> None of these big tech companies have leveraged AI to build anything remotely interesting from a product perspective. Its truly astounding how bad they are at it.

Oh my God, tell me about it. Our C levels are being fed bullshit by all of our vendors about how AI is going to transform their business. Every few weeks I have to ask "what the fuck does that mean exactly?" "Oh, well, agentic AI and workflows blah blah."

Ok? You want a chatbot? Fine, we're still building a state machine. At best, the LLM is doing expensive NLP to classify the choices.

Something something classify support tickets? Alright, but we're still just doing keyword search, LLMs literally aren't even needed.

I love LLMs and get a lot of use out of them for coding, but I still don't see anywhere that they're going to fit in for core business functions. Anything that is proposed can and should be done without LLMs. I'm just not seeing where they can be useful until they are truly AGI. Until then, it's just expensive NLP.

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coliveira 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

It's very funny that for pretty much any use case of LLMs, they're either too expensive or too incapable or both! There may be a few uses that make sense, but it seems to be incredibly hard to find the balance.

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bbor 6 days ago | parent [-]

It blows my mind how many computing professionals truly think this is the case. It doesn't take a tech blogger to draw a trend line through the advancements of the past 2.5 years and see where we're headed. The fact that grifters abound on the edges of the industry is a sign of the radical importance of this unexpected breakthrough, not an indication that it's all a grift.

To engage in some armchair psychology, I think this is in large part due to a natural human tendency for stability (which is all the stronger for those in relatively powerful positions like us SWEs). Knowing that believing A would imply that your mortgage is in jeopardy, your retirement plan up-ended, and your entire career completely obscured beyond a figurative singularity point makes believing ~A a very appealing option...

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moregrist 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

> It doesn't take a tech blogger to draw a trend line through the advancements of the past 2.5 years and see where we're headed.

People did this with airplanes in the 60s, and based on that trajectory we should be exploring the outer edges of our solar system by now. Turns out the market for supersonic jets was unsustainably small and the cost/risk of space exploration is still very high.

Every sigmoidal curve looks exponential as it starts to enter the linear regime. But eventually the curve turns over, either due to limits in the technology, the marginal cost of the technology, or no clear way to further commercialize it.

I don't know that we've reached that point with AI, but a do know that extrapolating from a trend line is fraught with peril.

	▲	floren 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		I think about that chart of disco sales from the Simpsons a lot these days...

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gtirloni 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Where's your evidence though? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

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azemetre 5 days ago | parent [-]

It's a weird way to talk about the destruction people livelihood's as inevitable. Like none of this is preordained, we can stop it or impede it.

	▲	coliveira 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, that's something that makes me very angry. The media and most people talk about this as if its a natural phenomenon that cannot be stopped, when in fact governments and investors are giving billions of dollars to make it happen; and at the same time they're doing nothing to prevent the job losses that have already started.

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moi2388 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The difference is that I can’t sell elasticsearch in my company, but I can sell an LLM.

Yeah, don’t ask..

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smcin 6 days ago | parent [-]

Why doesn't your company get the use case for Elasticsearch?

Is it because you're trying to pitch it with CTO arguments on capabilities, not COO/CFO arguments like "will permanently replace N humans"?

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moi2388 5 days ago | parent [-]

No, they do get it. They just don’t want to invest time in it, so only through a third party.

But AI is sexy, so LLMs doing document search? Yes please, let’s have some teams dedicate their time and effort to develop it ourselves.

It’s because AGI is going to come, you know, so if we invest now they can replace everybody with AI

Are you laughing as hard as I was when they told me this?

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smcin 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

If your mgmt is so technically illiterate, why not just pitch them you're investigating using LLMs, then do the ElasticSearch work and sprinkle on some magic LLM pixie dust so it looks good on their mgmt slides? Should keep you all happy. That's generally what I've seen happen under such types.

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bongodongobob 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

We just recently implemented a doc search "agent". It's no better than just using the built in search in Teams/M365. Complete waste of time. One of our dev teams spent an entire quarter on it and no one is going to use it because it is slower and outside of everyone's normal workflow.

	▲	moi2388 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yep. We do the same. We also do copilot agents. Just don’t tell anybody that behind the scenes it’s the same 10 year old power automate flows running..

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827a 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I think there's a lot of really interesting (and profitable) AI products out there. And: there's so many more that can be built. We're only scratching the surface of what the industry has already invented can do. Not in an "AGI Inevitable" capacity; what we have, today, with more context engineering, better user interfaces, better products with deeper AI-first thinking, etc.

My point was more-so that FAANG isn't even scratching the surface; they're punching it bloody with their fists while yelling "look at all this AI we have, see dad we can't be disrupted we're the disrupters we're the disrupters".

It reminds me a lot of Xbox over the past six years, so much so that I think Xbox is a canary for how many business units in these companies will look in five more years.

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pornel 6 days ago | parent [-]

There's a lot of "promising" and "interesting" stuff, but I'm not seeing anything yet that actually works reliably.

Sooner or later (mostly sooner) it becomes apparent that it's all just a chatbot hastily slapped on top of an existing API, and the integration barely works.

A tech demo shows your AI coding agent can write a whole web app in one prompt. In reality, a file with 7 tab characters in a row completely breaks it.

	▲	thewebguyd 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		> A tech demo shows your AI coding agent can write a whole web app in one prompt. In reality, a file with 7 tab characters in a row completely breaks it. I like how all the demos just show these crazy simple, single page "web apps" that are effectively just coding tutorial material, and people eat it up. There's no talk of auth, persistence, security, deployment, performance, etc. Cool...it vibe coded a janky snake game with no collision, now what?