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The critics of the current AI buzz certainly have been drawing comparisons to self driving cars as LLMs inch along with their logarithmic curve of improvement t
by dingnuts 1y ago
The critics of the current AI buzz certainly have been drawing comparisons to self driving cars as LLMs inch along with their logarithmic curve of improvement that's been clear since the GPT-2 days.
Whenever someone tells me how these models are going to make white collar professions obsolete in five years, I remind them that the people making these predictions 1) said we'd have self driving cars "in a few years" back in 2015 and 2) the predictions about white collar professions started in 2022 so five years from when?
- ishita159 1y agoI think people don't realize how much models have to extrapolate still, which causes hallucinations. We are still not great at giving all the context in our brain to LLMs. There's still a lot of tooling to be built before it can start completely replacing anyone.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dortlick 1y agoIt doesn't have to "completely" replace any individual employee to be impactful. If you have 50 coders that each use AI to boost their productivity by 10%, you need 5 fewer coders. It doesn't require that AI is able to handle 100% of any individual person's job.
- doctorpangloss 1y agoOkay, but the experts saying self driving cars were 50 years out in 2015 were wrong too. Lots of people were there for those speeches, and yet, even the most cynical take on Waymo, Cruise and Zoox’s limitations would concede that the vehicles are autonomous most of the time in a technologically important way. There’s more to this than “predictions are hard.” There are very powerful incentives to eliminate driving and bloated administrative workforces. This is why we don’t have flying cars: lack of demand. But for “not driving?” Nobody wants to drive!
- n2d4 1y ago> said we'd have self driving cars "in a few years" back in 2015 And they wouldn't have been too far off! Waymo became L4 self-driving in 2021, and has been transporting people in the SF Bay Area without human supervision ever since. There are still barriers — cost, policies, trust — but the technology certainly is here.
- amccollum 1y agoPeople were saying we would all be getting in our cars and taking a nap on our morning commute. We are clearly still a pretty long ways off from self-driving being as ubiquitous as it was claimed it would be.
- n2d4 1y agoThere are always extremists with absurd timelines on any topic! (Didn't people think we'd be on Mars in 2020?) But this one? In the right cities, plenty of people take a Waymo morning commute every day. I'd say self-driving cars have been pretty successful at meeting people's expectations — or maybe you and I are thinking of different people.
- wat10000 1y agoThe expectation of a "self-driving car" is that you can get in it and take any trip that a human driver could take. The "in certain cities" is a huge caveat. If we accept that sort of geographical limitation, why not say that self-driving "cars" have been a thing since driverless metro systems started showing up in the 1980s?
- vidarh 1y agoAnd other people were a lot more moderate but still assumed we'd get self-driving soon, with caveats, and were bang on the money. So it's not as ubiquitous as the most optimistic estimates suggested. We're still at a stage where the tech is sufficiently advanced that seeing them replace a large proportion of human taxi services now seems likely to have been reduced to a scaling / rollout problem rather than primarily a technology problem, and that's a gigantic leap.
- satyrun 1y agoHow profound. No one has ever posted that exact same thought before on here. Thank you.