5 ms·

This is a big issue in the short term but in the long term I actually think AI is going to be a huge democratization of work and company building. I spend a lo

This is a big issue in the short term but in the long term I actually think AI is going to be a huge democratization of work and company building. I spend a lot of time encouraging people to not fight the tide and spend that time intentionally experimenting and seeing what you can do. LLMs are already useful and it's interesting to me that anybody is arguing it's just good for toy applications. This is a poisonous mindset and results in a potentially far worse outcome than over-hyping AI for an individual. I am wondering if I should actually quit a >500K a year job based around LLM applications and try to build something on my own with it right now. I am NOT someone that thinks I can just craft some fancy prompt and let an LLM agent build me a company, but I think it's a very powerful tool when used with great intention. The new grads and entry level people are scrappy. That's why startups before LLMs liked to hire them. (besides being cheap, they are just passionate and willing to make a sacrifice to prove their worth) The ones with a lot of creativity have an opportunity right now that many of us did not when we were in their shoes. In my opinion, it's important to be technically potent in this era, but it's now even more important to be creative - and that's just what so many people lack. Sitting in front of a chat prompt and coming up with an idea is hard for the majority of people that would rather be told what to do or what direction to take. My message to the entry-level folks that are in this weird time period. It's tough, and we can all acknowledge that - but don't let cynicism shackle you. Before LLMs, your greatest asset was fresh eyes and the lack of cynicism brought upon by years of industry. Don't throw away that advantage just because the job market is tough. You, just like everybody else, have a very powerful tool and opportunity right in front of you. The amount of people trying to convince you that it's just a sham and hype means that you have less competition to worry about. You're actually lucky there's a huge cohort of experienced people that have completely dismissed LLMs because they were too egotistical to spend meaningful time evaluating it and experimenting with it. LLM capabilities are still changing every 6 months-1 year. Anybody that has decided concretely that there is nothing to see here is misleading you. Even in the current state of LLM if the critics don't see the value and how powerful it is mostly a lack of imagination that's at play. I don't know how else to say it. If I'm already able to eliminate someone's role by using an LLM then it's already powerful enough in its current state. You can argue that those roles were not meaningful or important and I'd agree - but we as a society are spending trillions on those roles right now and would continue to do so if not for LLMs

izabera 1y ago
what does "huge democratization of work" even mean? what world do you people live in? the current global unemployment rate on my planet is around 5% so that seems pretty democratised already?
- abletonlive 1y ago
  What I mean by that is that you have even more power to start your own company or use LLMs to reduce the friction of doing something yourself instead of hiring someone else to do it for you. Just as the internet was a democratization of information, llms are a democratization of output. That may be in terms of production or art. There is clearly a lower barrier for achieving both now compared to pre-llm. If you can't see this then you don't just have your head stuck in the sand, you have it severed and blasted into another reality. The reason why you reacted in such a way is again, a lack of imagination. To you, "work" means "employment" and a means to a paycheck. But work is more than that. It is the output that matters, and whether that output benefits you or your employer is up to you. You now have more leverage than ever for making it benefit you because you're not paying that much time/money to ask an LLM to do it for you. Pre-llm, most for-hire work was only accessible to companies with a much bigger bank account than yours. There is an ungodly amount of white collar workers maintaining spreadsheets and doing bullshit jobs that LLMs can do just fine. And that's not to say all of those jobs have completely useless output, it's just that the amount of bodies it takes to produce that output is unreasonable. We are just getting started getting rid of them. But the best part of it is that you can do all of those bullshit jobs with an LLM for whatever idea you have in your pocket. For example, I don't need an army of junior engineers to write all my boilerplate for me. I might have a protege if I am looking to actually mentor someone and hire them for that reason, but I can easily also just use LLMs to make boilerplate and write unit tests for me at the same time. Previously I would have had to have 1 million dollars sitting around to fund the amount of output that I am able to produce with a $20 subscription to an LLM service. The junior engineer can also do this too, albeit in most cases less effectively. That's democratization of work. In your "5% unemployment" world you have many more gatekeepers and financial barriers.
  - 1y ago

izabera 1y ago

what does "huge democratization of work" even mean? what world do you people live in? the current global unemployment rate on my planet is around 5% so that seems pretty democratised already?

abletonlive 1y ago
What I mean by that is that you have even more power to start your own company or use LLMs to reduce the friction of doing something yourself instead of hiring someone else to do it for you. Just as the internet was a democratization of information, llms are a democratization of output. That may be in terms of production or art. There is clearly a lower barrier for achieving both now compared to pre-llm. If you can't see this then you don't just have your head stuck in the sand, you have it severed and blasted into another reality. The reason why you reacted in such a way is again, a lack of imagination. To you, "work" means "employment" and a means to a paycheck. But work is more than that. It is the output that matters, and whether that output benefits you or your employer is up to you. You now have more leverage than ever for making it benefit you because you're not paying that much time/money to ask an LLM to do it for you. Pre-llm, most for-hire work was only accessible to companies with a much bigger bank account than yours. There is an ungodly amount of white collar workers maintaining spreadsheets and doing bullshit jobs that LLMs can do just fine. And that's not to say all of those jobs have completely useless output, it's just that the amount of bodies it takes to produce that output is unreasonable. We are just getting started getting rid of them. But the best part of it is that you can do all of those bullshit jobs with an LLM for whatever idea you have in your pocket. For example, I don't need an army of junior engineers to write all my boilerplate for me. I might have a protege if I am looking to actually mentor someone and hire them for that reason, but I can easily also just use LLMs to make boilerplate and write unit tests for me at the same time. Previously I would have had to have 1 million dollars sitting around to fund the amount of output that I am able to produce with a $20 subscription to an LLM service. The junior engineer can also do this too, albeit in most cases less effectively. That's democratization of work. In your "5% unemployment" world you have many more gatekeepers and financial barriers.
- 1y ago