[HN Gopher] AI Hyperopia
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       AI Hyperopia
        
       Author : mvcalder
       Score  : 81 points
       Date   : 2022-10-01 13:20 UTC (9 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (mvcalder-01701.medium.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (mvcalder-01701.medium.com)
        
       | obiefernandez wrote:
       | Stopped reading once the author started saying CoPilot is not
       | useful.
        
         | mvcalder wrote:
         | Apparently you stopped reading, but since I never claimed
         | CoPilot is not useful, it wasn't because of that. My claim is,
         | I think, more subtle. The tools of AI/ML are useful, and can
         | solve many problems. But they can't solve all problems, and
         | specifically, they can't solve many of the problems (well) they
         | are currently targeting.
        
           | obiefernandez wrote:
           | CoPilot helps me code (mostly Rails full stack stuff) a lot
           | faster than ever, which is no small feat considering I've got
           | 30 plus years of daily programming experience, half of that
           | in Rails. Occasionally CoPilot produces output that is
           | nothing short of miraculous, stunning even. Suggesting that
           | it's a faulty area of research, that the creators of CoPilot
           | were somehow overreaching (if that's indeed what you're
           | saying) is imbecilic.
        
             | trention wrote:
             | What's imbecilic is generalizing your own experience to
             | others and their standards. I am yet to see current
             | iteration copilot producing non-trivial code. But maybe
             | "miraculous" for you means something else.
        
           | visarga wrote:
           | Let a thousand flowers bloom, it doesn't matter "they can't
           | solve all problems". There's enough space for traditional
           | approaches, nobody's forcing anyone to use a neural net.
           | Copilot is just a good code neural net, it's unique in its
           | own way, but it's not even state of the art for a long time.
        
       | patientplatypus wrote:
        
       | masswerk wrote:
       | Ah, the AI versus advanced automation debate and the Lighthill
       | Report (UK, 1973).
       | 
       | [1] Report: http://www.chilton-
       | computing.org.uk/inf/literature/reports/l...
       | 
       | [2] Video of the public debate:
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03p2CADwGF8&t
        
       | simon_000666 wrote:
       | "Instead CoPilot attempts to solve the most general problem, have
       | the engineer state their intent and let the AI produce the code."
       | 
       | And here in lies the rub, 90% of the time, the engineers intent
       | is wrong. That's what real pair programming will help you with
       | and what an 'ai pair programmer' will not. It just helps you
       | build something that's probably wrong faster.
        
         | dwiel wrote:
         | I actually find the "build something that is probably wrong
         | faster" really helpful. I frequently write a function and a
         | quick bit of documentation about what it should do, let copilot
         | finish it, realize my intent was wrong, rethink the intent,
         | etc. If I didn't have copilot I would follow the same process,
         | but it would take a lot longer to realize my intent was wrong.
         | 
         | It takes some time to learn what copilot is capable of and how
         | best to prompt it, but I'm my experience it very quickly pays
         | off.
        
       | cercatrova wrote:
       | > The AI effect occurs when onlookers discount the behavior of an
       | artificial intelligence program by arguing that it is not real
       | intelligence.
       | 
       | > Author Pamela McCorduck writes: "It's part of the history of
       | the field of artificial intelligence that every time somebody
       | figured out how to make a computer do something--play good
       | checkers, solve simple but relatively informal problems--there
       | was a chorus of critics to say, 'that's not thinking'."
       | Researcher Rodney Brooks complains: "Every time we figure out a
       | piece of it, it stops being magical; we say, 'Oh, that's just a
       | computation.'"
       | 
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
        
         | stephc_int13 wrote:
         | I think that we're going to see that again and again.
         | 
         | At some point, we should learn and try to manage expectations,
         | by using less emotionally charged words.
        
         | goatlover wrote:
         | Because it's all narrow AI that's often hyped as it's science
         | fiction counterpart. Augmented intelligence would have been a
         | better term, because that's what AI had been to this point.
         | Leave the term Artificial Intelligence for AGI. If and when the
         | day comes that we have Data, HAL, Skynet, then I don't think
         | the critics will be making the same complaint. They'll have
         | bigger things to worry about.
        
         | BrainVirus wrote:
         | I hate this meme. Essentially, an arrogant and condescending
         | straw man argument.
         | 
         | Here is what really happens. People who are not familiar with
         | programming assume that some mental faculty is necessary to
         | solve a particular problem. Indeed, it is required for a
         | _person_ to succeed at the problem. That mental faculty is
         | often general and can be applied to other tasks. It 's some
         | aspect of what we consider general intelligence.
         | 
         | Instead, software engineers look at a problem and solve it _by
         | changing its representation_ to fit the capabilities of a pre-
         | existing algorithm. The solution has nothing to do with mental
         | faculties in the general population. The solutions ends up
         | being specific. If you want to apply it to another problem, you
         | need to transform _that_ problem into some clever
         | representation as well.
         | 
         | People notice the lack of generality and say "no, this is not
         | what we had in mind". It's an entirely reasonable sentiment.
        
       | lwneal wrote:
       | I agree with the general sentiment of the article - that AI
       | should be focused on solving specific, solvable problems, rather
       | than on trying to solve general, unsolvable problems. However, I
       | think that the author overestimates the difficulty of the latter
       | and underestimates the difficulty of the former.
       | 
       | Specifically, the author claims that "CoPilot ... leaves
       | unaddressed the solvable problems of making Intellisense less
       | intrusive and more accurate, making it better with judicious
       | application of existing algorithms." However, making Intellisense
       | less intrusive and more accurate is a general, unsolvable problem
       | - there is no algorithm that can take into account all the
       | possible ways in which Intellisense can be intrusive or
       | inaccurate, and so no way to automatically make it better.
       | 
       | On the other hand, the author claims that "statistical techniques
       | ... can be used to improve virtually any human - computer
       | interaction." However, this is not true - there are many human -
       | computer interactions which cannot be improved by statistical
       | techniques, because they are too complex or too specific. For
       | example, consider the problem of automated code review. This is a
       | specific, solvable problem, but it is not one that can be solved
       | by statistical techniques - the code to be reviewed is too
       | complex and too specific for any general algorithm to be able to
       | automatically identify errors.
       | 
       | In conclusion, I think that the author is wrong to claim that AI
       | should focus on solving specific, solvable problems, and that
       | trying to solve general, unsolvable problems is a waste of time.
       | ```
       | 
       | - GPT3, text-davinci-002 temperature 0.7, prompt "Read the
       | Following Article:\n```\n${ARTICLE}\n```\nHacker News Comment
       | (written by an AI):"
        
       | brrrrrm wrote:
       | There just aren't enough "full stack" machine learning folks who
       | can quickly solve these problems.
       | 
       | The pure programming people have trouble scoping out which
       | solutions to try due to lack of experience. The pure ML people
       | code in Python notebooks and have little visibility into these
       | issues.
       | 
       | Both folks could easily learn the other side and help, but it's
       | surprisingly rare to see.
        
       | stephc_int13 wrote:
       | The problem is the naming.
       | 
       | Even weak/incomplete AI results tends to fuel the imagination, we
       | can easily fill the gaps with anything from fiction or our own
       | dreams.
       | 
       | On the contrary, when AI works and is strong (like with chess) we
       | stop calling it AI and start seeing it for what it is.
       | 
       | Stockfish is called a chess engine. Not an AI.
       | 
       | And the algorithm behind current chess engines is not super
       | smart, it is mostly brute force.
       | 
       | The trick is to avoid doing brute force at every move, but
       | instead doing the grunt work once a huge computer and store
       | everything in a compact form.
        
         | gamegoblin wrote:
         | I agree on the general thrust of your comment. Though it's
         | worth pointing out that the just the neural net behind
         | AlphaZero is still pro-level on its own, without any search
         | algorithm attached (the "engine", so to speak). It's not super-
         | human without the engine, but still "super smart" for some
         | definition of the words.
         | 
         | That said, Stockfish NNUE took the heart of AlphaZero (the
         | evaluation neural net), ripped it out, refined and shrunk it,
         | and stuck it back into Stockfish, and now Stockfish is clearly
         | back on top and is still clearly an "engine" and not an "AI" as
         | you say.
         | 
         | It seems like this will be the case for AI vs. Engine in a lot
         | of fields going forward. A bio-inspired "AI" approach will do
         | well. Then that thing will get stripped down and refined to the
         | bare minimum to do some particular task, and it will then be
         | more of an "engine".
         | 
         | It will be very interesting to see what this looks like for
         | "general intelligence". That is, how many components of
         | intelligence are separable and distillable into engines? E.g.
         | reasoning, creativity, knowledge, foresight, etc.
        
           | mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
           | I have a theory that the fact that the net on its own is a
           | decent player is precisely its greatest weakness. Obviously
           | the deep NN must be doing some type of search, but this
           | search is maybe slower than the engine search, because it
           | can't interact with the various engine cache tables, and feed
           | into the statistics used to heuristically order moves.
           | 
           | Stockfish NNUE is a much simpler neural net that's just a
           | really strong, static evaluation function, not doing its own
           | search and therefore the engine can search further and get
           | the most out of the data(transposition table, continuation
           | tables etc) generated by that search.
           | 
           | I think the AlphaGo architecture makes more sense for Go than
           | the chess family of games, but that's a different discussion
           | altogether.
        
             | gamegoblin wrote:
             | Yes, it does seem plausible (or even likely) that a deep
             | net (AlphaZero is 80 layers deep) is doing some kind of
             | implicit search from layer to layer.
        
           | stephc_int13 wrote:
           | In my opinion, the process you describe when transforming the
           | AI approach into an engine is simply related to our
           | understanding of why it works and how.
           | 
           | And this can clearly be done to cover a wide range of useful
           | things.
           | 
           | But I would make two observations, first, neural nets are
           | much more closely related to applied statistics than biology
           | mimicry. The historical name should not matter much but it
           | does because humans are driven by emotions, even in research.
           | 
           | Second, AGI is still too badly defined to be seriously
           | discussed.
           | 
           | Every time people can observe some progress in the AI field,
           | they are tempted to make predictions that, in my opinion, are
           | impossible to make.
           | 
           | We're getting closer. That's all.
        
             | namarie wrote:
             | > first, neural nets are much more closely related to
             | applied statistics than biology mimicry
             | 
             | Well, aren't biological systems really really refined
             | statistical systems?
        
               | stephc_int13 wrote:
               | Maybe, but real neurons are not closer to artificial
               | neurons than a digestive system is to a furnace or a
               | barrel of acid.
               | 
               | There is a very loose relation between them, because
               | neural nets were historically inspired by the way real
               | neurons are connected.
               | 
               | This is not saying anything about the capabilities of
               | neural nets, I think they can be extremely potent, up to
               | AGI level, but not because of biological mimicry but
               | thanks to Computational Equivalence.
               | 
               | https://worldscienceu.com/lessons/2-6-principle-of-
               | computati...
        
       | Animats wrote:
       | The basic problem is that machine learning systems don't really
       | understand what they're doing. So most of the time, they do the
       | right thing, and when they do a totally wrong thing, they don't
       | notice. Works fine for advertising, not so much for self-driving.
       | 
       | Look at those systems that generate images or text from a prompt.
       | Usually the results are good, and sometimes they are totally
       | bogus.
       | 
       | As I point out occasionally, the big hole in AI is "common
       | sense", defined as not screwing up big-time in the next 30
       | seconds. Until that gets solved, AI systems can't be trusted very
       | far.
       | 
       | The control theory people are trying to fix this, so they can use
       | ML to build control systems with safe behavior. The math is
       | really tough. Way beyond me. See IEEE Transactions on Control
       | Systems Technology to follow this. People are trying to make
       | control theory math and ML math play together. Control theory
       | usually has continuity - if it does the same right thing at 0.21
       | and 0.22, you can be confident it will do the same right thing at
       | 0.215. ML systems do not have that property. Which is why we see
       | those image recognition demos where some minor change in the
       | background noise totally changes the result.
        
         | drooby wrote:
         | Can't we create a model that asks questions when the other
         | model gets something wrong. The model will get very good at
         | asking questions and then the other model will update
         | accordingly..millions of people using the system will keep it
         | continuously improving itself.
        
           | pjbeam wrote:
           | Won't the watcher model then need a watcher? And the watcher
           | watcher model too? Etc.
        
           | version_five wrote:
           | Doesn't really work that way in that it still reduces to an
           | overall system that doesn't understand what it's doing
           | (someone else mentioned GANs, they are a great example of how
           | unwittingly incorrect ML model output can be - go look at the
           | out-takes from any image generation model)
           | 
           | A better approach is good uncertainty quantification (this is
           | not at all trivial) to quantify when the model is and isn't
           | qualified to be making a prediction.
        
           | ben_w wrote:
           | That's basically what a GAN is -- they're great, but not a
           | panacea.
        
       | AtlasBarfed wrote:
       | If you have AI generating code, then you'll have to:
       | 
       | 1) have the software requirements codified to a near-coded state
       | already
       | 
       | 2) have a validation/verification test suite that validates the
       | software generated works correctly
       | 
       | Both of which increase the overall complexity to the point that
       | the AI will be of minimal value-add.
        
         | visarga wrote:
         | The AI can also write the tests and docs.
        
       | fny wrote:
       | Copilot is a verbose savant heavily afflicted by Dunning-
       | Kruger... but an extremely useful one.
       | 
       | Do you remember how Googling was a skill?
       | 
       | Learning to Copilot, Stable Diffusion, GPT are exactly the same
       | thing.
       | 
       | Copilot's full power (at this time) does not exist in generating
       | reams of code. Here are a few things it excels at:
       | 
       | - Snippet search: Say you can't remember how to see if a variable
       | is empty in a bash conditional, ask.
       | 
       | - Template population: Say I have a series of functions I need to
       | write in a language without good meta programming facilities. I
       | can write a list of the (all combinations), write one example,
       | the ai will pick up on the rest.
       | 
       | - Rust: If I get trapped because of some weird borrow checker
       | issue with `fn doit(...`, I begin rewriting the function `fn
       | fixed_doit(...`, and 9/10 times Copilot fixes the bug.
        
         | PontifexMinimus wrote:
         | > Say I have a series of functions I need to write in a
         | language without good meta programming facilities. I can write
         | a list of the (all combinations), write one example, the ai
         | will pick up on the rest.
         | 
         | If you are coding in a language that requires tons of
         | boilerplate, the solution is to use a different language that
         | require less boilerplate.
        
           | richk449 wrote:
           | Why isn't "have an AI write the boilerplate" an equally good
           | solution?
           | 
           | Asking earnestly.
        
         | viraptor wrote:
         | > I begin rewriting the function `fn fixed_doit(...`, and 9/10
         | times Copilot fixes the bug.
         | 
         | This blew my mind. Thank you for sharing, I never thought of
         | approaching it that way.
        
       | mark_l_watson wrote:
       | I liked the main theme of concentrating on practical AI that adds
       | value right now, but disagree with his opinions on CoPilot.
       | 
       | I use CoPilot in all or my development modes except for the
       | LispWorks IDE. I find it very useful, especially when I toggle
       | over multiple code completions, picking the best one. It is not
       | as much about writing code for me as it is saving time looking up
       | documentation. I usually work in Emacs with a REPL so checking
       | generated code is quick.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | thekoma wrote:
       | Tangent notes but I would really like an AI writing my commit
       | messages and pull request summaries. Is it a thing?
        
       | dqpb wrote:
       | > AI is software based automation. That we imbue any automated
       | process with intention, emotion, and intelligence, is a defect of
       | our human software
       | 
       | Matt Calder thinks he's teaching us something about AI, but he's
       | really just teaching us something sad about Matt Calder.
        
       | imglorp wrote:
       | Wake me up when AI will join the customer call, negotiate
       | features with product managers, and figure out exactly what needs
       | to get built.
        
         | whywhywhywhy wrote:
         | In a post-dall-e post-stable-diffusion world I've completely
         | 180'd on this argument as defending your job worth.
         | 
         | I used to think you'd struggle to replace an actual
         | illustrator/artist because clients always want something
         | specific. But really it isn't about you giving them what they
         | want it's about them having to deal with you at all.
         | 
         | Why would I message the illustrator, negotiate rate, have a
         | meeting then have back and forths trying to get what I want
         | when AI can be running from the first moment without
         | interacting with anyone else and it can be spitting out
         | versions of the thing before you have the actual person in a
         | video call.
         | 
         | It can do this all day and all night then someone just had to
         | choose what version of the thing they want or nudge it closer.
         | 
         | It happened to art and I don't see why devs think they're
         | immune.
         | 
         | On a long enough timeline, there may only be unfortunately
         | project managers.
         | 
         | (Still think building great and opinionated work has value. But
         | low level generic work is on the chopping block as far as I can
         | see today)
        
           | imglorp wrote:
           | I think the hard part is where the customer doesn't really
           | know everything about their business process: it's extremely
           | common to have a partial view of a complex system. The
           | process of requirements discovery involves asking questions,
           | pointing out inconsistencies, and setting priorities. Only at
           | that point do you sort of have an agreement about the desired
           | work and even then there are gaps that need iteration.
        
           | trention wrote:
           | >It happened to art and I don't see why devs think they're
           | immune.
           | 
           | Probably because it's a different problem domain that
           | actually requires precision and the requirements often are
           | unexpressable in natural language.
           | 
           | Also, it has not happened in art. You can say it has happened
           | in art when 50% of currently salaried graphic artists are
           | unemployed.
        
             | whywhywhywhy wrote:
             | >actually requires precision and the requirements often are
             | unexpressable in natural language
             | 
             | Same sentence could describe art.
        
               | trention wrote:
               | The first part couldn't and the second doesn't apply to
               | the current (and I suspect any future) mechanism AI
               | models use to generate...anything.
        
           | csmpltn wrote:
           | > "On a long enough timeline, there may only be unfortunately
           | project managers."
           | 
           | You won't need those either. AI will be able to just use your
           | neuralink implant to build a complete product based on some
           | vague ideas, in minutes. Goodbye daily scrum meetings and
           | quarterly planning.
           | 
           | In all seriousness now - who is going to be building this
           | "AI"? What about the platforms it has to run on (both
           | software and hardware)? The tools that team has to use?
           | 
           | Will AI find new ways to implement AI? Will AI research and
           | implement ways to optimize itself across the whole stack?
           | 
           | Are you just going to let AI spin VMs for you in your multi-
           | cloud Azure subscription with uncapped spend, if that's what
           | it takes to build your product? Maybe AI will also
           | investigate customer escalations and bug reports? Or memory
           | corruption issues?
           | 
           | Look, I get it. You're excited about a computer computing.
           | And maybe you've gotten used to the idea that engineering
           | ends with being a code-monkey stitching together CRUD APIs in
           | Python.
           | 
           | Nothing wrong with being excited. But please, have a bit of
           | respect for the craft.
        
             | whywhywhywhy wrote:
             | > In all seriousness now - who is going to be building this
             | "AI"? What about the platforms it has to run on (both
             | software and hardware)? The tools that team has to use?
             | 
             | as I said "low level generic work is on the chopping block"
        
           | Keyframe wrote:
           | Re: Art, it'll be interesting what all this brings to the
           | table. On one hand, tools for artists, on other replacement
           | for artists. Turns out, we might be getting into polemics of
           | what art is and it'll turn out that skills (as in trade) are
           | part of it, but not the most important - it's artist's taste
           | that sets them apart and drives them above. Now, everyone
           | will face the same since skills barrier will be brought down.
        
         | Keyframe wrote:
         | Wait until AI also becomes product manager and the client.
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | broast wrote:
         | I already use gpt3 in my daily life to refine details for
         | things I'm building for work, and to advance personal goals. If
         | you give AI all the pertinent requirements, it's great at
         | coming up with solutions. That's despite the fact these early
         | language models are optimized for coherency and not
         | correctness. So I wouldn't think we're too far off from waking
         | you up.
        
           | giardini wrote:
           | I've used a predecessor of gpt3 quite successfully for
           | decades:
           | 
           | https://www.amazon.com/Mattel-Games-Magic-Ball-
           | Retro/dp/B014...
        
           | furyofantares wrote:
           | Do you have any examples you can share?
        
       | Ukv wrote:
       | > CoPilot changes the kind of work the engineer has to do, from
       | authoring to editing, but the amount of work is not reduced.
       | 
       | Disagree based on my own experience using CoPilot, but it would
       | be interesting to think about ways to fairly test this.
       | 
       | > Reweighting these potential choices with the most likely given
       | the current context and showing only the most likely is a
       | solvable AI problem.
       | 
       | Not sure about other editors, but for JetBrains IDEs at least
       | this has been a thing for a while:
       | https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/guide/tips/enable-ml-code-com...
        
         | hugozap wrote:
         | Me too, It has reduced the amount of work and by extension
         | allowed me to have more productive work sessions.
        
       | hugozap wrote:
       | Copilot has been really useful to me, and if you know what you
       | are doing it's a massive time and mental energy saver.
       | 
       | You can let it draft an initial approach to a small task and then
       | you refine it, I've found this works well, and in practical
       | terms, I end up less tired after working in collaboration with
       | Copilot.
       | 
       | I don't expect it to give me the perfect answer, and it doesn't
       | remove the need for tests (which it can also help creating). But
       | as an assistant? It rocks.
        
       | woojoo666 wrote:
       | > An Intellisense AI that detected when an arrow key press was an
       | intended interaction with Intellisense and when it was a
       | continuation of the normal typing flow could smooth out these
       | awkward discontinuities.
       | 
       | I think this is bad UX actually. It should be obvious to the
       | programmer what the arrow key will do next, the programmer
       | shouldn't have to guess what the AI is thinking. Navigation
       | should be predictable
        
         | soulofmischief wrote:
         | As I often say, gravity should always be down. Tools like IDEs,
         | autocomplete, search, etc. should be completely deterministic.
         | The same action should _always_ end in the same result.
         | 
         | The reason for this is that the IDE is an extension of the arm.
         | The brain literally treats it as an extension of its own
         | capabilities though processes like transactive memory. It can
         | only reliably integrate and achieve a state of deep flow if it
         | can form a reliable model of your external brain. If actions
         | don't always give the same result, there's no model to
         | integrate.
        
       | vslira wrote:
       | These AI tools are not static. They are products with well funded
       | teams behind them constantly iterating to make them better.
       | 
       | I don't dismiss them, but I do put a low weight on arguments of
       | the form "AI is not there yet" give how far it has come in the
       | last 5 years. By 2030, I can see a product understanding the
       | context of a system from multiple repos and, given an intent,
       | producing code and deployment infra that adds new features
       | respecting constraints
       | 
       | This is good. A single dev will be able to do the work of a full
       | team and then every small business will be able to develop
       | software that suits their specific needs with a couple of
       | dedicated employees
        
       | BrainVirus wrote:
       | Imagine that you are a CEO of Microsoft. Someone in your company
       | invented an AI tool that makes an average developer much better
       | at coding (more productive, etc.). As a reminder: you company is
       | a software company that itself employs tens of thousand of
       | developers. What would you do?
       | 
       | a) Downplay the tool. Use it internally to completely crush
       | competition by writing amazing software. License for exorbitant
       | price to a select few partners, who will also crush their
       | competition.
       | 
       | b) Hype it up as much as possible and license it to anyone who's
       | willing to pay $10/month.
       | 
       | I think the rational choice is obvious, which also makes it
       | blatantly obvious that Copilot is not seen as any kind of
       | competitive advantage by Microsoft itself.
        
         | jameshart wrote:
         | That logic suggests Microsoft should simply never sell
         | development tools, or even productivity software, because they
         | would presumably be able to leverage the advantage of those
         | tools internally in their own interests to crush all
         | competitors.
         | 
         | Microsoft has long taken the position that its interests are
         | served by there just being more computers being used by more
         | people to do more things ('a computer on every desk' etc) - not
         | by monopolizing all computer activity. That's more IBM's style.
         | 
         | Why I'd it better to ship it than keep it?
         | 
         | If you have a widget that makes software developers 10% more
         | efficient, sure you can use it to make your own developers more
         | efficient, but if your developers currently account for 1% of
         | all the programming productivity on the planet you just
         | realized a value equivalent to 0.1% of global programming
         | potential.
         | 
         | On the other hand if you ship it as a product in exchange for,
         | say, 10% of the increase in value produced, you contributed a
         | value increase to the world equivalent to 9.9% of programming
         | output, and captured .99% of the value of the market for
         | yourself. That's _much more than the value you could have
         | captured yourself_ and you _grew the market_ meaning you can
         | extract even more value on the next go around.
        
           | BrainVirus wrote:
           | _> That logic suggests Microsoft should simply never sell
           | development tools_
           | 
           | You employ faulty economic reasoning here. Most MS tools are
           | not unique and aren't even best in their class. In cases
           | where they are close, MS charges _a lot_ of money for the
           | privilege to use them.
           | 
           | To put it in simple terms, if Copilot worked as advertised it
           | would cost significantly more than VS enterprise. At some
           | point of usefulness the logic related to selling vs using it
           | internally would work exactly like I described. This is why
           | many companies develop their own software and don't sell it
           | _at all_ even if they could charge for it.
        
             | thfuran wrote:
             | My company develops software for internal use and we've
             | even been asked about selling it by some customers who have
             | seen it. We don't sell it because doing so would require a
             | ton of work to decouple it from our other internal
             | services/processes and generalize it enough to maybe be
             | actually useable by other enterprises, would give us a
             | whole second set of customers in totally different
             | industries from that of our main product, and would
             | generally be a total pain in the ass. I suspect that
             | there's a lot more of that sort of thing than the other.
        
         | kwerk wrote:
         | Isn't Microsoft the licensee though?
         | 
         | https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/09/22/microsoft-teams-...
        
       | AIorNot wrote:
       | So it sounds like Their complaining about the UI of Copilot
       | -Doesn't seem to be a complaint about current capabilities of AI
       | 
       | Hmm https://youtu.be/PdFB7q89_3U
        
         | badtension wrote:
         | It's like focusing on building very fast transportation through
         | a vacuum (which may eventually work after sinking an absurd
         | amount of money) instead of creating fast train infrastructure
         | which we know is possible and works. It looks like a moonshot
         | but in reality is just a pipe dream and a waste of resources
         | (imo, with today's technology anyway).
         | 
         | The linked video seems like most comedy - optimized for laughs
         | instead of describing reality, I don't think it is relevant.
        
       | kache_ wrote:
       | We'll get there :)
        
         | mvcalder wrote:
         | My point is, maybe, but at what cost? I like the other poster's
         | analogy to transportation systems. While ambition should be
         | encouraged, there's work to do, so much so when it comes to
         | exploiting our new found software powers.
        
           | kache_ wrote:
           | yes, there's a lot of work to do. The cost is me, rolling up
           | my sleeves, and adding entry points to the systems that I
           | build to take advantage of it.
           | 
           | I don't think people are just sitting around. From my
           | observations, there's a mad race happening right now.
        
             | selestify wrote:
             | What's the mad race that you're seeing?
        
       | holoduke wrote:
       | Copilot doesn't remove the thinking process for large problems.
       | But it helps me with dozens of small things. Like adding log
       | lines, variable names etc.
        
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