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I hope so because I'm extraordinarily sick of the technology. I can't really ask a question at work without some jackass posting an LLM answer in there. The ans

I hope so because I'm extraordinarily sick of the technology. I can't really ask a question at work without some jackass posting an LLM answer in there. The answers almost never amount to anything useful, but no one can tell since it looks clearly written. They're "participating" but haven't actually done anything worthwhile.

yashap 2y ago
I hope so, but for different reasons. Agreed they spit out plenty of gibberish at the moment, but they’ve also progressed so far so fast it’s pretty scary. If we get to a legitimate artificial general super intelligence, I’m about 95% sure that will be terrible for the vast, vast majority of humans, we'll be obsolete. Crossing my fingers that the current AI surge stops well short of that, and the push that eventually does get there is way, way off into the future.
- youssefabdelm 2y ago
  Or liberating... as Douglas Rushkoff puts it. If and only if something like high-paying UBI comes along, and people are freed to pursue their passions and as a consequence, benefit the world much more intensely.
  - amarcheschi 2y ago
    everything points to the opposite
    - youssefabdelm 2y ago
      It may be impossible in this world to expect a form of donation, but it is certainly not impossible to expect forms of investment. One idea I had is everyone is paid a thriving wage, and in exchange, if they in the future develop their passion into something that can make a profit, they pay back 20% of their profits they make up to some capped amount. This allows for extreme generality. It truly frees people to pursue whatever they fancy every day until they catch lightning in a bottle. There would be 0 obligation as to what to do, and when to pay back the money. But of course would have to be only open to honest people, so that neither side is exploiting the other. Both sides need a sense of gratitude, and wanting to give back. A philanthropic 'flair' "If it doesn't work out, it's okay", and a gratitude and wanting to give back someday on the side of the receiver, as they continue working on probably the most resilient thing they could ever work on (the safest investment), their lifelong passion.
  - gershy 2y ago
    I'm not sure passion exists in a world without struggle...
    - kerkeslager 2y ago
      The idea that AI will ever remove all struggle, even if it reaches AGI, is absurd. AI by itself can't give you a hug, for example--and even if advances in robotics make it possible for an AI-controlled robot to do that, there are dozens of unsolved problems beyond that to make that something that most people would even want. AI enthusiasm really is reaching a religious level of ridiculous beliefs and this point.
      - gershy 2y ago
        I doubt ai will remove all struggle. I suspect we wouldn't see great extents of human passion in a world where everyone is fed, clothed, housed, etc without needing to exert themselves at all.
        kerkeslager 2y ago
        And AI isn't going to feed, clothe, or house people either. AGI, at best, would provide ideas for how to do those things. And the current AI, which is not AGI, can only remix ideas humans have already given it--ideas which haven't fed, clothed, or housed us all yet.
    - smallmancontrov 2y ago
      "I only make you struggle because I love you!" (Mmmhmm, I'm sure the benefits received by the people on top have nothing to do with it.)
  - diego_sandoval 2y ago
    I'm not sure if that is something we actually would want. Lots of people certainly think they want that.
    - Hasu 2y ago
      Why wouldn't you want it, unless you are currently benefiting from employing people who would rather be doing literally anything else?
      - szundi 2y ago
        Even then he’ll probably like employing AI more. Lots of new taxes and UBI!
      - hackinthebochs 2y ago
        For the vast majority of people, getting rid of necessary work will usher in an unprecedented crisis of meaning. Most people aren't the type pursue creative ends if they didn't have to work. They would veg out or engage in degenerate activities. Many people have their identity wrapped up in the work they do, or being a provider. Take this away without having something to replace it with will be devastating.
        pixl97 2y ago
        >They would veg out or engage in degenerate activities "Oh no the sinners might play video games all day" I do expect the next comment would be something like "work is a path to godliness"
        hackinthebochs 2y ago
        >I do expect the next comment would be something like "work is a path to godliness" And you think these kinds of maxims formed out of vacuums? They are the kinds of sayings that are formed through experience re-enforced over generations. We can't just completely reject all historical knowledge encoded in our cultural maxims and expect everything to work out just fine. Yes, it is true that most people not having productive work will fill the time with frivolous or destructive ends. Modernity does not mean we've somehow transcended our historical past.
  - drdaeman 2y ago
    That requires achieving post-scarcity to work in practice and be fair, though. If achievable, it’s not clear how it relates to AGI. I mean, there’s plenty of intelligence on this planet already, and resources are still limited - and it’s not like AGI would somehow change that.
    - roboboffin 2y ago
      One thing I thought recently, is that a large amount of work is currently monitoring and correcting human activity. Corporate law, accounting, HR and services etc. If we have AGI that is forced to be compliant, then all these businesses disappear. Large companies are suddenly made redundant, regardless of whether they replace their staff with AI or not.
      - drdaeman 2y ago
        I agree that if true AGI happens (current systems still cannot reason at all, only pretend to do so) and if it comes out cheaper to deploy and maintain, that would mean a lot of professions could be automated away. However, I believe this had already happened quite a few times in history - industries becoming obsolete with technological advances isn’t anything new. This creates some unrest as society needs to transition, but those people are always learning a different profession. Or retire if they can. Or try to survive some other way (which is bad, of course). It would be nice, of course, if everyone won’t have to work unless they feel the need and desire to do so. But in our reality, where the resources are scarce and their distribution in a way that everyone will be happy is a super hard unsolved problem (and AGI won’t help here - it’s not some Deus ex Machina coming to solve world problems, it’s just a thinking computer), I don’t see a realistic and fair way to achieve this. Put simply, all the reasons we cannot implement UBI now will still remain in place - AGI simply won’t help with this.
        roboboffin 2y ago
        I guess the point I am trying to make, is that paradoxically the more an AI company's products are integrated into the economy, the less value they can extract from the economy. As a large amount of the world's economic output is just dealing with the human factor.
  - shadowerm 2y ago
    How can one not understand that UBI is captured by inflation. Its just a modern religion really because anyone can understand this it is so basic and obvious. You don't have to point out some bullshit captured study that says otherwise.
    - Aerroon 2y ago
      Inflation is a lack of goods for a given demand though. Ie if we can flood the world with cheap goods then inflation won't happen. That would make practical UBI possible. To some extent it has already happened.
    - NumberWangMan 2y ago
      My intuition, based on what I know of economics, is that a UBI policy would have results something like the following: * Inflation, things get more expensive. People attempt to consume more, especially people with low income. * People can't consume more than is produced, so prices go up. * People who are above the break-even line (when you factor in the taxes) consume a bit less, or stay the same and just save less or reduce investments. * Producers, seeing higher prices, are incentivized to produce more. Increases in production tend to be concentrated toward the things that people who were previously very income-limited want to buy. I'd expect a good bit of that to be basic essentials, but of course it would include lots of different things. * The system reaches a new equilibrium, with the allocation of produced goods being a bit more aimed toward the things regular people want, and a bit less toward luxury goods for the wealthy. * Some people quit work to take care of their kids full-time. The change in wages of those who stay working depends heavily on how competitive their skills are -- some earn less, but with the UBI still win out. Some may actually get paid more even without counting the UBI, if a lot of workers in their industry have quit due to the UBI, and there's increased demand for the products. * Prices have risen, but not enough to cancel out one's additional UBI income entirely. It's very hard to say how much would be eaten up by inflation, but I'd expect it's not 10% or 90%, probably somewhere in between. Getting an accurate figure for that would take a lot of research and modeling. Basically, I think it's complicated, with all the second and third-order effects, but I can't imagine a situation where so much of the UBI is captured by inflation that it makes it pointless. I do think that as a society, we should be morally responsible for people who can't earn a living for whatever reason, and I think UBI is a better system than a patchwork of various services with onerous requirements that people have to put a lot of effort into navigating, and where finding gainful employment will cause you to lose benefits.
  - nntwozz 2y ago
    “We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.” — Buckminster Fuller
- smallmancontrov 2y ago
  It doesn't have to be super, it just has to inflect the long term trend of labor getting less relevant and capital getting more relevant. We've made an ideology out of denying this and its consequences. The fallout will be ugly and the adjustment will be painful. At best.
- cactusplant7374 2y ago
  I think of ChatGPT as a faster Google or Stackoverflow and all of my colleagues are using it almost exclusively in this way. That is still quite impressive but it isn’t what Altman set out to achieve (and he admits this quite candidly). What would make me change my mind? If ChatGPT could take the lead on designing a robot through all the steps: design, contract the parts and assembly, market it, and sell it that would really be something. I assume for something like this to happen it would need all source code and design docs from Boston Dynamics in the training set. It seems unlikely it could independently make the same discoveries on its own.
  - randmeerkat 2y ago
    > I assume for something like this to happen it would need all source code and design docs from Boston Dynamics in the training set. It seems unlikely it could independently make the same discoveries on its own. No, to do this it would need to be able to independently reason, if it could do that, then the training data stops mattering. Training data is a crutch that makes these algos appear more intelligent than they are. If they were truly intelligent they would be able to learn independently and find information on their own.
- markus_zhang 2y ago
  It's already impacting some of us. I hope it never appears until the human civilization undergoes a profound change. But I'm afraid many rich people want that happen. It's the real Great Filter in the universe IMO.
- rbetts 2y ago
  I believe (most) people contribute their ambitions to nurture safe, peaceful, friend-filled communities. AGI won’t obsolete those human desires. Hopefully we weather the turbulence that comes with change and come out the other side with new tools that enable our pursuits. In the macro, that’s been the case. I am grateful to live in a time of literacy, antibiotics, sanitation, electricity… and am optimistic that if AGI emerges, it joins that list of human empowering creations.
  - szundi 2y ago
    Wise words, thank you.
- jeezfrk 2y ago
  Current AI degrades totally unlike human experts. It also, by design, must lag its data input. Anything innovated must come from outside or have a very close permutation to be found. Generative AI isn't scary at all now. It is merely rolling dice on a mix of other tech and rumors from the internet. The data can be wrong or old...and people keep important secrets.
  - hmottestad 2y ago
    Gotta wonder if Google has used code from internal systems to train Gemini? Probably not, but at what point will companies start forking over source code for LLM training for money?
    - throwuxiytayq 2y ago
      It seems much cheaper, safer legally and more easily scalable to simply synthesize programs. Most code out there is shit anyway, and the code you can get by the GB especially so.
      - hmottestad 2y ago
        How do they synthesize programs? I would assume that internal code at Google is of higher quality than random code you find on Github. Commit messages, issue descriptions and code review is probably more useful too.
- guerrilla 2y ago
  > I’m about 95% sure that will be terrible for the vast, vast majority of humans, we'll be obsolete. This isn't a criticism of you, but this is a very stupid idea that we have. The economy is mean to serve us. If it can't, we need to completely re-organize it because the old model has become invalid. We shouldn't exist to serve the economy. That's an absolutely absurd idea that needs to be killed in every single one of us.
  - insane_dreamer 2y ago
    > we need to completely re-organize it because the old model has become invalid that's called social revolution, and those who benefit from the old model (currently that would be the holders of capital, and more so as AI grows in its capabilities and increasingly supplants human labor) will do everything in their power to prevent that re-organization
  - hackinthebochs 2y ago
    This doesn't engage with the problem of coordinating everyone around some proposed solution and so is useless. Yes, if we could all just magically decide on a better system of government, everything would be great!
    - guerrilla 2y ago
      Identifying the problem is never useless. We need the right understanding if we're going to move forward. Believing we serve the economy and not the other way around hinders any progress on that front and so inverting it is a solid first step.
  - jprete 2y ago
    The economy isn't meant to serve us. It's an emergent system that evolves based on a complex incentive structure and its own contingent history.
    - guerrilla 2y ago
      Economic activity is meant to serve us. Don't be a pedant.
- accra4rx 2y ago
  think more deeply . who benefits with super intelligence ? at the end it is game of what humans desire naturally. AI has no incentive and are not controlled by hormones.
- jay_kyburz 2y ago
  It's not _that_ scary. I kind of like the idea of going out to the country and building a permiculture garden to feed myself and my family.
  - wiml 2y ago
    Until you try and you find that all the arable land is already occupied by industrial agriculture, the ADMs/Cargills of the world, using capital intensive brute force uniformity to extract more value from the land than you can compete with, while somehow simultaneously treating the earth destructively and inefficiently. This is both a metaphor for AGI and not a metaphor at all.
  - skulk 2y ago
    Sure, if you can survive the period between the obsolescence of human labor and the achievement of post-scarcity. Do you really think that period of time is zero, or that the first version of a post-scarcity economy will be able to carry the current population? No, such a transition implies a brutish end for most.
    - jay_kyburz 2y ago
      Sorry, I was being too subtle. When nobody has a job anymore and the economy is crashing, I'm looking forward to moving into the country and becoming self sufficient. We'll be very very poor, and it will be really hard work, but I'm looking forward to the challenge. Human labour will never be obsolete because you can always work for yourself. Post scarcity will never happen unless some benevolent AI god chooses to give it to us like in a Banks novel.
BurningFrog 2y ago
Your problem may be with those jackasses at work. I get very useful answers from ChatGPT several times a day. You need to verify anything important, of course. But that's also true when asking people.
- zeroonetwothree 2y ago
  There’s some people I trust on certain topics such that I don’t really need to verify them (and it would be a tedious existence to verify everything).
  - amanaplanacanal 2y ago
    Exactly. If you don't trust anybody, who would you verify with?
- dheatov 2y ago
  I have never personally met any malicious actor that knowingly dump unverified shit straight from GPT. However, I have met people IRL who gave way too much authority to those quantized model weights, got genuinely confused when the generated text doesn't agree with human written technical information. To them, chatgpt IS the verification. I am not optimistic about the future. But also perhaps some amazing people will deal with the error for the rest of us, like how most people don't go and worry about floating point error, and I'm just not smart enough to see how it looks like.
  - magicalhippo 2y ago
    Reminds me of the stories about people slavishly following Apple or Google maps navigation when driving, despite the obvious signs that the suggested route is bonkers, like say trying to take you across a runway[1]. [1]: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/apple-maps-bad_n_3990340 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/apple-maps-bad_n_3990340
paulddraper 2y ago
This is the "cell phones in public" stage of technology. As with cell phones, eventually society will adapt.
- hugey010 2y ago
  This may be the "cell phones in public" stage, but society has completely failed to adapt well to ubiquitous cell phone usage. There are many new psychological and behavioral issues associated with cell phone usage.
- everdrive 2y ago
  Cell phones were definitely a net loss for society, so I hope you're wrong.
flessner 2y ago
LLMs still completely won't admit that they're wrong, don't have enough information or that the information could have changed - Asking anything about Svelte 5 is an incredible experience currently. At the end of the day it's a tool currently, with surface-level information it's incredibly helpful in my opinion - Getting an overview of a subject or even coding smaller functions. What's interesting in my opinion is "agents" though... not in the current "let's slap an LLM into some workflow", but as a concept that is at least an order of magnitude away from what is possible today.
- gom_jabbar 2y ago
  Working with Svelte 5 and LLMs is a real nightmare. AI agents are really interesting. Fundamentally they may represent a step toward the autonomization of capital, potentially disrupting "traditional legal definitions of personhood, agency, and property" [0] and leading to the need to recognize "capital self-ownership" [1]. [0] https://retrochronic.com/#teleoplexy-17 https://retrochronic.com/#teleoplexy-17 [1] https://retrochronic.com/#piketty https://retrochronic.com/#piketty
- baobabKoodaa 2y ago
  It's fairly easy to prompt an LLM in a way where they're encouraged to say they don't know. Doesn't work 100% but cuts down the hallucinations A LOT. Alternatively, follow up with "please double check..."
davidclark 2y ago
Might just be me, but I also read in a condescending tone to these types of responses akin to “let me google that for you”
- DragonStrength 2y ago
  Pretty much. It should be considered rude to send AI output to others without fact checking and editing. Anyone asking a person for help isn’t looking for an answer straight from Google or ChatGPT.
wildermuthn 2y ago
I develop sophisticated LLM programs every day at a small YC startup — extracting insights from thousands of documents a day. These LLM programs are very different than naive one-shot questions asked of ChatGPT, resembling o1/3 thinking that integrates human domain knowledge to produce great answers that would have been cost-prohibitive for humans to do manually. Naive use of LLMs by non-technical users is annoying, but is also a straw-man argument against the technology. Smart usage of LLMs in o1/3 style of emulated reasoning unlocks entirely new realms of functionality. LLMs are analogous to a new programming platform, such as iPhones and VR. New platforms unlock new functionality along with various tradeoffs. We need time to explore what makes sense to build on top of this platform, and what things don’t make sense. What we shouldn’t do is give blanket approval or disapproval. Like any other technology, we should use the right tool for the job and utilize said tool correctly and effectively.
- neves 2y ago
  what is o1/3?
  - baobabKoodaa 2y ago
    o1 and o3 are new models from openai
- kbr- 2y ago
  Do you mean you implement your own CoT on top of some open source available GPT? (Basically making the model talk to itself to figure out stuff)
- Timber-6539 2y ago
  There is nothing to build on top of this AI platform as you call it. AI is nothing but an autocorrect program, AI is not innovating anything anywhere. Surprises me how much even the smartest people are deceived by simple trickery and continue to fall for every illusion.
- everdrive 2y ago
  >Naive use of LLMs by non-technical users is annoying, but is also a straw-man argument against the technology. Smart usage of LLMs in o1/3 style of emulated reasoning unlocks entirely new realms of functionality. I agree in principle, but disagree in practice. With LLMs available to everyone, the uses we're seeing currently will only proliferate. Is that strictly a technology problem? No, but it's cold comfort given how LLM usage is actually playing out day-to-day. Social media is a useful metaphor here: it could potentially be a strictly useful technology, but in practice it's used to quite deleterious effect.
wendyshu 2y ago
Wouldn't that mean that you want LLMs to advance further, not be at a dead end?
foobiekr 2y ago
You can tell. The tiresome lists.
- baobabKoodaa 2y ago
  Yep. Why does every answer has to be a list nowadays?
SoylentOrange 2y ago
This comment reads like a culture problem not an LLM problem. Imagine for a moment that you work as a developer, encounter a weird bug, and post your problem into your company’s Slack. Other devs then send a bunch of StackOverflow links that have nothing to do with your problem or don’t address your central issue. Is this a problem with StackOverflow or with coworkers posting links uncritically?

yashap 2y ago

I hope so, but for different reasons. Agreed they spit out plenty of gibberish at the moment, but they’ve also progressed so far so fast it’s pretty scary. If we get to a legitimate artificial general super intelligence, I’m about 95% sure that will be terrible for the vast, vast majority of humans, we'll be obsolete. Crossing my fingers that the current AI surge stops well short of that, and the push that eventually does get there is way, way off into the future.

youssefabdelm 2y ago
Or liberating... as Douglas Rushkoff puts it. If and only if something like high-paying UBI comes along, and people are freed to pursue their passions and as a consequence, benefit the world much more intensely.
- amarcheschi 2y ago
  everything points to the opposite
  - youssefabdelm 2y ago
    It may be impossible in this world to expect a form of donation, but it is certainly not impossible to expect forms of investment. One idea I had is everyone is paid a thriving wage, and in exchange, if they in the future develop their passion into something that can make a profit, they pay back 20% of their profits they make up to some capped amount. This allows for extreme generality. It truly frees people to pursue whatever they fancy every day until they catch lightning in a bottle. There would be 0 obligation as to what to do, and when to pay back the money. But of course would have to be only open to honest people, so that neither side is exploiting the other. Both sides need a sense of gratitude, and wanting to give back. A philanthropic 'flair' "If it doesn't work out, it's okay", and a gratitude and wanting to give back someday on the side of the receiver, as they continue working on probably the most resilient thing they could ever work on (the safest investment), their lifelong passion.
- gershy 2y ago
  I'm not sure passion exists in a world without struggle...
  - kerkeslager 2y ago
    The idea that AI will ever remove all struggle, even if it reaches AGI, is absurd. AI by itself can't give you a hug, for example--and even if advances in robotics make it possible for an AI-controlled robot to do that, there are dozens of unsolved problems beyond that to make that something that most people would even want. AI enthusiasm really is reaching a religious level of ridiculous beliefs and this point.
    - gershy 2y ago
      I doubt ai will remove all struggle. I suspect we wouldn't see great extents of human passion in a world where everyone is fed, clothed, housed, etc without needing to exert themselves at all.
      - kerkeslager 2y ago
        And AI isn't going to feed, clothe, or house people either. AGI, at best, would provide ideas for how to do those things. And the current AI, which is not AGI, can only remix ideas humans have already given it--ideas which haven't fed, clothed, or housed us all yet.
  - smallmancontrov 2y ago
    "I only make you struggle because I love you!" (Mmmhmm, I'm sure the benefits received by the people on top have nothing to do with it.)
- diego_sandoval 2y ago
  I'm not sure if that is something we actually would want. Lots of people certainly think they want that.
  - Hasu 2y ago
    Why wouldn't you want it, unless you are currently benefiting from employing people who would rather be doing literally anything else?
    - szundi 2y ago
      Even then he’ll probably like employing AI more. Lots of new taxes and UBI!
    - hackinthebochs 2y ago
      For the vast majority of people, getting rid of necessary work will usher in an unprecedented crisis of meaning. Most people aren't the type pursue creative ends if they didn't have to work. They would veg out or engage in degenerate activities. Many people have their identity wrapped up in the work they do, or being a provider. Take this away without having something to replace it with will be devastating.
      - pixl97 2y ago
        >They would veg out or engage in degenerate activities "Oh no the sinners might play video games all day" I do expect the next comment would be something like "work is a path to godliness"
        hackinthebochs 2y ago
        >I do expect the next comment would be something like "work is a path to godliness" And you think these kinds of maxims formed out of vacuums? They are the kinds of sayings that are formed through experience re-enforced over generations. We can't just completely reject all historical knowledge encoded in our cultural maxims and expect everything to work out just fine. Yes, it is true that most people not having productive work will fill the time with frivolous or destructive ends. Modernity does not mean we've somehow transcended our historical past.
- drdaeman 2y ago
  That requires achieving post-scarcity to work in practice and be fair, though. If achievable, it’s not clear how it relates to AGI. I mean, there’s plenty of intelligence on this planet already, and resources are still limited - and it’s not like AGI would somehow change that.
  - roboboffin 2y ago
    One thing I thought recently, is that a large amount of work is currently monitoring and correcting human activity. Corporate law, accounting, HR and services etc. If we have AGI that is forced to be compliant, then all these businesses disappear. Large companies are suddenly made redundant, regardless of whether they replace their staff with AI or not.
    - drdaeman 2y ago
      I agree that if true AGI happens (current systems still cannot reason at all, only pretend to do so) and if it comes out cheaper to deploy and maintain, that would mean a lot of professions could be automated away. However, I believe this had already happened quite a few times in history - industries becoming obsolete with technological advances isn’t anything new. This creates some unrest as society needs to transition, but those people are always learning a different profession. Or retire if they can. Or try to survive some other way (which is bad, of course). It would be nice, of course, if everyone won’t have to work unless they feel the need and desire to do so. But in our reality, where the resources are scarce and their distribution in a way that everyone will be happy is a super hard unsolved problem (and AGI won’t help here - it’s not some Deus ex Machina coming to solve world problems, it’s just a thinking computer), I don’t see a realistic and fair way to achieve this. Put simply, all the reasons we cannot implement UBI now will still remain in place - AGI simply won’t help with this.
      - roboboffin 2y ago
        I guess the point I am trying to make, is that paradoxically the more an AI company's products are integrated into the economy, the less value they can extract from the economy. As a large amount of the world's economic output is just dealing with the human factor.
- shadowerm 2y ago
  How can one not understand that UBI is captured by inflation. Its just a modern religion really because anyone can understand this it is so basic and obvious. You don't have to point out some bullshit captured study that says otherwise.
  - Aerroon 2y ago
    Inflation is a lack of goods for a given demand though. Ie if we can flood the world with cheap goods then inflation won't happen. That would make practical UBI possible. To some extent it has already happened.
  - NumberWangMan 2y ago
    My intuition, based on what I know of economics, is that a UBI policy would have results something like the following: * Inflation, things get more expensive. People attempt to consume more, especially people with low income. * People can't consume more than is produced, so prices go up. * People who are above the break-even line (when you factor in the taxes) consume a bit less, or stay the same and just save less or reduce investments. * Producers, seeing higher prices, are incentivized to produce more. Increases in production tend to be concentrated toward the things that people who were previously very income-limited want to buy. I'd expect a good bit of that to be basic essentials, but of course it would include lots of different things. * The system reaches a new equilibrium, with the allocation of produced goods being a bit more aimed toward the things regular people want, and a bit less toward luxury goods for the wealthy. * Some people quit work to take care of their kids full-time. The change in wages of those who stay working depends heavily on how competitive their skills are -- some earn less, but with the UBI still win out. Some may actually get paid more even without counting the UBI, if a lot of workers in their industry have quit due to the UBI, and there's increased demand for the products. * Prices have risen, but not enough to cancel out one's additional UBI income entirely. It's very hard to say how much would be eaten up by inflation, but I'd expect it's not 10% or 90%, probably somewhere in between. Getting an accurate figure for that would take a lot of research and modeling. Basically, I think it's complicated, with all the second and third-order effects, but I can't imagine a situation where so much of the UBI is captured by inflation that it makes it pointless. I do think that as a society, we should be morally responsible for people who can't earn a living for whatever reason, and I think UBI is a better system than a patchwork of various services with onerous requirements that people have to put a lot of effort into navigating, and where finding gainful employment will cause you to lose benefits.
- nntwozz 2y ago
  “We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.” — Buckminster Fuller
smallmancontrov 2y ago
It doesn't have to be super, it just has to inflect the long term trend of labor getting less relevant and capital getting more relevant. We've made an ideology out of denying this and its consequences. The fallout will be ugly and the adjustment will be painful. At best.
cactusplant7374 2y ago
I think of ChatGPT as a faster Google or Stackoverflow and all of my colleagues are using it almost exclusively in this way. That is still quite impressive but it isn’t what Altman set out to achieve (and he admits this quite candidly). What would make me change my mind? If ChatGPT could take the lead on designing a robot through all the steps: design, contract the parts and assembly, market it, and sell it that would really be something. I assume for something like this to happen it would need all source code and design docs from Boston Dynamics in the training set. It seems unlikely it could independently make the same discoveries on its own.
- randmeerkat 2y ago
  > I assume for something like this to happen it would need all source code and design docs from Boston Dynamics in the training set. It seems unlikely it could independently make the same discoveries on its own. No, to do this it would need to be able to independently reason, if it could do that, then the training data stops mattering. Training data is a crutch that makes these algos appear more intelligent than they are. If they were truly intelligent they would be able to learn independently and find information on their own.
markus_zhang 2y ago
It's already impacting some of us. I hope it never appears until the human civilization undergoes a profound change. But I'm afraid many rich people want that happen. It's the real Great Filter in the universe IMO.
rbetts 2y ago
I believe (most) people contribute their ambitions to nurture safe, peaceful, friend-filled communities. AGI won’t obsolete those human desires. Hopefully we weather the turbulence that comes with change and come out the other side with new tools that enable our pursuits. In the macro, that’s been the case. I am grateful to live in a time of literacy, antibiotics, sanitation, electricity… and am optimistic that if AGI emerges, it joins that list of human empowering creations.
- szundi 2y ago
  Wise words, thank you.
jeezfrk 2y ago
Current AI degrades totally unlike human experts. It also, by design, must lag its data input. Anything innovated must come from outside or have a very close permutation to be found. Generative AI isn't scary at all now. It is merely rolling dice on a mix of other tech and rumors from the internet. The data can be wrong or old...and people keep important secrets.
- hmottestad 2y ago
  Gotta wonder if Google has used code from internal systems to train Gemini? Probably not, but at what point will companies start forking over source code for LLM training for money?
  - throwuxiytayq 2y ago
    It seems much cheaper, safer legally and more easily scalable to simply synthesize programs. Most code out there is shit anyway, and the code you can get by the GB especially so.
    - hmottestad 2y ago
      How do they synthesize programs? I would assume that internal code at Google is of higher quality than random code you find on Github. Commit messages, issue descriptions and code review is probably more useful too.
guerrilla 2y ago
> I’m about 95% sure that will be terrible for the vast, vast majority of humans, we'll be obsolete. This isn't a criticism of you, but this is a very stupid idea that we have. The economy is mean to serve us. If it can't, we need to completely re-organize it because the old model has become invalid. We shouldn't exist to serve the economy. That's an absolutely absurd idea that needs to be killed in every single one of us.
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  > we need to completely re-organize it because the old model has become invalid that's called social revolution, and those who benefit from the old model (currently that would be the holders of capital, and more so as AI grows in its capabilities and increasingly supplants human labor) will do everything in their power to prevent that re-organization
- hackinthebochs 2y ago
  This doesn't engage with the problem of coordinating everyone around some proposed solution and so is useless. Yes, if we could all just magically decide on a better system of government, everything would be great!
  - guerrilla 2y ago
    Identifying the problem is never useless. We need the right understanding if we're going to move forward. Believing we serve the economy and not the other way around hinders any progress on that front and so inverting it is a solid first step.
- jprete 2y ago
  The economy isn't meant to serve us. It's an emergent system that evolves based on a complex incentive structure and its own contingent history.
  - guerrilla 2y ago
    Economic activity is meant to serve us. Don't be a pedant.
accra4rx 2y ago
think more deeply . who benefits with super intelligence ? at the end it is game of what humans desire naturally. AI has no incentive and are not controlled by hormones.
jay_kyburz 2y ago
It's not _that_ scary. I kind of like the idea of going out to the country and building a permiculture garden to feed myself and my family.
- wiml 2y ago
  Until you try and you find that all the arable land is already occupied by industrial agriculture, the ADMs/Cargills of the world, using capital intensive brute force uniformity to extract more value from the land than you can compete with, while somehow simultaneously treating the earth destructively and inefficiently. This is both a metaphor for AGI and not a metaphor at all.
- skulk 2y ago
  Sure, if you can survive the period between the obsolescence of human labor and the achievement of post-scarcity. Do you really think that period of time is zero, or that the first version of a post-scarcity economy will be able to carry the current population? No, such a transition implies a brutish end for most.
  - jay_kyburz 2y ago
    Sorry, I was being too subtle. When nobody has a job anymore and the economy is crashing, I'm looking forward to moving into the country and becoming self sufficient. We'll be very very poor, and it will be really hard work, but I'm looking forward to the challenge. Human labour will never be obsolete because you can always work for yourself. Post scarcity will never happen unless some benevolent AI god chooses to give it to us like in a Banks novel.

BurningFrog 2y ago

Your problem may be with those jackasses at work. I get very useful answers from ChatGPT several times a day. You need to verify anything important, of course. But that's also true when asking people.

zeroonetwothree 2y ago
There’s some people I trust on certain topics such that I don’t really need to verify them (and it would be a tedious existence to verify everything).
- amanaplanacanal 2y ago
  Exactly. If you don't trust anybody, who would you verify with?
dheatov 2y ago
I have never personally met any malicious actor that knowingly dump unverified shit straight from GPT. However, I have met people IRL who gave way too much authority to those quantized model weights, got genuinely confused when the generated text doesn't agree with human written technical information. To them, chatgpt IS the verification. I am not optimistic about the future. But also perhaps some amazing people will deal with the error for the rest of us, like how most people don't go and worry about floating point error, and I'm just not smart enough to see how it looks like.
- magicalhippo 2y ago
  Reminds me of the stories about people slavishly following Apple or Google maps navigation when driving, despite the obvious signs that the suggested route is bonkers, like say trying to take you across a runway[1]. [1]: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/apple-maps-bad_n_3990340 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/apple-maps-bad_n_3990340

paulddraper 2y ago

This is the "cell phones in public" stage of technology. As with cell phones, eventually society will adapt.

hugey010 2y ago
This may be the "cell phones in public" stage, but society has completely failed to adapt well to ubiquitous cell phone usage. There are many new psychological and behavioral issues associated with cell phone usage.
everdrive 2y ago
Cell phones were definitely a net loss for society, so I hope you're wrong.

flessner 2y ago

LLMs still completely won't admit that they're wrong, don't have enough information or that the information could have changed - Asking anything about Svelte 5 is an incredible experience currently. At the end of the day it's a tool currently, with surface-level information it's incredibly helpful in my opinion - Getting an overview of a subject or even coding smaller functions. What's interesting in my opinion is "agents" though... not in the current "let's slap an LLM into some workflow", but as a concept that is at least an order of magnitude away from what is possible today.

gom_jabbar 2y ago
Working with Svelte 5 and LLMs is a real nightmare. AI agents are really interesting. Fundamentally they may represent a step toward the autonomization of capital, potentially disrupting "traditional legal definitions of personhood, agency, and property" [0] and leading to the need to recognize "capital self-ownership" [1]. [0] https://retrochronic.com/#teleoplexy-17 https://retrochronic.com/#teleoplexy-17 [1] https://retrochronic.com/#piketty https://retrochronic.com/#piketty
baobabKoodaa 2y ago
It's fairly easy to prompt an LLM in a way where they're encouraged to say they don't know. Doesn't work 100% but cuts down the hallucinations A LOT. Alternatively, follow up with "please double check..."

davidclark 2y ago

Might just be me, but I also read in a condescending tone to these types of responses akin to “let me google that for you”

DragonStrength 2y ago
Pretty much. It should be considered rude to send AI output to others without fact checking and editing. Anyone asking a person for help isn’t looking for an answer straight from Google or ChatGPT.

wildermuthn 2y ago

I develop sophisticated LLM programs every day at a small YC startup — extracting insights from thousands of documents a day. These LLM programs are very different than naive one-shot questions asked of ChatGPT, resembling o1/3 thinking that integrates human domain knowledge to produce great answers that would have been cost-prohibitive for humans to do manually. Naive use of LLMs by non-technical users is annoying, but is also a straw-man argument against the technology. Smart usage of LLMs in o1/3 style of emulated reasoning unlocks entirely new realms of functionality. LLMs are analogous to a new programming platform, such as iPhones and VR. New platforms unlock new functionality along with various tradeoffs. We need time to explore what makes sense to build on top of this platform, and what things don’t make sense. What we shouldn’t do is give blanket approval or disapproval. Like any other technology, we should use the right tool for the job and utilize said tool correctly and effectively.

neves 2y ago
what is o1/3?
- baobabKoodaa 2y ago
  o1 and o3 are new models from openai
kbr- 2y ago
Do you mean you implement your own CoT on top of some open source available GPT? (Basically making the model talk to itself to figure out stuff)
Timber-6539 2y ago
There is nothing to build on top of this AI platform as you call it. AI is nothing but an autocorrect program, AI is not innovating anything anywhere. Surprises me how much even the smartest people are deceived by simple trickery and continue to fall for every illusion.
everdrive 2y ago
>Naive use of LLMs by non-technical users is annoying, but is also a straw-man argument against the technology. Smart usage of LLMs in o1/3 style of emulated reasoning unlocks entirely new realms of functionality. I agree in principle, but disagree in practice. With LLMs available to everyone, the uses we're seeing currently will only proliferate. Is that strictly a technology problem? No, but it's cold comfort given how LLM usage is actually playing out day-to-day. Social media is a useful metaphor here: it could potentially be a strictly useful technology, but in practice it's used to quite deleterious effect.

wendyshu 2y ago

Wouldn't that mean that you want LLMs to advance further, not be at a dead end?

foobiekr 2y ago

You can tell. The tiresome lists.

baobabKoodaa 2y ago
Yep. Why does every answer has to be a list nowadays?

SoylentOrange 2y ago

This comment reads like a culture problem not an LLM problem. Imagine for a moment that you work as a developer, encounter a weird bug, and post your problem into your company’s Slack. Other devs then send a bunch of StackOverflow links that have nothing to do with your problem or don’t address your central issue. Is this a problem with StackOverflow or with coworkers posting links uncritically?