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I am another AI pessimist. Can I please ask the optimists to list the good things LLMs can do for humanity as a whole? I don't mean banal stuff like Copilot, w

• funerr 3y ago
  There are too many variables to predict the future. Yet, I believe that it will empower more 1-3 person businesses to compete with the big incumbents. Imagine you could run teams of marketing/sales/support ai-agents and focus on your core business. "The next 1B, 1 Person companies". Just 15 years ago you'd need teams of 10+ people to do basic ml tasks you could do today. Now you have an LLM or a SaaS service that outperforms those teams for the fraction of the cost.
  • supriyo-biswas 3y ago
    I expect such gradients to be temporary. After all, there’s nothing that stops the 100,000 person mega corp to do something with an LLM either.
    • calebkaiser 3y ago
      We will certainly see increased adoption at large corporations, but where LLMs will have a lasting equalizing effect is in areas where scaling has a logarithmic sort of benefit--very impactful going from 0-1, but less and less as scale increases. To give a concrete example, if you're a standard 1-3 person business with a niche enterprise SaaS product targeting the enterprise, outbound sales is likely going to be a meaningful channel for you. Having a team of good SDRs is a huge step function for your org, and if an LLM can give you that functionality without you needing to hire, then they'll make an outsized impact on your business. However, the Google-sized org operating in your space likely already has a huge sales and marketing org. They've likely "saturated" the market in the sense that they're already engaging most of their prospects in one way or another. Adding the functionality of many SDRs via an LLM might give them some efficiency gains, but it won't unlock a new level of growth for them, nor will nullify the value the LLMs provide your smaller org.
• Jack000 3y ago
  A doctor for every person, a teacher for every child, available any time and for free.
  • danielbln 3y ago
    Doctor, therapist, teacher, coach - and with the advent of private, fine-tunable models those can be private, local and in the hand of the people.
    • franky47 3y ago
      > private, local and in the hand of the people. We've seen time and time again that "the people" prefers centralised, paid, convenient management of complexity. If the majority of "the people" prefers paying a subscription for watching movies or listening to music, I doubt they'll make the effort to learn how to tune and run private LLMs locally, for medical aspects or otherwise. Not when there will be major companies spending billions on marketing more convenient options. Guillermo Rauch's essay [1] still rings true: it's hard to forego efficiency (though it works just as well for convenience). [1] https://rauchg.com/2017/its-hard-to-forego-efficiency https://rauchg.com/2017/its-hard-to-forego-efficiency
    • lewhoo 3y ago
      But I haven't seen any good argument as to why an AI teacher that is even cognitively equivalent to the real deal (and surpasses a human in everything a machine can) won't just become an intellectual worker. I'm not saying this eliminates the need for education, but it certainly erases its major component and that is to be competitive on the job market.
    • namaria 3y ago
      I don't know where this idea comes from that we can get more from language models then what we put inside. Thinking we can process any amount of data and get a competent surrogate mind out of it borders on magical thinking.
      • danielbln 3y ago
• BoorishBears 3y ago
  When you say someone should list all the good world changing benefits to counter your suggestions, it means you're expecting world changing negativity. That means you're envisioning a future where LLMs are so powerful that they actually cause huge societal impacts but somehow they can't detect spam, or make customer service more effective, make the general populace smarter? You're asking a for an answer that you by definition wouldn't accept. To me LLMs are like cloud computing: cloud computing technically didn't change the world in that your average person knows what a load balance is... but there was a democratization that allowed many great things to be built at a scale that was previously not possible, and the results of that are what brought value.
  • aragilar 3y ago
    Here's one positive use of AI: detection of shark species by drones to inform lifesavers as to whether a beach should be closed or not. This saves both shark and human lives, and is likely more cost effective than other methods (e.g. nets). Noticeably, it's the choice of data (i.e. not ingesting the labour of others without recompense), and how it's used, that make it very different to the various products that startups are producing. But it's the startups (and their owners) that will profit from misuse.
• pjerem 3y ago
  As someone suffering from severe inattentive ADHD, I can see a great potential in the rise of really smart personal assistants which could aggregate every single data point in my life and throw the information at me when needed. But that’s the only thing I could imagine and it must be local not to be a privacy nightmare. Because I have no doubt that Google and Amazon are already working on that. For anything else, I just agree with you and the author. It will just make capitalism worse.
  • supriyo-biswas 3y ago
    If the model of streaming services is anything to go by, the LLM would be offered as a paid subscription with ads.
    • yomlica8 3y ago
      And once ads are involved, the perverse incentives will mean the assistant will begin pushing you toward advertised products.
  • projektfu 3y ago
    This is kind of what kills me about the current crop of assistants. They all make my ADHD life harder, not easier. The Google Assistant, for example, cannot handle the few obvious things I ask. "Send an email to Jim." Nope. "Record my weight in Google fit." Nope. It won't look at any calendar that's not a Google calendar. It puts other people's flights on my schedule. It tells me I've got good traffic an hour before rush hour, but doesn't give me an update as it gets worse. I've probably wasted more time trying to get it to work than it's ever saved me. And it's twice as good as Siri was. I'm always getting reminders about bills I've auto-paid, that Google has dug up from the bowels of my email, and yet I still find myself scrambling on things I forgot about. I'm highly unimpressed by anything other than the incredible confidence with which these systems will lie. Online and phone support is bad enough, AI will not make it better, not because they can't make an AI that could figure out that you need a technician to come, but because corporate won't trust the AI to not deliver a pony along with them. And who could blame them? As soon as they give AI any power it will become the tool of the stainless steel rat. Instead, it will continue to be used to fend off support calls and fudge internal metrics, just like the last round of automated support.
• ben_w 3y ago
  > I don't mean banal stuff like Copilot, which is a double-edged sword that might be used against junior developers. I mean world-changing benefits, one step closer to the techno-utopia. Every (tech) sword is triple-edged, and it's the third one that people trip up on because they never expect it. That code generation is "banal" to you, or a threat to junior developers, suggests to me that it's already huge. Likewise the job replacements you fear: that's only even possible when the AI doesn't suck massively. The current state of downloadable models implies any corporate advantage is temporary.
• dandellion 3y ago
  I'm not a native English speaker and ChatGPT is the best existing tool to spell check and fix gramatical errors in emails. Copilot is another very useful application, and I think your dismissal of it is invalid. Even if we accept that Copilot hurts new devs (which I don't know if you have any proof but I'll make the concession that it is a possibility). A double edged sword hurts and helps the same person. I and half the programmers I know who pay a subscription for Copilot already know how to program perfectly well.
  • agentgumshoe 3y ago
    Does it help you learn better spelling and grammar, or do you just stop thinking about it? Is that a good thing long term? Same with dev. Does it actually make you better, or does it make you not think about learning so much?
    • ExtremisAndy 3y ago
      This is indeed a valid question, but I think it’s largely up to the user. For me, as a hobbyist programmer that sometimes writes code at work to automate certain tasks, I use ChatGPT to quickly create boilerplate/template type code AND to learn how to do new things. When I’m asking how to do something new, I try to actually learn what’s going on so that I won’t have to keep asking about that particular issue. But yeah, the temptation to just say “thanks, ChatGPT” and move on without learning anything is certainly there and could be quite harmful to one’s overall coding skills.
      • agentgumshoe 3y ago
        I think the interesting part of that is, is there money in it? I could see it being useful for hobbyists that don't care about programming that much, but would you pay for that?
    • raincole 3y ago
      > Does it help you learn better spelling and grammar... Yes. (Of course I still have a long way to go) > Same with dev. Does it actually make you better... Also yes. In terms of "scripting" it helped me tremendously. There were many little tasks that I wouldn't bother to automate without ChatGPT, because the time spent on looking up those niche APIs would outweight the time saved. Without ChatGPT I would have learned 0 about them. With ChatGPT at least I learned a bit.
• jiggawatts 3y ago
  I just watched the latest Star Trek show and something occurred to me: the Enterprise computer acts much like an LLM. It doesn't take actions on its own, but you ask it any question about the ship, and it answers politely. LLMs are literally science fiction come to life, something out of the movies. It's early days still, they're a bit primitive and the compute substrate is woefully underpowered for what we would ideally like... but the promise is there.
  • moffkalast 3y ago
    Working with LLMs while programming is also not unlike the TNG holodeck interface. Verbal generation of the first draft, some feedback and more specific commands to get closer to the intended goal, then sometimes handmade edits to get it all the way there.
• lijok 3y ago
  Accelerate education at unprecedented levels (if we can figure out how to integrate LLMs into the education system). To this day I find myself doing a double take every time I'm about to ask ChatGPT to produce a ludicrous amount of output, because it would simply not be reasonable to ask that of some random person. But with LLMs you can do that, over and over again and it will comply every time. How great is it that if I want to learn about, say, hexagonal architecture pattern, I can ask this thing to produce 500 LOC in a language I happen to be familiar with, and then interrogate it to no end until it clicks for me?
  • layer8 3y ago
    I don’t know, but anyone who has the motivation to “interrogate it to no end until it clicks for [them]” already didn’t have trouble to become well-educated before. AI can speed things up for those people, but I can imagine much less impact on general education.
    • spion 3y ago
      The speed difference is out of this world. I have very long sessions with ChatGPT on the Rust ownership and borrowing system. Its sometimes wrong (would say about 1 in 30 messages), but when it is it becomes clear quite quickly and then I search the internet armed with the new knowledge of terminology and relations within that terminology
    • lijok 3y ago
      I agree on your first statement, and raise a challenge on the second. We're smart, lets figure out how to create the same impact on general education. Could we wire up ChatGPT so it asks us questions and leads the conversation instead of us? Could we also make it present the questions in ways that make educational youtube channels like Kurzgesagt so easy to engage with? We could start with private tutoring. LLMs tailored to educate kids of rich parents. Easy market fit as they're already looking for private tutoring. We prove out the need then quickly move onto schools. Imagine if we could show that engaging with an LLM for an hour produces as much learning as sitting in class for 4. Could we cut school days in half, set LLM interaction as homework for an hour (teachers would get reports from the LLM on how the child is doing)?
• RecycledEle 3y ago
  The good AI can do for humanity is increasing our productivity. It should be the goal of every human to eliminate as many jobs as possible. Every job that is eliminated frees up that person and the people who would have done that job in the future to do other work. Humanity gain the productivity of that other work. If we had not forced painful job losses on people, we would still be 97% subsistence farmers, as we were at the time of the American Revolution in the 1770's. If you oppose progress due to the job losses, please at least be consistent and become a subsistence farmer.
  • falloutx 3y ago
    Not every worker is so good that they will just get free from the job and they would instantly turn into mega entrepreneur god creating 12 companies in a month. Most of them will struggle to put food on the table, resorting to crimes and eventually ending up in worse jobs
    • carlosjobim 3y ago
      Most of us have had to adapt, with nothing guaranteed. Look at the population under 50, very few in that group have ever had any kind of job security, except for the highly paid specialists. That's been the reality for decades. Thousands of people have lost their jobs because of the hackers on here making effective software solutions. Where was the solidarity then? It's only now when the hackers themselves are threatened that we suddenly have to think about the poor human. With that said, we should do all to eliminate jobs, but not eliminate workers. Technology can also be used to produce more services for more people, not just producing the same more effectively.
  • HWR_14 3y ago
    When was the widespread unemployment in the US due to technological innovations
    • RecycledEle 3y ago
      Widespread unemployment occurred in the 19th and early 20th centuries as Americans left farms to move to cities. They were desperate for work. The unemployment in farms was caused by the Industrial Revolution.
• danleshem 3y ago
  I think AI has the potential to level up the plain field. Speaking from an entrepreneur's POV, AI gives me an unfair advantage with respect to the large whales. It lets us complete projects (specifically, software projects) 10 times faster and achieve things before I had to raise millions to achieve them. I can't tell if the net negative/positive is + or -, but it's not clear-cut for sure.
  • turtles3 3y ago
    Does AI really speed up projects by 10x? In my experience, tools like copilot help with the smaller things, but it's bigger things that really matter in a project. For example, the right database schema or the right architecture I could easily see saving you 10x the development effort, but these are the things copilot is least able to help you with. Am I misunderstanding something here? Or could it be that what you are finding is that your experience is helping you build faster, and this is being misattributed to AI?
  • sph 3y ago
    I... don't believe you. I'm building a product as an experienced engineer with 17 years in the field, and the only place LLMs would be useful without slowing me down is writing copy, whereas I would pay for a copywriter, which I will probably do. LLM making you 10 times faster to build a product (of which coding is like 20%) needs better sources and proof, as it's a ludicrous number, and a whale with billions has access to much better tools than ChatGPT (i.e actual paid humans). If by building product you mean "create a basic landing page in HTML", sure. But a landing page is not a company, nor a product you can sell.
• spion 3y ago
  I'm a cautious optimist. If we manage to improve correctness further and set up some guardrails to avoid convincing it to do the work for you, AI can be an incredible augmentation for students and learners, completely transforming education to the level of everyone having something close to a personal tutor I don't worry too much about the lack of correctness, as long as the learner is aware of the possibility - lots of teachers are sometimes wrong too, and a lot of information on the internet is incorrect. But there indeed is a certain threshold of correctness. Below that threshold, the tehcnology is more harmful than helpful. The threshold is also different for different aspects of education - for example for many uses in software engineering education current LLMs are already good enough, but they are nowhere near where they would need to be for e.g. law.
  • spion 3y ago
    I have no idea what the thought process is for downvoting a post which is answering to someone asking optimists to contribute their thoughts.
• Paradigma11 3y ago
  Empower artists to make far more complex works that they would never have been able to do alone before. One artist might be able to produce a complete animated movie controlling all aspects.