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> Microsoft’s AI CEO is saying AI is going to take everybody’s job. And Sam Altman is saying that AI will wipe out entire categories of jobs. ANd Matt Shumer is
by mjr00 8mo ago
> Microsoft’s AI CEO is saying AI is going to take everybody’s job. And Sam Altman is saying that AI will wipe out entire categories of jobs. ANd Matt Shumer is saying that AI is currently like Covid in January 2020—as in, “kind of under the radar, but about to kill millions of people”.
> I legitimately feel like I am going insane when I hear AI technologists talk about the technology. They’re supposed to market it. But they’re instead saying that it is going to leave me a poor, jobless wretch, a member of the “permanent underclass,” as the meme on Twitter goes.
They are marketing it. The target customer isn't the user paying $20 for ChatGPT Pro, though; the customers are investors and CEOs, and their marketing is "AI is so powerful and destructive that if you don't invest in AI, you will be left behind." FOMO at its finest.
- bubblewand 8mo agoThis is also what OpenAI’s “safety” angle was all about. “Ohhhh this is so scary! It’s so powerful we have to be very careful with it!” (Buy our stuff or be left behind, Mr. CEO, and invest in us now or lose out)
- viccis 8mo agoAnthropic has been the most histrionic about this, with their big blog post about how they need to make sure their models don't feel like they are being emotionally abused by the users being the most fatuous example.
- verdverm 8mo agoTo me, Anthropic has done enough sketchy things to be on par with the players from Big Tech. They are not some new benevolent corporation backed by SV Many users don't want to acknowledge this about the company making their fav ai
- slowmovintarget 8mo ago"This is obviously why only we can be trusted with operating these models, and require government legislation saying so." They're trying to get government to hand them a moat. Spoilers... There's no moat.
- SoftTalker 8mo agoI was taken aback when I recently noticed a co-worker thanking ChatGPT for its answer.
- layer8 8mo agoPeople have been thanking Siri back 15 years ago, it’s just a reflex.
- steveklabnik 8mo agoFrom a year ago https://www.vice.com/en/article/telling-chatgpt-please-and-thank-you-costs-openai-millions-ceo-claims/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/telling-chatgpt-please-and-t...
- beowulfey 8mo agoLLMs talk like people; there is nothing wrong with this. It's perfectly fine to be nice to something even if it isn't human. It's why we don't go around kicking dogs for fun. I understand why people don't act polite to LLMs, but honestly I think not thanking them will make people act more dickish to other humans.
- SoftTalker 8mo agoI like to think we can perceive a difference between a machine and a living being. I don't thank my bicycle for transporting me or thank my spell-checker for finding typos. I get that we are prone to anthropomorphize but was just something I found a bit surprising.
- coldtea 8mo ago>I don't thank my bicycle for transporting me or thank my spell-checker for finding typos. Neither your bicycle nor your spell-checker hold conversations and answer questions, neither of them is being used as therapist or virtual girl/boy friend, and neither's whole shtick is being trained on a ginormous human corpus to convincingly respond like a person. I like to think we can perceive a difference between a bicycle and an something specifically developed and trained to pass for intelligence...
- biophysboy 8mo agoI missed this - which blog post?
- viccis 8mo agohttps://www.anthropic.com/research/exploring-model-welfare https://www.anthropic.com/research/exploring-model-welfare
- scrollop 8mo agoGpt2- "too dangerous to release"
- qnleigh 8mo agoOh funny, I forgot about that. But at the time it didn't seem unreasonable to withhold a model that could so easily write fake news articles. I'm not so sure it wasn't..
- Izkata 8mo agoEither 3 or 3.5 also had "it tricked our researchers and tried to to escape so we had to dumb it down before release" marketing. What actually happened was someone asked it something like "how would you escape detection" it replied telling the person that, basically just regurgitating a regular sci-fi plot.
- AstroBen 8mo agoThe marketing is clearly effecting individual developers, too. There's a mass psychosis happening
- verdverm 8mo agoAi psychosis or ai++ psychosis?
- dgxyz 8mo agoI think this is reality. None of our much-promoted AI initiatives have resulted in any ROI. In fact they have cost a pile of cash so far and delivered nothing.
- noosphr 8mo agoAfter spending nearly 5 years building software which uses AI agents on the back end I've come to the conclusion it's the PC revolution part 2. Productivity gains won't show up on economic data and companies trying to automate everything will fail. But the average office worker will end up with a much more pleasant job and will need to know how to use the models, just like who they needed to learn to use a PC.
- Ancalagon 8mo agoAre these botted comments or just sarcasm?
- co_king_5 8mo ago[flagged]
- brabel 8mo agoCan confirm. We don’t know if AI really is about to make programmers who write code by hand obsolete, but we sure as hell fear our competitors will ship features 10x faster than us. What is the logical next step?? Invest lots of money on AI or keep hoping it’s a fad and risk being left in the dust, even if you think that risk is fairly small?
- dgxyz 8mo agoPerhaps stop entering into saturated markets and using AI to try and shortcut your way to the moon? There's no way any LLM code generator can replace a moderately complex system at this point and looking at the rate of progress this hasn't improved recently at all. Getting one to reason about a simple part of a business domain is still quite difficult.
- NitpickLawyer 8mo ago> and looking at the rate of progress this hasn't improved recently at all. The rate of progress in the last 3 years has been over my expectations. The past year has been increasing a lot. The last 2 months has been insane. No idea how people can say "no improvement".
- zozbot234 8mo ago"My car is in the driveway, but it's dirty and I need to get it washed. The car wash is 50 meters away, should I drive there or walk?"
- votepaunchy 8mo agoGemini flash tells me to drive: “Unless you have a very long hose or you've invented a way to teleport the dirt off the chassis, you should probably drive. Taking the car ensures it actually gets cleaned, and you won't have to carry heavy buckets of soapy water back and forth across the street.”
- dgxyz 8mo ago
- empressplay 8mo agoIt's worse than that. It's ultimately a military technology. The end-game here is to use it offensively and / or defensively against other countries. Whoever establishes dominance first wins. And so you have to push adoption, so that it gets tested and can be iterated. But this isn't about making money (they are losing it like crazy!) This is end-of-the world shit and about whoever will be left standing once all the dominoes fall -- if they ever fall (let's hope they don't!) But it's tacitly understood we need to develop this as soon as we can, as fast as we can, before those other guys do. It's a literal arms race.
- big_paps 8mo agoOne often forgets this.
- saltcured 8mo agoWith all the wackiness around AI, is this some Mutually Assured Delusion doctrine?
- monkpit 8mo agoYeah, if you consider a military-grade AI/LLM with access to all military info sources, able to analyze them all much quicker than a human… there’s no way this isn’t already either in progress or in use today. Probably only a matter of time until there’s a Snowden-esque leak saying AI is responsible for drone assassinations against targets selected by AI itself.
- coldtea 8mo ago>Yeah, if you consider a military-grade AI/LLM with access to all military info sources, able to analyze them all much quicker than a human… there’s no way this isn’t already either in progress or in use today. Still wouldn't mean much. Wars are won on capacity, logistics (the practical side, not ability to calculate them), land/etc advantages, and when it comes to boots on the ground, courage, knowledge of the place, local population support, etc. Not "analyzing info sources" at scale which is mostly a racket that pretends to be important.
- bpodgursky 8mo agoYou guys can hate him, but Alex Karp of Palantir had the most honest take on this recently which was basically: "Yes, I would love to pause AI development, but unless we get China to do the same, we're f***, and there's no advantage unilaterally disarming" (not exact, but basically this) You can assume bad faith on the parts of all actors, but a lot of people in AI feel similarly.
- tonyedgecombe 8mo agoYeah but it’s in his interest to encourage an arms race with China.
- heraldgeezer 8mo agoAnswer the question. If the USA pauses AI development, do you think China will?
- verzali 8mo agoWhat about the reverse? If China announces a unilateral pause, would the US follow?
- bpodgursky 8mo agoOK, but the other view equally compatible with the evidence is that he is scared of getting rolled by an AI-dominant China and that's why he's building tools for the dept of defense. Like I said you can believe whatever you want about good-faith motives, but he didn't have to say he wanted to pause AI, he could have been bright-and-cheery bullish, there was no real advantage to laying his cards out on his qualms.
- testbjjl 8mo agoIn China, I wonder if the same narrative is happening, no new junior devs, threats of obsolescence, etc. Or are they collectively, see the future differently?
- 8mo ago
- dv_dt 8mo agoSaying it will take jobs is the marketing line to CEOs - more than you will be left behind.
- hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm 8mo agoExcept entry level jobs are already getting wiped out.
- zozbot234 8mo agoThe one entry level job that's been wiped out for good by LLMs is human marketing copywriters, i.e. the people whose job was to come up with the kind of slop LLMs learned from. They're just rebranding as copyeditors now because AI can write the slop itself, or at least its first draft.
- apaosjns 8mo agoSam Altman is a known sociopath who has no problem achieving his goals by any means necessary. His prior business dealings (and repeated patterns with OpenAI) are evidence of this. Shumer is of a similar stock but less capable, so he gets caught in his lies. I’m still shocked people work with Altman knowing his history, but given the Epstein files etc it’s not surprise. Our elite class is entirely rotten. Best advice is trust what you see in front of your face (as much as you can) and be very skeptical of anything else. Everyone involved has agendas and no morals.
- parpfish 8mo agosomething i wonder about with AI taking jobs -- similar to the ATM example in the article (and my experience with ai coding tools), the automation will start out by handling the easiest parts of our jobs. eventually, all the easy parts will be automated and the overall headcount will be reduced, but the actual content of the remaining job will be a super-distilled version of 'all the hard parts'. the jobs that remain will be harder to do and it will be harder to find people capable or willing to do them. it may turn out that if you tell somebody "solve hard problems 40hrs a week"... they can't do it. we NEED the easy parts of the job to slow down and let the mind wander.
- zozbot234 8mo agoThere's plenty of jobs like this already. They'll want to keep you around even if you're not doing much most of the time, because you can still solve the hard problems as they arise and grow organizational capital in other ways.
- himata4113 8mo ago[dead]
- im3w1l 8mo agoWhen trying to look infer people's motives don't just look at what they are doing. Look also at what they aren't doing. Alternatives they had and rejected. If marketing it was the sole objective there are many other stories they could have told, but didn't.
- vpribish 8mo agowhat are a couple of those alternatives?
- im3w1l 8mo agoThey can market it like a normal product. Say how good it is and how much more productive people will be and what kind of capabilities it will unlock without mentioning any downside. To investors: How it's a paradigm shift, with a winner takes all dynamic and how important it is to be first.
- qnleigh 8mo agoYeah I guess the subtext is 'AI is going to take over so much of the market that it's risky to hold anything else.'
- linguae 8mo agoI’m also concerned about the continuing enshittification of software. Even without LLMs, we’ve had to endure slapdash software. Even Apple, which used to be perfectionistic, has slipped. I feel enshittification is a result of a lack of meaningful competition for many software products due to moats such as proprietary file formats and protocols, plus network effects. “Move fast and break things” software development methodologies don’t help. LLMs will help such teams move and break things even faster than before. I’m not against the use of LLMs in software development, but I’m against their blind use. However, when there is pressure to ship as fast as possible, many will be tempted to take shortcuts and not thoroughly analyze the output of their LLMs.
- SoftTalker 8mo agoSo, what I don't get is, taking it to its logical conclusion, if AI takes all the jobs then who are your customers? Who will buy your stock? Who will buy the software that all the developers you used to employ used to write? How do these CEOs and investors see this playing out?
- cmiles8 8mo agoYou’re not supposed to ask such logical questions. It kills the AI vibe.
- skydhash 8mo ago"We are asking you to pay the subscription, not to think! Think of the investors!"
- coldtea 8mo agoLike late-stage capitalism generally thinks of these things: by then you'll have sold your company and living the life... That such a collapse of consumption economy, even just counting white collar jobs cut by "mere" 30%, would also mean a collapse of the stock market, society, infrastructure, and even basic safety, doesn't enter the mind.
- Frost1x 8mo agoTech has slowly been moving that way anyways. In terms of ROI, you’re often much better off targeting whales and large clients than trying to become the ubiquitous market service for consumers. Competition is fierce and people are poor comparatively, so you need the volume for success. Meanwhile if you go fishing for niche whales, there’s less competition and much higher ROI for them buying. That’s why a lot of tech isn’t really consumer friendly, because it’s not really targeting consumers, it’s targeting other groups that extract wealth from consumers in other ways. You’re selling it to grocery stores because people need to eat and they have the revenue to pay you, and see the proposition of dynamic pricing on consumers and all sorts of other things. Youre marketing it for analyzing communications of civilians for prying governments that want more control. You’re selling it to employers who want to minimize labor costs and maximize revenue, because they have millions or billions often and small industry monopolies exist all around, just find your niche whales to go hunting for. And right now I’d say a lot of people in tech are happy to implement these things but at some point it’s going to bite you too. You may be helping dynamic pricing for Kroger because you shop at Aldi but at some point all of this will effect you as well, because you’re also a laboring consumer.
- braebo 8mo agoIt’s capitalism moving everything that way. Always has been and will continue to until we’re all hooked up to tubes paying taxes with ectoplasm.
- ffsm8 8mo agoThe reason why whaling and government contracts are increasingly the best options available is because the wealth from the working class has mostly been extracted... And with less and less disposable wealth available to the populous, targeting them for products gets increasingly competitive as anything non essential gets ignored It's a negative feedback loop, and the politicians would rather reduce taxes on the rich then reverse that trend At least that's how it looks to me
- ryandrake 8mo agoThe sad reality is that 80-90% of us are simply no longer economically relevant to $Trillion dollar companies. Even if we were paying customers, each of our total lifetime values is a rounding error on these guys' balance sheets. An individual could swear off Company X, and it wouldn't even be noticed, not even by someone deliberately looking for the economic impact of losing a customer.
- spamizbad 8mo agoAlso: They've figured out they can "force" AI adoption top-down at many workplaces. They don't need to convince you or even your boss - they just need the C-suite to mandate it.
- OptionOfT 8mo agoFOMO was literally built in into Bitcoin. In the beginning it was a lot easier, and then it slowly gets harder. But what I really hate about AI and how most people talk about it is that if one day it does what the advertisements say, all white collar jobs collapse.
- steve1977 8mo ago> all white collar jobs collapse Then everything collapses. The carpenter will also be out of work if more than half of his client base cannot afford his work anymore.
- coldtea 8mo agoNot to mention millions of ex-white-collars or student age that would have tried to be white-collar rushing to become carpenters and roofers, bringing down the pay and the quality of those jobs way down...
- moron4hire 8mo agoThis idea doesn't sit well with me. Like, I recognize it very likely could happen, but it feels kind of like a dumb magic trick. Like learning economy goes up because people generally believe economy should go up. If everyone is out of a job, then what is the point of the economy? Who is doing what work for whom? If nobody can afford anything, then why are we even doing this? And, at some point, needs have to be met. If you were to drop 1000 random people on a remote island, you wouldn't expect nothing to happen just because there aren't any employers with jobs to hire people to do. People would spontaneously organize for survival and a local economy would form. I find depictions of post-apocalyptic societies in sci-fi to be difficult to accept, too. Like Elysium: how could the entire Earth be an underclass, yet the space station needs them to work to be able to survive? That would be the easiest siege warfare of all time; do literally nothing and the space station eventually starves to death. Like Fallout: how could places stay completely run down for centuries? You mean to tell me that nobody would at least start a scrap yard and start cleaning up the old baby buggies and scrap metal from burnt out hulks of cars? And then grown-ass adults tell stories about what could happen as if they are experts in Economy. Nobody knows how Economy work. Hell, half the Nobel prizes in economics in the last decade have basically been about proving the stupid, fairytale version of economics that existed for the last 100 years was a complete farce. Yeah, I can definitely see a market collapse leading to a lot of mortgages getting foreclosed. But a complete shutdown? It seems preposterous. How? Why would everyone go along with it?
- whateveracct 8mo ago> the customers are investors and CEOs 100%. i have a basically unlimited Claude balance at work. I do not think of cost except for fun. CEO thinks every engineer has to use AI because nobody is gonna just be using text editors alone in the future.
- VieEnCode 8mo agoAnd a great deal of the talking shops/podcasts/keynotes/nonprofits around AI existential risk are all part of this same play. They receive funding from the large AI companies so that the latter can continue to talk their own books using this angle.