The problem with LLM is when they're used for creativity or for thinking.

Just because LLMs are indeed useful in some (even many!) context, including coding, esp. to either get something started, or, like in your example, to transcode an existing code base to another platform, doesn't mean they will change everything.

It doesn't mean “AI is the new electricity.” (actual quote from Andrew Ng in the post).

More like AI is the new VBA. Same promise: everyone can code! Comparable excitement -- although the hype machine is orders of magnitude more efficient today than it was then.

I don't know about VBA, but spreadsheets actually delivered (to a large extent) on the promise that 'everyone can write simple programs'. So much so that people don't see creating a spreadsheet as coding.

Before spreadsheets you had to beg for months for the IT department to pick your request, and then you'd have to wait a quarter or two for them to implement a buggy version of your idea. After spreadsheets, you can hack together a buggy version of your idea yourself over a weekend.

> everyone can code!

I work directly with marketers and even if you give them something like n8n, they find it hard to be precise. Programming teaches you a "precise mindset" that one doesn't have when they aren't really thinking about tech professionally.

I wonder if seasoned UX designers can code now. They do think professionally about software. I wonder if it's at a deep enough granularity such that they can simply use natural language to get something to work.

> It doesn't mean “AI is the new electricity.” (actual quote from Andrew Ng in the post).

I personally agree with Andrew Ng here (and I've literally arrived at the exact same formulation before becoming aware of Ng's words).

I take "new electricity" to mean, it'll touch everything people do, become part of every endeavor in some shape of form. Much like electricity. That doesn't mean taking over literally everything; there's plenty of things we don't use electricity for, because alternatives - usually much older alternatives - are still better.

There's still plenty of internal combustion engines on the ground, in the seas and in the skies, and many of them (mostly on extremely light and extremely heavy ends of the spectrum) are not going to be replaced by electric engines any time soon. Plenty of manufacturing and construction is still done by means of hydraulic and pneumatic power. We also sometimes sidestep electricity for heating purposes by going straight from sunlight to heat. Etc.

But even there, electricity-based technology is present in some form. The engine may be this humongous diesel-burning colossus, built from heat, metal, and a lot of pneumatics, positioned and held in place by hydraulics - but all the sensors on it are electric, where in the past some would be hydraulic and rest wouldn't even exist; it's controlled and operated by electricity-based computing network; it's been designed on computers, and so on.

In this sense, I think "AI is a new electricity" is believable. It's a qualitatively new approach to computing, that's directly or indirectly applicable everywhere, and that people already try to apply to literally everything[0]. And, much like with electricity, time and economics will tell which of those applications make sense, which were dead ends, and which were plain dumb in retrospect.

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[0] - And they really did try to stuff electricity everywhere back when it was the new hot thing. Same with nuclear energy few decades later. We still laugh at how people 100 years ago imagined the future will look like... in between crying that we got short-changed by reality.

While I'd agree with your first line:

> The problem with LLM is when they're used for creativity or for thinking.

And while I also agree that it's currently closer to "AI is the new VBA" because of the current domain in which consumer AI* is most useful.

Despite that, I'd also aver that being useful in simply "many" contexts will make AI "the new electricity”. Electricity itself is (or recently was) only about 15% of global primary power, about 3 TW out of about 20 TW: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consum...

Are LLMs 15% of all labour? Not just coding, but overall? No. The economic impact would be directly noticeable if it was that much.

Currently though, I agree. New VBA. Or new smartphone, in that we ~all have and use them, while society as a whole simultaneously cringes a bit at this.

* Narrower AI such as AlphaFold etc. would, in this analogy, be more like a Steam Age factory which had a massive custom steam engine in the middle distributing motive power to the equipment directly: it's fine at what it does, but you have to make it specifically for your goal and can't easily adapt it for something else later.

LLM is helpful for creativity and thinking When you run out of your ideas