Yep. I find the hype around AI to be wildly overblown, but that doesn’t mean that what it can do right now isn’t interesting & useful.
If you told me a decade ago that I could have a fuzzy search engine on my desktop that I could use to vaguely describe some program that I needed & it would go out into the universe of publicly available source code & return something that looks as close to the thing I’ve asked for as it can find then that would have been mindblowing. Suddenly I have (slightly lossy) access to all the code ever written, if I can describe it.
Same for every other field of human endeavour! Who cares if AI can “think“ or “do new things”? What it can do is amazing & sometimes extremely powerful. (Sometimes not, but that’s the joy of new technology!)
Why do you think what you describe being excited about does not warrant the current level of AI hype? I agree with your assessment and sometimes I think there is too much cynicism and not enough excitement.
the current level of AI hype amongst a lot of people, but especially investors and bosses, is that you can already give an AI a simple prompt and get it to spit out a fully functional, user-ready application for you. and we're so incredibly far off that.
the things that AI is able to do are incredible, but hype levels are just totally detached from reality.
> is that you can already give an AI a simple prompt and get it to spit out a fully functional, user-ready application for you.
But it can already do that. Isn't that the whole "one-shotting" thing?
The problem is, of course, that it won't be optimized, maintainable or have anyone responsible you can point to if something with it goes wrong. It almost certainly (unless you carefully prompted it to) won't have a test suite, which means any changes (even fixes) to it are risky.
So it's basically a working mockup generator.
I am so, so tired of "semi-technical" youtubers showing off new models with one-shots. The vast majority of actual devs who use this stuff need it to work over long-term context windows and over multiple iterations.
The thing is, we've already had "working mockup generators" — a.k.a. prototyping tools — for decades now.
If you come at the problem from the direction of "I draw a user interface; you guess what it's supposed to do and wire it up for me", then all you need to solve that problem (to a first-order approximation) is some plain-old 1970s "AI" heuristics.
The buzz around current AI coding prompting seems to be solely generated by the fact that while prototyping tools require you to at least have some training as a designer (i.e. understanding the problem you're solving on the level of inputs and outputs), these tools allow people with no experience in programming or design to get results. (Mainly by doing for UIs what genAI image/video tools do for art: interpolating the average of many ingested examples of how a designer would respond to a client request for X, with no regard for the designer's personal style†.)
† Unless prompted to have such regard... but if you know enough to tell the AI how to design everything, then you may as well just design everything. Just as, if you know art well enough to prompt an AI into developing a unique art style, then you likely know art well enough to just make that same art yourself with less effort than it takes to prompt and re-prompt and patch-erase-infill-prompt the AI into drawing what you want.
from what i can tell, the one-shot thing only works on youtube.
you might produce something that looks usable at first, but the actual application functionality will be significantly broken in most ways. it maybe works enough to do a demo for your video, but it won't work enough to actually distribute to end-users. and of course, as you say, it's not testable or maintainable in any way, so fixing what's broken is a bigger project than just writing it properly in the first place.
Because to justify the current hype and spending, these companies have to have a product that will generate trillions of dollars and create mass unemployment. Which they don't have.
They go beyond merely "return something that looks as close to the thing I’ve asked for as it can find". Eg: Say we asked for "A todo app that has 4 buttons on the right that each play a different animal sound effect for no good reason and also you can spin a wheel and pick a random task to do". That isn't something that already exists, so in order to build that, the LLM has to break that down, look for appropriate libraries and source and decide on a framework to use, and then glue those pieces together cohesively. That didn't come from a singular repo off GitHub. The machine had to write new code in order to fulfill my request. Yeah, some if it existed in the training data somewhere, but not arranged exactly like that. The LLM had to do something in order to glue those together in that way.
Some people can't see past how the trick is done (take training data and do a bunch of math/statistics on it), but the fact that LLMs are able to build the thing is in-and-of-itself interesting and useful (and fun!).
I’m aware. But the first part is “find me something in the vector space that looks something like the thing I’m asking for”. Then the rest is vibes. Sometimes the vibes are good, sometimes they are ... decidedly not.
If the results are useful, then that’s what matters. Although I do suspect that some AI users are spending more time pulling the AI one-armed bandit handle than it would take them to just solve their problem the old fashioned way a lot of the time - but if pulling the one-armed bandit gets them a solution to their problem that they wouldn’t work up the motivation to solve themselves then that counts too, I guess.
If you told me a decade ago that I could have a fuzzy search engine on my desktop that I could use to vaguely describe some program that I needed & it would go out into the universe of publicly available source code & return something that looks as close to the thing I’ve asked for as it can find then that would have been mindblowing. Suddenly I have (slightly lossy) access to all the code ever written, if I can describe it.
Same for every other field of human endeavour! Who cares if AI can “think“ or “do new things”? What it can do is amazing & sometimes extremely powerful. (Sometimes not, but that’s the joy of new technology!)