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> Obama, no. Geoff Hinton has his opinions and I’ve listened to them. For every smart person who believes in AI and AGI happening soon you can find other smart

> Obama, no. Geoff Hinton has his opinions and I’ve listened to them. For every smart person who believes in AI and AGI happening soon you can find other smart people who argue the other way. So your argument is "smart people are wrong sometimes so I will say he is one of those people". Not an incorrect argument in principle, but it can be used to arbitrarily dismiss any opinion you disagree with. I think what's more important is the delta of average sentiment among experts. The general opinion you'd get talking to reasonably smart, well informed tech-adjacent people on the impending approach of AGI is very different now than a few years ago, and these are people who can tell the difference between marketing hype and legitimate impacts. >Trading stock and Azure credits don’t equal revenue. OpenAI, the leader in the AI industry, loses billions every quarter. Microsoft and Google and Meta subsidize their work from other profitable activities. The profit isn’t there. They're losing money because they're spending a lot on talent, datacenter buildup and training runs. This makes sense given the returns on scaling. This is like how people had said "Amazon never made a profit" for years, even though their money was just being put into growth. A lack of profitability during growth isn't a weird exception that proves that OpenAI and AI companies are scams, it's pretty much the standard for the tech industry due to the benefits of being a loss leader when money invested early is instrumental for relative market dominance. ChatGPT has 500 million active users. Over half of its billions in revenue is from ChatGPT plus subscriptions (which is mostly individuals paying for it, not b2b swap schemes.) > I’d expect more tectonic changes than “It wrote my term paper.” My specific example was a bigger deal than "It wrote my term paper". Even so, I know you used that example as a shorthand for a tool of trivial utility, but a tool which can effectively write at the college is invariably a big deal. However it seems that every advance in AI shifts the goalposts. > I might agree, but I didn’t make that claim. AI tools probably can add value as tools. If you find a real example of AI taking over a professional job at scale let us know. Your claim was that it's unreasonable to assert that layoffs were in part due to AI. My claim is that AI being merely labor multiplying is enough for it to be an impetus for layoffs. Even if it's impossible for an AI tool to completely replace one job fully on its own with no human input, if a senior engineer could use an AI tool that allows them to perform the job of 1.5 equivalent engineers at a company, then that company requires only 2/3 its original number of engineers for the same output, which would preempt a layoff of the least productive engineers due to their contribution being made redundant. No one doubts that a smaller percentage of humans are employed as farmers today than were in the 1800s, but it would be silly to claim that since no robot exists that can fully perform every task that a farmer can completely autonomously that the massive reduction in farm jobs since the 1800s could not have been in any part due to technological advancements. No one single farmer has been "fully replaced", but the integration of labor multiplying tools allowed a smaller number of farmers to perform the duties of far more, which is what is effectively happening with AI tools. > We could have better discussions if the AI industry wasn’t led by chronic liars and frauds, people making ridiculous self-serving predictions not backed by anything that resembles science. AI gets literally shoved down our throats with no demonstrated or measurable benefit, poor accuracy, severe limitations, heavy costs that get subsidized by investors and the public. Forget about the energy and environmental impact. Which “side” acts in good faith in the so-called debate? Every booming industry is rife with those seeking to maximally exploit its growth potential. This was true with the emergence of electricity, the dot-com boom, mobile phones, etc. Anyone with a brain could see that in any new flashy domain there is a lot of deceptive hype, but anyone with a brain could also see that these new advancements did massively impact the world and in many ways improved productivity and general technological enablement. > I have. You just need to take the critics seriously. No one can even define intelligence or AGI, but they sure can sell it to FOMO CIOs. You still haven't provided any substantive arguments beyond "AI company CEOs are all a pack of liars", outright denial of any claim I make, and reflexive dismissal of any citation I provide. The substance of your arguments seems to rely on retreating to a bastion of impossible to certify claims, using the lack of absolute consensus in one direction as evidence that the complete opposite claim must be correct. Claiming that "no one can define intelligence or AGI" has absolutely no bearing on whether LLMs or the like are effectively performing many tasks humans consider essential to intelligence. These semantic hideaways would be a sensible area to take shelter in if this were 1999 and machine intelligence were a far-off fantasy, but ignoring much of the realities emerging across the economy and society is a rhetorical flourish you can only pull off for so long.

gregjor 1y ago
As much as I’d like to continue debating with you I think we will just continue talking past each other. I didn’t address the possibility of AGI, the consensus or “delta” of smart people, the utility of LLMs, or the prospect of OpenAI et al. someday making a profit in my original comment. You raised those issues and then put words in my mouth. My original comment amounted to an Occam’s Razor argument: we can explain layoffs in terms of tax changes, economic and political uncertainty, over-hiring during COVID, and management incompetence. The impact of AI remains to be seen. The hype and fear-mongering serves the AI companies in a blatantly obvious way, so we should take their claims skeptically. Maybe it will all come true, but even if we get AGI next week that won’t explain the layoffs in tech and other sectors that started several years ago. In a few years we will have more evidence to support (or not) AGI, whatever it means. And we will have more evidence of the real economic impact of AI. Right now no one can claim expertise, just opinions.
- atleastoptimal 1y ago
  I feel that it’s important to make a note of the kinds of discussions people have on this site which commonly recur yet offer no benefit to either party. Some of our disagreements lie in the realm of speculative confidence and thus whether either one of us is correct is up to our biases and trust in various sources. However, there are some points of disagreement which I feel don’t factor in the very real nuts and bolts realities and are tiresome to see brought up. However I believe you and many others are, due to a fear or animosity towards the implications of near term AGI, are engaged in motivated reasoning. Even the smartest people fall victim to this folly, even Einstein for a while could not accept the implications of quantum mechanics. You seem like a very smart person, so I implore you to audit the motivations driving your conclusions, and whether you would be willing to entertain ideas that are correct despite being unpalatable. The ability to accept and effectively grapple with unsavory realities is a massively useful skill in a world where long held assumptions are being upended every day.
  - gregjor 1y ago
    > However I believe you and many others are, due to a fear or animosity towards the implications of near term AGI, are engaged in motivated reasoning. Not fear or animosity. I have over 40 years in software development. I’ve seen numerous fads and supposedly revolutionary tech ideas get pushed hard only to fade away, or fail to deliver. Not long ago we had to endure the metaverse hype, before that blockchain. No code/ low code has been around in some form as a a holy grail for management for decades. I haven’t stayed employable into my sixties by ignoring new things. I try to discern the useful and real from the hyped and fake. I don’t claim to know how LLMs or anything else will eventually play out, but I’ve seen this money-driven hypetrain and cults of personality before. > Even the smartest people fall victim to this folly, even Einstein for a while could not accept the implications of quantum mechanics. That of course works both ways. If so-called AI offers benefits I will adapt, just as I’ve adapted to many new things during my career. If it fizzles out or falls short of the promises I will still have a job. Right now the AI coding tools add nothing for me. Other programmers may have different experiences. Programmers with years of experience in multiple business domains, like me, have the least to fear from AI. I think excluding young people just starting their careers, at a time when an LLM can plausibly do the same work under supervision, will choke off the path to senior developer and the necessary mentoring and real-world experience. AI may create a demographic crisis even if it doesn’t actually replace senior programmers. The damage will come from management short-sightedness and short-term profit seeking, not the technology itself. In any case the question of what AI can do or might do only has a little to do with layoffs in tech and other sectors, and that was the original topic.

gregjor 1y ago

As much as I’d like to continue debating with you I think we will just continue talking past each other. I didn’t address the possibility of AGI, the consensus or “delta” of smart people, the utility of LLMs, or the prospect of OpenAI et al. someday making a profit in my original comment. You raised those issues and then put words in my mouth. My original comment amounted to an Occam’s Razor argument: we can explain layoffs in terms of tax changes, economic and political uncertainty, over-hiring during COVID, and management incompetence. The impact of AI remains to be seen. The hype and fear-mongering serves the AI companies in a blatantly obvious way, so we should take their claims skeptically. Maybe it will all come true, but even if we get AGI next week that won’t explain the layoffs in tech and other sectors that started several years ago. In a few years we will have more evidence to support (or not) AGI, whatever it means. And we will have more evidence of the real economic impact of AI. Right now no one can claim expertise, just opinions.

atleastoptimal 1y ago
I feel that it’s important to make a note of the kinds of discussions people have on this site which commonly recur yet offer no benefit to either party. Some of our disagreements lie in the realm of speculative confidence and thus whether either one of us is correct is up to our biases and trust in various sources. However, there are some points of disagreement which I feel don’t factor in the very real nuts and bolts realities and are tiresome to see brought up. However I believe you and many others are, due to a fear or animosity towards the implications of near term AGI, are engaged in motivated reasoning. Even the smartest people fall victim to this folly, even Einstein for a while could not accept the implications of quantum mechanics. You seem like a very smart person, so I implore you to audit the motivations driving your conclusions, and whether you would be willing to entertain ideas that are correct despite being unpalatable. The ability to accept and effectively grapple with unsavory realities is a massively useful skill in a world where long held assumptions are being upended every day.
- gregjor 1y ago
  > However I believe you and many others are, due to a fear or animosity towards the implications of near term AGI, are engaged in motivated reasoning. Not fear or animosity. I have over 40 years in software development. I’ve seen numerous fads and supposedly revolutionary tech ideas get pushed hard only to fade away, or fail to deliver. Not long ago we had to endure the metaverse hype, before that blockchain. No code/ low code has been around in some form as a a holy grail for management for decades. I haven’t stayed employable into my sixties by ignoring new things. I try to discern the useful and real from the hyped and fake. I don’t claim to know how LLMs or anything else will eventually play out, but I’ve seen this money-driven hypetrain and cults of personality before. > Even the smartest people fall victim to this folly, even Einstein for a while could not accept the implications of quantum mechanics. That of course works both ways. If so-called AI offers benefits I will adapt, just as I’ve adapted to many new things during my career. If it fizzles out or falls short of the promises I will still have a job. Right now the AI coding tools add nothing for me. Other programmers may have different experiences. Programmers with years of experience in multiple business domains, like me, have the least to fear from AI. I think excluding young people just starting their careers, at a time when an LLM can plausibly do the same work under supervision, will choke off the path to senior developer and the necessary mentoring and real-world experience. AI may create a demographic crisis even if it doesn’t actually replace senior programmers. The damage will come from management short-sightedness and short-term profit seeking, not the technology itself. In any case the question of what AI can do or might do only has a little to do with layoffs in tech and other sectors, and that was the original topic.