Notes • Software Engineering • Updated Monday, November 18th 2024

AI is a multiplier

AI, as it exists today mid-2024, feels more like a multiplier of existing capabilities than something wholly new.

Its best feature is still the distillation of information from an immense corpus by way of an amazing parlor trick. Distillation and summarization are two sides of the same coin. LLMs are like panning for gold with a sledgehammer. Brutal, but effective.

It feels like more, you could ascribe to something more, but only if you believe the machinations of "real" intelligence are equal parts parlor trick.

Maybe it is. Maybe it's not. But either intelligence is less impressive than we thought or we have not cracked it. I do not see much daylight between these things.

Perusing the startups trying to leverage this leveraging agent sure smells a little like crypto and Web3 nonsense to me.

𐫱 Note published on November 18th, 2024 • ~100 words • 0.6 minute read