6 ms·

> 1) Show Priya how to use GPT4 to do her current job in 1/10th of the time. Why would I subsidize that as a business owner? I can fire 9/10ths of the people

• imdsm 4y ago
  Train people to use GPT-related tech to become superhuman team members. You can do it all yourself, sure, but that doesn't scale. You can either train GPT-tech to use GPT to scale or train humans. Right now, reliability is the most difficult issue, so humans are essentially to ensuring the results are correct.
  • henriquez 4y ago
    Humans are useful for training future iterations of the closed source thinking model. Once the model is sophisticated enough to train itself humans will no longer be required.
  • blibble 4y ago
    > Train people to use GPT-related tech to become superhuman team members. then OpenAI either discontinue or slightly adjust the model such that it doesn't work now there goes your business
• 1123581321 4y ago
  Historically, in these situations your business is either about to become obsolete or is about to have much more competition. You could hire people to do the new tasks required to thrive, but it’s easier to retrain people you already know and who want to work for you.
  • scarface74 4y ago
    It actually much easier to hire people who already have the skillset and pay them 5-10% more than they are making because of salary compression and inversion.
    • XorNot 4y ago
      Let's be realistic here though: a big chunk of that is that there are plenty of people who decide they'll simply ignore the new direction, or they're too old to adapt with the times, and curmudgeon about it until someone's hand is forced.
    • 1123581321 4y ago
      That’s only true during stable times or when more mature markets are casting off that type of employee. Or, I suppose, if a company is incapable of understanding employees’ aptitudes behind their skills.
• fnordpiglet 4y ago
  It’s also possible, like a lot of skilled knowledge work, they’re greatly constrained on talent relative to potential work. I think something folks don’t get is that AI is going to allow a lot more of everything to be done, and will still need humans to guide it. I suspect it’ll be a bit like the calculator and it’s acceleration of math fields. Human calculators became less useful, but humans could do much more math and I’d argue power tools don’t eliminate jobs, they allow the people that exist do 10x the work allowing 10x to be achieved with the same people. I think it’s cynical to think a rising tide sinks all boats.
  • eropple 4y ago
    I don't think anyone at all suggests that all boats will sink. But the poorest and most vulnerable will. It happens every time. This time, we could do better--and we won't.
    • richk449 4y ago
      Is that true? The last few centuries have shown a near continuous improvement in the standard of living, particularly at the lower end of the distribution.
      • pixl97 4y ago
        You missed the union wars to ensure that we didn't fall back into a techno-feudalism. I'm sure we're all looking forward for the Amazon Wars with a billion percent more killer drones to put down worker rights.
      • eropple 4y ago
        I think your windows are larger than mine. The Industrial Revolution did not improve standard of living for the people crushed in the gears, both metaphorical and physical. Remember: it was not until the modern age, almost but not quite within living memory, where cities were not a sink for population. Cities were places where normal people died and died ugly for most of human history, and much of the migration to them has historically been out of desperation. Eventually, improvements through both technological means but also political ones (worker action says hi) did make things on-net better, but we live in the now and the now is going to simply vaporize an impossibly large set of jobs, particularly in developing countries. Turning one person into an LLM driver to lay off four or nine is not a net benefit. As just one example: with modern text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and AI parsing, how much of every call center can just go away? Eight of ten? Nine? I have no idea, but it's a lot, and we have neither time nor inclination to prepare, globally or locally, for this. (edit to add: the most appalling part of this oncoming train, as I have mentioned elsewhere in this thread, is just how shitty a future this one wants so desperately to be. A LLM-driven chatbot or phone system doesn't get tired. It doesn't get "too expensive" to continue to obstruct you and to stiff you. Not only is this primed to seriously hurt people who are below the API, but it's going to make the world suck more for the rest of us, too. Like, sure, "it makes writing code marginally easier"--it's going to make getting a refund for a messed-up Comcast bill an exercise in pain. That doesn't remotely net out, code's already easy enough.)
• rib3ye 4y ago
  So workers are 10x more productive! Are there not enough papers to annotate? The writer still needs a specialist to make sure the LLM is going the right thing. Aren’t the comparisons to blue collar labor a little much here? If I hire 10 people to dig the ditches, and then I get a backhoe, yes, one guy is needed to dig the ditch. But backhoes are expensive investments, LLMs are not. LLMs gives everyone of those ditch diggers a backhoe. Now I have an army of backhoes! Unless the world runs out of a need for ditches, time to start a ditch digging empire.
• elforce002 4y ago
  Interesting. Who's going to buy products and services? 1/10th of the remaining employees? What would happen with to the 9/10 unemployed people? Imagine a really big chunk of the human population trying to digest the idea of not being able to work, eat, feed their families, etc... The industrial revolution switched work from almost exclusively manual labor to a more intellectual one while improving manual labor itself (better tools, etc.). This one is cranking up a notch times 100 by trying to replace basically the human out of the equation altogether (This is the end goal of automation). It's going to be a really interesting decade tbh.