It seems to me like the AI labs are just pushing the envelope with blind faith that”something” will happen if they just get enough development speed. Nobody seems to have a coherent idea of what that something is.
I took a photo of a tree with chatgpt recently and asked it what species it was. That was kinda neat I guess. Someone forked a ps4 emulator with a bunch of Bloodborne specific improvements so its more playable on my setup. It's kind of okay for medical stuff.
All that busy work was for going from zero revenue to $50B in revenue in about 3 years, and releasing AI systems that are getting better and better at a ridiculous rate. AI isn't solving all the world's problems but you can't deny that they are extremely successful with this method of operating.
I definitely think that's an interesting question though. I know that in the physical product development world I'm seeing really odd asymmetric speed ups. Creating simulations is essentially automated at this point, stuff that would take days to code by hand can be done in an hour. Firmware debugging feels 3x faster than before. But the big slow stuff like manufacturing, assembly, and testing are completely unchanged. All of that little stuff probably adds up to maybe a 5% faster product development cycle than before if you're really leaning into AI. It's the type of thing that will compound over time especially if it's happening all over the economy, but won't blow your socks off.
"A world where starting is incredibly easy and finishing is more complicated than ever"
LLM's do allow you to oneshot huge starting bits of work in record short time. The frontier of the amount of work they can oneshot is clearly getting larger and larger. But I am still not convinced that they allow you to maintain existing work at a cost that is below a human being.
But, if the frontier of what you can oneshot continues to grow unbounded, then it really will not matter. We will eventually oneshot all software and maintenance will be a thing of the past.
... But that is a very big bet.
Yeah I wish this whole energy was towards optimization and improving hardware.
One thing that people are finding hard to believe is that the frontier labs are cultists who want to "create god". Hence the focus on improving intelligence so they can get to recursive AI, as well as the fear-mongering.
Aanthropic-openAI duo cannot go bankrupt soon enough. This industry is going to flourish with those two out of the picture. They're the pets.com of 1999 trying to have a say how the internet should be.