6 ms·

"shouldn't it be painfully obvious in companies' output?" No. The bottleneck isn't intellectual productivity. The bottleneck is a legion of other things; reg

"shouldn't it be painfully obvious in companies' output?" No. The bottleneck isn't intellectual productivity. The bottleneck is a legion of other things; regulation, IP law, marketing, etc. The executive email writers and meeting attenders have a swarm of business considerations ricocheting around in their heads in eternal battle with each other. It takes a lot of supposedly brilliant thinking to safely monetize all the things, and many of the factors involved are not manifest in written form anywhere, often for legal reasons. One place where AI is being disruptive is research: where researchers are applying models in novel ways and making legitimate advances in math, medicine and other fields. Another is art "creatives": graphic artists in particular. They're early victims and likely to be fully supplanted in the near future. A little further on and it'll be writers, actors, etc.

ImaCake 1y ago
Maybe this means that LLMs are ultimately good for small buisness. If large buisness is constrained by being large and LLMs are equally accesible to 5 people or 100 then surely what we will see is increased productivity in small companies?
- topspin 1y ago
  My direct experience has been that even very small tech businesses contend with IP issues as well. And they don't have the means to either risk or deliberately instigate a fight.
bawolff 1y ago
Even still, in theory this should free up more money to hire more lawyers, markerters, etc. The effect should still be there presuming the market isn't saturated with new ideas .
- xkcd1963 1y ago
  Something else will get expensive in the meantime, e.g. it doesn't matter how much you earn, landlords will always increase rent to the limit because a living space is a basic necessity
  - bawolff 1y ago
    No, landlords will increase rent as much as they can because they like money (they call it capitalism for a reason). This is true of all goods, both essential and non-essential. All businesses follow the rule of supply and demand when setting prices or quickly go out of business. In the scenario being discussed - if a bunch of companies hired a whole bunch of lawyers, markerters, etc that might make salaries go up due to increased demand (but probably not super high amoung as tech isnt the only industry in the world). That still first requires companies to be hiring more of these types of people for that effect to happen, so we should still see some of the increased output even if there is a limiting factor. We would also notice the salaray of those professions going up, which so far hasn't happened.
    - xkcd1963 1y ago
      you say no for no reason. read what I wrote again
      - bawolff 1y ago
        Perhaps you could more clearly articulate your point if you think i am missing it.
        xkcd1963 1y ago
        » landlords will always increase rent to the limit In your own words, a business will run out of business quickly if supply and demand do not match. So unless you are confident that there will be a buyer, you cannot raise prices infinitely. » because a living space is a basic necessity While most people can live without a netflix subscription (hence they cannot raise prices infinitely and still expect to find buyers) most people prefer to live in housings. A housing is a basic necessity hence as a landlord you can confidently raise prices to the barrier of an affordability limit. » Something else will get expensive in the meantime Lets assume electricity prices get really cheap because humanity discovers fusion reaction. Well guess what, now landlords will increase the rents again because they can. Hope I expressed myself to your liking. I mean you just walz in here and start lecturing people about capitalism, maybe you should change your careerpath and become a teacher.
SteveNuts 1y ago
>A little further on and it'll be writers, actors, etc. The tech is going to have to be absolutely flawless, otherwise the uncanny-valley nature of AI "actors" in a movie will be as annoying as when the audio and video aren't perfectly synced in a stream. At least that's how I see it..
- Izkata 1y ago
  This was made a little over a week ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/IndiaTech/comments/1ksjcsr/this_video_was_entirely_generated_by_googles_veo/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IndiaTech/comments/1ksjcsr/this_vid... For most of them I'm not seeing any of those issues.
  - PeterHolzwarth 1y ago
    I get what you mean, but the last year has been a story of sudden limits and ceilings of capability. The (damned impressive) video you post is a bunch of extremely brief snippets strung together. I'm not yet sure we can move substantially beyond that to something transformative or pervasively destructive. A couple years ago, we thought the trend was without limits - a five second video would turn into a five minute video, and keep going from there. But now I wonder if perhaps there are built in limits to how far things can go without having a data center with a billion Nvidia cards and a dozen nuclear reactors serving them power. Again, I don't know the limits, but we've seen in the last year some sudden walls pop up that change our sense of the trajectory down to something less "the future is just ten months away."
    - genewitch 1y ago
      Approximately 1 second was how long AI could hold it together. If you had a lot of free time you could extend that out a bit, but it'll mess something up. So generally people who make them will run it slow-motion. This is the first clip I've seen with it at full speed. The quick cuts thing is a huge turnoff so if they have a 15 second clip later on, I missed it. When I say "1second" I mean that's what I was doing with automatic1111 a couple years ago. And every video I've seen is the same 30-60 generated frames...
csomar 1y ago
> where researchers are applying models in novel ways and making legitimate advances in math, medicine and other fields. Can you give an example, say in Medicine, where AI made a significant advancement? That is we are talking neural networks and up (ie: LLM) and not some local optimization.
- pkroll 1y ago
  https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.10849 https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.10849 "Our study suggests that LLMs have achieved superhuman performance on general medical diagnostic and management reasoning"
  - squigz 1y ago
    This isn't really applying LLMs to research in novel ways.
throwaway2037 1y ago
> One place where AI is being disruptive is research: where researchers are applying models in novel ways and making legitimate advances in math, medicine and other fields. Great point. The perfect example: (From Wiki): > In 2024, Hassabis and John M. Jumper were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their AI research contributions for protein structure prediction. AFAIK: They are talking about DeepMind AlphaFold. Related: (Also from Wiki): > Isomorphic Labs Limited is a London-based company which uses artificial intelligence for drug discovery. Isomorphic Labs was founded by Demis Hassabis, who is the CEO.
- SirHumphrey 1y ago
  I think AlphaFold is where current AI terminology starts breaking down. Because in some real sense, AlphaFold is primarily a statistical model - yes, it's interesting that they developed it using ML techniques, but from the use standpoint it's little different than perturbation based black boxes that were used before that for 20 years. Yes, it's an example of ML used in science (other examples include NN based force fields for molecule dynamics simulations and meteorological models) - but a biologist or meteorologist usually cares little how the software package they are using works (excluding the knowledge of different limitation of numerical vs statistical models). The whole thing "but look AI in science" seem to me like Motte-and-bailey argument to imply the use of AGI-like MLLM agents that perform independent research - currently a much less successful approach.
  - vhcr 1y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
    - immibis 1y ago
      Yeah, but also AI now means LLMs and they're not LLMs.
    - SirHumphrey 1y ago
      Not really my point. I specifically didn't call LLMs a statistical model - while they technically are, it's obvious they are something more. While intelligence is a hard concept to pin down, current gen LLMs already can do most (knowledge work) based things better than most people (they are better writers than most people, they can program better than most people, they are better at math than most people, have better medical knowledge than most people...). If the human is the mark of intelligence - it has been achieved. Alphafold is something else though. I work with something similar (specifically FNOs for biophysical simulations) and the insight that data only models perform better than physics based model is novel - I think that the Nobel prize was deservedly awarded - however the thing is still closer to a curve fit than to LLMs regarding intelligence - or in other words, it's about as "intelligence" as permutation based black boxes were.
pera 1y ago
Bullshit: Chatbots are not failing to demonstrate a tangible increase in companies' output because of regulations and IP law, they are failing because they are still not good for the job. LLMs only exist because the companies developing them are so ridiculously powerful that can completely ignore the rule of law, or if necessary even change it (as they are currently trying to do here in Europe). Remember we are talking about a technology created by torrenting 82 TB of pirated books, and that's just one single example. "Steal all the users, steal all the music" and then lawyer up, as Eric Schmidt said at Stanford a few months ago.
- hoosieree 1y ago
  And currently trying in the US too: https://apnews.com/article/ai-regulation-state-moratorium-congress-39d1c8a0758ffe0242283bb82f66d51a https://apnews.com/article/ai-regulation-state-moratorium-co... They want to ban states from imposing their own regulations on AI.
- acquisitionsilk 1y ago
  Piracy when the local pleb does it, brilliancy when the new VC-fat wunderkind does it
throwawayffffas 1y ago
The things you mention in the legion of other things are actually things LLMs do better than intellectual productivity. They can spew entire libraries of marketing bs, summarize decades of legal precedents and fill out mountains of red tape checklists. They have trouble with debugging obvious bugs though.
redtaperat 1y ago
[flagged]
Teever 1y ago
Maybe in some industries and for some companies and their products but not all. Like let's take operating systems as an example. If there are great productivity gains from LLMs while aren't companies like Apple, Google and MS shipping operating systems with vastly less bugs and cleaning up backlogged user feature requests?
gibbitz 1y ago
Don't forget that to start a company the more common goal is to make money, not to produce a good or service that others want or need including employment. Meaning this is just a lesser concern. Generally business owners are just as likely to shed quality as to shed employees as long as the profits go up. What helps to sustain this is the gradual lowering of the bar on quality that leads to consumers settling for garbage products and sending a positive signal to the business to continue. This is exacerbated by monopolistic trends in the world where only one company is providing a good or service and buying out the competition when it raises to control choice. What we end up with is similar from the consumer's viewpoint to late Communism in regards to choice and quality. In the end Capitalism didn't win. It just lost last.

ImaCake 1y ago

Maybe this means that LLMs are ultimately good for small buisness. If large buisness is constrained by being large and LLMs are equally accesible to 5 people or 100 then surely what we will see is increased productivity in small companies?

topspin 1y ago
My direct experience has been that even very small tech businesses contend with IP issues as well. And they don't have the means to either risk or deliberately instigate a fight.

bawolff 1y ago

Even still, in theory this should free up more money to hire more lawyers, markerters, etc. The effect should still be there presuming the market isn't saturated with new ideas .

xkcd1963 1y ago
Something else will get expensive in the meantime, e.g. it doesn't matter how much you earn, landlords will always increase rent to the limit because a living space is a basic necessity
- bawolff 1y ago
  No, landlords will increase rent as much as they can because they like money (they call it capitalism for a reason). This is true of all goods, both essential and non-essential. All businesses follow the rule of supply and demand when setting prices or quickly go out of business. In the scenario being discussed - if a bunch of companies hired a whole bunch of lawyers, markerters, etc that might make salaries go up due to increased demand (but probably not super high amoung as tech isnt the only industry in the world). That still first requires companies to be hiring more of these types of people for that effect to happen, so we should still see some of the increased output even if there is a limiting factor. We would also notice the salaray of those professions going up, which so far hasn't happened.
  - xkcd1963 1y ago
    you say no for no reason. read what I wrote again
    - bawolff 1y ago
      Perhaps you could more clearly articulate your point if you think i am missing it.
      - xkcd1963 1y ago
        » landlords will always increase rent to the limit In your own words, a business will run out of business quickly if supply and demand do not match. So unless you are confident that there will be a buyer, you cannot raise prices infinitely. » because a living space is a basic necessity While most people can live without a netflix subscription (hence they cannot raise prices infinitely and still expect to find buyers) most people prefer to live in housings. A housing is a basic necessity hence as a landlord you can confidently raise prices to the barrier of an affordability limit. » Something else will get expensive in the meantime Lets assume electricity prices get really cheap because humanity discovers fusion reaction. Well guess what, now landlords will increase the rents again because they can. Hope I expressed myself to your liking. I mean you just walz in here and start lecturing people about capitalism, maybe you should change your careerpath and become a teacher.

SteveNuts 1y ago

>A little further on and it'll be writers, actors, etc. The tech is going to have to be absolutely flawless, otherwise the uncanny-valley nature of AI "actors" in a movie will be as annoying as when the audio and video aren't perfectly synced in a stream. At least that's how I see it..

Izkata 1y ago
This was made a little over a week ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/IndiaTech/comments/1ksjcsr/this_video_was_entirely_generated_by_googles_veo/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IndiaTech/comments/1ksjcsr/this_vid... For most of them I'm not seeing any of those issues.
- PeterHolzwarth 1y ago
  I get what you mean, but the last year has been a story of sudden limits and ceilings of capability. The (damned impressive) video you post is a bunch of extremely brief snippets strung together. I'm not yet sure we can move substantially beyond that to something transformative or pervasively destructive. A couple years ago, we thought the trend was without limits - a five second video would turn into a five minute video, and keep going from there. But now I wonder if perhaps there are built in limits to how far things can go without having a data center with a billion Nvidia cards and a dozen nuclear reactors serving them power. Again, I don't know the limits, but we've seen in the last year some sudden walls pop up that change our sense of the trajectory down to something less "the future is just ten months away."
  - genewitch 1y ago
    Approximately 1 second was how long AI could hold it together. If you had a lot of free time you could extend that out a bit, but it'll mess something up. So generally people who make them will run it slow-motion. This is the first clip I've seen with it at full speed. The quick cuts thing is a huge turnoff so if they have a 15 second clip later on, I missed it. When I say "1second" I mean that's what I was doing with automatic1111 a couple years ago. And every video I've seen is the same 30-60 generated frames...

csomar 1y ago

> where researchers are applying models in novel ways and making legitimate advances in math, medicine and other fields. Can you give an example, say in Medicine, where AI made a significant advancement? That is we are talking neural networks and up (ie: LLM) and not some local optimization.

pkroll 1y ago
https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.10849 https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.10849 "Our study suggests that LLMs have achieved superhuman performance on general medical diagnostic and management reasoning"
- squigz 1y ago
  This isn't really applying LLMs to research in novel ways.

throwaway2037 1y ago

> One place where AI is being disruptive is research: where researchers are applying models in novel ways and making legitimate advances in math, medicine and other fields. Great point. The perfect example: (From Wiki): > In 2024, Hassabis and John M. Jumper were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their AI research contributions for protein structure prediction. AFAIK: They are talking about DeepMind AlphaFold. Related: (Also from Wiki): > Isomorphic Labs Limited is a London-based company which uses artificial intelligence for drug discovery. Isomorphic Labs was founded by Demis Hassabis, who is the CEO.

SirHumphrey 1y ago
I think AlphaFold is where current AI terminology starts breaking down. Because in some real sense, AlphaFold is primarily a statistical model - yes, it's interesting that they developed it using ML techniques, but from the use standpoint it's little different than perturbation based black boxes that were used before that for 20 years. Yes, it's an example of ML used in science (other examples include NN based force fields for molecule dynamics simulations and meteorological models) - but a biologist or meteorologist usually cares little how the software package they are using works (excluding the knowledge of different limitation of numerical vs statistical models). The whole thing "but look AI in science" seem to me like Motte-and-bailey argument to imply the use of AGI-like MLLM agents that perform independent research - currently a much less successful approach.
- vhcr 1y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
  - immibis 1y ago
    Yeah, but also AI now means LLMs and they're not LLMs.
  - SirHumphrey 1y ago
    Not really my point. I specifically didn't call LLMs a statistical model - while they technically are, it's obvious they are something more. While intelligence is a hard concept to pin down, current gen LLMs already can do most (knowledge work) based things better than most people (they are better writers than most people, they can program better than most people, they are better at math than most people, have better medical knowledge than most people...). If the human is the mark of intelligence - it has been achieved. Alphafold is something else though. I work with something similar (specifically FNOs for biophysical simulations) and the insight that data only models perform better than physics based model is novel - I think that the Nobel prize was deservedly awarded - however the thing is still closer to a curve fit than to LLMs regarding intelligence - or in other words, it's about as "intelligence" as permutation based black boxes were.

pera 1y ago

Bullshit: Chatbots are not failing to demonstrate a tangible increase in companies' output because of regulations and IP law, they are failing because they are still not good for the job. LLMs only exist because the companies developing them are so ridiculously powerful that can completely ignore the rule of law, or if necessary even change it (as they are currently trying to do here in Europe). Remember we are talking about a technology created by torrenting 82 TB of pirated books, and that's just one single example. "Steal all the users, steal all the music" and then lawyer up, as Eric Schmidt said at Stanford a few months ago.

hoosieree 1y ago
And currently trying in the US too: https://apnews.com/article/ai-regulation-state-moratorium-congress-39d1c8a0758ffe0242283bb82f66d51a https://apnews.com/article/ai-regulation-state-moratorium-co... They want to ban states from imposing their own regulations on AI.
acquisitionsilk 1y ago
Piracy when the local pleb does it, brilliancy when the new VC-fat wunderkind does it

throwawayffffas 1y ago

The things you mention in the legion of other things are actually things LLMs do better than intellectual productivity. They can spew entire libraries of marketing bs, summarize decades of legal precedents and fill out mountains of red tape checklists. They have trouble with debugging obvious bugs though.

redtaperat 1y ago

[flagged]

Teever 1y ago

Maybe in some industries and for some companies and their products but not all. Like let's take operating systems as an example. If there are great productivity gains from LLMs while aren't companies like Apple, Google and MS shipping operating systems with vastly less bugs and cleaning up backlogged user feature requests?

gibbitz 1y ago

Don't forget that to start a company the more common goal is to make money, not to produce a good or service that others want or need including employment. Meaning this is just a lesser concern. Generally business owners are just as likely to shed quality as to shed employees as long as the profits go up. What helps to sustain this is the gradual lowering of the bar on quality that leads to consumers settling for garbage products and sending a positive signal to the business to continue. This is exacerbated by monopolistic trends in the world where only one company is providing a good or service and buying out the competition when it raises to control choice. What we end up with is similar from the consumer's viewpoint to late Communism in regards to choice and quality. In the end Capitalism didn't win. It just lost last.