Overheard a dev at a meetup in Chicago say most AI tools are just fancy autocomplete

He was talking to someone about LLMs and said we're basically just building really expensive predictive text. It hit me because I've been spending hours tweaking prompts thinking I'm doing something cutting edge. The guy wasn't wrong - half the time the output is just rearranging stuff from the training data anyway. Has anyone else started feeling like the magic wore off and we're just arguing with a math equation all day?

2 comments

2 Comments

gibson.sarah5d ago

Stopped feeling like magic when it couldn't tell me how many R's are in "strawberry".

faith_carter5d ago

Yeah but like, does it really matter though? Everyone's acting shocked that a text predictor isn't perfect at counting letters, but that's not what it's for anyway. @gibson.sarah I feel you on the strawberry thing but that's like getting mad at a calculator for not knowing how to fold laundry. The real question is whether the output helps you get where you're going faster, and half the time it does if you're not overthinking it. People act like they discovered the matrix is fake or something, calm down.