The IT industry is also full of salesmen and con men, both enjoy unrealistic exaggeration. Your statements would not be out of place 20 years ago when the iPhone dropped. Your statements would not be out of place 3 years ago before every NFT went to 0. LLMs could hit an unsolvably hard wall next year and settle into a niche of utility. AI could solve a lengthy list of outstanding architectural and technical problems and go full AGI next year.

If we're talking about changing the industry, we should see some clear evidence of that. But despite extensive searching myself and after asking many proponents (feel free to jump in here), I can't find a single open source codebase, actively used in production, and primarily maintained and developed with AI. If this is so foundationally groundbreaking, that should be a clear signal. Personally, I would expect to see an explosion of this even if the hype is taken extremely conservatively. But I can't even track down a few solid examples. So far my searching only reveals one-off pull requests that had to be laboriously massaged into acceptability.

> I can't find a single open source codebase, actively used in production, and primarily maintained and developed with AI.

That's because using AI to write code is a poor application of LLM AIs. LLMs are better suited to summary, advice, and reflection than forced into a Rube Goldberg Machine. Use your favorite LLM as a Socratic advisor, but not as a coder, and certainly not as an unreliable worker.

> I can't find a single open source codebase, actively used in production, and primarily maintained and developed with AI

This popular repo (35.6k stars) documents the fraction of code written by LLM for each release since about a year ago. The vast majority of releases since version 0.47 (now at 0.85) had the majority of their code written by LLM (average code written by aider per release since then is about 65%.)

https://github.com/Aider-AI/aider

https://github.com/Aider-AI/aider/releases

> If we're talking about changing the industry, we should see some clear evidence of that.

That’s a great point...and completely incompatible with my pitch deck. I’m trying to raise a $2B seed round on vibes, buzzwords, and a slightly fine-tuned GPT-3.5.. You are seriously jeopardizing my path to an absurdly oversized yacht :-))

> The IT industry is also full of salesmen and con men, both enjoy unrealistic exaggeration. Your statements would not be out of place 20 years ago when the iPhone dropped. Your statements would not be out of place 3 years ago before every NFT went to 0. LLMs could hit an unsolvably hard wall next year and settle into a niche of utility.

The iPhone and subsequent growth of mobile (and the associated growth of social media which is really only possible in is current form with ubiquitous mobile computing) are evidence it did change everything. Society has been reshaped by mobile/iPhone and its consequences.

NFTs were never anything, and there was never an argument they were. The were a financial speculative item, and it was clear all the hype was due to greater fools and FOMO. To equate those two is silly. That's like arguingsome movie blockbuster like Avengers Endgame was going to "change everything" because it was talked about and advertised. It was always just a single piece of entertainment.

Finally for LLMs, a better comparison for them would have been the 80's AI winter. The question should be "why will this time not be like then?" And the answer is simple: If LLMs and generative AI models never improve an ounce - If they never solve another problem, nor get more efficient, nor get cheaper - they will still drastically change society because they are already good enough today. They are doing so now.

Advertising, software engineering, video making. The tech is already for enough that it is changing all of these fields. The only thing happening now is the time it takes for idea diffusion. People learning new things and applying it are the slow part of the loop.

You could have made your argument pre-chatgpt, and possibly could have made that argument in the window of the following year or two, but at this point the tech at the level to change society exists, it just needs time to spread. All it need are two things: tech stays the same, prices roughly stay the same. (No improvements required)

Now there still is a perfectly valid argument to make against the more extreme claims we hear of: all work being replaced..., and that stuff. And I'm as poorly equipped to predict that future as you (or anyone else) so won't weigh in - but that's not the bar for huge societal change.

The tech is already bigger than the iPhone. I think it is equivalent to social media, (mainly because I think most people still really underestimate how enormous the long term impact of social media will be in society: Politics, mental health, extremism, addiction. All things they existed before but now are "frictionless" to obtain. But that's for some other post...).

The question in my mind is will it be as impactful as the internet? But it doesn't have to be. Anything between social media and internet level of impact is society changing. And the tech today is already there, it just needs time to diffuse into society.

You're looking at Facebook after introducing the algorithm for engagement. It doesn't matter that society wasn't different overnight, the groundwork had been laid.

One part of the code generation tools is that they devalue code at the same time as produce low quality code (without a lot of human intervention.)

So a project that mostly is maintained by people who care about their problem/code (OSS) would be weird to be "primarily maintained by AI" in a group setting in this stage of the game.

This has been researched, and while the existing research is young and inconclusive, the outlook is not so good for the AI industry, or rather for the utility of their product, and the negative effects it has on their users.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44522772

> LLMs could hit an unsolvably hard wall next year and settle into a niche of utility

LLMs in their current state have integrated into the workflows for many, many IT roles. They'll never be niche, unless governing bodies come together to kill them.

> I can't find a single open source codebase, actively used in production, and primarily maintained and developed with AI

Straw man argument - this is in no way a metric for validating the power of LLMs as a tool for IT roles. Can you not find open source code bases that leverage LLMS because you haven't looked, or because you can't tell the difference between human and LLM code?

> If this is so foundationally groundbreaking, that should be a clear signal.

As I said, you haven't been paying attention.

Denialism - the practice of denying the existence, truth, or validity of something despite proof or strong evidence that it is real, true, or valid

> The IT industry is also full of salesmen and con men, both enjoy unrealistic exaggeration. Your statements would not be out of place 20 years ago when the iPhone dropped. Your statements would not be out of place 3 years ago before every NFT went to 0. LLMs could hit an unsolvably hard wall next year and settle into a niche of utility.

Not only is that a could, I'd argue they already are. The huge new "premier" models are barely any better than the big ticket ones that really kicked the hype into overdrive.

* Using them as a rubber duck that provides suggestions back for IT problems and coding is huge, I will fully cosign that, but it is not even remotely worth what OpenAI is valued at or would need to charge for it to make it profitable, let alone pay off it's catastrophic debt. Meanwhile every other application is a hard meh.

* The AI generated video ads just look like shit and I'm sorry, call me a luddite if you will, but I just think objectively less of companies that leverage AI video/voices/writing in their advertisements. It looks cheap, in the same way dollar store products have generic, crappy packaging, and makes me less willing to open my wallet. That said I won't be shocked at all if that sticks around and bolsters valuations, because tons of companies worldwide have been racing to the bottom for decades now.

* My employer has had a hard NO AI policy for both vetting candidates and communicating with them for our human resources contracting and we've fired one who wouldn't comply. It just doesn't work, we can tell when they're using bots to review resumes because applicants get notably, measurably worse.

LLMs are powerful tools that have a place, but there is no fucking UNIVERSE where they are the next iPhone that silicon valley is utterly desperate for. They just aren't.

> I can't find a single open source codebase, actively used in production, and primarily maintained and developed with AI.

As I stated, you haven't been paying attention.

At the heart of it all is language. Logic gates to assembly to high level programming languages are a progression of turning human language into computed processes. LLMs need to be tuned to recognize ambiguity of intention in human language instructions, following up with clarifying questions. Perhaps quantum computing will facilitate the process, the AI holding many fuzzy possibilities simultaneously, seeking to "collapse" them into discrete pathways by asking for more input from a human.