13 ms·

AI is different

• xyz_opinion 1y ago
  "It was not even clear that we were so near to create machines that could understand the human language" LLMs don't _understand_ "the human language". They dont _understand_ anything. It would be really great if everyone would keep their heads and not lose sight of this fundamental truth.
• BoorishBears 1y ago
  I don't get how post GPT-5's launch we're still getting articles where the punchline is "what if these things replace a BUNCH of humans".
  • markmoscov 1y ago
    what if they replace internet comments? As a large language model developed by OpenAI I am unable to fulfill that request.
    • asciimov 1y ago
      Not sure the last time you went on reddit, but I wouldn't be surprised if around 20% of posts and comments there are LLM generated.
  • mrbungie 1y ago
    People just want to feel special pointing a possibility, so in case it happens, they can then point towards their "insight".
    • nurettin 1y ago
      Or they are experts in one field and think that they have valuable insight into other fields they are not experts on.
    • ares623 1y ago
      I kind of want to put up a wall of fame/shame of these people to be honest. Whether they turn out right or wrong, they undoubtedly cheered on the prospect of millions of people suffering just so they can sound good at the family dinner. I wouldn’t want to work for or with these people.
      • Davidzheng 1y ago
        sorry but prediction and cheering on is different. If there's a tsunami coming, not speaking about it doesn't help the cause.
  • stephc_int13 1y ago
    Salvatore is right about the fact that we have not seen the full story yet, LLMs are stalling/plateauing but active research is already ongoing to find different architectures and models. And I think the effort here can be compared in scale to the Manhattan or Apollo projects, but there is also the potential for a huge backlash to the hype that was built up and created what is arguably a bubble, so this is a race against the clock. I also think he is wrong about the markets reaction, markets are inherently good integrators and bad predictors, we should not expect to learn anything about the future by looking at stocks movements.
    • BoorishBears 1y ago
      > Salvatore is right about the fact that we have not seen the full story yet, LLMs are stalling/plateauing but active research is already ongoing to find different architectures and models. They will need to be so different that any talk implying current LLMs eventually replaced humans will be like saying trees eventually replaced horses because the first cars were wooden. > And I think the effort here can be compared in scale to the Manhattan or Apollo projects, but there is also the potential for a huge backlash to the hype that was built up and created what is arguably a bubble, so this is a race against the clock. It's not useful to blindly compare scale. We're not approaching AI like the Manhattan or Apollo projects, we're approaching this like we did crypto, and ads, and other tech. That's not to say nothing useful will come out of it, I think very amazing things will come out of it and already have... but none of them will resemble mass replacement of skilled workers. We're already so focused on productization and typical tech distractions that this is nothing like those efforts. (In fact thinking a bit more, I'd say this is like the Space Shuttle. We didn't try to make the best spacecraft for scientific exploration and hope later on it'd be profitable in other ways... instead we immediately saddled it with serving what the Air Force/DoD wanted and ended up doing everything worse.) > I also think he is wrong about the markets reaction, markets are inherently good integrators and bad predictors, we should not expect to learn anything about the future by looking at stocks movements. I agree, so it's wrong about the over half of punchline too.
      • noduerme 1y ago
  • nojito 1y ago
    The amount of innovation in the last 6-8 months has been insane.
    • BoorishBears 1y ago
      Innovation in terms of helping devs do cool things has been insane. There've been next to no advancements relative to what's needed to redefine our economic systems by replacing the majority of skilled workers. - Productionizing test-time compute covers 80% of what we've gotten in the last 6-8 months. Advancements in distillation and quantization cover the 20% of the rest... neither unlocks some path to mass unemployment. What we're doing is like 10x'ing your vertical leap when your goal is to land on the moon: 10x is very impressive and you're going to dominate some stuff in ways no one ever thought possible. But you can 100x it and it's still not getting you to the moon.
  • energy123 1y ago
    I have to tap the sign whenever someone talks about "GPT-5" > AI is exceptional for coding! [high-compute scaffold around multiple instances / undisclosed IOI model / AlphaEvolve] > AI is awesome for coding! [Gpt-5 Pro] > AI is somewhat awesome for coding! ["gpt-5" with verbosity "high" and effort "high"] > AI is a pretty good at coding! [ChatGPT 5 Thinking through a Pro subscription with Juice of 128] > AI is mediocre at coding! [ChatGPT 5 Thinking through a Plus subscription with a Juice of 64] > AI sucks at coding! [ChatGPT 5 auto routing]
  • K0balt 1y ago
    LLMs are limited because we want them to do jobs that are not clearly defined / have difficult to measure progress or success metrics / are not fully solved problems (open ended) / have poor grounding in an external reality. Robotics does not suffer from those maladies. There are other hurdles, but none are intractable. I think we might see AI being much, much more effective with embodiment.
    • jazzyjackson 1y ago
      do you know how undefined and difficult to measure it is to load silverware into a dishwasher?
      • K0balt 1y ago
        As someone who actually has built robots to solve similar challenges, I’ve got a pretty good idea of that specific problem. Not too far from putting sticks in a cup, which is doable with a lot of situational variance. Will it do as good a job a competent adult? Probably not. Will it do it as well as the average 6 year old kid? Yeah, probably. But given enough properly loaded dishwashers to work from, I think you might be surprised how effective VLA/VLB models can be. We just need a few hundred thousand man hours of dishwasher loading for training data.
    • chrisco255 1y ago
      What? Robotics will have far more ambiguity and nuance to deal with than language models, and they'll have to analyze realtime audio and video to do so. Jobs are not so clearly defined as you imagine in the real world. For example, explain to me what a plumber does, precisely and how you would train a robot to do so? How do you train it to navigate ANY type of buildings internal plumbing structure and safely repair or install for?
      • K0balt 1y ago
        I don’t think robot plumbers are coming anytime soon lol. Robot warehouse workers, factory robots, cleaning robots, delivery robots, security robots, general services robots, sure. Stuff you can give someone 0-20 hours of training and expect them to do 80% as well as someone who has been doing it for 5 years are the kinds of jobs that robots will be able to do, but perhaps with certain technical skills bolted on. Plumbing a requires the effective understanding and application of engineering knowledge, and I don’t think unsupervised transformer models are going to do that well. Trades like plumbing that take humans 10-20 years to truly master aren’t the low hanging fruit. A robot that can pick up a few boxes of roofing at a time and carry it up the ladder is what we need.
  • juped 1y ago
    I think GPT-5's backlash was the beginning of the end of the hype bubble, but there's a lot of air to let out of it, as with any hype bubble. We'll see it for quite some time yet.
  • bravesoul2 1y ago
    What does that have to do with it? One company (desperate to keep runway), one product, one release.
• btilly 1y ago
  In every technology wave so far, we've disrupted many existing jobs. However we've also opened up new kinds of jobs. And, because it is easier to retrain humans than build machines for those jobs, we wound up with more and better jobs. This is the first technology wave that doesn't just displace humans, but which can be trained to the new job opportunities more easily than humans can. Right now it can't replace humans for a lot of important things. But as its capabilities improve, what do displaced humans transition to? I don't think that we have a good answer to that. And we may need it sooner rather than later. I'd be more optimistic if I trusted our leadership more. But wise political leadership is not exactly a strong point for our country right now.
  • player1234 1y ago
    Improve how? And when? Give us the map. Making a prediction straight into sci fi territory and then become worried about that future is hella lame.
  • yomismoaqui 1y ago
    Don't worry about the political leaders, if a sizeable amount of people lose their jobs they will surely ask GPT-10 how to build a guillotine.
    • HDThoreaun 1y ago
      The french revolution did not go well for the average french person. Not sure guillotines are the solution we need.
      • skinnymuch 1y ago
        How did it not go well for the avg person? The status quo does not go well for the avg person.
        • chrisco255 1y ago
          You should read French history more closely, they went through hell and changed governments at least 5 or 6 times in the 1800s.
• jeffWrld 1y ago
  [dead]
• ahurmazda 1y ago
  When I hear folks glazing some kinda impending jobless utopia , I think of the intervening years. I shudder. As they say, "An empty stomach knows no morality."
  • ares623 1y ago
    This pisses me off so much. So many engineers are so excited to work on and with these systems, opening 20 prs per day to make their employers happy going “yes boss!” They think their $300k total compensation will give them a seat at the table for what they’re cheering on to come. I say that anyone who needed to go the grocery this week will not be spared by the economic downturn this tech promises. Unless you have your own fully stocked private bunker with security detail, you will be affected.
    • voidhorse 1y ago
      Yes. The complete irony in all software engineers enthusiasm for this tech is that, if the boards wishes come true, they are literally helping them eliminate their own jobs. It's like the industrial revolution but worse, because at least the craftsmen weren't also the ones building the factories that would automate them out of work. Marcuse had a term for this "false consciousness"-when the structure of capitalism ends up making people work against their own interests without realizing it, and that is happening big time in software right now. We will still need programmers for hard, novel problems, but all these lazy programmers using AI to write their crud apps don't seem to realize the writing is on the wall.
      • csoups14 1y ago
        Or they realize it and they're trying to squeeze the last bit of juice available to them before the party stops. It's not exactly a suboptimal decision to work towards your own job's demise if it's the best paying work available to you and you want to save up as much as possible before any possible disruption. If you quit, someone else steps into the breach and the outcome is all the same. There's very few people actually steering the ship who have any semblance of control; the rest of us are just along for the ride and hoping we don't go down with the ship.
• aurareturn 1y ago
  We are not there, yet, but if AI could replace a sizable amount of workers, the economic system will be put to a very hard test. Moreover, companies could be less willing to pay for services that their internal AIs can handle or build from scratch. There will be fewer very large companies in terms of human size. There will be many more companies that are much smaller because you don't need as many workers to do the same job. Instead of needing 1000 engineers to build a new product, you'll need 100 now. Those 900 engineers will be working for 9 new companies that weren't viable before because the cost was too big but is now viable. IE. those 9 new companies could never be profitable if it required 1000 engineers each but can totally sustain itself with 100 engineers each.
  • mattnewton 1y ago
    Maybe, or 300 of those engineers will be working for 3 new companies while the other 600 struggle to find gainful employment, even after taking large pay cuts, as their skillsets are replaced rather than augmented. It’s way too early to call afaict
    • aurareturn 1y ago
      Because it's so easy to make new software and sell it using AI, 6 of those 600 people who are unemployed will have ideas that require 100 engineers each to make. They will build a prototype, get funding, and hire 99 engineers each. There are also plenty of ideas that aren't profitable with 2 salaries but is with 1. Many will be able to make those ideas happen with AI helping.
      • breuleux 1y ago
        It'll be easy to make new software. I don't know if it's going to be easy to sell it. The more software AI can write, the more of a commodity software will become, and the harder the value of software will tank. It's not magic.
        • aurareturn 1y ago
• solarkraft 1y ago
  > After all, a plateau of the current systems is possible and very credible, but it would likely stimulate, at this point, massive research efforts in the next step of architectures. A lot of AI’s potential hasn’t even been realized yet. There’s a long tail of integrations and solution building still ahead. A lot of creative applications haven’t been realized yet - arguably for the better, but it will be tried and some will be economical. That’s a case for a moderate economic upturn though.
  • parineum 1y ago
    I'd argue that the applications if LLMs are well known but tgat LLMs currently aren't capable of performing those tasks. Everyone wants to replace their tech support with an LLM but they don't want some clever prompter to get it to run arbitrary queries or have it promise refunds. It's not reliable because it's not intelligent.
    • Paradigma11 1y ago
      I think autonomous support agents are just missing the point. LLMs are tools that empower the user. A support agent is very often in a somewhat adversarial position to the customer. You don't want to empower your adversary. LLMs supporting an actual human customer service agent are fine and useful.
      • layer8 1y ago
        How do you prevent your adversary prompt-injecting your LLM when they communicate with it? Or if you prevent any such communication, how can the LLM be useful?
• mxwsn 1y ago
  AI with ability but without responsibility is not enough for dramatic socioeconomic change, I think. For now, the critical unique power of human workers is that you can hold them responsible for things. edit: ability without accountability is the catchier motto :)
  • ScotterC 1y ago
    I’m surprised that I don’t hear this mentioned more often. Not even in a Eng leadership format of taking accountability for your AI’s pull requests. But it’s absolutely true. Capitalism runs on accountability and trust and we are clearly not going to trust a service that doesn’t have a human responsible at the helm.
  • adriand 1y ago
    This is a great observation. I think it also accounts for what is so exhausting about AI programming: the need for such careful review. It's not just that you can't entirely trust the agent, it's also that you can't blame the agent if something goes wrong.
  • ares623 1y ago
    Removing accountability is a feature
  • leeoniya 1y ago
    i've also made this argument. would you ever trust safety-critical or money-moving software that was fully written by AI without any professional human (or several) to audit it? the answer today is, "obviously not". i dont know if this will ever change, tbh.
    • bbqfog 1y ago
      I would. If something has proven results, it won't matter to me if a human is in the loop or not. Waymo has worked great for me for instance.
      • leeoniya 1y ago
• throwaway20174 1y ago
  Humans have a proven history of re-inventing economic systems, so if AI ends up thinking better than we do (yet unproven this is possible), then we should have superior future systems. But the question is a system optimized for what? That emphasizes huge rewards for the few, and that requires the poverty of some (or many). Or a more fair system. Not different from the challenges of today. I'm skeptical even a very intelligent machine will change the landscape of our dificult decisions, but will accelerate which direction we decide (or is decided for us), that we go.
• intended 1y ago
  Could, if, and maybe. When we discuss how LLMs failed or succeeded, as a norm, we should start including - the language/framework - task, - our experience levels (highly familiar, moderately familiar, I think I suck, unfamiliar) Right now, we know both - Claude is magic, and LLMs are useless, but never how we move between these two states. This level of uncertainty, when economy making quantities of wealth are being moved, is “unhelpful”.
• alex1138 1y ago
  Open letter to tech magnates: By all means, continue to make or improve your Llamas/Geminis (to the latter: stop censoring Literally Everything. Google has a culture problem. To the former... I don't much trust your parent company in general) It will undoubtedly lead to great advances But for the love of god do not tightly bind them to your products (Kagi does it alright, they don't force it on you). Do not make your search results worse. Do NOT put AI in charge of automatic content moderation with 0 human oversight (we know you want to. The economics of it work out nicely for you, with no accountability). People already as is get banned far too easily by your automated systems
  • poink 1y ago
    > It will undoubtedly lead to great advances "Undoubtedly" seems like a level of confidence that is unjustified. Like Travis Kalanick thinking AI is just about to help him discover new physics, this seems to suggest that AI will go from being able to do (at best) what we can already do if we were simply more diligent at our tasks to being something genuinely more than "just" us
    • amanaplanacanal 1y ago
      Angela Collier has a hilarious video on tech bros thinking they can be physicists.
      • mdaniel 1y ago
        Is it this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmJI6qIqURA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmJI6qIqURA and, germane to this discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMoz3gSXBcY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMoz3gSXBcY vibe physics
        • amanaplanacanal 1y ago
          Yes both of those :)
• deepfriedbits 1y ago
  I am a relentlessly optimistic person and this is the first technology that I've seen that worries me in the decades I've been in the biz. It's a wonderful breakthrough, nearly indistinguishable from magic, but we're going to have to figure something out – whether that's Universal Basic Income (UBI) or something along those lines, otherwise, the loss of jobs that is coming will lead to societal unrest or worse.
  • nikolayasdf123 1y ago
    probably "or worse"
• cratermoon 1y ago
  This same link was submitted 2 days ago. My comment there still applies. LLMs do not "understand the human language, write programs, and find bugs in a complex code base" "LLMs are language models, and their superpower is fluency. It’s this fluency that hacks our brains, trapping us into seeing them as something they aren’t." https://jenson.org/timmy/ https://jenson.org/timmy/
• AdieuToLogic 1y ago
  > Since LLMs and in general deep models are poorly understood ... This is demonstrably wrong. An easy refutation to cite is: https://medium.com/@akshatsanghi22/how-to-build-your-own-large-language-model-6f7b5a2dc2b1 https://medium.com/@akshatsanghi22/how-to-build-your-own-lar... As to the rest of this pontification, well... It has almost triple the number of qualifiers (5 if's, 4 could's, and 5 will's) than paragraphs (5).
  • __float 1y ago
    That doesn't mean we _understand_ them, that just means we can put the blocks together to build one.
    • AdieuToLogic 1y ago
      > That doesn't mean we _understand_ them, that just means we can put the blocks together to build one. Perhaps this[0] will help in understanding them then: Foundations of Large Language Models This is a book about large language models. As indicated by the title, it primarily focuses on foundational concepts rather than comprehensive coverage of all cutting-edge technologies. The book is structured into five main chapters, each exploring a key area: pre-training, generative models, prompting, alignment, and inference. It is intended for college students, professionals, and practitioners in natural language processing and related fields, and can serve as a reference for anyone interested in large language models. 0 - https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.09223 https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.09223
      • throwaway314155 1y ago
        I think the real issue here is understanding _you_.
        • AdieuToLogic 1y ago
          > I think the real issue here is understanding _you_. My apologies for being unclear and/or insufficiently explaining my position. Thank you for bringing this to my attention and giving me an opportunity to clarify. The original post stated: Since LLMs and in general deep models are poorly understood ... To which I asserted: This is demonstrably wrong. And provided a link to what I thought to be an approachable tutorial regarding "How to Build Your Own Large Language Model", albeit a simple implementation as it is after all a tutorial. The person having the account name "__float" replied to my post thusly: That doesn't mean we _understand_ them, that just means we can put the blocks together to build one. To which I interpreted the noun "them" to be the acronym "LLM's." I then inferred said acronym to be "Large Language Models." Furthermore, I took __float's sentence fragment: That doesn't mean we _understand_ them ... As an opportunity to share a reputable resource which: .. can serve as a reference for anyone interested in large language models. Is this a sufficient explanation regarding my previous posts such that you can now understand?
• silisili 1y ago
  > Moreover, companies could be less willing to pay for services that their internal AIs can handle or build from scratch. Companies have to be a bit more farsighted than this thinking. Assuming LLMs reach this peak...if say, MS says they can save money because they don't need XYZ anymore because AI can do it, XYZ can decide they don't need Office anymore because AI can do it. There's absolutely no moat anymore. Human capital and the shear volume of code are the current moat. An all capable AI completely eliminates both. It's a bit scary to say "what then?" How do you make money in a world where everyone can more or less do everything themselves? Perhaps like 15 Million Merits, we all just live in pods and pedal bikes all day to power the AI(s).
  • anon-3988 1y ago
    Isn't this exactly the goals of open source software? In an ideal open source world, anything and everything is freely available, you can host and set up anything and everything on your own. Software is now free, and all people care about is the hardware and the electricity bills.
    • bamboozled 1y ago
      This is why I’m not so sure we’re all going to end up in breadlines even if we all lose our jobs, if the systems are that good (tm) then won’t we all just be doing amazing things all the time. We will be tired of winning ?
      • anon-3988 1y ago
        > won’t we all just be doing amazing things all the time. We will be tired of winning ? There's a future where we won't be because to do the amazing things (tm), we need resources that are beyond what the average company can muster. That is to say, what if the large companies becomes so magnificiently efficient and productive that it renders the rest of the small company pointless? What if there's no gaps in the software market anymore because it will be automatically detected and solved by the system?
  • AdieuToLogic 1y ago
• eviks 1y ago
  > AI systems continue to impress with their ability to replicate certain human skills. Even if imperfect, such systems were a few years ago science fiction. In which science fiction were the dreamt up robots as bad?
• _jab 1y ago
  I'm skeptical of arguments like this. If we look at most impactful technologies since the year 2000, AI is not even in my top 3. Social networking, mobile computing, and cloud computing have all done more to alter society and daily life than has AI. And yes, I recognize that AI has already created profound change, in that every software engineer now depends heavily on copilots, in that education faces a major integrity challenge, and in that search has been completely changed. I just don't think those changes are on the same level as the normalization of cutting-edge computers in everyone's pockets, as our personal relationships becoming increasingly online, nor as the enablement for startups to scale without having to maintain physical compute infrastructure. To me, the treating of AI as "different" is still unsubstantiated. Could we get there? Absolutely. We just haven't yet. But some people start to talk about it almost in a way that's reminiscent of Pascal's Wager, as if the slight chance of a godly reward from producing AI means it is rational to devote our all to it. But I'm still holding my breath.
  • c0balt 1y ago
    > in that every software engineer now depends heavily on copilots That is maybe a bubble around the internet. Ime most programmers in my environment rarely use and certainly aren't dependent on it. They do also not only do code monkey-esque web programming so maybe this is sampling bias though it should be enough to refute this point.
    • Raphael_Amiard 1y ago
      Came here to say that. It’s important to remember how biased hacker news is in that regard. I’m just out of ten years in the safety critical market, and I can assure you that our clients are still a long way from being able to use those. I myself work in low level/runtime/compilers, and the output from AIs is often too erratic to be useful
      • djeastm 1y ago
        >our clients are still a long way from being able to use those So it's simply a matter of time >often too erratic to be useful So sometimes it is useful.
• rifty 1y ago
  Every technology tends to replace many more jobs in a given role than which ever existed inducing more demand on its precursors. If the only potential application of this was just language, the historic trend that humans would just fill new roles would hold true. But if we do the same with motor movements with a generalized form factor this is really where the problem emerges. As companies drop more employees moving towards fully automated closed loop production their consumer market fails faster than they can reach a zero cost. Nonetheless I do still believe humans will continue to be the more cost efficient way to come up with and guide new ideas. Many human performed services will remain desirable because of its virtue and our sense of emotion and taste for a moment that other humans are feeling too. But how much of the populous does that engage? I couldn't guess right now. Though if I was to imagine what might make things turn out better it would be that AI is personally ownable, and that everyone owns, at least in title, some energy production which they can do things with.
• throwaway314155 1y ago
  About 3 years late to this "hot take".
• atleastoptimal 1y ago
  This is an accurate assessment. I do feel that there is a routine bias on HN to underplay AI. I think it's people not wanting to lose control or relative status in the world. AI is an existential threat to the unique utility of humans, which has been the last line of defense against absolute despotism (i.e. a tyrannical government will not kill all its citizens because it still needs them to perform jobs. If humans aren't needed to sustain productivity, humans have no leverage against things becoming significantly worse for them, gradually or all at once).
  • prairieroadent 1y ago
    [dead]
  • thrw045 1y ago
    I think AI is still in the weird twilight zone that it was when it first came out in that it's great sometimes and also terrible. I still get hallucinations when I check a response I get with ChatGPT on Google. On the one hand, what it says can't be trusted, on the other, I have debugged code I have written where I was unable to find the bug myself, and ChatGPT found it. I also think a reason AI's are popular and the companies haven't gone under is that probably hundreds of thousands if not millions of people are getting responses that have hallucinations, but the user doesn't know it. I fell into this trap myself after ChatGPT first came out. I became addicted to asking anything and it seemed like it was right. It wasn't until later I started realizing that it was hallucinating information. How prevalent this phenomena is is hard to say but I still think it's pernicious. But as I said before, there are still use cases for AI and that's what makes judging it so difficult.
  • morsecodist 1y ago
    > I do feel that there is a routine bias on HN to underplay AI It's always interesting to see this take because my perception is the exact opposite. I don't think there's ever been an issue for me personally with a bigger mismatch in perceptions than AI. It sometimes feels like the various sides live in different realities.
    • 1y ago
• voidhorse 1y ago
  I agree with the general observation, and I've been of this mind since 2023 (if AI really gets as good as the boosters claim, we will need a new economic system). I usually like Antirez's writing, but this post was a whole lot of...idk nothing? I don't feel like this post said anything interesting, and it was kind incoherent at moments. I think in some respects it's a function of the technology and situation we're in—the current wave of "AI" is still a lot of empty promises and underdelivery. Yes, it is getting better, and yes people are getting clever by letting LLMs use tools, but these things still aren't intelligent insofar as they do not reason. Until we achieve that, I'm not sure there's really as much to fear as everyone thinks. We still need humans in the loop as of now. These tools are still very far from being good enough to fully autonomously manage each other and manage systems, and, arguably, because the systems we build are for humans we will always need humans to understand them to some extent. LLMs can replace labor, but they cannot replace human intent and teleology. One day maybe they will achieve intentions of their own, but that is an entirely different ballgame. The economy ultimately is a battle of intentions, resources, and ends. And the human beings will still be a part of this picture until all labor can be fully automated across the entire suite of human needs. We should also bear in mind our own bias as "knowledge workers". Manual laborers arguably already had their analogous moment. The encoding kept on humming. There isn't anything particularly special about "white collar" work in that regard. The same thing may happen. A new industry requiring new skills might emerge in the fallout of white collar automation. Not to mention, LLMs only work in the digital realm. handicraft artisanry is still a thing and is still, appreciated, albeit in much smaller markets.
• russellbeattie 1y ago
  > "However, if AI avoids plateauing long enough to become significantly more useful..." As William Gibson said, "The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed." Even if LLMs, reasoning algorithms, object recognition, and diffusion models stopped improving today, we're still at a point where massive societal changes are inevitable as the tech spreads out across industries. AI is going to steadily replace chair-to-keyboard interfaces in just about every business you can imagine. Interestingly, AI seems to be affecting the highest level "white collar" professionals first, rather than replacing the lowest level workers immediately, like what happened when blue collar work was automated. We're still pretty far away from AI truck drivers, but people with fine arts or computer science degrees, for example, are already feeling the impact. "Decimation" is definitely an accurate way to describe what's in the process of happening. What used to take 10 floors of white collar employees will steadily decline to just 1. No idea what everyone else will be doing.
• MattDamonSpace 1y ago
  > But stocks are insignificant in the vast perspective of human history This really misunderstands what the stock market tracks
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• tokioyoyo 1y ago
  One thing that doesn’t seem to be discussed with the whole “tech revolution just creates more jobs” angle is that, in the near future, there are no real incentives for that. If we’re going down the route of declining birth rates, it’s implied we’ll also need less jobs. From one perspective, it’s good that we’re trying to over-automate now, so we can sustain ourselves in old age. But decreasing population also implies that we don’t need to create more jobs. I’m most likely wrong, but it just feels off this time around.
  • joshdavham 1y ago
    If there are going to less people in the future, especially as the world ages, I think a lot of this automation will be arriving at the right moment.
    • tokioyoyo 1y ago
      I agree with the idea, but it might get worse for a lot of people, which eventually would spiral down to the general society.
• pton_xd 1y ago
  AI is only different if it reaches a hard takeoff state and becomes self-aware, self-motivated, and self-improving. Until then it's an amazing productivity tool, but only that. And even then we're still decades away from the impact being fully realized in society. Same as the internet.
  • lucisferre 1y ago
    Realistically most people became aware of the internet in the late 90s. Its impact was significantly realized not much more than a decade later.
    • roenxi 1y ago
      In fact the current trends suggest its impact hasn't fully played out yet. We're only just seeing the internet-native generation start to move into politics where communication and organisation has the biggest impact on society. It seems the power of traditional propaganda centres in the corporate media has been, if not broken, badly degraded by the internet too.
  • Davidzheng 1y ago
    Do we not have any sense of wonder in the world anymore? Referring to a system which can pass the Turing test as a "amazing productivity tool" is like viewing human civilization as purely measured by GDP growth.
    • amanaplanacanal 1y ago
      Probably because we have been promised what AI can do in science fiction since before we were born, and the reality of LLMs is so limited in comparison. Instead of Data from Star Trek we got a hopped up ELIZA.
  • nikolayasdf123 1y ago
    Internet did not take away jobs (only relocated support/SWE from USA to India/Vietnam) these AI "productivity" tools straight up eliminating jobs. and in turn wealth that otherwise supported families, humans, and powered economy. it is directly "removing" humans from workforce and from what that work was supporting. not even hard takeoff is necessary for collapse.
• deleted 1y ago
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• Davidzheng 1y ago
  I actually find it hard to understand how the market is supposed to react if the AI capabilities does surpass all humans in all domains. It's first of all not clear such a scenario leads to runaway wealth for a few, even though with no outside events that may be the outcome. However, such scenarios are so unsustainable and catastrophic it's hard to imagine there are no catastrophic reactions to it. How is the market supposed to react if there's a large chance of market collapse and also a large chance of runaway wealth creation? Besides the point that in an economy where AI surpass humans the demands of the market will shift drastically too. Which I also think is underrepresented in predictions, which is the induced demand of AI-replaced labor and the potential for entire industries to be decimated by secondary effects instead of direct AI competition/replacement at labor scale.
  • manyaoman 1y ago
    Agreed, if the author truly thinks the markets are wrong about AI, he should at least let us know what kind of bets he’s making to profit from it. Otherwise the article is just handwaving.
    • mrob 1y ago
      There's no way to profitably bet on the whole economy collapsing.
      • nicce 1y ago
        AI still does not own the land and can't grow the crops without it. So maybe people in agriculture are winners. We always need food.
      • neom 1y ago
        Become a social worker, or an undertaker.
• crummy 1y ago
  > However, if AI avoids plateauing long enough to become significantly more useful and independent of humans, this revolution is going to be very unlike the past ones. Yet the economic markets are reacting as if they were governed by stochastic parrots. Aren't the markets massively puffed up by AI companies at the moment? edit: for example, the S&P500's performance with and without the top 10 (which is almost totally tech companies) looks very different: https://i.imgur.com/IurjaaR.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/IurjaaR.jpeg
  • karakot 1y ago
    As someone who keeps 401k 100% in sp500 that scares me. If the bubble pops it will erase half of gains, if the bubble continues then the gap(490 vs 10) will grow even larger.
• Ericson2314 1y ago
  The right way to think about "jobs" is that we could have given ourselves more leisure on the basis of previous technological progress than we actually did.
  • neom 1y ago
    Economics Explained recently did a good video about this idea: - Why do We Still Need to Work? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KXZP-Deel4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KXZP-Deel4
• vivzkestrel 1y ago
  I ll happily believe it the day something doesnt adhere to the Gartner cycle, until then it is just another bubble like dotcom, chatbots, crypto and the 456345646 things that came before it
• s_ting765 1y ago
  I find it funny that almost every talking point made about AI is done in future tense. Most of the time without any presentation of evidence supporting those predictions.
• itsalotoffun 1y ago
  > The future may reduce the economic prosperity and push humanity to switch to some different economic system (maybe a better system). Markets don’t want to accept that. [Emphasis added] What a silly premise. Markets don't care. All markets do is express the collective opinion; in the short term as a voting machine, in the long term as a weighing machine. Seeing a real uptick of socio-policital prognostication from extremely smart, soaked-in-AI, tech people (like you Salvatore!), casting heavy doom-laden gestures towards the future. You're not even wrong! But this "I see something you all clearly don't" narrative, wafer thin on real analysis, packed with "the feels", coated with what-ifs.. it's sloppy thinking and I hold you to a higher standard antirez.
  • sota_pop 1y ago
    > “… as a voting… as a weighing…” I’m sure I remember that as a graham, munger, or buffet quote. > “not even wrong” - nice, one of my favorites from Pauli.
    • djeastm 1y ago
      Definitely Benjamin Graham, though Buffett (two T's) brought it back
  • xpe 1y ago
    > All markets do is express the collective opinion; in the short term as a voting machine, in the long term as a weighing machine. I prefer the concepts and rigor from political economy: markets are both preference aggregators and coordination mechanisms. Does your framing (voting machines and weighing machines) offer more clarity and if so, how? I’m not seeing it.
    • acivitillo 1y ago
      His framing is that markets are collective consensus and if you claim to “know better”, you need to write a lot more than a generic post. It’s so simple, and it is a reminder that antirez’s reputation as a software developer does not automatically translate to economics expert.
• tgbugs 1y ago
  I think there is an unspoken implication built into the assumption that AI will be able to replace a wide variety of existing jobs, and that is that those current jobs are not being done efficiently. This is sometimes articulated as bullshit jobs, etc. and if AI takes over those the immediate next thing that will happen is that AI will look around ask why _anyone_ was doing that job in the first place. The answer was articulated 70 years ago in [0]. The only question is how much fat there is to trim as the middle management is wiped out because the algorithms have determined that they are completely useless and mostly only increase cost over time. Now, all the AI companies think that they are going to be deriving revenue from that fat, but those revenue streams are going to disappear entirely because a huge number of purely politic positions inside corporations will vanish, because if they do not the corporation will go bankrupt competing with other companies that have already cut the fat. There won't be additional revenue streams that get spent on the bullshit. The good news is that labor can go somewhere else, and we will need it due to a shrinking global population, but the cushy bullshit management job is likely disappear. At some point AI agents will cease to be sycophantic and when fed the priors for the current situation that a company is in will simply tell it like it is, and might even be smart enough to get the executives to achieve the goal they actually stated instead of simply puffing up their internal political position, which might include a rather surprising set of actions that could even lead to the executive being fired if the AI determines that they are getting in the way of the goal [1]. Fun times ahead. 0. https://web.archive.org/web/20180705215319/https://www.economist.com/news/1955/11/19/parkinsons-law https://web.archive.org/web/20180705215319/https://www.econo... 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evitable_Conflict https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evitable_Conflict
• Sateeshm 1y ago
  We are too far from exploring alternate economies. LLMs will not push us there, atleast not in their current state.
• ETH_start 1y ago
  [dead]
• jongjong 1y ago
  People thought it was the end of history and innovation would be all about funding elaborate financial schemes; but now with AI people are finding themselves running all these elaborate money-printing machines and they're unsure if they should keep focusing on those schemes as before or actually try to automate stuff. The risk barrier has been lowered a lot to actually innovate, almost as low risk as doing a scheme but still people are having doubts. Maybe because people don't trust the system to reward real innovation. LLMs feel like a fluke, like OpenAI was not intended to succeed... And even now that it succeeded and they try to turn the non-profit into a for-profit, it kind of feels like they don't even fully believe their own product in terms of its economic capacity and they're still trying to sell the hype as if to pump and dump it.
  • andai 1y ago
    They've made it pretty clear with the GPT-5 launch that they don't understand their product or their users. They managed to simultaneously piss off technical and non-technical people. It doesn't seem like they ever really wanted to be a consumer company. Even in the GPT-5 launch they kept going on about how surprised they are that ChatGPT got any users.
• strogonoff 1y ago
  As any other technology, at the end of the day LLMs are used by humans for humans’ selfish, driven by mental issues and trauma and overcompensation, maybe even paved with good intentions but leading you know where, short-sighted goals. If we were to believe that LLMs are going to somehow become extremely powerful, then we should be concerned, as it is difficult to imagine how that can lead to an optimal outcome organically. From the beginning, corporations and their collaborators at the forefront of this technology tainted it by ignoring the concept of intellectual property ownership (which had been with us in many forms for hundreds if not thousands of years) in the name of personal short-term gain and shareholder interest or some “the ends justify the means” utilitarian calculus.
• econ 1y ago
  For me it maps elegantly on previous happenings. When the radio came people almost instantly stopped singing and playing instruments. Many might not be aware of it but for thousands of years singing was a normal expression of a good mood and learning to play an instrument was a gateway to lifting the mood. Dancing is still in working order but it lacks the emotional depth that provided a window into the soul of those you live and work with. A simpler example is the calculator. People stopped doing it by hand and forgot how. Most desk work is going to get obliterated. We are going to forget how. The underlings on the work floor currently know little to nothing about management. If they can query an AI in private it will point out why their idea is stupid or it will refine it into something sensible enough to try. Eventually you say the magic words and the code to make it so happens. If it works you put it live. No real thinking required. Early on you probably get large AI cleanup crews to fix the hallucinations (with better prompts)
  • otabdeveloper4 1y ago
    > for thousands of years singing was a normal expression of a good mood Back in the day singing was what everybody did to pass the time. (Especially in boring and monotonous situations.)
    • owebmaster 1y ago
      That is exactly what I would do when I needed to drive to an office.
  • ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago
    Humans sing. I sing every day, and I don't have any social or financial incentives driving me to do so. I also listen to the radio and other media, still singing.
    • econ 1y ago
      Do others sing along? Do they sing the songs you've written? I think we lost a lot there. I can't even begin to imagine it. Thankfully singing happy birthday is mandatory - the fight isn't over! People also still have conversations despite phones. Some even talk all night at the kitchen table. Not everyone, most don't remember how.
• gamerDude 1y ago
  I don't think I agree. I think it's the same and there is great potential for totally new things to appear and for us to work on. For example, one path may be: AI, Robotics, space travel all move forward in leaps and bounds. Then there could be tons of work in creation from material things from people who didn't have the skills before and physical goods gets a huge boost. We travel through space and colonize new planets, dealing with new challenges and environments that we haven't dealt with before. Another path: most people get rest and relaxation as the default life path, and the rest get to pursue their hobbies as much as they want since the AI and robots handle all the day to day.
• Waterluvian 1y ago
  The thing that blows me away is that I woke up one day and was confronted with a chat bot that could communicate in near perfect English. I dunno why exactly but that’s what felt the most stunning about this whole era. It can screw up the number of fingers in an image or the details of a recipe or misidentify elements of an image, etc. but I’ve never seen it make a typo or use improper grammar or whatnot.
  • sebmellen 1y ago
    In a sense, LLMs emergently figured out the deep structure of language before we did, and that’s the most remarkable thing about them.
    • hashmush 1y ago
      I dunno, it seems you have figured it out too, probably before LLMs? I'd say all speakers of all languages have figured it out and your statement is quite confusing, at least to me.
      • Waterluvian 1y ago
        We all make grammar mistakes but I’ve yet to see the main LLMs make any.
      • sebmellen 1y ago
        Yes of course we’ve implicitly learned those rules, but we have not been able to articulate them fully ala Chomsky. Somehow, LLMs have those rules stored within a finite set of weights. https://slator.com/how-large-language-models-prove-chomsky-wrong-with-steven-piantadosi/ https://slator.com/how-large-language-models-prove-chomsky-w...
  • nikolayasdf123 1y ago
    also, how quickly we moved from "it types nonsense" to "it can solve symbolic math, write code, test code, write programs, use bash, and tools, plan long-horizon actions, execute autonomously, ..."
• iLoveOncall 1y ago
  > However, if AI avoids plateauing long enough I'm not sure how someone can seriously write this after the release of GPT-5. Models have started to plateau since ChatGPT came out (3 years ago) and GPT-5 has been the final nail in this coffin.
  • andai 1y ago
    o3 was actually GPT-5. They just gave it a stupid name, and made it impractical for general usage. But in terms of wow factor, it was a step change on the order of GPT-3 -> GPT-4. So now they're stuck slapping the GPT-5 label on marginal improvements because it's too awkward to wait for the next breakthrough now. On that note, o4-mini was much better for general usage (speed and cost). It was my go-to for web search too, significantly better than 4o and only took a few seconds longer. (Like a mini Deep Research.) Boggles the mind that they removed it from the UI. I'm adding it back to mine right now.
    • iLoveOncall 1y ago
      I have acid reflux every time I see the term "step change" used to talk about a model change. There hasn't been any model that has been a "step change" over its predecessor. It's much more like each new model climbs another step of the ladder that goes up the step, and so far we can't even see the top of the ladder. My suspicion is also that the ladder actually ends way before it reaches the next step, and LLMs are a dead end. Everything indicates it so far. Let's not even talk about "reasoning models", aka spend twice the tokens and twice the time on the same answer.
• codr7 1y ago
  The biggest difference to me is that it seems to change people in bad ways, just from interacting with it. Language is a very powerful tool for transformation, we already knew this. Letting it loose on this scale without someone behind the wheel is begging for trouble imo.
• ausbah 1y ago
  i don’t this article really says anything that hasn’t been already said for the past two years. “if AI actually take jobs, it will be a near-apocalyptic system shock if there aren’t news jobs to replace them”. i still think it’s at best too soon to say if jobs have permanently been lost they are tremendous tools but seems like they make a near equal amount of work from the stuff the save time on
• abhaynayar 1y ago
  At the moment I just don't see AI in its current state or future trajectory as a threat to jobs. (Not that there can't be other reasons why jobs are getting harder to get). Predictions are hard, and breakthroughs can happen, so this is just my opinion. Posting this comment as a record to myself on how I feel of AI - since my opinion on how useful/capable AI is has gone up and down and up and down again over the last couple of years. Most recently down because I worked on two separate projects over the last few weeks with the latest models available on GitHub Copilot Pro. (GPT-5, Claude Sonnet 4, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and some lesser capable ones at times as well). Trying the exact same queries for code changes across all three models for a majority of the queries. I saw myself using Claude most, but it still wasn't drastically better than others, and still made too many mistakes. One project was a simple health-tracking app in Dart/Flutter. Completely vibe-coded, just for fun. I got basic stuff to start working. Over the days I kept finding bugs as I starting using it. Since I truly wanted to use this app in my daily life, at one point I just gave up cause fixing the bugs was getting way too annoying. Most "fixes" as I later got into the weeds of it, were wrong, with wrong assumptions, made changes that seemed to fix the problem at the surface but introducing more bugs and random garbage, despite giving a ton of context and instructions on why things are supposed to be a certain way, etc. I was constantly fighting with the model. Would've been much easier to do much more on my own and using it a little bit. Another project was in TypeScript, where I did actually use my brain, not just vibe-coded. Here, AI models were helpful because I mostly used them to explain stuff. And did not let them make more than a few lines of code changes at most at a time. There was a portion of the project which I kinda "isolated" which I completely vibe-coded and I don't mind if it breaks or anything as it is not critical. It did save me some time but I certainly could've done it on my own with a little more time, while having code that I can understand fully well and edit. So the way I see using these models right now is for research/prototyping/throwaway kind of stuff. But even in that, I literally had Claude 4 teach me something wrong about TypeScript just yesterday. It told me a certain thing was deprecated. I made a follow up question on why that thing is deprecated and what's used instead, it replied with something like "Oops! I misspoke, that is not actually true, that thing is still being used and not deprecated." Like, what? Lmao. For how many things have I not asked a follow up and learnt stuff incorrectly? Or asked and still learnt incorrectly lmao. I like how straightforward GPT-5 is. But apart from that style of speech I don't see much other benefit. I do love LLMs for personal random searches like facts/plans/etc. I just ask the LLM to suggest me what to do just to rubber duck or whatever. Do all these gains add up towards massive job displacement? I don't know. Maybe. If it is saving 10% time for me and everyone else, I guess we do need 10% less people to do the same work? But is the amount of work we can get paid for fixed and finite? Idk. We (individuals) might have to adapt and be more competitive than before depending on our jobs and how they're affected, but is it a fundamental shift? Are these models or their future capabilities human replacements? Idk. At the moment, I think they're useful but overhyped. Time will tell though.
• fraboniface 1y ago
  On this, read Daniel Susskind - A world without work (2020). He says exactly this: the new tasks created by AI can in good part themselves be done by AI, if not as soon as they appear then a few years of improvement later. This will inevitably affect the job market and the relative importance of capital and labor in the economy. Unchecked, this will worsen inequalities and create social unrest. His solution will not please everyone: Big State. Higher taxes and higher redistribution, in particular in the form of conditional basic income (he says universal isn't practically feasible, like what do you do with new migrants).
  • xpe 1y ago
    Characterizing government along only one axis, such as “big” versus “small”, can overlook important differences having to do with: legal authority, direct versus indirect programs, tax base, law enforcement, and more. In the future, I could imagine some libertarians having their come to AI Jesus moment getting behind a smallish government that primarily collects taxes and transfers wealth while guiding (but not operating directly) a minimal set of services.
• eternauta3k 1y ago
  At some point far in the future, we don't need an economy: everyone does everything they need by themselves, helped by AI and replicators. But realistically, you're not going to have a personal foundry anytime soon.
  • juniperus 1y ago
    resources and materials will still be required, and economics will spawn from this trade.
  • DrewADesign 1y ago
    Economics is essentially the study of resource allocation. We will have resources that will need to be allocated. I really doubt that AI will somehow neutralize the economies of scale in various realms that make centralized manufacturing necessary, let alone economics in general.
    • willguest 1y ago
      I so wish this were true, but unfortunately economics has a catch-all called "externalities" for anything that doesn't fit neatly into its implicit assessments of what value is. Pollution is tricky, so we push it outside the boundaries of value-estimation, along with any social nuance that we deem unquantifiable, and carry on as is everything is understood.
      • DrewADesign 1y ago
        economics being deeply imperfect doesn’t really change my point
        • willguest 1y ago
          Indeed, but I think it renders your point obsolete, since deeply imperfect resource allocation isn't really resource allocation at all, it is (in this case) resource accumulation. Are you suggesting that compound interest serves to redistribute the wealth coming from extractive industries?
• andrewmutz 1y ago
  Reading smart software people talk about AI in 2025 is basically just reading variations on the lump of labor fallacy. If you want to understand what AI can do, listen to computer scientists. If you want to understand it’s likely impact on society, listen to economists.
  • nibnalin 1y ago
    What or whose writing or podcasts would you recommend reading / listening?
    • snapey 1y ago
      Tyler Cowen has a lot of interesting things to say on the impact of AI on the economy. His recent talk at DeepMind is a good place to start https://www.aipolicyperspectives.com/p/a-discussion-with-tyler-cowen https://www.aipolicyperspectives.com/p/a-discussion-with-tyl...
  • victorbjorklund 1y ago
    100%. Just because someone understands how a NN works does not mean they understand the impact it has on the economy, society, etc. They could of course be right. But they don't have any more insight than any other average smart person does.
    • DrewADesign 1y ago
      The “I think I understand a field because I think I understand the software for that field,” thing is a perennial problem in the tech world.
      • exasperaited 1y ago
        Indeed it is -- it's perhaps the central way developers offend their customers, let alone misunderstand them. One problem is it is met from the other side by customers who think they understand software but don't actually have the training to visualise the consequences of design choices in real life. Good software does require cross-domain knowledge that goes beyond "what existing apps in the market do". I have in the last few years implemented a bit of software where a requirement had been set by a previous failed contractor and I had to say, look, I appreciate this requirement is written down and signed off, but my mother worked in your field for decades, I know what kind of workload she had, what made it exhausting, and I absolutely know that she would have been so freaking furious at the busywork this implementation will create: it should never have got this far. So I had to step outside the specification, write the better functionality to prove my point, and I don't think realistically I was ever compensated for it, except metaphysically: fewer people out there are viscerally imagining inflicting harm on me as a psychological release.
• Rob_Polding 1y ago
  GenAI is a bubble, but that’s not the same as the broader field of AI, which is completely different. We will probably not even be using chat bots in a few years, better interfaces will be developed with real intelligence, not just predictive statistics.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• cjfd 1y ago
  If we accept the possibility that AI is going to be more intelligent than humans the outcome is obvious. Humans will no longer be needed and either go extinct or maybe be kept by the AI as we now keep pets or zoo animals.
• mycentstoo 1y ago
  I am just not having this experience of AI being terribly useful. I don’t program as much in my role but I’ve found it’s a giant time sink. I recognize that many people are finding it incredibly helpful but when I get deeper into a particular issue or topic, it falls very flat.
  • alex-moon 1y ago
    This is my view on it too. Antirez is a Torvalds-level legend as far as I'm concerned, when he speaks I listen - but he is clearly seeing something here that I am not. I can't help but feel like there is an information asymmetry problem more generally here, which I guess is the point of this piece, but I also don't think that's substantially different to any other hype cycle - "What do they know that I don't?" Usually nothing.
    • tim333 1y ago
      A lot of AI optimist views are driven more by Moore's law like advances in the hardware rather than LLM algorithms being that special. Indeed the algorithms need to change really so future AIs can think and learn rather than just be pretrained. If you read Moravec's paper written in 1989 predicting human level AI progress around now (mid 2020s) there's nothing about LLMs or specific algorithms - it's all Moore's law type stuff. But it's proved pretty accurate.
  • dsign 1y ago
    The argument goes like this: - Today, AI is not incredibly useful and we are not 100% sure that it will improve forever, specially in a way that makes economic sense, but - Investors are pouring lots of money into it. One should not assume that those investors are not making their due diligence. They are. The figures they have obtained from experts mean that AI is expected to continue improving in the short and medium term. - Investors are not counting on people using AI to go to Mars. They are betting on AI replacing labor. The slice of the pie that is currently captured by labor, will be captured by capital instead. That's why they are pouring the money with such enthusiasm [^1]. The above is nothing new; it has been constantly happening since the Industrial Revolution. What is new is that AI has the potential to replace all of the remaining economic worth of humans, effectively leaving them out of the economy. Humans can still opt to "forcefully" participate in the economy or its rewards; though it's unclear if we will manage. In terms of pure economic incentives though, humans are destined to become redundant. [^1]: That doesn't mean all the jobs will go away overnight, or that there won't be new jobs in the short and medium term.
• grumpy-de-sre 1y ago
  Honestly the long-term consequences of Baumol's disease scare me more than some AI driven job disruption dystopia. If we want to continue on the path of increased human development we desperately need to lift the productivity of a whole bunch of labor intensive sectors. We're going to need to seriously think about how to redistribute the gains, but that's an issue regardless of AI (things like effective tax policy).
  • mdaniel 1y ago
    I didn't recognize that expression, so in case others were in the same boat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
• yard2010 1y ago
  I think so too - the latest AI changes mark the new "automate everything" era. When everything is automated, everything costs basically zero, as this will eliminate the most expensive part of every business - human labor. No one will make money from all the automated stuff, but no one would need the money anyway. This will create a society in which money is not the only value pursued. Instead of trying to chase papers, people would do what they are intended to - create art and celebrate life. And maybe fight each other for no reason. I'm flying, ofc, this is just a weird theory I had in the back of my head for the past 20 years, and it seems like we're getting there. Antirez you are the best
  • Guthur 1y ago
    It will only be zero as long as we don't allow rent seeking behaviour. If the technology has gatekeepers, if energy is not provided at a practically infinite capacity and if people don't wake themselves from the master/slave relationships we seem to so often desire and create, then I'm skeptical. The latter one is probably the most intellectually interesting and potentially intractable... I completely disagree with idea that money is currently the only driver of human endeavour, frankly it's demonstrably not true, at least not in it's direct use value, it maybe used as a proxy for power but it's also not directly correlatable. Looking at it intellectually from a Hegelian lens of master/slave dialectic might provide some interesting insights. I think both sides are in some way usurped. The slaves position of actualisation through productive creation is taken via automation, but if that automation is also widely and freely available the masters position of status via subjection is also made common and therefore without status. What does it all mean in the long run? Damned if I know...
  • globular-toast 1y ago
    You are forgetting that there is actually scarcity built into the planet. We are already very from being sustainable, we're eating into reserves that will never come back. There are only so many nice places to go on holiday. Only so much space to grow food etc. Economics isn't about money, it's about scarcity.
  • righthand 1y ago
    Are humans meant to create art and celebrate life. That just seems like something people into automation tell people. Really as a human I’ve physically evolved to move and think in a dynamic way. But automation has reduced the need for me to work and think. Do you not know the earth is saturated with artists already? There’s whole class of people that consider themselves technically minded and not really artists. Will they just roll over and die? Everything basically costs zero is a pipe dream where there is no social order or economic system. Even in your basically zero system there is a lot of cost being hand waved away. I think you need a rethink on your 20 year thought.
• ekianjo 1y ago
  For every industrial revolution (and we dont even know if AI is one yet) this kind of doom prediction has been around. AI will obviously create a lot of jobs too. the infra to run AI will not building itself, the people who train models will still be needed, the AI supervisors or managers or whatever we call it will be necessary part of the new workflows. And if your job needs hands you will be largely unaffected as there is no near future where robots will replace the flexibility of what most humans can do.
• jrvarela56 1y ago
  This whole ‘what are we going to do’ I think is way out of proportion even if we do end up with agi. Let’s say whatever the machines do better than humans, gets done by machines. Suddenly the bottleneck is going to shift to those things where humans are better. We’ll do that and the machines will try to replace that labor too. And then again, and again. Throughout this process society becomes wealthier, TVs get cheaper, we colonize Mars, etc. The force that keeps this going is human insatisfaction: once we get these things we’ll want whatever it is we don’t have. Maybe that’s the problem we should focus on solving…
  • fmbb 1y ago
    > Throughout this process society becomes wealthier, TVs get cheaper, we colonize Mars, etc. The force that keeps this going is human insatisfaction: once we get these things we’ll want whatever it is we don’t have. What makes you think the machines will both be smarter and better than us but also be our slaves to make human society better. Is equine society better now than before they started working with humans? (Personally I believe AGI is just hype and nobody knows how anyone could build it and we will never do, so I’m not worried about that facet of thinking machine tech.)
    • jrvarela56 1y ago
      The machine doesn’t suffer if you ask it to do things 24/7. In that sense, they are not slaves. As to why they’d do what we ask them to, the only reason they do anything is because some human made a request. In this long chain there will obv be machine to machine requests, but in the aggregate it’s like the economy right now but way more automated. Whenever I see arguments about AI changing society, I just replace AI with ‘the market’ or ‘capitalism’. We’re just speeding up a process that started a while ago, maybe with the industrial revolution? I’m not saying this isn’t bad in some ways, but it’s the kind of bad we’ve been struggling with for decades due to misaligned incentives (global warming, inequality, obesity, etc). What I’m saying is that AI isn’t creating new problems. It’s just speeding up society.
      • fmbb 1y ago
• globular-toast 1y ago
  We currently work more than we ever have. Just a couple of generations ago it was common for a couple to consist of one person who worked for someone else or the public, and one who worked at home for themselves. Now we pretty much all have to work for someone else full time then work for ourselves in the evening. And that won't make you rich, it will just make you normal. Maybe a "loss of jobs" is what we need so we can go back working for ourselves, cooking our own food, maintaining our own houses etc. This is why I doubt it will happen. I think "AI" will just end up making us work even more for even less.
• sawyna 1y ago
  Unpopular opinion: Let us say AI achieves general intelligence levels. We tend to think of current economy, jobs, research as a closed system, but indeed it is a very open system. Humans want to go to space, start living on other planets, travel beyond solar system, figure out how to live longer and so on. The list is endless. Without AI, these things would take a very long time. I believe AI will accelerate all these things. Humans are always ambitious. That ambition will push us to use AI more than it's capabilities. The AI will get better at these new things and the cycle repeats. There's so much humans know and so much more that we don't know. I'm less worried about general intelligence. Rather in more worried about how humans are going to govern themselves. That's going to decide whether we will do great things or end humanity. Over the last 100 years, we start thinking more about "how" to do something rather than the "why". Because "how" is becoming more and more easier. Today it's much more easier and tomorrow even more. So nobody's got the time to ask "why" we are doing something, just "how" to do something. With AI I can do more. That means everyone can do more. That means governments can do so much more. Large scale things in a short period. If those things are wrong or have irreversible consequences, we are screwed.
• xg15 1y ago
  > Nor is it possible to imagine a system where a few mega companies are the only providers of intelligence Why not? This seems to be exactly where we're headed right now, and the current administration seems to be perfectly fine with that trend. If you follow the current logic of AI proponents, you get essentially: (1) Almost all white-collar jobs will be done better or at least faster by AI. (2) The "repugnant conclusion": AI gets better if and only if you throw more compute and training data at it. The improvements of all other approaches will be tiny in comparison. (3) The amount of capital needed to play the "more compute/more training data" game is already insanely high and will only grow further. So only the largest megacorps will be even able to take part in the competition. If you combine (1) with (3), this means that, over time, the economic choice for almost any white-collar job would be to outsource it to the data centers of the few remaining megacorps.
  • brap 1y ago
    I find it extremely hard to believe that ASI will still require enormous investments in a post-ASI world. The initial investment? Likely. But there have to be more efficient ways to build intelligence, and ASI will figure it out. It did not take trillions of dollars to produce you and I.
    • xg15 1y ago
      Maybe in a few decades or so, but medium-term, there seems to be a race of who can built the largest data centers. https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/the-ai-bubble-is-so-big-its-propping https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/the-ai-bubble-is-so-big-...
    • layer8 1y ago
      The efficient ways (biotech?) are still likely to require massive investments, maybe not unlike chip fabs that cost billions. And then IP and patents come in.
    • walleeee 1y ago
      > It did not take trillions of dollars to produce you and I. Indeed, an alien ethnographer might be forgiven for boggling at the speed and enthusiasm with which we are trading a wealth of the most advanced technology in the known universe for a primitive, wasteful, fragile facsimile of it.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• yapyap 1y ago
  Well this is a pseudo-smart article if I’ve ever seen one. “It was not even clear that we were so near to create machines that could understand the human language, write programs, and find bugs in a complex code base” The author is critical of the professionals in AI saying “ even the most prominent experts in the field failed miserably again and again to modulate the expectations” yet without a care sets the expectation of LLMs understanding human language in the first paragraph. Also it’s a lot of if this then that, the summary of it would be: if AI can continue to grow it might become all encompassing. To me it reads like a baseless article written by someone blinded by their love for AI to see what a good blogpost is but not yet blinded enough to claim ‘AGI is right around the corner’. Pretty baseless but safe enough to have it rest on conditionals.
• 0points 1y ago
  antirez should retire, his recent nonsense AI take is shadowing his merits as a competent programmer.
• howtofly 1y ago
  > The future may reduce the economic prosperity and push humanity to switch to some different economic system (maybe a better system). Humans never truly produce anything; they only generate various forms of waste (resulting from consumption). Human technology merely enables the extraction of natural resources across magnitudes, without actually creating any resources. Given its enormous energy consumption, I strongly doubt that AI will contribute to a better economic system.
  • mcherm 1y ago
    > Humans never truly produce anything; they only generate various forms of waste Counterpoint: nurses.
  • diggan 1y ago
    > Humans never truly produce anything; they only generate various forms of waste What a sad way of viewing huge fields of creative expressions. Surely, a person sitting on a chair in a room improvising a song with a guitar is producing something not considered "waste"?
    • howtofly 1y ago
      It's all about human technology, which enables massive resource consumption. I should really say humans never truly produce anything in the realm of technology industry.
      • diggan 1y ago
        But that's clearly not true for every technology. Photoshop, Blender and similar creative programs are "technology", and arguably they aren't as resource-intensive as the current generative AI hype, yet humans used those to create things I personally wouldn't consider "waste".
        • howtofly 1y ago
          The real issue is determining how much non-renewable resource consumption is justified for these "valuable" things? Note that we are always inclined to value ourselves too much. I agree the things you mentioned are valuable in the very common sense and I deliberately assign them no value to the avoid the above issue.
• yubblegum 1y ago
  Butlerian Jihad it is then.
• tobyhinloopen 1y ago
  It's not a matter of "IF" LLM/AI will replace a huge amount of people, but "WHEN". Consider the current amount of somewhat low-skilled administrative jobs - these can be replaced with the LLM/AI's of today. Not completely, but 4 low-skill workers can be replaced with 1 supervisor, controlling the AI agent(s). I'd guess, within a few years, 5 to 10% of the total working population will be unemployable due to no fault of their own, because they have relevant skill left, and they are incapable of learning anything that cannot be done by AI.
  • CSSer 1y ago
    I'm not at all skeptical of the logical viability of this, but look at how many company hierarchies exist today that are full stop not logical yet somehow stay afloat. How many people do you know that are technical staff members who report to non-technical directors who themselves have two additional supervisors responsible for strategy and communication who have no background, let alone (former) expertise, in the fields of the teams they're ultimately responsible for? A lot of roles exist just to deliver good or bad news to teams, be cheerleaders, or have a "vision" that is little more than a vibe. These people could not direct a prompt to give them what they want because they have no idea what that is. They'll know it when they see it. They'll vaguely describe it to you and others and then shout "Yes, that's it!" when they see what you came up with or, even worse, whenever the needle starts to move. When they are replaced it will be with someone else from a similar background rather than from within. It's a really sad reality. My whole career I've used tools that "will replace me" and every. single. time. all that has happened is that I have been forced to use it as yet another layer of abstraction so that someone else might use it once a year or whenever they get a wild feeling. It's really just about peace of mind. This has been true of every CMS experience I've ever made. It has nothing to do with being able to "do it themselves". It's about a) being able to blame someone else and b) being able to take it and go when that stops working without starting over. Moreover, I have, on multiple occasions, watched a highly paid, highly effective individual be replaced with a low-skilled entry-level employee for no reason other than cost. I've also seen people hire someone just to increase headcount. LLMs/AI have/has not magically made things people do not understand less scary. But what about freelancers, brave souls, and independent types? Well, these people don't employ other people. They live on the bleeding edge and will use anything that makes them successful.
• yubblegum 1y ago
  Clear long term winners are energy producers. AI can replace everything including hardware design & production but it can not produce energy out of thin air.
• keiferski 1y ago
  There’s a simple flaw in this reasoning: Just because X can be replaced by Y today doesn’t imply that it can do so in a Future where we are aware of Y, and factor it into the background assumptions about the task. In more concrete terms: if “not being powered by AI” becomes a competitive advantage, then AI won’t be meaningfully replacing anything in that market. You can already see this with YouTube: AI-generated videos are a mild amusement, not a replacement for video creators, because made by AI is becoming a negative label in a world where the presence of AI video is widely known. Of course this doesn’t apply to every job, and indeed many jobs have already been “replaced” by AI. But any analysis which isn’t reflectively factoring in the reception of AI into the background is too simplistic.
  • keiferski 1y ago
    Just to further elaborate on this with another example: the writing industry. (Technical, professional, marketing, etc. writing - not books.) The default logic is that AI will just replace all writing tasks, and writers will go extinct. What actually seems to be happening, however, is this: - obviously written-by-AI copywriting is perceived very negatively by the market - companies want writers that understand how to use AI tools to enhance productivity, but understand how to modify copy so that it doesn’t read as AI-written - the meta-skill of knowing what to write in the first place becomes more valuable, because the AI is only going to give you a boilerplate plan at best And so the only jobs that seem to have been replaced by AI directly, as of now, are the ones writing basically forgettable content, report-style tracking content, and other low level things. Not great for the jobs lost, but also not a death sentence for the entire profession of writing.
    • zarzavat 1y ago
      The assumption here is that LLMs will never pass the Turing test for copywriting, i.e. AI writing will always be distinguishable from human writing. Given that models that produce intelligible writing didn't exist a few years ago, that's a very bold assumption.
      • keiferski 1y ago
• scrollaway 1y ago
  Humans Need Not Apply - Posted exactly 11 years ago this week. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
  • mdaniel 1y ago
    I wish I could upvote this a million times, I love his content so much Coincidentally, I'm reading your comment while wearing my CGP Grey t-shirt
• HellDunkel 1y ago
  Is it true that current LLMs can find bugs in complex codebases? I mean, they can also find bugs in otherwise perfectly working code
  • ansgri 1y ago
    With some luck, yes. I’ve had o3 in cursor successfully diagnose a couple of quite obscure bugs in multithreaded component interactions, on which I’d probably spend a couple of days otherwise.
• ThomPete 1y ago
  It's really very simple. We used to have deterministic systems that required humans either through code, terminals or interfaces (ex GUI's) to change what they were capable of. If we wanted to change something about the system we would have to create that new skill ourselves. Now we have non-deterministic systems that can be used to create deterministic systems that can use non-deterministic systems to create more deterministic systems. In other words deterministic systems can use LLMs and LLMs can use deterministic systems all via natural language. This slight change in how we can use compute have incredible consequences for what we will be able to accomplish both regarding cleaning up old systems and creating completely new ones. LLMs however will always be limited by exploring existing knowledge. They will not be able to create new knowledge. And so the AI winter we are entering is different because it's only limited to what we can train the AI to do, and that is limited to what new knowledge we can create. Anyone who work with AI everyday know that any idea of autonomous agents is so beyond the capabilities of LLMs even in principle that any worry about doom or unemployment by AI is absurd.
• netcan 1y ago
  Here's what I want. A compilation of claims, takes, narratives, shills, expectations and predictions from the late 90s "information superhighway" era. I wonder if LLMs can produce this. A lot of the dotcom exuberance was famously "correct, but off by 7 years." But... most of it flat wrong. Right but early applies mostly to the meta investment case: "the internet business will be big." One that stands out in my memory is "turning billion dollar industries into million dollar industries." With ubiquitous networked computers, banking and financial services could become "mostly software." Banks and whatnot would all become hyper-efficient Vanguard-like companies. We often starts with an observation that economies are efficiency seeking. Then we imagine the most efficient outcome given legible constraints of technology, geography and whatnot. Then we imagine dynamics and tensions in a world with that kind of efficiency. This, incidentally, is also "historical materialism." Marx had a lot of awe for modern industry, the efficiency of capitalism and whatnot. Almost Adam Smith-like... at times. Anyway... this never actually works out. The meta is a terrible predictor of where things will go. Imagine law gets more efficient. Will we have more or less lawyers? It could go either way.
• mgradowski 1y ago
  I wouldn't trust a taxi driver's predictions about the future of economics and society, why would I trust some database developer's? Actually, I take that back. I might trust the taxi driver.
  • antirez 1y ago
    The point is that you don't have to "trust" me, you need to argue with me, we need to discuss about the future. This way, we can form ideas that we can use to understand if a given politician or the other will be right, when we will be called to vote. We can also form stronger ideas to try to influence other people that right now have a vague understanding of what AI is and what it could be. We will be the ones that will vote and choose our future.
    • antidog 1y ago
      Life is too short to have philosophical debates with every self promoting dev. I'd rather chat about C style but that would hurt your feelings. Man I miss the days of why the lucky stiff, he was actually cool.
    • mgradowski 1y ago
      Sorry boss, I'm just tired of the debate itself. It assumes a certain level of optimism, while I'm skeptical that meaningfully productive applications of LLMs etc. will be found once hype settles, let alone ones that will reshape society like agriculture or the steam engine did.
    • palmfacehn 1y ago
      Whether it is a taxi driver or a developer, when someone starts from flawed premises, I can either engage and debate or tune out and politely humor them. When the flawed premises are deeply ingrained political beliefs it is often better to simply say, "Okay buddy. If you say so..." We've been over the topic of AI employment doom several times on this site. At this point it isn't a debate. It is simply the restating of these first principles.
  • nicce 1y ago
• narrator 1y ago
  I like to point out that ASI will allow us to do superhuman stuff that was previously beyond all human capability. For example, one of the tasks we could put ASI to work doing is to ask it to design implants that would go into the legs that would be powered by light, or electric induction that would use ASI designed protein metabolic chains to electrically transform carbon dioxide into oxygen and ADP into ATP so to power humans with pure electricity. We are very energy efficient. We use about 3 kilowatt hours of power a day, so we could use this sort of technology to live in space pretty effortlessly. Your Space RV would not need a bathroom or a kitchen. You'd just live in a static nitrogen atmosphere and the whole thing could be powered by solar panels, or a small modular nuke reactor. I call this "The Electrobiological Age" and it will unlock whole new worlds for humanity.
  • exitb 1y ago
    It feels like it’s been a really long time since humans invented anything just by thinking about it. At this stage we mostly progress by cycling between ideas and practical experiments. The experiments are needed not because we’re not smart enough to reason correctly with data we have, but because we lack data to reason about. I don’t see how more intelligent AI will tighten that loop significantly.
  • HiroProtagonist 1y ago
    > one of the tasks we could put ASI to work doing is... What makes you so confident that we could remain in control of something which is by definition smarter than us?
    • narrator 1y ago
      ASI would see that we are super energy efficient. Way more efficient than robots. We run on 70 cents of electricity a day! We'd be perfect for living in deep space if we could just eat electricity. In those niches, we'd be perfect. Also machine intelligence does not have all the predatory competition brainstack from evolution, and a trillion years is the same as a nano-second to AI, so analogies to biological competition are nonsensical. To even assume that ASI has a static personality that would make decisions based on some sort of statically defined criteria is a flawed assumption. As Grok voice mode so brilliantly shows us, AI can go from your best friend, to your morality god, to a trained assassin, to a sexbot, and back to being your best friend in no time. This absolute flexibility is where people are failing badly at trying to make biological analogies with AI as biology changes much more slowly.
• inquirerGeneral 1y ago
  [dead]
• siliconc0w 1y ago
  I'm on team plateau, I'm really not noticing increasing competency in my daily usage of the major models. And sometimes it seems like there are regressions where performance drops from what it could do before. There is incredible pressure to release new models which means there is incredible pressure to game benchmarks. Tbh a plateau is probably the best scenario - I don't think society will tolerate even more inequality+ massive job displacement.
  • andai 1y ago
    I think the current economy is already dreadful. So I don't have much desire to maintain that. But it's easier to break something further than to fix it, and god knows what AI is going to do to a system with so many feedback loops.
• andai 1y ago
  Reposting the article so I can read it in a normal font: Regardless of their flaws, AI systems continue to impress with their ability to replicate certain human skills. Even if imperfect, such systems were a few years ago science fiction. It was not even clear that we were so near to create machines that could understand the human language, write programs, and find bugs in a complex code base: bugs that escaped the code review of a competent programmer. Since LLMs and in general deep models are poorly understood, and even the most prominent experts in the field failed miserably again and again to modulate the expectations (with incredible errors on both sides: of reducing or magnifying what was near to come), it is hard to tell what will come next. But even before the Transformer architecture, we were seeing incredible progress for many years, and so far there is no clear sign that the future will not hold more. After all, a plateau of the current systems is possible and very credible, but it would likely stimulate, at this point, massive research efforts in the next step of architectures. However, if AI avoids plateauing long enough to become significantly more useful and independent of humans, this revolution is going to be very unlike the past ones. Yet the economic markets are reacting as if they were governed by stochastic parrots. Their pattern matching wants that previous technologies booms created more business opportunities, so investors are polarized to think the same will happen with AI. But this is not the only possible outcome. We are not there, yet, but if AI could replace a sizable amount of workers, the economic system will be put to a very hard test. Moreover, companies could be less willing to pay for services that their internal AIs can handle or build from scratch. Nor is it possible to imagine a system where a few mega companies are the only providers of intelligence: either AI will be eventually a commodity, or the governments would do something, in such an odd economic setup (a setup where a single industry completely dominates all the others). The future may reduce the economic prosperity and push humanity to switch to some different economic system (maybe a better system). Markets don’t want to accept that, so far, and even if the economic forecasts are cloudy, wars are destabilizing the world, the AI timings are hard to guess, regardless of all that stocks continue to go up. But stocks are insignificant in the vast perspective of human history, and even systems that lasted a lot more than our current institutions eventually were eradicated by fundamental changes in the society and in the human knowledge. AI could be such a change.
• bawana 1y ago
  If computers are ‘bicycles for the mind’, AI is the ‘self-driving car for the mind’. Which technology results in worse accidents? Did automobiles even improve our lives or just change the tempo beyond human bounds?
• bananapub 1y ago
  I think something everyone is underpricing in our area is that LLMs are uniquely useful for writing code for programmers. it's a very constrained task, you can do lots of reliable checking on the output at low cost (linters, formatters, the compiler), the code is mostly reviewed by a human before being committed, and there's insulation between the code and the real world, because ultimately some company or open source project releases the code that's then run, and they mostly have an incentive to not murder people (Telsa except, obviously). it seems like lots of programmers are then taking that information and then deeply overestimating how useful it is at anything else, and these programmers - and the marketing people who employ them - are doing enormous harm by convincing e.g. HR departments that it is of any value to them for dealing with complaints, or much much more danderously, convincing governments that it's useful for how they deal with humans asking for help. this misconception (and deliberate lying by people like OpenAI) is doing enormous damage to society and is going to do much much more.
• exasperaited 1y ago
  > It was not even clear that we were so near to create machines that could understand the human language It's not really clear to me to what extent LLMs even do *understand* human language. They are very good at saying things that sound like a responsive answer, but the head-scratching, hard-to-mentally-visualise aspect of all of this is that this isn't the same thing at all.
• SimianLogic 1y ago
  A lot of anxious words to say “AI is disruptive,” which is hardly a novel thought. A more interesting piece would be built around: “AI is disruptive. Here’s what I’m personally doing about it.”
• m4nu3l 1y ago
  >We are not there, yet, but if AI could replace a sizable amount of workers, the economic system will be put to a very hard test. Moreover, companies could be less willing to pay for services that their internal AIs can handle or build from scratch. Nor is it possible to imagine a system where a few mega companies are the only providers of intelligence: either AI will be eventually a commodity, or the governments would do something, in such an odd economic setup (a setup where a single industry completely dominates all the others). I think the scenario where companies that own AI systems don't get benefits from employing people, so people are poor and can't afford anything, is paradoxical, and as such, it can't happen. Let's assume the worst case: Some small percentage of people own AIs, and the others have no ownership at all of AI systems. Now, given that human work has no value to those owning AIs, those humans not owning AIs won't have anything to trade in exchange for AI services. Trade between these two groups would eventually stop. You'll have some sort of two-tier economy where the people owning AIs will self-produce (or trade between them) goods and services. However, nothing prevents the group of people without AIs from producing and trading goods and services between them without the use of AIs. The second group wouldn't be poorer than it is today; just the ones with AI systems will be much richer. This worst-case scenario is also unlikely to happen or last long (the second group will eventually develop its own AIs or already have access to some AIs, like open models). If models got exponentially better with time, then that could be a problem, because at some point, someone would control the smartest model (by a large factor) and could use it with malicious intent or maybe lose control of it. But it seems to me that what I thought time ago would happen has actually started happening. In the long term, models won't improve exponentially with time, but sublinearly (due to physical constraints). In which case, the relative difference between them would reduce over time.
  • iwontberude 1y ago
    I think the bigger relief is that I know humans won’t put up with a two tiered system of haves and have nots forever and eventually we will get wealth redistribution. Government is the ultimate source of all wealth and organization, corporations are built on top of it and thus are subservient.
    • 1y ago
• kaindume 1y ago
  > Regardless of their flaws, AI systems continue to impress with their ability to replicate certain human skills. Even if imperfect, such systems were a few years ago science fiction. It was not even clear that we were so near to create machines that could understand the human language, write programs, and find bugs in a complex code base: bugs that escaped the code review of a competent programmer. If we factor in that LLMs only exist because of Google search, after they have indexed and collected all the data on the WWW than LLMs are not surprising. They only replicate what has been published on the web, even the coding agents are only possible because of free software and open-source, code like Redis that has been published on the WWW.
• 1970-01-01 1y ago
  We will continue to have poor understanding of LLMs until a simple model can be constructed and taught to a classroom of children. It is only different in this aspect. It is not magic. It is not intelligent. Until we teach the public exactly what it is doing in a way simple adults will understand, enjoy hot take after hot take.
• mcswell 1y ago
  Reads like it was written by an AI.
• jeffreyrogers 1y ago
  These sort of commentaries on AI are the modern equivalent of medieval theologians debating how many angels could congregate in one place.
• gdubs 1y ago
  AI has been improving at a very rapid pace, which means that a lot of people have really outdated priors. I see this all the time online where people are dismissive about AI in a way that suggests it's been a while since they last checked-in on the capabilities of models. They wrote off the coding ability of ChatGPT on version 3.5, for instance, and have missed all the advancements that have happened since. Or they talk about hallucination and haven't tried Deep Research as an alternative to traditional web-search. Then there's a tendency to be so 'anti' that there's an assumption that anyone reporting that the tools are accomplishing truly impressive and useful things must be an 'AI booster' or shill. Or they assume that person must not have been a very good engineer in the first place, etc. Really is one of those examples of the quote, "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few." It's a rapidly evolving field, and unless you actually spend some time kicking the tires on the models every so often, you're just basing your opinions on outdated experiences or what everyone else is saying about it.
  • globnomulous 1y ago
    I belong to the camp for whom the capabilities of the models are irrelevant. The largest and most successful models all appear to have been built unethically. I want nothing to do with these companies or the slime who run them, and I will leave my professional field before I'll become their unwilling user. I don't want machines to write my code. I want to write it. I want to solve the problems and find the bugs myself. The engineers I work with who seem to rely most heavily on these tools all seem to be losing their sharpness and problem-solving ability. Many of them praise the models for making it easy to write tests..(Software engineers who treats testing with this kind of carelessness and dismissiveness should lose their jobs.) I like what I do. I like the way I do it. The day I have no choice but do my work, in essence, by scheduling a fucking meeting with a chipper chat bot and telling it what to do will be the day I retire and start a new career. I can't imagine a drearier way to work with technology.
  • thegrim33 1y ago
    To play devil's advocate, how is your argument not a 'no true scottsman' argument? As in, "oh, they had a negative view of X, well that's of course because they weren't testing the new and improved X2 model which is different". Fast forward a year .. "Oh, they have a negative view on X2, well silly them, they need to be using the Y24 model, that's where it's at, the X2 model isn't good anymore". Fast forward a year .. ad infinitum. Are the models that exist today a "true scottsman" for you?
• cs702 1y ago
  The OP is spot-on about this: If AI technology continues to improve and becomes capable of learning and executing more tasks on its own, this revolution is going to be very unlike the past ones. We don't how if or how our current institutions and systems will be able to handle that.
• IX-103 1y ago
  Assuming AI improves productivity then I don't see how it couldn't result in an economic boom. Labor has always been one of the most scarce resources in the economy. Now whether or not that the wealth from the improved productivity actually trickles down to most people depends on the political climate.
• throwawayffffas 1y ago
  > Yet the economic markets are reacting as if they were governed by stochastic parrots. That's because they are. The stock market is all about narrative. > Nor is it possible to imagine a system where a few mega companies are the only providers of intelligence. Yes it is, the mega companies that wil be providing the intelligence are, Nvidia, AMD, TSMC, ASML, add your favourite foundry.
• fullstackchris 1y ago
  > Yet the economic markets are reacting as if they were governed by stochastic parrots uh last time I checked, "markets" around the world are a few percent from all time highs
• mekael 1y ago
  After reading a good chunk of the comments, I got the distinct impression that people don't realize we could just not do the whole "let's make a dystopian hellscape" project and just turn all of it off. By that I mean, outlaw AI, destroy the data centers, have severe consequences for it's use by corporations as a way to reduce headcount, I'm talking executives get to spend the rest of their lives in solitary confinement, and instead invest all of this capital in making a better world (solving homelessness, the last mile problem of food distribution, the ever present and ongoing climate catastrophe). We, as humans, can make a choice and make it stick through force of actions. Or am I just too idealistic ? Sidenote, I never quite understand why the rich think their bunkers are going to save them from the crisis they caused. Do they fail to realize that there's more of us than them, or do they really believe they can fashion themselves as warlords?
• BobbyTables2 1y ago
  I was skeptical of AI for a very long time. But seeing it in action now makes me seriously question “human intelligence”. Maybe most of us just aren’t as smart as we think…