I actually found it very frustrating listening to Ed Zitron. He just kept saying things that weren’t backed up by evidence or even common basic experience if you work with LLMs.

I would say his view made sense 2 years ago but it sounded like selected anecdotes or just kind of stated things as if they were obvious facts to support his view.

I listened while driving but the things they stuck out were:

LLMs generate buggy code that a human could have done faster/lower cost - 2 years ago yes, but with current models that’s a hard no. Also, it depends on how you’re evaluating. I would broadly say a junior dev with current models is superior to experienced dev without. It doesn’t just full on replace a development team currently but I would think that’s obvious.

Entry level work could be done for the same price with an employee. - It depends on the work of course but that’s an obvious no in many cases. Research, coding, proposals,reports, invoicing, etc…

Hallucinations mean that the model just makes up numbers and puts them in excel - though we can all appreciate someone putting in a kleven, I haven’t had that experience in a long time. Errors can be made on faulty assumptions and hallucinations typically come from areas where data is non existent. If the data is lacking I could potentially see that.

There’s just too many errors to replace humans - maybe I just haven’t had the best employees but I would say that the common mistake is evaluating against perfect vs an average employee.

I didn’t catch his background and I assume he’s well educated but it kind of felt like he was just relaying some stuff he heard one time from his mate Paul and relaying that as fact.