small rant incoming
I work for a company that it’s mostly hardware focused, but we do ship some software for the final consumer including drivers and programs, to make use of said hardware.
While I am not in the software department, I held some SWE positions in previous companies for over a decade, our software isn’t very complex and I do know most of it pretty well.
Our employee just announced a new AI-only development cycle, they want all code submissions and reviews to be exclusively done by claude, effectively ending ownership of the code being shipped to customers. This is absolute madness.
Today, I received an email scheduling a workshop on how to integrate claude into vscode and how to work with the new gitflow, namely removing our authorship from commits and having al code reviews done by a LLM now.
I am just baffled at the decision.
edit: wow I’m a bit overwhelmed by the response, I did read all of you. Thanks!
For the most part, I am an AI sceptic. My firm has had access to and beta tested every Google AI model since before the AI had a name (yes, well before Bard). We also have access to ChatGPT, Claude and locally run models on dedicated hardware. I’ll save you the suspense, at the moment it’s all mostly trash. Barely a proof of concept. Definitely not production ready, but there are a few exceptions I, personally, have found.
Gemini Pro is excellent at identifying and diagnosing sick garden plants if you take and upload a photos of the plants. Unfortunately, it still cannot do simple arithmetic. A simple SUM that any spreadsheet does automatically by just highlighting the cells, and somehow it was still off by one.
For software dev, the only one product we have found to be useful is Claude, BUT it really depends on the model. Haiku is a joke. Sonnet is not bad, if not bad is ~50% accuracy. Opus is fairly descent at building scaffolding that you can then correct and complete, but don’t expect efficient code.
The only model we have ever tested that can deliver ALMOST fully functional code, reliably diagnose errors, and review code is Mythos/Fable. Genuinely not absolute shite, BUT that shit is extremely slow and outrageously expensive. I seriously doubt that your company is forking out the money for Claude Fable as their default model, and if they are, they must not care about ever making a profit.
For the plant identification, I would say that these detection methods are heavily biased towards the data in the training sets. Sure, it’s probably good at commonly occurring plant symptoms, but would be unable to assess rare symptoms with any real accuracy. Same goes for diseases with similar symptoms.
I think it if fine for entertainment or research purposes, but should not be used for real world issues. AI should not be used to accuse people of crime they didn’t commit and have that be taken as evidence. Like how Google scans all personal photos and has falsely reported people of heinous crimes. Sure they catch some bad actors, but I doubt they are doing better than if they were to randomly report people’s accounts. And there is never a human in the loop to correct for false positives.
might not work with plants that look like another plant too, and give you misleading info. some people couldnt identify rare plants, because rarely are encountered by people.
For sure. I have no doubt that it was trained primarily using Reddit (the gardening subs were actually pretty good). My intent with the comment was to imply casual home gardening use (entertainment). I apologize if that wasn’t clear.
i visit the whatisthisplant sub quite often, and some pretty unusual rare plants(like wild orchids, mycoheterotrophs), i thinks harder to identify tropical wild plants though.
Your comment was clear, I just wanted to add on some other supporting information and also add on other scenarios for additional context. The main point of all of this being the use cases for AI are currently very slim, but it is being pushed to an unreasonable extent on people. Maybe some like it and are happy to give up their data and privacy, but I think there needed to have been regulations and protections set in place before it was rolled out.
likely common house plants have so many pictures online already it would be easy to identify with a AI, especially people also post disease plants to idenfy it too. they dont do that well with animals/pests though, since theres alot of look alike species and very similar patterns.
Lets assume you have to cross a desert by foot. You can have either a human guide or a map, which is cheaper. The guide can reliably tell you points where you will find water that you need in order to survive. The map has much more information but it will be bullshit half of the time.
Which would you chose?
What would a company chose?
Why?