[HN Gopher] The barriers to AI engineering are crumbling fast
___________________________________________________________________
The barriers to AI engineering are crumbling fast
Author : lewq
Score : 169 points
Date : 2024-11-14 14:56 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.helix.ml)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.helix.ml)
| sharemywin wrote:
| looks interesting I'll have to check it out.
| normanthreep wrote:
| thank you for letting us know. i was wondering if you found it
| interesting and would check it out
| JSDevOps wrote:
| Is anyone instantly suspicious when they introduce themselves
| these days an "AI Developer"
| noch wrote:
| > Is anyone instantly suspicious when they introduce themselves
| these days an "AI Developer"
|
| I'm only suspicious if they don't simultaneously and eagerly
| show me their Github so that I can see what they've
| accomplished.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| Of the great developers I have worked with in real life,
| across a large number of projects and workplaces, very few
| have any Github presence. Most don't even have LinkedIn. They
| usually don't have any online presence at all: No blog with
| regular updates. No Twitter presence full of hot takes.
|
| Sometimes this industry is a lot like the "finance" industry:
| People struggling for credibility talk about it constantly,
| everywhere. They flex and bloviate and look for surrogates
| for accomplishments wherever they can be found. Peacocking on
| github, writing yet another tutorial on what tokens are and
| how embeddings work, etc.
|
| That obviously doesn't mean in all cases, and there are loads
| of stellar talents that have a strong online presence. But by
| itself it is close to meaningless, and my experience is that
| it is usually a negative indicator.
| JSDevOps wrote:
| If someone has to tell you either themselves of by proxy
| they are influential in the industry ... they are not.
| noch wrote:
| > Of the great developers I have worked with in real life,
| across a large number of projects and workplaces
|
| Dear God, let's not pretend to be obtuse or facile. Saying
| "GitHub" is just a way of saying: "Show me what you've
| accomplished."
|
| If someone has no accomplishments anywhere to show then
| someone else might find them credible but I don't, as a
| heuristic.
|
| It's really not that difficult to show what you've
| accomplished if you claim to be in a field.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| >Saying "GitHub" is just a way of saying: "Show me what
| you've accomplished."
|
| Do you actually think all development happens in public
| GitHub repos? Do you even think a majority does? Even a
| strong minority?
|
| Across a number of enormous, well-known projects I've
| worked on, covering many thousands of contributors,
| including several very well known names, 0% of it exists
| in public Github repos. The overwhelming bulk of
| development is happening in the shadows.
|
| If your "field" is "open source software", then sure. But
| if you're confused into thinking Github -- at least the
| tiny fraction that you can see -- is "the field" of
| software development or even just generally providing
| solutions, I can understand your weird belief about this.
| noch wrote:
| > Do you actually think all development happens in public
| GitHub repos? Do you even think a majority does? Even a
| strong minority?
|
| Are you actually able to read what I wrote? I said
| "GitHub" is a euphemism. I'm happy to read your papers on
| arxiv or elsewhere, for instance.
|
| Try not to be too horny to reply in opposition and
| instead just read what another human is saying first.
| Otherwise your replies in high dudgeon are a waste of my
| time and don't teach me anything new.
| kazinator wrote:
| > _It 's really not that difficult to show what you've
| accomplished if you claim to be in a field._
|
| Actually it is incredibly difficult, because you no
| longer have access to your previous employers' code bases
| and even if you do, it is illegal for you to show it to
| anyone.
| noch wrote:
| > Actually it is incredibly difficult, because you no
| longer have access to your previous employers' code
| bases.
|
| So the person never does anything outside of his
| employer's IP? That's unfortunate, but as a heuristic,
| I'd like to see stuff that the person has done if they
| claim to be in a field.
|
| Perhaps other people don't care, and will be convinced by
| expertise without evidence, but I'm busy, and my life is
| hard enough already: show me your code or gtfo. :-)
| kazinator wrote:
| Newsflash: the majority of working, paid developers do
| not do any programming outside of their employer's IP.
|
| Someone who worked on successful projects that shipped
| and are still out there, they can point you to that. You
| can buy the app, or device with their embedded code, or
| use the website or whatever. Not always an option for
| everyone, or not all the time.
|
| That's one reason why there are skill tests in
| interviews. And why people ask for, and contact,
| references.
|
| Public code can't be trusted. If you make that the
| yardstick for hiring people, then everyone and his dog
| will spin up some phony github repo with stuff that can't
| be confirmed to have been written by them. Goodhart's Law
| and all that.
|
| You have no idea how much help someone had with the code
| in their github repo, or to what extent it is cribbed
| from somewhere else. Enter AI into the picture now, too.
| noch wrote:
| > Newsflash
|
| Thanks for the newsflash! It's always great to hear that
| snarky boomer anachronism. Do you remember how you'd be
| watching cartoons then suddenly a dramatic interruption,
| a banner flying across the screen, clarions sounding, and
| bam! _Newsflash!_ Upon which your parents tell you to
| hush because "this is important!".
|
| > the majority of working, paid developers do not do any
| programming outside of their employer's IP.
|
| Dude. Explain that to your recruiter. I'm just a random
| and we're hanging out talking about transformers then a
| guy walks into the bar and proclaims, "I am an AI
| engineer!" Just show me some code already or what are we
| even talking about when you say you're an AI engineer?
|
| This isn't a moral issue. I'm glad that you (and
| allegedly majority of developers) are employed and never
| do anything outside of work. But for the purposes of a
| conversation, _what are you talking about in a field if
| you have nothing at all to show in public or to your peer
| group?_
|
| > Public code can't be trusted. [...] You have no idea
| how much help someone had with the code in their github
| repo, or to what extent it is cribbed from somewhere
| else. Enter AI into the picture now, too.
|
| Code either compiles and runs or it does. The author can
| either explain it or doesn't understand it.
|
| That's why we would have a conversation: For instance, if
| I'm hiring (or if I'm being hired), or we're just having
| a semi-serious conversation about technical stuff, we
| typically walk each other through something difficult
| that we solved. We discuss the code we've written and
| show it. We talk about stuff and that's how we figure out
| how much we both know about the topic.
|
| Why is this even remotely controversial? ;-) Do you guys
| never talk to anyone about what you do or what you know?
| Do you never help friends or colleagues or even
| acquaintances discuss technical problems at their
| companies or startups or with their freelance projects?
| Do you never just discuss technical stuff after having a
| meal with friends, when you open a laptop and read code?
| Do you even never write code with friends for fun or to
| figure out new stuff about novel problems?
|
| > That's one reason why there are skill tests in
| interviews. And why people ask for, and contact,
| references.
|
| Thanks for explaining to me how recruiting and employment
| works. Thankfully I'm an adult who has existed on the
| planet for some time. I imagine you assume I've never
| filed a reference letter? But I've also seen reference
| letters being gamed just like every other reputation
| system so ...
|
| Anyway, out of curiosity, if you've literally never done
| anything other than what your employer gave you, how did
| you even become a programmer? You left college or high-
| school and walked straight into a job then learned to
| code there, or what?
| kazinator wrote:
| > The author can either explain it or doesn't understand
| it.
|
| I've never been challenged to explain any of the code my
| CV points to. I could have made it all up. If they
| randomly asked about something I have not looked at in a
| long a while, it could actually look like I don't know
| it! There is so much of it that I would have to study the
| code as a full time activity to be able to fluently spout
| off about any random sample of it.
|
| I think I'm going to rearrange my resume to move the free
| software stuff farther down and maybe shorten it. It
| could come across as a negative.
|
| Some hiring people genuinely don't understand why someone
| would put in a 40 hour week and then do some more on
| evenings and weekends. Well, I don't know how many. In my
| career I heard something along those lines from around
| two. Not everyone will tell you.
|
| > _You left college or high-school and walked straight
| into a job then learned to code there, or what?_
|
| It doesn't describe me, but does almost everyone I've
| ever known in the field (other than distant strangers met
| through online free-software-related channels, who are an
| obviously biased sample).
| noch wrote:
| > If they randomly asked about something I have not
| looked at in a long a while, it could actually look like
| I don't know it!
|
| Typically the interviewer asks: "Tell me about something
| you worked on in this list of stuff you provided."
|
| An interview isn't designed to trick you into failing
| random questions. It's to find out what you care about.
| You choose what to talk about. :-)
|
| At least, that's how I engage in conversations. I want
| you to decide what you want to talk about so that I can
| get to know you.
| cess11 wrote:
| When assessing a candidate that didn't come with a
| reliable recommendation or similar short circuiting I
| spend a short time chatting to learn a little about their
| personality, then I ask for code, suggesting they show a
| public repo where they keep some of their personal stuff.
|
| If they can't I give the option to write some code that
| they like and they think shows off what they can do,
| usually suggesting to spend half an hour or a couple of
| hours on it.
|
| To me it's an obvious red flag if there is nothing. It's
| as if talking to a graphics designer or photographer and
| they're like "no, sorry, I can't show a portfolio, I've
| only done secretive proprietary work and have never done
| anything for fun or practice".
|
| Those that show me something get to talk about it with
| me. A casual chat about style, function, possible
| improvements and so on. Usually when they have nothing to
| show they also don't put in that half an hour to make
| something up, or get back with excuses about lack of
| inspiration or whatever, and that's where I say "thanks,
| but no thanks, good luck".
|
| If you can't easily initiate a git repo and whip
| something up and send it to me in half an hour you won't
| be a good fit. It means you aren't fluent and lack in
| experience. I might consider internship, or a similar
| position where you mainly do something else, perhaps
| you're good at managing Linux servers or something but
| want to learn how to design programs and develop software
| as well.
| spacemanspiff01 wrote:
| It takes a special someone to work 40-50 hrs per week,
| writing hard creative software, then go home and write
| hard creative software in a different domain, while also
| balancing family/life.
|
| Also, unless you are in CA many companies have extensive
| IP assignment clauses, which makes moonlighting on other
| projects potentially questionable.(especially if they are
| assholes)
|
| My previous job made it hard to even submit bugs/fixes to
| open source projects we used internally. Often we just
| forked b/c bureaucracy (there's a reason it was my
| previous job)
|
| Not saying your wrong, seeing someone's code is nice. As
| long as you are aware that you are leaving alot on the
| table by excluding those that do not have a presence.
| (Particularly older with kids)
| abeppu wrote:
| If you hire an accountant, do you expect to see the books
| of their other clients? When you choose a doctor, do you
| expect to see the charts of their prior patients?
|
| And frankly, when you hire a manager or executive,
| there's not generally a single artifact that you could
| use to examine their value-add. You can see perhaps the
| trajectory of a company or a division or the size of
| their team over time, but you can't see the pile of
| ongoing decisions and conversations that produce actual
| value.
|
| I think the flip side regarding code is, the stuff I do
| for fun _outside_ of my employer 's IP is not at all
| representative of what I do at work, or how. I pick
| topics that interest me, work in languages that my
| company doesn't use, etc, and because my purpose is
| learning and exploration, often it doesn't end up as a
| finished, working, valuable piece of tech. I deliberately
| don't do anything too close to my actual work both b/c
| that just feels like working longer and because I'm
| concerned it would make ownership of the code a bit
| fuzzy, and perhaps it would be inappropriate to consider
| open sourcing. Because my side projects are eclectic and
| didactic, I rarely put it in a public repo -- but it has
| served its purpose of teaching me something. If I shared
| all of my code side projects, they would show an
| unfocused person dabbling in a range of areas and not
| shipping anything useful, because that's what's fun ...
| whereas at work, I am focused in a few quite narrow
| areas, and working on customer-facing features, because
| the point is to build what the company needs rather than
| what I enjoy building.
| noch wrote:
| > If you hire an accountant, do you expect to see the
| books of their other clients? When you choose a doctor,
| do you expect to see the charts of their prior patients?
|
| I'm genuinely sorry for you if you think a programmer is
| analogous to an accountant or doctor. Presumably you are
| one of those people who think that a Software Engineer is
| as much an engineer as a Civil Engineer?
|
| Anyway, let me not speculate as to your state of mind.
| You wrote a lot of words. What exactly are you even
| trying to defend or attack or justify? Is the number of
| your words commensurate to the informational content of
| what you think you're explaining? Can you explain your
| point in 1 sentence? Or perhaps I should just ask an LLM
| to summarize it. smh.
| abeppu wrote:
| Even if an ML/AI/software engineer has a public GH with
| projects on it, there's no strong reason to expect it
| will be a useful signal about their expertise.
| noch wrote:
| > Even if an ML/AI/software engineer has a public GH with
| projects on it, there's no strong reason to expect it
| will be a useful signal about their expertise.
|
| That's only true if you don't know how to read code. I
| simply _read their code_ and based on my level of
| expertise, I can determine if someone is at least at my
| level or if they are incompetent.
| cess11 wrote:
| If I'm shopping for an accountant I will present them
| with one or two cases and see how they would reason about
| them. It's not as easy to do with a physician.
|
| The main difference between those professions and people
| who build software for a living is that they have
| organisations that predate modernity that keep tabs on
| their members and kick them out if they misbehave.
|
| We should absolutely build such organisations, but there
| will be intense confrontations with industry and academia
| when we try, because capitalists hate when other people
| unionise and academics think they're the best at
| evaluating peers.
|
| It's fine that your personal projects aren't polished
| products. They show your interests and some of how you
| adapt to and solve problems. It's something you've chosen
| to do because you wanted to, and not something you did
| because you were pressured by profit. The everyday grind
| at work wouldn't show what you'd do under more
| exceptional circumstances, which is where your personal
| character and abilities might actually matter, but what
| you do for fun or personal development likely does.
| taway1874 wrote:
| This is exactly what we're talking about here and you are
| proving our point.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| I've found this to be especially true of the great business
| minded devs that I've come across. They're not giving you
| crap for free. Pardon my French.
| 0points wrote:
| It's spelled crepe
| jchw wrote:
| I think the actual truth is somewhere halfway. Hard to not
| have _any_ GitHub presence if you use enough open source
| projects, since you can 't even report bugs to many of them
| without an account.
|
| But if you mostly mean in the sense that they don't have a
| fancy GitHub profile with a ton of followers... I agree,
| that does seem to be the case.
|
| LinkedIn on the other hand... I sincerely can't imagine
| networking on LinkedIn being a fraction as useful as
| networking... Well, at work. For anyone that has a decent
| enough resume LinkedIn is basically only useful if you want
| a gutter trash news feed and to be spammed by dubious job
| offers 24/7. Could be wrong, but I'm starting to think you
| should really only stoop to LinkedIn in moments of
| desperation...
| mitchitized wrote:
| As a hiring manager LinkedIn profiles are a huge window
| into someone's professional side, just like github _may_
| be a huge window into their technical side.
|
| As a candidate I think LinkedIn is absolute trash - and
| toxic with all the ghost jobs and dark patterns. Feels
| like everyone else has the same opinion, or at the very
| least it is a common one. But when I have 50 candidates
| to review for 5 open positions, LinkedIn is going to give
| me great insight that I cannot really get anywhere else.
| I keep my profile current in the hopes that I'm not doing
| it for LinkedIn, but for the person researching me to see
| if I am a valid candidate for their role.
| namaria wrote:
| "Linkedin is trash but I use it as a signal source" is
| kinda telling on yourself there bud.
| bdangubic wrote:
| coding since the '90's - do not have a github account at
| all that I ever used for anything. of the top say 10
| people I have ever worked with not a single one has a
| github account.
|
| there is an entire industry of devs who work on
| meaningful projects, independently or for an employer who
| solve amazing problems and do amazing sh*t none of which
| is public or will ever be public.
|
| I have signed more NDAs in my career than I have commits
| in public repos :)
| jddj wrote:
| Dark matter developers
|
| https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dark-matter-developers-
| the-un...
| noch wrote:
| > I have signed more NDAs in my career than I have
| commits in public repos :)
|
| Someone like you is extremely experienced and skilled,
| and has a reputation in your industry. You started
| working before it was normal and trivial to build stuff
| in public. Such activities were even frowned upon if I
| recall correctly (a friend got fired merely for emailing
| a dll to a friend to debug a crash; another was
| reprimanded for working on his own projects after hours
| at the office, even though he never intended to ever sell
| them).
|
| That you have a reputation means posting work publicly
| would be of little to no value to your reputation. All
| the people who need to know you already do or know
| someone reputable who does.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| LinkedIn remains a reasonable substitute for emailing
| around PDFs of resumes/CVs.
|
| Any usage beyond that, for "networking" or "social
| sharing" is terrible.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| << I sincerely can't imagine networking on LinkedIn being
| a fraction as useful as networking.
|
| I have removed my profile some time ago. While I agree
| with you in general, I have to say that initially
| LinkedIn was actually not bad and I did get some value
| out of it. It is a little harder now to not have it,
| because initial interviews scoff at its absence ( it
| apparently sends a negative signal to HR people ), but an
| established network of colleagues can overcome that.
|
| I guess it is a little easier for people already
| established in their career. I still am kinda debating
| some sort of replacement for it, but I am honestly
| starting to wonder if github is just enough to stop HR
| from complaining.
| CM30 wrote:
| Eh, I've found LinkedIn moderately useful as a way to
| apply for jobs and share my CV. A few application forms
| have a field for it too.
|
| Still have no idea how anyone can even hope to use the
| news feed there though. It's just a seemingly random
| torrent of garbage 24/7, with the odds of you getting any
| traction being virtually non existent.
| taway1874 wrote:
| Well said! Have you seen the titles and summary of those
| LinkedIn profiles? Not an ounce of humility. I'm afraid
| it's only going to get worse with "AI".
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yes, just like "Data Engineer" for knowing how to use Tableau
| or doing OLAP queries.
| valval wrote:
| To be fair, the market dictates the job titles.
| Ldragon27 wrote:
| Are you saying that true Data Engineers typically do more
| than just use Tableau or run OLAP queries, or do you see the
| title 'Data Engineer' itself as a bit of a red flag these
| days? I'm pretty early in my career and was leaning toward
| Data Engineering, but hearing stuff like this makes me wonder
| if going for SWE might be smarter.
| hobs wrote:
| The better paying role is a Backend SWE (usually). A really
| a good data engineer is just a Backend SWE who has specific
| experience.
|
| A bad one is a SQL analyst whose been promoted too much.
| bubbleRefuge wrote:
| as as data engieer/data architect , agreed. there are
| allot of 'tools' experts who are data engineers but can't
| code a lick.
| hobs wrote:
| Yep, that's where I am at - the amount of times people
| have talked to me about the most recent podcast where
| they've heard how a new tool will solve all their
| problems and really its some samey mix of CDC and bad
| python+sql is... a lot.
|
| I think there's not a ton of political palatability for
| realizing most of their projects are like one API and a
| sane use of some SQL away.
| pjmlp wrote:
| For starters, Engineer only makes sense if the person
| actually holds an engineering degree, taken at an
| institution validated by the Engineering Order.
| JohnFen wrote:
| That's a legalism that isn't universal. Personally, I
| think that anyone who engages in engineering is logically
| an engineer. Maybe not a certified engineer, but an
| engineer nonetheless.
| pjmlp wrote:
| So is anyone that cooks a Chef.
| hobs wrote:
| My Kiss The Chef apron says yes.
| JohnFen wrote:
| "Chef" is a specific job title. Anyone who has that job,
| regardless of qualifications, is a "chef", yes.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yeah but can they deliver, and handle a kitchen, like one
| that actually has a diploma in Culinary arts?
| taway1874 wrote:
| LOL! A butcher cuts meat and so does a surgeon. Who would
| you prefer to operate on you?
| Eisenstein wrote:
| "The creative application of scientific principles to
| design or develop structures, machines, apparatus, or
| manufacturing processes, or works utilizing them singly
| or in combination; or to construct or operate the same
| with full cognizance of their design; or to forecast
| their behavior under specific operating conditions; all
| as respects an intended function, economics of operation
| and safety to life and property"[1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering
| WorldWideWebb wrote:
| I feel the same way about "UX Designer/Engineer". Seems to
| mean someone who can put a wireframe together but has no
| design chops. Any good designer that has experience crafting
| user interfaces should be skilled at thinking through in-
| depth about what the user is doing when using the product and
| how to successfully guide them through that process.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Eh. Titles dont really mean anything. Do we want to start the
| age old software engineer vs software developer title debate
| again?
|
| Let someone call themselves whatever they want. If they can
| do the job they were hired for then... who cares?
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yes, we want, a bootcamp isn't a three to five years degree
| with a possible exam.
| bubbleRefuge wrote:
| having data engineer in my title has led to recruiters
| calling about DBA type roles. ugh.
| 0points wrote:
| Instant red flag. Like "Scrum master" used to be back in the
| day.
| amelius wrote:
| "AI engineer" is the new "Web developer".
| moffkalast wrote:
| I prefer the term "Scrumlord" /s
| 1123581321 wrote:
| There are some funny comments that use that term. This
| one's my favorite.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25721837
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > back in the day
|
| Well, most are called "project manager" now. But it would
| still be a giant red flag, just like the project manager job
| title or even worse, using PM so you don't know exactly what
| it means.
| master-lincoln wrote:
| I would interpret that as somebody working on ML algorithms and
| architectures, not somebody developing a product that uses some
| form of AI at runtime...
| spmurrayzzz wrote:
| I haven't seen this sort of work called AI Developer yet, but
| I may have missed the trend shift. Isn't the convention for
| this still to use the title of Machine Learning Engineer
| (MLE)?
| master-lincoln wrote:
| There is another thread here that seems to confirm it's me
| who has missed a trend shift. I didn't know this term had a
| special meaning. I just followed the thought that an
| x-developer is somebody developing x.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I work on such a team, and we don't refer to ourselves as "AI
| engineers". We're devs working on developing deep learning
| systems (but not genAI).
| swyx wrote:
| correct - but "developing a product that uses some form of
| AI at runtime" is a job that people do and the community
| has consolidated around "AI engineer" as shorthand
| https://www.latent.space/p/ai-engineer
|
| i argue that its useful to have these shorthands to quickly
| understand what people do. its not so nice to just be
| default suspicious at a perhaps lower-technical-difficulty
| job that nevertheless a lot of comapnies want and a lot of
| people do
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Difficulty [?] Value
|
| But we think it is, due to our _learned industrious_
| --which is the opposite of learned helplessness. We
| associate difficulty with reward. And we feel discomfort
| when really valuable things become very easy. Strange
| times.
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| > devs working on developing deep learning systems (but not
| genAI)
|
| Catchy job title.
| 8338550bff96 wrote:
| I work on such a team too. I don't care what you call me
| - pay me
| wrs wrote:
| I'm instantly suspicious when anyone uses the term "AI".
| bdangubic wrote:
| in 2024 thats as crazy as being suspicious of anyone that
| uses the term "internet"
| taway1874 wrote:
| No, it's not crazy at all. Back in the early noughts
| everyone was associating themselves with Internet and
| WorldWideWeb (yes, they used to spell that out). Same thing
| happening today with AI. It is irritating ...
| wrs wrote:
| I guess your perception depends on how many tech hype
| cycles you've lived through. I've lived through three for
| "AI" alone.
| 8338550bff96 wrote:
| Who cares what it is called? I care about the
| capabilities.
|
| In my experience when people say things like this what
| they're just projecting insecurity
| ocular-rockular wrote:
| You would be surprised how many people have no idea what
| "machine learning" means (not even technical definition but
| just as in the field). I'm working on a PhD in an adjacent
| field and basically have to tell people I work in AI for them
| to have any semblance of what I do.
| namaria wrote:
| I don't think telling people that have no idea what machine
| learning is that you work with 'AI' is giving them any
| semblance of understanding what you do.
| woodson wrote:
| I say "I work in machine learning, what kids these days call
| AI" ;).
| amelius wrote:
| Soon enough we'll have AI that is just integrated into the OS.
|
| So individual apps don't need to do anything to have AI.
| michaelmior wrote:
| What does it mean for an app to "have AI"?
| SteveSmith16384 wrote:
| If it makes any kind of decision whatsoever (like an "if"
| statement), slap the word AI on it.
| amelius wrote:
| Think of it as another human having access to the keyboard,
| mouse and the screen buffer.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| At a very minimum I'd say they'll have a way to "chat" with
| the apps to ask questions / do stuff. Either via APIs that
| the OS calls or integrated in the app via whatever frameworks
| will rise to handle this. In 5 to 10 years we'll probably see
| this. At a very minimum searching docs and "guide" the users
| through the functionality / do it straight up when asked.
|
| Basically what chatgpt did for chatbots, but at app level.
| There are lots of apps that take a long time to master. But
| the average joe doesn't need to master them. If I want to
| lightly edit some photos, I know photoshop can do it, but I
| have no clue where that specific thing is in the menus,
| because I haven't used it in 10 years. But it would be cool
| to type in a chat box "take all the pictures from my sd card,
| adjust the colors, straighten the ones that need it, and put
| them in my Pictures folder under "trip to the sea". And then
| I can go do something else for the 30-60 minutes it would
| have taken me to google how to do all of that, or script
| something, etc.
|
| The ideea of an assistant that can work like that isn't
| _that_ far-fetched today, IMO. The apps need to expose some
| APIs, and the "os" needs an language -> action model capable
| enough to handle basic stuff for average joes. I'd bet good
| money sonnet3.5 + proper APIs + a bit of fine-tuning could do
| it today for 50%+ of average user cases.
| croes wrote:
| Is that really AI engineering or Software engineering with AI?
|
| If a model goes sideways how do you fix that? Could you find and
| fix flaws in the base model?
| sigmar wrote:
| Agree that the use of "AI engineers" is confusing. Think this
| blog should use the term "engineering software with AI-
| integration" which is different from "AI engineering"
| (creating/designing AI models) and different from "engineering
| with AI" (using AI to assist in engineering)
| crimsoneer wrote:
| The term AI engineer is now pretty well recognised in the
| field (https://www.latent.space/p/ai-engineer), and is very
| much not the same as an AI researcher (which would be
| involved in training and building new models). I'd expect an
| AI engineer to be primarily a software developer, but with an
| excellent understanding of how to implement, use and evaluate
| LLMs in a production environment, including skills like
| evaluation and fine-tuning. This is not some dataset you can
| just bundle in software developer.
| liampulles wrote:
| I wonder if either could be really be called engineering.
| billmalarky wrote:
| You find issues when they surface during your actual use case
| (and by "smoke testing" around your real-world use case). You
| can often "fix" issues in the base model with additional
| training (supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning w/
| DPO, etc).
|
| There's a lot of tooling out there making this accessible to
| someone with a solid full-stack engineering background.
|
| Training an LLM from scratch is a different beast, but that
| knowledge honestly isn't too practical for everyday engineers
| given even if you had the knowledge you wouldn't necessarily
| have the resources necessary to train a competitive model. Of
| course you could command a high salary working for the orgs who
| do have these resources! One caveat is there are orgs doing
| serious post-training even with unsupervised techniques to take
| a base model and reeaaaaaally bake in domain-specific
| knowledge/context. Honestly I wonder if even that is
| unaccessible to pull off. You get a lot of wiggle-room and
| margin for error when post-training a well-built base model
| because of transfer learning.
| hpen wrote:
| Does AI engineer == API Engineer?
| bormaj wrote:
| The P is silent
| sdesol wrote:
| If the P is silent, how can you "Prompt"?
| Joker_vD wrote:
| How many silent P's are in the word "prompt"? Let me ask
| ChatGPT...
| tjr wrote:
| Just for fun, I did ask ChatGPT:
|
| _There's one silent "p" in the word "prompt"--right at
| the beginning! The "p" isn't pronounced, but it sneaks
| into the word anyway._
| dpassens wrote:
| Normally, I'd just dismiss this as ChatGPT being trained
| not to disagree, but as a non-native speaker this has me
| doubting myself: Is prompt really pronounced rompt?
|
| It feels like it can't possible be true, but on the other
| hand, I'm probably due for having my confidence in my
| English completely shattered again by learning another
| weird word's real pronunciation, so maybe this is it.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| I am not a native English speaker either, but I am fairly
| certain it's pronounced "promt", with the second "p", the
| one between the "m" and the "t", merging into those
| sounds to the point of being inaudible itself.
|
| Also, I too asked ChatGPT and it told me that _In the
| word "prompt," there are no silent P's. All the letters
| in "prompt" are pronounced, including the P_.
| akavi wrote:
| I'm a native english speaker, and prompt is pronounced
| "promt" ( /pramt/ in my roughly General American accent).
| Ie, there is a silent "p", but it's the second one, not
| the first.
| okasaki wrote:
| There's no silent p in prompt.
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/prompt
| ben_w wrote:
| Rompt. Means "to break" in French:
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rompt
|
| Remove both the P's and you get romt, which is Norwegian
| for sour cream.
|
| Insert your own joke here about taking the Ps, it's bound
| to be better than what I'll come up with.
| tejtm wrote:
| as it is in "swimming"
| pjmlp wrote:
| Assuming an Engineer degree to start with.
| taco_emoji wrote:
| We can all be janitors too, so what?
| sincerecook wrote:
| The only remaining question being, why would you want to?
| aithrowawaycomm wrote:
| Funny enough, Helix doesn't know either! They put together a
| contest hoping that you'll figure it out:
| https://blog.helix.ml/p/llm-app-challenge-with-helix-10
|
| You might say this is about Helix being small and trying to
| break into a crowded market, but OpenAI and Google offered
| similar contests / offers that asked users to submit ideas for
| LLM applications. Considering how many LLM sample apps are
| either totally useless ("Walter the Bavarian, a chatbot who
| gives trivia about Oktoberfest!") or could be better solved by
| classical programming ("a GPT that automatically converts
| currencies to USD!), it seems AI developers have struggled to
| find a single marketable use case of LLMs outside of codegen.
| neeleshs wrote:
| Codegen, contentgen, and driving existing products in human
| language (which you can largely bucket into interactive
| codegen)
| sourcepluck wrote:
| I feel like I see this comment fairly often these days, but
| nonetheless, perhaps we need to keep making it - the AI generated
| image there is so poor, and so off-putting. Does anyone like
| them? I am turned off whenever I see someone has used one on a
| post, with very few exceptions.
|
| Is it just me? Why are people using them? I feel like objectively
| they look like fake garbage, but obviously that must be my
| subjective biases, because people keep using them.
| RodgerTheGreat wrote:
| Some people have no taste, and lack the mental tools to
| recognize the flaws and shortcomings of GANN output. People who
| enthuse about the astoundingly enthralling literary skills of
| LLMs tend to be the kind of person who hasn't read many books.
| These are sad cases: an undeveloped palate confusing green food
| coloring and xylitol for a bite of an apple.
|
| Some people can recognize these shortcomings and simply don't
| care. They are fundamentally nihilists for whom quantity itself
| is the only important quality.
|
| Either way, these hero images are a convenient cue to stop
| reading: nothing of value will be found below.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| > these hero images are a convenient cue to stop reading.
|
| If you don't like such content. But I would say don't judge a
| book by its cover.
| RodgerTheGreat wrote:
| "GenAI" slop is a time-vampire.
|
| In a world where anyone can ask an LLM to gish-gallop a
| plausible facsimile of whatever argument they want in
| seconds, it is _simply untenable_ to give any piece of
| writing you stumble upon online the benefit of the doubt;
| you will drown in counterfeit prose.
|
| The faintest hint that the author of a piece is a "GenAI"
| enthusiast (which in this case is already clear from the
| title) is immediate grounds for dismissing it; "the cover"
| clearly communicates the quality one might expect in the
| book. Using slop for hero images tells me that the author
| doesn't respect my time.
| GPerson wrote:
| An insidious feature of machine generated content is that it
| will dominate not because it's better, but because it's
| cheaper.
| auggierose wrote:
| I think AI images can be very nice, I like to use them myself.
| I don't use images I don't personally like very much. So if you
| don't like them, it is not because, AI, it is because your
| taste and my taste don't match. Or maybe you would like them,
| if you didn't have a bias against AI. What I love about AI
| images is that you can often generate very much the thing you
| want. The only better alternative would be to hire an actual
| human to do that work, and the difference in price here is
| huge, of course.
|
| It is like standing in front of a Zara, and wondering why
| people are in that shop, and not in the Versace shop across
| town. Surely, if you cannot afford Versace, you rather walk
| naked?
| colonelspace wrote:
| You mean to tell me this doesn't convincingly look like people
| working on their laptops on trestle tables in the forest at
| dusk?
|
| Last time I worked on my laptop on a trestle table in the
| forest at dusk it looked almost exactly like this.
| vunderba wrote:
| That picture doesn't even have anything to do with the contents
| of the post either.
|
| Reminds me of the image attached to Karpathy's (one of the
| founding members of openAI) twitter post on founding an
| education AI lab:
|
| https://x.com/karpathy/status/1813263734707790301
|
| I just don't understand how he didn't take 10 seconds to review
| the image before attaching it. If the image is emblematic of
| the power of AI, I wouldn't have a lot of faith in the
| aforementioned company.
|
| If you're going to use GenAI (stable diffusion, flux) to
| generate an image, at least take the time to learn some basic
| photobashing skills, inpainting, etc.
| rurp wrote:
| You aren't exaggerating! There are some creepy arms in that
| image, along with the other weirdness. I'm surprised Karpathy
| of all people used such a poor quality image for such a post.
| sourcepluck wrote:
| Yeah, wow. And it's a lovely post otherwise, too!
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| I don't find the image poor, but somehow I see immediately that
| it is generated because of the stylistic style. And that simply
| triggers the 'fake' flag in the back of my head, which has this
| bad subjective connotation. But objectively I believe it is a
| very nice picture.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| Edit: i looked at it more closely and the way the people are
| sitting, their direction, is totally unnatural.
| PreInternet01 wrote:
| "after years of working in DevOps, MLOps, and now GenAI"
|
| You truly know how to align yourself with hype cycles?
| snovv_crash wrote:
| They missed out on drones and blockchain.
| taway1874 wrote:
| ... and Cloud! Don't forget The Klaaooud ...
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Well, resume driven development _does_ work, it seems.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| After just spending 15 minutes trying to get something useful
| accomplished, anything useful at all, with latest beta Apple
| Intelligence with a M1 iPad Pro (16G RAM), this article appealed
| to me!
|
| I have been running the 32B parameters qwen2.5-coder model on my
| 32G M2 Mac and and it is a huge help with coding.
|
| The llama3.3-vision model does a great job processing screen
| shots. Small models like smollm2:latest can process a lot of text
| locally, very fast.
|
| Open source front ends like Open WebUI are improving rapidly.
|
| All the tools are lining up for do it yourself local AI.
|
| The only commercial vendor right now that I think is doing a
| fairly good job at an integrated AI workflow is Google. Last
| month I had all my email directed to my gmail account, and the
| Gemini Advanced web app did a really good job integrating email,
| calendar, and google docs. Job well done. That said, I am back to
| using ProtonMail and trying to build local AIs for my workflows.
|
| I am writing a book on the topic of local, personal, and private
| AIs.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Another thought: OpenAI has done a good enough job productizing
| ChatGPT with advanced voice mode and now also integrated web
| search. I don't know if I would trust OpenAI with access to my
| Apple iCloud data, Google data, my private GitHub repositories,
| etc., but given their history of effective productization, they
| could be a multi-OS/platform contender.
|
| Still, I would really prefer everything running under my own
| control.
| alexander2002 wrote:
| Who can trust a company whose name contradicts its presence.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I don't disagree with you!
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| Not me. I learned that lesson after I tried to take a bite
| out of my Apple Macintosh.
| blharr wrote:
| Well, clearly the apple already has a bite taken out of
| it, so that's user error
| sumedh wrote:
| You are getting access to some of the best AI tools for
| free, by that definition isnt that open?
| zerop wrote:
| Have you tried RAG on Open WebUI. How does it do in asking
| questions from source docs?
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Not yet. It has 'Knowledge sources' that you can set up, and
| I think that supplies data for built in RAG - but I am not
| sure until I try it.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| I wrote a script to queue and manage running llama vision on
| all my images and writing the results to an sqlite db used by
| my Media Viewer, and now I can do text or vector search on it.
| It's cool to not have to rely on Apple or Google to index my
| images and obfuscate how they're doing it from me. Next I'm
| going to work on a pipeline for doing more complex things like
| multiple frames in a video, doing multiple passes with llama
| vision or other models to separate out the OCR, description,
| and object, people recognition. Eventually I want to feed all
| of this in here https://lowkeyviewer.com/ and have the ability
| to manually curate the automated classifications and text.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| I'm curious why you find descriptions of images useful for
| searching. I developed a similar flow and ended up embedding
| keywords into the image metadata instead. It makes them
| easily searchable and not tied to any databases, and it is
| faster (dealing with tens of thousands of images personally).
|
| * https://github.com/jabberjabberjabber/LLavaImageTagger
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| It's not as good as tags but it does pretty ok for now
| especially since searching for specific text in an image is
| something I want to do a lot. I'm trying to work on getting
| llama to output according to a user defined tagging
| vocabulary/taxonomy and ideally learn from manual
| classifications. Kind of a work in progress there.
|
| This is the prompt I've been using.
|
| "Create a structured list of all of the people and things
| in the image and their main properties. Include a section
| transcribing any text. Include a section describing if the
| image is a photo, comic, art, or screenshot. Do not try to
| interpret, infer, or give subjective opinions. Only give
| direct, literal, objective descriptions of what you see."
| Eisenstein wrote:
| > I'm trying to work on getting llama to output according
| to a user defined tagging vocabulary/taxonomy and ideally
| learn from manual classifications. Kind of a work in
| progress there.
|
| Good luck with that. The only thing that I found that
| works is using gbnf to force it, which slows inference
| down considerably.
| vunderba wrote:
| I can't speak to the OPs decision, but I also have a
| similar script set up that adds a combination of YOLO,
| bakllava, tesseract etc. and also puts it along with a URI
| reference to the image file into a database.
|
| I actually store the data in the EXIF as well, but the nice
| thing about having a database is that it's significantly
| faster than attempting to search hundreds of thousands of
| images across a nested file structure, particularly since I
| store a great deal of media on a NAS.
| bboygravity wrote:
| can llama 3.3 vision do things like "there's a textbox/form
| field at location 1000, 800 with label "address"" ?
|
| I did a quick and dirty prototype with Claud for this, but it
| returned everything with an offset and/or scaled.
|
| Would be a killer app to be able to auto-fill any form using
| OCR.
| ein0p wrote:
| An AI engineer with some experience today can easily pull down
| 700K-1M TC a year at a bigtech. They must be unaware that the
| "barriers are coming down fast". In reality it's a full time job
| to just _keep up with research_. And another full time job to try
| and do something meaningful with it. So yeah, you can all be AI
| engineers, but don't expect an easy ride.
| actusual wrote:
| I run an ML team in fintech, and am currently hiring. If a
| resume came across my desk with this "skill set" I'd laugh my
| ass off. My job and my team's jobs are extremely stressful
| because we ship models that impact people's finances. If we
| mess up our customers lose their goddamn minds.
|
| Most of the ML candidates I see now are all "working with
| LLMs". Most of the ML engineers I know in the industry who are
| actually shipping valuable models, are not.
|
| Cool, you made a chatbot that annoys your users.
|
| Let me know when you've shipped a fraud model that requires
| four 9's, 100ms latency, with 50,000 calls an hour, 80% recall
| and 50% precision.
| btdmaster wrote:
| What does 50% precision mean in this case? I know 50%
| accuracy might mean P(fraud_predicted | fraud) = 50%, but I
| don't understand what you mean by precision?
| JohnFen wrote:
| I don't want to be an "AI engineer" in the way the article means.
| There's nothing about that sort of job that I find interesting or
| exciting.
|
| I hope there will still be room for devs in the future.
| cess11 wrote:
| I mean, sure, anyone can cobble together Ollama and a wrapper API
| and an adjusted system prompt, or go serious with Bumblebee on
| the BEAM.
|
| But that's akin to web devs of old that stitched up some cruft in
| Perl or PHP and got their databases wiped by someone entering a
| SQL username. Yes, it kind of works under ideal conditions, but
| can you fix it when it breaks? Can you hedge against all or most
| relevant risks?
|
| Probably not. Don't put it your toys into production, and don't
| tell other people you're a professional at it until you know how
| to fix and hedge and can be transparent about it with the people
| giving you money.
| fullstackchris wrote:
| I still don't see how AI replaces the understanding of what a
| server is, what DNS is, what HTTP is, or what...
|
| I could go on and on.
|
| Copy paste is great until you literally dont know where you are
| copy and pasting
| gabrieledarrigo wrote:
| Just...boring.
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