not true, I tried just now. Took 30 seconds of due diligence. You could have done this too. Do better. The problem is they’ll do what you ask. And if you are the type of non-curious person who replies “ Autocomplete only 'knew' how to output a scraper...”, then you’ll tell it to make you a scraper instead of ask what your options are for getting HN data.
        • tomjen3 4mo ago
          Okay, fair. I am using the API to scrape it.
          • solid_fuel 4mo ago
            Sounds like you didn't even know what your own tool was doing. This would be a prime example of why relying on autocomplete based tools makes you look like a fool.
  • stx5 4mo ago
    What makes you think you're anything more than a 'text autocompleter'? You are justing auto completing someone's comment
    • altmanaltman 4mo ago
      If you seriously cannot tell what is the difference between a human being and a LLM and think they are both "autocompleters", you know very little about both humans and LLMs.
      • stx5 4mo ago
        with all my ears
      • jpadkins 4mo ago
        I cannot. Please explain the difference to me. Everything I've read about neuroscience is basically the brain is a signal prediction machine. The harness, signals and incentive (hormone) systems may be different, but predicting the future is basic building blocks of intelligence.
        • ai_fry_ur_brain 4mo ago
          How much karma do you have on reddit, probably millions. Only redditors with Dunning-Kruger would say something like this. I reccomend the podcast Machine Learning Street Talk, you'll find plenty of machine learning PhDs who are also neuroscientists that are completely mystified by the brain, how it works and what intelligence is. The people at the forefront of nueroscience definately aren't reducing human intelligence and experience to "signal processing", or whatever you think it is.
          • jpadkins 4mo ago
            I mostly stopped using Reddit in 2016, and was site banned in 2019 (for posting "gnews.com" in answer to the question of which site has the Biden laptop leak). I didn't say "signal processing", I stated 'signal prediction machine'. This is not my idea, I would say my more source is the book On Intelligence, written by neuroscientists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Intelligence but this idea is hundreds of thousands of years old. Prediction as intelligence is hardly a fringe topic https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13164-021-00538-5 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13164-021-00538-5 Try to not be insulting when you post here, this is not reddit.
  • dboreham 4mo ago
    "Text autocomplete" is literally what you just did.
  • __mharrison__ 4mo ago
    My comment is the autocompletion to your prompt.
    • Archonical 4mo ago
      My job is just text autocomplete.
  • lazzlazzlazz 4mo ago
    Insane to see this kind of comment on Hacker News. I suspect it's satire!
  • jpadkins 4mo ago
    In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
• tootie 4mo ago
  The memo also says they're eliminating a lot of middle management tiers which has been a theme for a lot of companies recently. It's also been a theme historically. Really has nothing to do with AI. It's just the classic executive view that they are paying people who sit in meetings and write emails instead of writing code. Blissfully unaware that meetings and emails are how big organizations function.
  • DaSHacka 4mo ago
    > Blissfully unaware that meetings and emails are how big organizations function. I don't know, I've seen more big organizations that have a dysfunctional amount of middle management and "meetings about meetings" than ones that truly benefit from that culture.
    • drw85 4mo ago
      I worked for some large corps and they all had one thing in common. Tons of middle management that makes no decisions what so ever. Everytime you ask a question, they delegate, until you end up at person 1 again and they just can't decide anything. It's like they all have decision paralysis.
    • tootie 4mo ago
      Meetings about meetings are frequently mandatory steps to navigate internal politics. Frame your questions, gather allies, hone your message. It's how you don't waste the time of very busy people that you need things from. Besides, the alternative is fewer managers dealing with 20+ reports and not knowing what anyone is doing. Institutional inertia can be frustrating, but it's also necessary to avoid chaos.
  • siva7 4mo ago
    Your argument doesn't make sense. They literally explained why they are doing it. They are looking to remove who can't or won't keep up with ai. That can be managers but also engineers. That's what most companies right now are doing.
    • 4mo ago
• internet101010 4mo ago
  And people wonder why there is so much push back against AI. The last thing leadership should do when laying off people is use the term AI. It's the most tone deaf thing you can do.
  • franga2000 4mo ago
    We don't live in the same world as they do. Saying AI out loud makes line go up, not down. Investors are still eating this shit up, for now at least...
• laweijfmvo 4mo ago
  there’s a familiar saying “Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” i think that applies here as well. everyone (customers) want AI; investors demand it. it may eventually calm down but i’m sure many companies will be left behind and ultimately fade away if they don’t keep up until then.
  • mirekrusin 4mo ago
    I don't think anything is going to calm down. Models will only get better with time, not worse. Demand will keep raising.
    • platevoltage 4mo ago
      Of course they're not going to get worse. That would be absurd. The rate of progress will slow down though.
      • NewJazz 4mo ago
        I don't think it would be absurd for them to worsen. If LLMs cause discourse to worsen, but also grow and change, then the trainers are in a conundrum of ignoring new training data or losing track of the zeitgeist.
      • LtWorf 4mo ago
        They might get worse for 2 reasons: 1. AI free training sets no longer exist. This might degrade quality, although some claim that it will not. 2. Cost. Right now they are burning a lot of money to convince people it's good. But they might not be able to keep it up forever and need to increase prices (which few will want to pay) or degrade the quality to save money.
        • mirekrusin 4mo ago
          non synthetic pre-training text got exhausted long time ago, now focus is more on quality and rl/post-training. cost will keep going down and more powerful chips will be available, like it always was. reinforcement learning doesn't have fixed ceiling, advancements in software will keep happening as well. things like distilling smaller models will likely become free – ie. through speculative decoding which speeds up larger models (incentive to run during inference) where you have free access to strong distillation (large model's logits are calculated, ie. it's free for pickup for distillation) etc.
• morningsam 4mo ago
  >some don't really seem to make sense. This one stood out to me: >Machine-scale infrastructure. [...] Git itself wasn't designed for that load, and bolting AI onto platforms not built for agents is the biggest mistake of this era. [...] Git itself is being reengineered for machine scale. Git itself is so far down the list of bottlenecks that do or could hamper LLM-driven development, even projecting years into the future...
  • lbotos 4mo ago
    I wholeheartedly disagree. Git has always been one of the biggest perf bottlenecks inside of the product. First for any scaled deploy we recommended NFS. We were young and dumb and it was too slow. (We’ve all been there) Then we went to an RPC model with gitaly and even unwrapped some of the git calls inside of that to speed it up. Just a few months ago we had a large customer with thousands of devs and a large monorepo ground their deployments to a halt because of a cloning strategy change that introduced an accidental 10x in git calls. Git itself was the bottleneck because it’s not designed for this scale and speed. For enterprises where thousands of developers are contributing code via git to a centralized system of record, who are firing off 1000s of CI jobs Git is absolutely a bottleneck. Now with LLM technologies we should easily expect a 5-20x code volume increase on the conservative side. Git is being stretched to its perf limits. (Source: see my profile)