Not sure why this has drawn silence and attacks - whence the animus to Ng? His high-level assessments seem accurate, he's a reasonable champion of AI, and he speaks credibly based on advising many companies. What am I missing? (He does fall on the side of open models (as input factors): is that the threat?)
He argues that landscape is changing (at least quarterly), and that services are (best) replaceable (often week-to-week) because models change, but that orchestration is harder to replace, and that there are relatively few orchestration platforms.
So: what platforms are available? Are there other HN posts that assess the current state of AI orchestration?
(What's the AI-orchestration acronym? not PAAS but AIOPAAS? AOP? (since aspect-oriented programming is history))
I have had reservation about Ng from a lot of his past hype, but I thought this talk was extremely practical and tactical. I recommend watching it before passing judgement.
I think quality takes time and refinement which is not something that LLMs have solved very well today. They are very okay at it, except for very specific targeted refinements (Grammerly, SQL editors).
However, they are excellent at building from 0->1, and the video is suggesting that this is perfect for startups. In the context of startups, faster is better.
My two takeaways is you build
1) Having a precise vision of what you want to achieve
2) Being able to control / steer AI towards that vision
Teams that can do both of these things, especially #1 will move much faster. Even if they are wrong its better than vague ideas that get applause but not customers
Are you a student of Robert Fritz? He says this exactly. The only two things you need is 1) a vision and 2) ability to see present reality clearly. Beyond this it’s all about the skill to nudge a creation towards the vision without being prescribed to a process. The art is knowing when to just use the status quo tool or try something new at any point during the nudging is key. Based on his teachings I can easily see vibe coding fitting into creation process quite easily. Where it becomes tricky is “seeing current reality clearly”. If you have been vibe coding for two weeks and perhaps a weak programmer or worse no technical ability, can you actually see reality at that point? Probably not. It requires understanding the software structure. Maybe. Its all up in the air right now. But I truly believe that LLMs make software creation more like creating art.
I’m 20 minutes into the video and it does seem mostly basic and agreeable.
Two arguments from Ng that really stuck out that is really tripping my skepticism alarm are:
1) He mentions how fast prototyping has begun because generating a simple app has become easier with AI. This, to me, has always been quick and never the bottleneck for any company I’ve been at, including startups. Validating an idea was simple enough via wireframing. I can maybe see it for selling an idea where you need some amount of fidelity yo impress potential investors… but I would hope places like YC can see the tech behind the idea without seeing the tech itself. Or at least can ignore low fidelity if a prototype shows the meat of the product.
2) Ng talks about how everyone in his company codes, from the front desk to the executives. The “everyone should code” idea has been done and shown to fail for the past 15 years. In fact I’ve seen it be more damaging than helpful because it gave people false confidence that they could tell engineers how to do their job rather than a more empathetic understanding.
not a single word about overwhelming replacement of humans with AI. nothing about countless jobs lost. nothing about ever increasing competition and rat-race. (speaking of software, but applies to all industries). his rose-glasses view is somewhere in between optimism-in-denial to straight-up lunacy. if this is the leader(s) we have been following, this should be a wake up call.
This talk is deceptively simple. The most sage advice that founders routinely forget is what concrete idea are you going to implement and why do you think it will work? There has be a way to invalidate your idea and as a corollary you must have the focus to collect the data and properly invalidate it.
I would love to have access to whatever this guy is smoking, cause that is some grade-A mind rotted insanity right there. I can count on half of 1 hand the number of good PMs I've had trough my career who weren't a net negative on the projects/companies, and even they most definitely cannot build jackshit by throwing a bunch of LLM-hallucinated crap at the wall and seeing what sticks.
But sure, the devs are the ones that are going to be replaced by the clueless middle managers who only exist to waste everyone's time.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 52.0 ms ] threadHe argues that landscape is changing (at least quarterly), and that services are (best) replaceable (often week-to-week) because models change, but that orchestration is harder to replace, and that there are relatively few orchestration platforms.
So: what platforms are available? Are there other HN posts that assess the current state of AI orchestration?
(What's the AI-orchestration acronym? not PAAS but AIOPAAS? AOP? (since aspect-oriented programming is history))
Why faster and not better with AI?
However, they are excellent at building from 0->1, and the video is suggesting that this is perfect for startups. In the context of startups, faster is better.
Teams that can do both of these things, especially #1 will move much faster. Even if they are wrong its better than vague ideas that get applause but not customers
Two arguments from Ng that really stuck out that is really tripping my skepticism alarm are:
1) He mentions how fast prototyping has begun because generating a simple app has become easier with AI. This, to me, has always been quick and never the bottleneck for any company I’ve been at, including startups. Validating an idea was simple enough via wireframing. I can maybe see it for selling an idea where you need some amount of fidelity yo impress potential investors… but I would hope places like YC can see the tech behind the idea without seeing the tech itself. Or at least can ignore low fidelity if a prototype shows the meat of the product.
2) Ng talks about how everyone in his company codes, from the front desk to the executives. The “everyone should code” idea has been done and shown to fail for the past 15 years. In fact I’ve seen it be more damaging than helpful because it gave people false confidence that they could tell engineers how to do their job rather than a more empathetic understanding.
I would love to have access to whatever this guy is smoking, cause that is some grade-A mind rotted insanity right there. I can count on half of 1 hand the number of good PMs I've had trough my career who weren't a net negative on the projects/companies, and even they most definitely cannot build jackshit by throwing a bunch of LLM-hallucinated crap at the wall and seeing what sticks.
But sure, the devs are the ones that are going to be replaced by the clueless middle managers who only exist to waste everyone's time.