For mechanical work–things like bumping versions, fixing failing tests, checking documentation for inconsistencies–the clankers have proven their worth (even before LLMs, anybody remember dependabot?)!
The way to fix that, of course, is automated processes and mechanical guardrails. Automatic enforcement of style, automatic testing and linting and formatting–same as ever.
We can use the whale fall tokens to build that machinery.
This seems to be the main contention of the post, however it leaves me confused as to what the author specifically thinks should happen. “We should have the AIs generate more dependabots”?
I don’t get this idea that AI will go away at some point. We’ll still have all the self-hostable models even if there are no newly trained models for a while. There will be companies that make money hosting those and selling tokens at a profit. We already have a pretty good idea what that looks like.
We’ll also have companies like Google and Meta where AI is not their main product, who get competitive benefit out of offering AI.
We’ll have companies trying to figure out how to update and train models more cheaply.
People aren’t just going to walk away from it all.
Very cheap uber rides went away and so could very cheap subsidized AI.
That said I personally think AI at the level today will get cheaper and probably run locally on boring hardware soon enough. FOSS code doesn't need to FOMO.
Your analogy is perfect, because you can self-host your own “Uber”, by owning, renting, or leasing a car and using it to drive yourself around. Uber may have become more expensive, but cars didn’t go away or see less use.
There is only one 'falling whale reference' and it is this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THSY7-CxKnQ
Oh no, not again.
I agree completely.
I don’t get this idea that AI will go away at some point. We’ll still have all the self-hostable models even if there are no newly trained models for a while. There will be companies that make money hosting those and selling tokens at a profit. We already have a pretty good idea what that looks like.
We’ll also have companies like Google and Meta where AI is not their main product, who get competitive benefit out of offering AI.
We’ll have companies trying to figure out how to update and train models more cheaply.
People aren’t just going to walk away from it all.
Very cheap uber rides went away and so could very cheap subsidized AI.
That said I personally think AI at the level today will get cheaper and probably run locally on boring hardware soon enough. FOSS code doesn't need to FOMO.
Your analogy is perfect, because you can self-host your own “Uber”, by owning, renting, or leasing a car and using it to drive yourself around. Uber may have become more expensive, but cars didn’t go away or see less use.