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> Generative AI has no shortage of ways that it might, with care, be shaped into genuinely useful products, but this shaping needs to actually happen before the

> Generative AI has no shortage of ways that it might, with care, be shaped into genuinely useful products, but this shaping needs to actually happen before the hyper-scalers earn the right to continually harass the psyche of billions of people with breathless pronouncements. Most people don’t care that GPT 5.5, released late last week, underperformed Opus 4.7 on SWE-Bench Pro. They want the AI companies to let them know when they have a product that will actually and notably improve their lives, and until then, they want these companies to leave them alone and try their best not to crash the economy . I don’t want to be snarky or dismiss without giving it though but this line of thinking is childish and shows lack of understanding of how products enter market. Companies that invent product generally can not predict all the uses. That’s what the free market exists for - push your product and see how people use them, get feedback and improve. I find that beautiful. Does the author want planned RCTs to understand how they might be useful and slowly release them only every dimension of utility is confirmed? This reeks of euopilled mindset - a perverse parental kind of mindset where the state decides how products may be used. The Silicon Valley doesn’t work like this. They release products and the second or third order effects can not be predicted. Who knew NVIDIA might be used for LLMs when they first started producing chips for gaming? The author (I assume) is feeling some latent anxiety over the extreme speed in which things are progressing. They are grieving by finding reasons to stall this progress by falsely claiming that people don’t care about LLMs until there is confirmed proof that LLMs can help them improve their lives. But this is fundamentally a childish mindset, and flat out wrong. People do care - there are always enthusiasts who are top of the game and who the broader public follow.

aspenmartin 6mo ago
Yes. As if there is some dichotomy where the evil out of touch Silicon Valley are making a terrible misjudgement of what society “wants”. They have built a powerful technology with enormous economic and geopolitical implications and the author thinks they shouldn’t have because “people didn’t ask for this”. People don’t ask for anything they don’t understand: electricity, the internet, the steam engine — all of them were strange and new and scary and “no one” (in terms of people on the street) asked for them.
bigbadfeline 6mo ago
> I don’t want to be snarky or dismiss without giving it though but this line of thinking is childish and shows lack of understanding of how products enter market. I don’t want to be snarky but your line of thinking is childish and shows lack of understanding of how products should enter market. > The Silicon Valley doesn’t work like this. They release products and the second or third order effects can not be predicted. Unpredictability is a very good argument for slowing down data center construction and AI deployments until the tech can pay for itself. Now all "order effects" are heavily subsidized with no end in sight, and they needlessly drain too much precious capital out of the rest of the economy. When the "effects" come slower, we'll have a better chance of evaluating them without exposing the economy to the excessive drain and risk it's subjected now. If you remove the hype and exaggerations, the whole show looks like just another market bubble for extracting money via losing ventures in a negative-sum game.

aspenmartin 6mo ago

Yes. As if there is some dichotomy where the evil out of touch Silicon Valley are making a terrible misjudgement of what society “wants”. They have built a powerful technology with enormous economic and geopolitical implications and the author thinks they shouldn’t have because “people didn’t ask for this”. People don’t ask for anything they don’t understand: electricity, the internet, the steam engine — all of them were strange and new and scary and “no one” (in terms of people on the street) asked for them.

bigbadfeline 6mo ago

> I don’t want to be snarky or dismiss without giving it though but this line of thinking is childish and shows lack of understanding of how products enter market. I don’t want to be snarky but your line of thinking is childish and shows lack of understanding of how products should enter market. > The Silicon Valley doesn’t work like this. They release products and the second or third order effects can not be predicted. Unpredictability is a very good argument for slowing down data center construction and AI deployments until the tech can pay for itself. Now all "order effects" are heavily subsidized with no end in sight, and they needlessly drain too much precious capital out of the rest of the economy. When the "effects" come slower, we'll have a better chance of evaluating them without exposing the economy to the excessive drain and risk it's subjected now. If you remove the hype and exaggerations, the whole show looks like just another market bubble for extracting money via losing ventures in a negative-sum game.