What I’ve learned about writing AI apps so far | Seldo.com
LLMs are good at transforming text into less text
Laurie is really onto something with this:
This is the biggest and most fundamental thing about LLMs, and a great rule of thumb for what’s going to be an effective LLM application. Is what you’re doing taking a large amount of text and asking the LLM to convert it into a smaller amount of text? Then it’s probably going to be great at it. If you’re asking it to convert into a roughly equal amount of text it will be so-so. If you’re asking it to create more text than you gave it, forget about it.
Depending how much of the hype around AI you’ve taken on board, the idea that they “take text and turn it into less text” might seem gigantic back-pedal away from previous claims of what AI can do. But taking text and turning it into less text is still an enormous field of endeavour, and a huge market. It’s still very exciting, all the more exciting because it’s got clear boundaries and isn’t hype-driven over-reaching, or dependent on LLMs overnight becoming way better than they currently are.
Related links
Open source devs say AI crawlers dominate traffic, forcing blocks on entire countries - Ars Technica
As it currently stands, both the rapid growth of AI-generated content overwhelming online spaces and aggressive web-crawling practices by AI firms threaten the sustainability of essential online resources. The current approach taken by some large AI companies—extracting vast amounts of data from open-source projects without clear consent or compensation—risks severely damaging the very digital ecosystem on which these AI models depend.
Go To Hellman: AI bots are destroying Open Access
AI companies with billions to burn are hard at work destroying the websites of libraries, archives, non-profit organizations, and scholarly publishers, anyone who is working to make quality information universally available on the internet.
FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies
More on how large language bots are DDOSing the web:
LLM scrapers are taking down FOSS projects’ infrastructure, and it’s getting worse.
Please stop externalizing your costs directly into my face
Over the past few months, instead of working on our priorities at SourceHut, I have spent anywhere from 20-100% of my time in any given week mitigating hyper-aggressive LLM crawlers at scale.
This matches my experience with The Session. In fact, while I had this article open in a tab, I had to go deal with a tsunami of large language model bots. It’s really fucking depressing.
Please stop legitimizing LLMs or AI image generators or GitHub Copilot or any of this garbage. I am begging you to stop using them, stop talking about them, stop making new ones, just stop. If blasting CO2 into the air and ruining all of our freshwater and traumatizing cheap laborers and making every sysadmin you know miserable and ripping off code and books and art at scale and ruining our fucking democracy isn’t enough for you to leave this shit alone, what is?
Related posts
Reason
Please read Miriam’s latest blog post.
The meaning of “AI”
Naming things is hard, and sometimes harmful.
Unsaid
I listened to a day of talks on AI at UX Brighton, and I came away disappointed by what wasn’t mentioned.
Mismatch
It’s almost as though humans prefer to use post-hoc justifications rather than being rational actors.
What price?
Using generative large-language model tools? Sleeping well at night?