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The universal theme with general purpose technologies is 1) they start out lagging behind current practices in every context 2) they improve rapidly, but 3) the

The universal theme with general purpose technologies is 1) they start out lagging behind current practices in every context 2) they improve rapidly, but 3) they break through and surpass current practices in different contexts at different times. What that means is that if you work in a certain context, for a while you keep seeing AI get a 0 because it is worse than the current process. Behind the scenes the underlying technology is improving rapidly, but because it hasn’t cusped the viability threshold you don’t feel it at all. From this vantage point, it is easy to dismiss the whole thing and forget about the slope, because the whole line is under the surface of usefulness in your context. The author has identified two cases where current AI is below the cusp of viability: design and large scale changes to a codebase (though Codex is cracking the second one quickly). The hard and useful thing is not to find contexts where the general purpose technology gets a 0, but to surf the cusp of viability by finding incrementally harder problems that are newly solvable as the underlying technology improves. A very clear example of this is early Tesla surfing the reduction in Li-ion battery prices by starting with expensive sports cars, then luxury sedans, then normal cars. You can be sure that throughout the first two phases, everyone at GM and Toyota was saying: Li-ion batteries are totally infeasible for the consumers we prioritize who want affordable cars. By the time the technology is ready for sedans, Tesla has a 5 year lead.

deleted 11mo ago
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bawolff 11mo ago
> The universal theme with general purpose technologies is 1) they start out lagging behind current practices in every context 2) they improve rapidly, but 3) they break through and surpass current practices in different contexts at different times. I think you should say succesful "general purpose technologies". What you describe is what happens when things work out. Sometimes things stall at step 1, and the technology gets relegated to a foot note in the history books.
- jibal 11mo ago
  Yeah, that comment is heavy on survivor bias. The universal theme is that things go the way they go.
  - fnord123 11mo ago
    This is why TFA used Segway as an example.
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
portanus 11mo ago
We don’t argue that microwaves will be ubiquitous (which they aren’t, but close enough). We argue that microwaves are not an artificial general barbecue, as the makers might wish were true. And we argue that microwaves will indeed never replace your grill as the makers, again, would love you to believe.
- red75prime 11mo ago
  Your reasoning would be fine if there were a clear distinction, like between a microwave and a grill. What we actually have is a physical system (the brain) that somehow implements what we know as the only approximation of general intelligence and artificial systems of various architectures (mostly transformers) that are intended to capture the essence of general intelligence. We are not at the microwave and the grill stage. We are at the birds and the heavier-than-air contraptions stage, when it's not yet clear whether those particular models will fly, or whether they need more power, more control surfaces, or something else. Heck, the frontier models have around 100 times lower number of parameters than the most conservative estimate of the equivalent number of parameters of the brain: the number of synapses. And we are like "it won't fly".
  - ccppurcell 11mo ago
    There was a lot of hubris around microwaves. I remember a lot of images of full chickens being roasted in them. I've never once seen that "in the wild" as it were. They are good for reheating something that was produced earlier. Hey the metaphor is even better than I thought!
    - momoschili 11mo ago
      they did invent the combi oven, which while not a microwave is capable of most of its duties along with roasting a chicken :)
    - red75prime 11mo ago
      Then you don't know about RLVR.
friendzis 11mo ago
That is not my experience or look at the history at all, wrt general-ish purpose technologies. What usually happens is they either empower unskilled (in a particular context) personnel to perform some amount of tasks at "good enough" level or replace highly specialized machinery for some amount of tasks at again "good enough" level. At some point (typically, when a general purpose technology is able to do "good enough" in multiple contexts) operating at "good enough" enough level in multiple verticals becomes profitable over operating ant specialized level and this is when the general purpose technology starts replacing specialized technology/personnel. Very much not all general-purpose technologies reach this stage at all, this is only applicable to highly successful general purpose technologies. Then market share of general technology starts increasing rapidly while at the same time market share of specialized technologies drops, RnD in general tech explodes while specialized technologies start stagnating. Over time this may lead to cutting edge general purpose technologies surpassing the now-old specialized technologies, taking over in most areas. > A very clear example of this is early Tesla surfing the reduction in Li-ion battery prices. <...> By the time the technology is ready for sedans, Tesla has a 5 year lead. > everyone at GM and Toyota was saying: Li-ion batteries are totally infeasible for the consumers we prioritize who want affordable cars. We are nearly two decades since the Tesla "expensive sports car" and pure BEVs are still the significantly more expensive option, despite massive subsidies. If anything, everyone at Toyota were right. Furthermore, they have been developing their electric drive-trains in parallel via the hybrid tech: surfing the same wave while raking in profits. In fact, BEV sales outpace other drive-train sales only in regions where either registrations of those are artificially limited, or the government heavily subsidizes both purchase and maintenance costs. If you don't have government subsidized rooftop solar the cost per mile of BEV is more or less on par with a HEV and in most cases worse than diesel for long range trips.
- Retric 11mo ago
  > pure BEVs are still the significantly more expensive option New technology often has ‘new’ tradeoffs, are GPU’s are sill only situationally better than CPU’s. DC fast charging is several times more expensive than home charging which heavily influences the economics of buying an EV without subsidies. Same deal with plug in Hybrids or long range batteries on PEV, if you don’t need the range you’re just wasting money. So there’s cases when an unsubsidized PEV is the cheapest option and that line will change over time even if it’s not going away anytime soon. AI on the other hand is such a wide umbrella it doesn’t really make sense to talk about specific tradeoffs beyond the short term. Nobody can say what the downsides will be in 10-20 years because they aren’t extrapolating a specific technology with clear tradeoffs. Self driving cars could be taking over industries in 15 years, or still quite limited we can’t say.
nkzd 11mo ago
> design and large scale changes to a codebase (though Codex is cracking the second one quickly). Can you share some experience regarding Codex and large scale changes to codebase? I haven't noticed any improvements.
dandellion 11mo ago
Even if you consider a car a general purpose technology, Tesla displacing GM is a car displacing a car, so it's not really an example of what you're saying, is it?
blackbrokkoli 11mo ago
I heard a very similar sentiment expressed as "everything is not good enough to be useful until it suddenly is". I find it a powerful mental model precisely because it is not a statement of success rate or survival rate: Yes, a lot of ideas never break any kind of viability threshold, sure, but every idea that did also started out as laughable, toy-like, and generally shit (not just li-ion batteries, also the wheel, guns, the internet and mobile computers). It is essentially saying 'current lack of viability is a bad indicator of future death' (at least not any more than the high mortality of new tech in general), I guess.
sigbottle 11mo ago
You took a very specific argument, abstracted it, then posited your worldview. What do you have to say about the circular trillions of dollars going around 7 companies and building huge data centers and expecting all smaller players to just subsidize them? Sure, you can elide the argument by saying, "actually that doesn't matter because I am really smart and understood what the author really was talking about, let me reframe it properly". I don't really have a response to that. You're free to do what you please. To me, something feels very wrong with that and this behavior in general plagues the modern Internet.
Marazan 11mo ago
Nissan were selling thousands of Leafs before the Model S every rolled off the production line.

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

bawolff 11mo ago

> The universal theme with general purpose technologies is 1) they start out lagging behind current practices in every context 2) they improve rapidly, but 3) they break through and surpass current practices in different contexts at different times. I think you should say succesful "general purpose technologies". What you describe is what happens when things work out. Sometimes things stall at step 1, and the technology gets relegated to a foot note in the history books.

jibal 11mo ago
Yeah, that comment is heavy on survivor bias. The universal theme is that things go the way they go.
- fnord123 11mo ago
  This is why TFA used Segway as an example.
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]

portanus 11mo ago

We don’t argue that microwaves will be ubiquitous (which they aren’t, but close enough). We argue that microwaves are not an artificial general barbecue, as the makers might wish were true. And we argue that microwaves will indeed never replace your grill as the makers, again, would love you to believe.

red75prime 11mo ago
Your reasoning would be fine if there were a clear distinction, like between a microwave and a grill. What we actually have is a physical system (the brain) that somehow implements what we know as the only approximation of general intelligence and artificial systems of various architectures (mostly transformers) that are intended to capture the essence of general intelligence. We are not at the microwave and the grill stage. We are at the birds and the heavier-than-air contraptions stage, when it's not yet clear whether those particular models will fly, or whether they need more power, more control surfaces, or something else. Heck, the frontier models have around 100 times lower number of parameters than the most conservative estimate of the equivalent number of parameters of the brain: the number of synapses. And we are like "it won't fly".
- ccppurcell 11mo ago
  There was a lot of hubris around microwaves. I remember a lot of images of full chickens being roasted in them. I've never once seen that "in the wild" as it were. They are good for reheating something that was produced earlier. Hey the metaphor is even better than I thought!
  - momoschili 11mo ago
    they did invent the combi oven, which while not a microwave is capable of most of its duties along with roasting a chicken :)
  - red75prime 11mo ago
    Then you don't know about RLVR.

friendzis 11mo ago

That is not my experience or look at the history at all, wrt general-ish purpose technologies. What usually happens is they either empower unskilled (in a particular context) personnel to perform some amount of tasks at "good enough" level or replace highly specialized machinery for some amount of tasks at again "good enough" level. At some point (typically, when a general purpose technology is able to do "good enough" in multiple contexts) operating at "good enough" enough level in multiple verticals becomes profitable over operating ant specialized level and this is when the general purpose technology starts replacing specialized technology/personnel. Very much not all general-purpose technologies reach this stage at all, this is only applicable to highly successful general purpose technologies. Then market share of general technology starts increasing rapidly while at the same time market share of specialized technologies drops, RnD in general tech explodes while specialized technologies start stagnating. Over time this may lead to cutting edge general purpose technologies surpassing the now-old specialized technologies, taking over in most areas. > A very clear example of this is early Tesla surfing the reduction in Li-ion battery prices. <...> By the time the technology is ready for sedans, Tesla has a 5 year lead. > everyone at GM and Toyota was saying: Li-ion batteries are totally infeasible for the consumers we prioritize who want affordable cars. We are nearly two decades since the Tesla "expensive sports car" and pure BEVs are still the significantly more expensive option, despite massive subsidies. If anything, everyone at Toyota were right. Furthermore, they have been developing their electric drive-trains in parallel via the hybrid tech: surfing the same wave while raking in profits. In fact, BEV sales outpace other drive-train sales only in regions where either registrations of those are artificially limited, or the government heavily subsidizes both purchase and maintenance costs. If you don't have government subsidized rooftop solar the cost per mile of BEV is more or less on par with a HEV and in most cases worse than diesel for long range trips.

Retric 11mo ago
> pure BEVs are still the significantly more expensive option New technology often has ‘new’ tradeoffs, are GPU’s are sill only situationally better than CPU’s. DC fast charging is several times more expensive than home charging which heavily influences the economics of buying an EV without subsidies. Same deal with plug in Hybrids or long range batteries on PEV, if you don’t need the range you’re just wasting money. So there’s cases when an unsubsidized PEV is the cheapest option and that line will change over time even if it’s not going away anytime soon. AI on the other hand is such a wide umbrella it doesn’t really make sense to talk about specific tradeoffs beyond the short term. Nobody can say what the downsides will be in 10-20 years because they aren’t extrapolating a specific technology with clear tradeoffs. Self driving cars could be taking over industries in 15 years, or still quite limited we can’t say.

nkzd 11mo ago

> design and large scale changes to a codebase (though Codex is cracking the second one quickly). Can you share some experience regarding Codex and large scale changes to codebase? I haven't noticed any improvements.

dandellion 11mo ago

Even if you consider a car a general purpose technology, Tesla displacing GM is a car displacing a car, so it's not really an example of what you're saying, is it?

blackbrokkoli 11mo ago

I heard a very similar sentiment expressed as "everything is not good enough to be useful until it suddenly is". I find it a powerful mental model precisely because it is not a statement of success rate or survival rate: Yes, a lot of ideas never break any kind of viability threshold, sure, but every idea that did also started out as laughable, toy-like, and generally shit (not just li-ion batteries, also the wheel, guns, the internet and mobile computers). It is essentially saying 'current lack of viability is a bad indicator of future death' (at least not any more than the high mortality of new tech in general), I guess.

sigbottle 11mo ago

You took a very specific argument, abstracted it, then posited your worldview. What do you have to say about the circular trillions of dollars going around 7 companies and building huge data centers and expecting all smaller players to just subsidize them? Sure, you can elide the argument by saying, "actually that doesn't matter because I am really smart and understood what the author really was talking about, let me reframe it properly". I don't really have a response to that. You're free to do what you please. To me, something feels very wrong with that and this behavior in general plagues the modern Internet.

Marazan 11mo ago

Nissan were selling thousands of Leafs before the Model S every rolled off the production line.