Altman really is a generational bullshit artist. Exaggerating the value of his talent while pretending he hasn't already lost a lot of his most valuable people (he has).
It makes sense he focuses on Meta in this interview -- his other competitors actually have taken some of his top talent and are producing better models than GPT now.
There is technology that can greatly benefit solopreneurs, but it isn’t AI. It’s just an evolution of the same tech that has been a huge benefit to early stage projects for awhile now. Knowing what you’re doing with highly productive tools like Rails or Laravel or whatever your preference is going to have a far greater impact than some LLM will.
Yeah I really don’t get why people keep hyping AI like this. It really doesn’t make things go that much faster. At best you’re able to generate prototypes more quickly + get better autocomplete. Nothing particularly revolutionary there.
Anyone claiming a generalized 100x, 10x, or even 2x productivity gain is either delusional or trying to sell you something. Possibly both.
The companies saying they are reducing the size of their workforce because of gains they’re getting from AI are probably just telling investors what they want to hear while cutting costs for the same reason they always have.
I felt this way until Claude Code. It works much, much better in large codebases than anything else I've tried. It implements smaller features, including ones with FE + API changes and tests for each, pretty well. I'm going to try cloning our main repo multiple times to get it working on multiple branches at once.
>Anyone claiming a generalized 100x, 10x, or even 2x productivity gain is either delusional or trying to sell you something
I don't understand how anyone who spends a couple hours or more per day coding new functionality couldn't at least double their productivity with LLMs, unless their organisation prohibits LLM usage. Even just limiting the LLM to writing unit tests would still save that much time.
The thing is, tab complete using LLMs is really great. But I still read it, then press tab, then press enter, then type a few chars, then wait.
Sometimes I get 1 good line from that. Sometimes I get 30. Usually I get 10 bad lines and have to type a bit more to coax out 8 good ones.
It just looks faster but typing was NEVER the bottleneck for coding.
Where it really flies, though, is building tooling around a well known API. FML if I ever have to write AWS CDK or AWS API calls without an LLM again. You're looking at ages of reading through really bad docs to get it going.
For that, which is a 1% task of convenience for most jobs, I can use most LLM output verbatim. But that's like I said less than 1% of the job, and only then when the core software is done.
Did you notice how much better things are today (eg Claude Sonnet 3.7) than they were 1 year ago? Don’t you expect things will not improve in the next year? Even R1, a public weights model, can add huge value when left to code in a loop.
Hm, I’m a CDK pro (4y of full time experience). I used all LLMs, except latest Claude model. All were bad in my estimation and just got in the way. I don’t use them for CDK code anymore.
Yeah! That's exactly the thing. It's passable for novices and bad for experts. But I don't need expert level CDK I need an instance to start up. Hate it or love it that's all I need.
The bottleneck is not putting code on the hard drive, or turning my thoughts into code — the productivity bottleneck is thinking and frankly no LLM is thinking better than an average developer.
I don’t know what news you’ve all been reading, but I don’t see anything about Trump cancelling the CHIPS Act. The 2 main things I’ve seen is trying to get TSMC to take over Intels manufacturing, and wanting to remove things like union labor requirements from the CHIPS Act.
The delays have nothing to do with it being in Ohio, and the CHIPS Act didn’t dictate where these would be built. Intel picked the site, just like TSMC and others picked theirs. Cost of land, energy, labor, etc all taken into account. The “flyover” states are the more cost effective place to do these things.
With Ohio specifically it’s being built just outside of a city too. Yes, we have those here. It’s actually not just one big state of a bunch of rural hicks demanding handouts from the government.
Elixir is a little less flexible since it doesn’t have the JVM interop but for domains where it’s a good fit I think it’s even better at most of this stuff (and easier to teach people unfamiliar with FP or lisps)
I think it's less of a distinctly populist thing and more of a "convert's zeal". I have seen this type of language used with a lot of different technologies over the years when there's a lot of hype and momentum around them.
Ultimately there's just a lot of tradeoffs to make in this space and I'm glad that we have more options now. For awhile it seemed like you were either doing SPAs or everyone thought you were doing it "wrong", but things like HTMX, LiveView, Livewire, and Hotwire make it much easier to build good backend driven web apps.
Inertia.js 2.0 is a really compelling middle ground as well & IMO is the best thing to come out of Laravel. You can get most of the benefits of a JS "metaframework", but you have adapters for many different backend and frontend frameworks.
Inertia is a godsend. We are using it at work and it’s such an amazing combination of the best of both worlds without all the craziness going on with the more popular meta frameworks.
Browser Company sort of built this themselves for Arc, but its really a separate SwiftUI-like Windows implementation (Windows UI is separate code written in a similar style). It still feels like a technical preview though unfortunately.
How do you ban AIPAC when they are basically malware that is running at all layers of the stack from OS to Firmware to CPU Microcode? Good luck with that!
There's no evidence of that happening & it really isn't even about that. It's about the popularity of pro-Palestinian content on TikTok. The other social media giants have censorship policies on this that tilt things towards a pro-Israel perspective, but TikTok does not and is being targeted for it.
It makes sense he focuses on Meta in this interview -- his other competitors actually have taken some of his top talent and are producing better models than GPT now.