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AI will divide the best from the rest
- josefritzishere 2y agoAI is the rest. It is the G in GIGO.
- A_D_E_P_T 2y agoThat depends. As an analyst it is already vastly superior to any human. Yet there appears to be an inventiveness gap. As an inventor -- or at the frontiers of scientific discovery -- it's hopeless and still vastly inferior to the average practitioner. (Hence Dwarkesh's question: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/02/dwarkeshs-question.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/02/dw... ) I've tried prompting o1-Pro to invent something genuinely novel in materials science, and it resists. It appears incapable. On that note, there was this AI materials science project that was run by Deepmind. They spent a ton of money to identify a bunch of "new compounds" -- which, it turns out, were not "novel, credible, or useful." (https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/11/google_deepmind_material_study/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/11/google_deepmind_mater...) ...Most interestingly, as I recall, the ones that were "credible" and "useful" were not novel, they were derivative of existing compounds already known to science. So the AI really achieved nothing at all, and, pointedly, this AI didn't have a gimped set of instructions. What we're seeing is that AIs and SotA LLMs excel at certain things -- analysis, linear prediction, and linguistic processing -- but fail utterly at other things such as multidisciplinary logical inference. So what I predict is not that AI will divide the best from the rest, but that it will exceed the best in some tasks, and prove almost entirely incapable of others. Bullish for science and advanced engineering, bad for financial analysts...
- amazingamazing 2y agoThe same can be said about any productivity raising tool, no?
- yoyohello13 2y agoIf the tool is free. It’s an equalizer. If the tool costs money, it increases the gap between rich and poor.
- amazingamazing 2y agoLuckily there are plenty of websites that host AI for free, and models that are increasingly becoming able to be able to run on personal compute.
- vonneumannstan 2y agoIf you can't afford $20/mo to get ChatGPT what makes you think you'd have the technical skill to setup a locally hosted LLM?
- amazingamazing 2y agoNot sure what the relevance is - there's free versions of that, not to mention Gemini and co. In any case what you're saying is true again, of any productivity tool.
- acureau 2y agoWealth and skill are not necessarily proportional.
- vonneumannstan 2y agoThey're tightly linked in technical domains. My point is if you can't even afford to pay for these tools there is slim chance you have the ability to deploy one locally.
- lm28469 2y agoYes, and until proven wrong it most likely will go as any other productivity enhancing technology: https://assets.weforum.org/editor/HFNnYrqruqvI_-Skg2C7ZYjdcXp-6EsuSBkSyHpSbm0.png https://assets.weforum.org/editor/HFNnYrqruqvI_-Skg2C7ZYjdcX...
- dartos 2y agoAh… finance reporting.
- Hizonner 2y ago... until it replaces the best. I used to say 20 to 100 years, now I'm down to 2 to 20.
- cybrox 2y agoI recommend you look at pictures of how people in the 60s thought the 2000s would be like.
- csallen 2y agoEvery situation is different, and thorough thinking requires taking those differences into account, rather than using oversimplified heuristics.
- beezlewax 2y agoI'm not sure which side of this two-sided argument you are trying to support with this comment.
- csallen 2y agoI'm against the idea that past overestimates of technological progress imply that CurrentTechPredictionX must also be an overestimate. It's a lazy way of thinking that fails to actually look at any specific details of either situation.
- cybrox 2y agoI'm not implying the current prediction >must< also be an overestimate. I'm saying be careful when adjusting your expectations based on current rapid momentum.
- bee_rider 2y agoIMO it is better not to assume a comment is trying to support one of two sides of an argument. For example, it might be critiquing the general way the argument has been framed (where the line’s been drawn between the two sides), or the method of making the argument (if everyone is sitting around looking at some obviously incomplete data and trying to tweak it to push their point, it is worth pointing out that whatever conclusion the group comes to is probably meaningless). Or it could just the a bit vague and hard to interpret.
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- dcminter 2y agohttps://archive.is/tBcXE https://archive.is/tBcXE
- nashashmi 2y agoNot really. I think it will shadow and cover the defects of people like they’re inability to communicate well. And it might shine light on what they do right. I will optimize people to only be specialized in a limited set of skills. And this will likely hurt their development of those very skills
- daft_pink 2y agoIt reminds me of the experiment with Gary Kasparov and chess, where different teams with computers and non computers played chess against each other. The findings showed that teams that effectively combined human strategic thinking with computer analytical power performed better than either humans or computers alone. This highlighted the potential for synergy between human and artificial intelligence, where the combination of both could surpass the capabilities of each individually. I think that’s the challenge of this time. Clearly AI is a tool to decrease the speed to do something and it favors people who are generally good or generally have some domain knowledge with the skills to leverage it.
- salviati 2y ago> Clearly AI is a tool to decrease the speed to do something Did you mean increase?
- iNic 2y agoThis is only ever true during "transition" periods. Chess computers at this point are strictly better than just humans or human computer teams. Of course, it is currently true for LLMs, but the question is how long?
- typon 2y agoWell no because Leela today beats human + AI combos or humans only just as well.
- myrmidon 2y ago> This highlighted the potential for synergy between human and artificial intelligence, where the combination of both could surpass the capabilities of each individually. This potential only existed for a very short period of time; current chess engines eclipse human capabilities completely; human assistance is about as useful to them as an amateur players advice would be to Magnus Carlsen. An uncomfortable analogy.
- carlospx 2y ago"AI will divide the best from the rest" -- I think you can call the increase in social inequality that way.
- gmuslera 2y agoDepending on the company, there may be more dynamics into play. AI could bring a new and improved version of the Peter principle.
- mkagenius 2y ago> In a decade perhaps everyone on earth will be capable of accomplishing more than the most impactful person can today - Sam Altman This guy lives in his own bubble. No reality of poor countries.
- v3xro 2y agoEven if that turns out to be true - I don't want human life to be about accomplishment only. We're not here as economic machines to squeeze value out of the next business idea.
- staplers 2y agoUnfortunately every single political, economic, and societal force is drifting aimlessly toward this end.
- dahart 2y agoI’m unconvinced. Working hours in industrial countries have gone down over the last century or two, not up. Things were even worse for the vast majority of people before the 1800s, most people didn’t even get “careers” or have the luxury of thinking in terms of “accomplishments”.
- lm28469 2y ago> Working hours in industrial countries have gone down over the last century or two, not up. Wages stagnated while productivity doubled. What you could afford on one salary 50 years ago is unaffordable for a 2 salaries household, &c. We peaked sometime between WWII and 1990, since then it's not obvious that things improved in the west
- dahart 2y agoI think waking time away from work, and not work pay, is the most relevant metric to answer the question raised in this sub-thread. (Though there is obviously overlap, what you can do with your free time and how much you have is obviously driven by your income.) While you have a good point - there is real inequality and it’s still a struggle to be poor, no question - this doesn’t actually contradict my point, which is that people have on average more free time than they used to, and that free time is what I think @v3xro is referring to. “Productivity” is a loaded word, it means dollars collected, and a productivity increase does not necessarily mean workers worked harder (though it does happen sometimes). While it sucks for workers if companies can collect more dollars without paying more for production, it’s not directly relevant to worker’s lifestyle. This chart shows adjusted wages increasing at a very slow moderate rate for the last 50 years: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q. It’s not that bad if wages “stagnate” if we’re talking inflation adjusted purchasing parity, which I think you are. While it might be unfair for capitalists to reap relatively more, that doesn’t actually reflect on the question of what human life is about and whether “accomplishments” at work are the primary meaning of our lives.
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- getnormality 2y agoI want to like LLMs. People are clearly betting trillions on them, and if those bets go sour, it will be bad for everyone. But my impression right now is that a large percentage of LLM use is for spamming, scamming, and cheating on homework. On the plus side, some software engineers save a couple minutes here and there with a slightly nicer autocomplete, white collar workers can get some advice on email style, and maybe it helps with sifting through millions of pages of legal discovery. Overall, this stuff by itself really doesn't seem world-changing to me. People should continue learning the same basic skills that have been valuable in the past. Speculation on how it will change society seems about as baseless and premature as guesstimating how society will change if quantum computers can somehow solve all problems instantly, ignoring the fact that they almost certainly can't. I am hopeful for some of the more advanced applications, e.g. proof assistance in math, but I think it will take a while to know what the killer apps are there, and what their impact will be.
- Workaccount2 2y agoEven if advances in LLMs stop right now, we still would probably see 5-10 years of integration. Keep in mind also that it's in vogue to talk about AI bad, and taboo to talk about how much you use it in your job or life.
- getnormality 2y agoIt's taboo to talk about how much you use it? Tell that to my LinkedIn feed. Everyone is desperate to tell me how desperately I need to use AI or I will fall behind in the rat race. Every app has an animated glowing starry "use our new AI features!" thingy that I mentally block out, no matter how much it (often literally) jumps up and down and waves at me. There is no question in my mind how badly the powerful want me to use AI and get others to use it.
- bende511 2y agohow many of the people on your linkedin feed have a financial incentive to talk up AI and LLMs? LinkedIn is truly a fascinatingly weird social media
- alecco 2y agoRemember that time when The Economist did a dumb article about your country or your area of expertise. These are the same people writing again about something they have no clue about. For clicks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
- crazygringo 2y agoActually, no. There have been a number of times when I've seen their reporting to be higher-quality than anything available domestically in the country. Above all when they dedicate a 20-page Special Report on a country or a new technology. They go into a level of detail and analysis that you basically can't get anywhere else. And especially with technology, they tend to look at the bigger social picture -- the wider implications -- that purely technology-focused sources tend to either ignore or else have shallow "hot takes" on.
- dcminter 2y agoAgreed, the fact that the technology quarterly and other tech writings appear to be written by people who understand what they're writing about is exactly why I'm willing to extend some trust to them on subjects where I'm clueless.
- gruez 2y ago>Remember that time when The Economist did a dumb article about your country or your area of expertise example?
- alecco 2y agoEvery single article about my country is ridiculous. They confuse the political parties. And about economics, they pick something random and use it to explain why that is the single cause of all the problems. Sure, The Economist is above average. But the average is pretty low and they are still mostly useless, IMO.
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- bloomingkales 2y agoI just want to say that I saw Fareed Zakaria talk about DeepSeek recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILCZAXmVYV0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILCZAXmVYV0 As he was delivering that segment, there was a feeling in me that just kept emanating that there is no way Fareed knows anything about this but he is broadcasting with such authority. And it's true, he had no idea about how Deepseek trained off OpenAI. This is probably very true for all mainstream media talking about AI, they literally are clueless and can be used to parrot anything that sounds world-changing.
- thundergolfer 2y agoThere’s no hope for someone if they take Zakaria seriously about anything. He’s the pinnacle of vacuous talking head infotainment. It used to be generally well known that Zakaria-types were for dimwits who mistook the appearance of insight for insight, but in an increasingly vacuous, video-soaked world, what used to be obviously pap for the plebs seems now solidly respectable, middle-brow.
- bloomingkales 2y agoThe devil is probably in the details. I don't stop watching someone because I disagree with them, if they have a generally calm and moderate tone, that's good enough for me (Fareed is awesome in that regard). The best way to see if someone is compelling on a topic is to see if they discuss it on a regular basis. Fareed is very good on the middle-east, for example. AI is a big topic, but so is transgenderism. Not everyone should be talking about it (this is indictment of many, Joe Rogan a major culprit). I'll leave it there.
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- csomar 2y agocnbc the other day had the reporters warning how deep seek can download all the data in your phone and send it to china and you should remove the app immediately. It froze my brain for a good minute.
- computerthings 2y agoThe phrase "Ark Fleet Ship B" is wandering through my mind in search of something to connect with.
- dcminter 2y agoChat agents often seem to suffer from Genuine People Personalities...
- caseyy 2y agoI don't buy it that AI will widen social divides. The evidence points the other way. LLMs are mostly useful for beginners, and they are basically a fast lane to knowledge. It's never been easier to start from nothing, absorb lots of synthesized knowledge, and go beyond what an LLM can do - essentially becoming "the best" according to the article. The path to being "the best" in any discipline is not decades today, it is years. Personally, I've picked up so many new skills in the last five years thanks to the LLMs. I now do my own car maintenance (fully), I'm restoring my home, and handling years of programmer health neglect. Each of these would have taken me either years to learn, or at least months with professional supervision. Thanks to LLMs, I basically have a direct line to a somewhat knowledgeable "person" that can answer all my questions immediately, and it takes days to learn how to be somewhat good at anything. I'm not saying I've become an expert car mechanic, builder, or personal health expert, but I have become functionally good. I can look at my work and say "I've actually done this better than the contractor I hired 2 years ago!", etc. It's true that there is a divide between "the best" and "the rest", but the divide is that "the best" don't benefit much from LLMs. At work where I am a senior SWE, there is nothing the current LLMs (including GitHub Copilot) can help me with. But on the weekends, when I'm learning a fun new programming language as a beginner, I can get up to speed in a few hours. That is the different effects LLMs have on "the best" and "the rest". If LLMs did not exist, and one needed to have really extensive domain expertise, plus ML, tensorflow, and python skills - then I would agree with The Economist that AI benefits technologists more. But LLMs exist, are widely available, and also are probably the main application of ML today. So I think the article misses the point very much.
- kalal 2y agoTo some extend I agree, that if you are professional in some are, current LLMs may not solve the issues you are facing. But, while I consider myself as "expert" in one very specific area, and don't find huge help from ChatGPT in that domain, I don't live in a bubble. I have to sometime touch on completely orthogonal skills where I am not expert at all. And in these areas, I get huge benefit even though LLMs give me "average" responses. It is still better than my own, below average judgements. That is very strong point.
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- smitelli 2y agoI liken it to furniture making. Used to be every piece was made by hand. That was the only way it could be done at all. It took however long it took, it cost however much it cost, and you could (slightly) tweak those knobs to control the overall quality of the finished product based on the customer's budget and tastes. Along comes mass-produced flat-packed particle board stuff. It's cheap garbage, everybody makes it, most customers buy it, and it works "fine" but perhaps there is something more spiritual about it that we have all collectively lost. The thing is, a small group of people still perform the old craft for a small group of customers who still want to pay for it. The market for it shrank, but it still exists. It sort of doesn't matter what happens in the flat-packed space, because handmade furniture is almost an entirely different universe from particle board. I'm sure somebody with a better grasp of macroeconomics could mop the floor with me, but that's my intuition about it.
- trey-jones 2y agoIt's not even spiritual, it's just care. If you care about something you build, and you are able to put in the required time and effort, there is a great possibility your output will be high-quality. Unfortunately, high-quality is playing second fiddle to low-cost (and does the job) for the majority.
- dsr_ 2y agoIt's not the spirituality of it. It's the longevity. If you own your living place or have an expectation of stability, well-built furniture is an investment -- not necessarily a hugely expensive one -- that can last your entire life. If you have to move frequently -- one year rentals, turbulent economy -- anything that's heavy and bulky doesn't fit into your plans. Or not as much of it. But the depressing thing is that the flatpack stuff is prone to breaking when you move it, so it becomes disposable much faster. Vimes' boots.
- harimau777 2y agoMy fear is that AI will further hurt neurodivergent people's ability to compete in tech. It seems to me that AI deemphasizes some of the advantages that some neurodivergent people have; e.g. hyperfocus, nonlinear thinking, etc. At the same time it introduces extra context switching which many neurodivergent people struggle with. I've already seen tech become much more hostile to neurodivergent people over the years. I'm afraid that this will just make things worse.
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- vonneumannstan 2y agoImagine what it will do to average people's ability to compete in the economy at all. Broaden your view.
- photochemsyn 2y agoOpen-source models drastically reduce the ability of the closed-source proprietary models to be used to control markets, establish monopolies, and extract rents from users. Since the economist doesn't even mention this divide, the article is best ignored.
- hiccuphippo 2y agoPeople using open source models will be a vast minority, akin to those willing to using Linux in the desktop now. I can't fault them for ignoring us.
- neuroelectron 2y agoYet we'll still be stuck with middling, mass media. I guess that's the price we pay for training AI with it.
- dukeofdoom 2y agoIt's like having a personal assistant for free. For example tell it what you want to do that day, and it can schedule your day. Ask for markdown check list. Ask it to improve your health and it can make a cookimg and shoppimg list for you. It gives you ideas you can then improve. Great time saver too... Ask how to do something obscure in the terminal and it just returns the commands in seconds you would need to research for hours.
- dandanua 2y agoIt's the sweet dream of raising far right. Of course, "the best" will be decided not through the AI enhanced productivity, but through the ability to utilize "the rest" and keep them where they are or dump even lower.
- throwcatowayne 2y agoAll these optimists want to say it will just "enhance" our abilities, not replace us. Well AI did "enhance" our chess playing skills, but it completely replaced the top skill level. That's ok for a game without economic value by being the best. But with these same people advocating that we can't stop because the potential economic value is so great and economics improves peoples' lives... We will use the replacement AI for economic value, not the inferior "enhanced" chess players.
- yannis 2y agoI reached 70 this year (still hacking...). I have seen a lot of changes in my life time, technical, economic and geopolitical. Is hard to predict the future. A common underlying pattern of change has been that income disparities will grow, both at a personal level as well as between companies. AI will accelerate this phenomenon. Yes jobs will be lost and unemployment will produce social friction and instability. At the moment, perhaps to most HN readers is a productivity tool (and not very good at it). I am hoping that applied AI would bring the costs of services and products down, through efficiencies so that people can still survive.
- meristohm 2y agoIf more of us grew up with unconditional postive regard, and internalized that, I reckon this focus on competition would be less. It's okay to draw lines in the sand. Yeah, I grew up with computers, and yeah, they're cool and all, but unnecessary for a meaningful life. I have yet to intentionally use ML/LLM tech, wnd I make efforts to turn it off in DuckDuckGo (haven't made an account to save that setting yet...) and others when I'm aware of it. I would far rather promote education of humans by humans, and the idea of "public luxury, private sufficiency." Two books come to mind: The Evolved Nest, by Darcia Narvaez Invisible Doctrine, by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison I recommend checking your public library for these, or bookshop dot org or thriftbooks, rather than Amazon.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y agoI saw a post recently on LinkedIn from a designer, and I thought it was remarkably accurate. It basically said that AI was going to eliminate a lot of the "low value" creative jobs that don't actually have a lot of creativity: e.g. technical writing and illustration that really serves just to summarize some application (AI is great at summarization), social media ad copy, etc. But, the weird part to me is that this guy said he was optimistic because he works with world class designers and writers who will be able to use AI to enhance their creativity. I agreed with that statement, but I completely don't understand his optimism given obviously the vast majority of creatives (or really, any occupation) are not "world class", by definition. AI will just set a much higher bar for being able to contribute economically. We're basically headed to a world where most non-physical occupations look like professional sports or acting. That is, a world where a few "stars" that are unique in their abilities vacuum up the vast, vast majority of the money, and everyone else can essentially have their skills replicated, and thus replaced, by AI. The reason I think the AI optimists are full of shit is because I've never seen a decent response to this argument. Usually I just get something hand-wavy, or worse, "well people at the bottom will just need to up-skill and become world class." Yeah, just tell everyone to be in the top 5%, that makes mathematical sense...
- satisfice 2y agoThe real DEI crisis is incompetent LLMs being promoted into jobs over qualified humans. LLMs suck at almost everything they try to do, while fan boys continue to make excuses for them. AI stands for automated irresponsibility.
- bookofjoe 2y agohttps://archive.ph/T8A2w https://archive.ph/T8A2w
- bookofjoe 2y agohttps://archive.ph/7xVoK https://archive.ph/7xVoK