I’m very much a luddite when it comes to AI, I’m unequivocally against its usage and development. The social and environmental costs AI incurs and proposes to incur are overwhelming. The celebration of AI with Chinese characteristics is often justified by the idea that AI can be useful, and the reason why it’s OK to be vehemently against it otherwise but support it when it’s being implemented by China is because AI can only be a force for evil within the capitalist framework. I agree with the latter point obviously but find it hard to accept that China driving AI advancement is a good thing for the world.
I don’t want to have a debate about whether China is a revisionist state, but I think we can all agree that China has refused to take the role of the Soviet Union in exporting socialism to the world. What happens when it exports AI to countries world over that very much operate within a capitalist framework while China does nothing to advance world wide socialism?
I very skeptical that any productive gains were had. There's massive amounts of cherry picking of data, marketing campaigns, misleading metrics, complete disregard for technical debt, and groupthink mania that suppresses critical voices.
I'm inclined to believe LLMs suck for any and all coding and you'd be better off without them, especially due to them being inherently unreliable, but even if they were marginally useful in specific situations, the overall negative effect in trying to leverage the chatbots for all the things are going to be disastrous and ruin many a codebase. It's completely up in the air if any organization will be able to use a coding chatbot responsibly only in situations where it has utility (if it has any) without suffering the negative effects of using it when not called for. Even if someone figures out the perfect use cases without falling into the trap of overusing it, it might still not make economic sense to actually use it due to the cost.