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The issue is, it almost always outperforms knowledge workers. IF the right questions are asked, and IF steered into and corrected at a few crucial points. IF n

The issue is, it almost always outperforms knowledge workers. IF the right questions are asked, and IF steered into and corrected at a few crucial points. IF not it goes off in the wrong direction really quick and that's a problem that's still mostly unsolved in the last 2 years. And that can be catastrophic in high risk environments, like legal, medical or high risk software products where being wrong in the wrong place can mean bankruptcy or even cost a life. I help run a few marketing websites where I let the CEO's run crazy with Claude cowork, they are making PR's like a madman, but they are not allowed to touch any of the API's & platforms where there is real user data & sensitive information.

goolz 4mo ago
Ya, while the tools are really solid and have seen huge leaps these past two years, in no way will an LLM be able to do any of it unguided in two years. Just a humble opinion that I would love to see be wrong.
- wouldbecouldbe 4mo ago
  Yeah it can do things unguided if the tests to confirm its correctness are very solid. Thats where a lot of progress has been made and where agents are good, but this is domain specific, and a chance where startups can shine.
- alberto467 4mo ago
  "in no way will an LLM be able to do any of it unguided in two years" IDK "not any of it" seems a bit strong, especially thinking towards 2028. For a lot of knowledge professions, there is a surprising amount of tasks that are just dumb work compared to the rest.
- ryan_n 4mo ago
  > Just a humble opinion that I would love to see be wrong Out of curiosity, why would you love to be wrong about that? What possible outcome could you see being a net positive for society if the vast majority of knowledge workers (and ultimately, as robotics progress, most workers in general) are replaced by AI?
  - koe123 4mo ago
    In a way, we are betraying something here. My reading is: solving the social problems of capitalism feels so impossible, that reducing the need for anyone to do work is a liability. In a way this sentiment should make extremists of us all?
    - bluefirebrand 4mo ago
      Unfortunately the fact is that society has some massive imbalances around capitalism It is not hard for me to imagine a world where if my bosses didn't need me, they would prefer me to be dead than to pay me some kind of permanent income to me. They would prefer to keep that power to themselves These are already the sort of people who will happily lay you off into a recession, leave you without a way to pay your rent or for food if it improves their bottom line. They do not care if you starve. Or at least they care less than they do about their quarterly bonus So no, I don't trust these fucks to continue playing nice if they view my value as going to zero
  - ToValueFunfetti 4mo ago
    I believe it was Blink-182 who said, "Work sucks". You have to pay people to do that stuff; they don't want to be there. And then you get into second order effects- costs plummet for anything labor intensive, including medical care, prepared food, cleaning, and private tutors. Then onto tertiary effects- if you can spin up a million genius researchers to attack a problem, you start seeing massive progress in every important area and it isn't tied to population growth. I get that you might have a 'UBI/alternative general welfare is impossible' up your sleeve, but you've written this like it's somehow unfathomable that not forcing everybody to work just to survive would be a good thing. Of course it would be good! It's just a matter of dealing with the (huge) side effect of lost income.
    - volkercraig 4mo ago
      In that scenario, AI would have to be a public utility, which it is not. Private corporations have no intention to provide services for public good. If they displace a billion jobs, they'll just throw up their hands and go "we're just an Ai company guyz"
- peterbell_nyc 4mo ago
  There's a huge difference between one shot and few shot versus building a robust harness with deterministic and adversarial quality gates. And I'm finding that agents can actually do a pretty good job of a surprising number of things if you are very clear about your dimensions of quality and the rubrics that you get agents to research and then use to validate against those dimensions of quality. Make sure to use a deterministic pipeline or harness to go step by step so agents aren't checking their own work and I sometimes get alpha from having a codex check the work of a clod but I am seeing pretty good output across multiple domains when I have three independent quality gates and a loop which only spits it out to a human if it doesn't converge at a reasonable cost.
pezgrande 4mo ago
I kinda disagree. High risk environments just means that they will have to have a human-in-the-loop for a longer time which drastically reduce the skill required for such human (which is still requires high skill just not stupidly high).
- moffkalast 4mo ago
  If the human involved has no skill then they might as well not be there, since they're just a fall guy when things go wrong and won't do anything to prevent it from happening.
  - pezgrande 4mo ago
    I said that still requires skill, just not as much.
- wouldbecouldbe 4mo ago
  I think the opposite, only the most skilled will be required. But it depends on the skill: - For landing pages & simple saas solutions: marketeers & founders have more skill, since they understand the user best. The real skill is not the basic coding, but understanding the market. - For security risks/architecture: senior devs can spot things in seconds Im not a doctor or lawyer, but im sure there are cases where AI is really good in a similar way and cases where they miss the most crucial aspects.
- KaiserPro 4mo ago
  > drastically reduce the skill required for such human I mean thats what is wanted by some companies. The problem, especially for things like legal is that it requires someone more skilled to read through and understand that the argument is bollocks, or the law/precedent they are banking on is in fact the right one. We have a tool that auto-writes letters to our management companies when they break SLAs. We have a slider that goes from polite to we are going to extract your first born. Thats simple ish to do for LLMs, and low risk. Drafting contracts is also something we could probably do, as its mostly boilerplate. However the consequence for mis-drafting a contract is multi-million dollars.
spider-mario 4mo ago
> And that can be catastrophic in high risk environments, like legal, medical or high risk software products where being wrong in the wrong place can mean bankruptcy or even cost a life. Which also happens with humans – does it do so at a lower rate? On its own, it kind of sounds like similar anti-self-driving-car arguments.
- wouldbecouldbe 4mo ago
  yeah thats why I mentioned it works well IF guided by the correct expert. I agree that you can create a set of domain specific rules, reinforcement layer validation tools, like self driving, that vastly improves the accuracy of au & llm's. Making humans less and less needed. But where LLM's comes from the magic of generic knowledge, this will be the opposite, narrowing it down.
nonethewiser 4mo ago
Yeah but even what you describe makes it an extremely useful tool and productivity boost. Sure, we're not going to deploy a lawyer agent with full autonomy and no more oversight than a real lawyer. But isn't it wild that's now the frontier? It's not like self driving cars where better than a human 80% of the time isn't good enough and they aren't really usable until its 95%, 99% etc.
promptalex53 4mo ago
[flagged]

goolz 4mo ago

Ya, while the tools are really solid and have seen huge leaps these past two years, in no way will an LLM be able to do any of it unguided in two years. Just a humble opinion that I would love to see be wrong.

wouldbecouldbe 4mo ago
Yeah it can do things unguided if the tests to confirm its correctness are very solid. Thats where a lot of progress has been made and where agents are good, but this is domain specific, and a chance where startups can shine.
alberto467 4mo ago
"in no way will an LLM be able to do any of it unguided in two years" IDK "not any of it" seems a bit strong, especially thinking towards 2028. For a lot of knowledge professions, there is a surprising amount of tasks that are just dumb work compared to the rest.
ryan_n 4mo ago
> Just a humble opinion that I would love to see be wrong Out of curiosity, why would you love to be wrong about that? What possible outcome could you see being a net positive for society if the vast majority of knowledge workers (and ultimately, as robotics progress, most workers in general) are replaced by AI?
- koe123 4mo ago
  In a way, we are betraying something here. My reading is: solving the social problems of capitalism feels so impossible, that reducing the need for anyone to do work is a liability. In a way this sentiment should make extremists of us all?
  - bluefirebrand 4mo ago
    Unfortunately the fact is that society has some massive imbalances around capitalism It is not hard for me to imagine a world where if my bosses didn't need me, they would prefer me to be dead than to pay me some kind of permanent income to me. They would prefer to keep that power to themselves These are already the sort of people who will happily lay you off into a recession, leave you without a way to pay your rent or for food if it improves their bottom line. They do not care if you starve. Or at least they care less than they do about their quarterly bonus So no, I don't trust these fucks to continue playing nice if they view my value as going to zero
- ToValueFunfetti 4mo ago
  I believe it was Blink-182 who said, "Work sucks". You have to pay people to do that stuff; they don't want to be there. And then you get into second order effects- costs plummet for anything labor intensive, including medical care, prepared food, cleaning, and private tutors. Then onto tertiary effects- if you can spin up a million genius researchers to attack a problem, you start seeing massive progress in every important area and it isn't tied to population growth. I get that you might have a 'UBI/alternative general welfare is impossible' up your sleeve, but you've written this like it's somehow unfathomable that not forcing everybody to work just to survive would be a good thing. Of course it would be good! It's just a matter of dealing with the (huge) side effect of lost income.
  - volkercraig 4mo ago
    In that scenario, AI would have to be a public utility, which it is not. Private corporations have no intention to provide services for public good. If they displace a billion jobs, they'll just throw up their hands and go "we're just an Ai company guyz"
peterbell_nyc 4mo ago
There's a huge difference between one shot and few shot versus building a robust harness with deterministic and adversarial quality gates. And I'm finding that agents can actually do a pretty good job of a surprising number of things if you are very clear about your dimensions of quality and the rubrics that you get agents to research and then use to validate against those dimensions of quality. Make sure to use a deterministic pipeline or harness to go step by step so agents aren't checking their own work and I sometimes get alpha from having a codex check the work of a clod but I am seeing pretty good output across multiple domains when I have three independent quality gates and a loop which only spits it out to a human if it doesn't converge at a reasonable cost.

pezgrande 4mo ago

I kinda disagree. High risk environments just means that they will have to have a human-in-the-loop for a longer time which drastically reduce the skill required for such human (which is still requires high skill just not stupidly high).

moffkalast 4mo ago
If the human involved has no skill then they might as well not be there, since they're just a fall guy when things go wrong and won't do anything to prevent it from happening.
- pezgrande 4mo ago
  I said that still requires skill, just not as much.
wouldbecouldbe 4mo ago
I think the opposite, only the most skilled will be required. But it depends on the skill: - For landing pages & simple saas solutions: marketeers & founders have more skill, since they understand the user best. The real skill is not the basic coding, but understanding the market. - For security risks/architecture: senior devs can spot things in seconds Im not a doctor or lawyer, but im sure there are cases where AI is really good in a similar way and cases where they miss the most crucial aspects.
KaiserPro 4mo ago
> drastically reduce the skill required for such human I mean thats what is wanted by some companies. The problem, especially for things like legal is that it requires someone more skilled to read through and understand that the argument is bollocks, or the law/precedent they are banking on is in fact the right one. We have a tool that auto-writes letters to our management companies when they break SLAs. We have a slider that goes from polite to we are going to extract your first born. Thats simple ish to do for LLMs, and low risk. Drafting contracts is also something we could probably do, as its mostly boilerplate. However the consequence for mis-drafting a contract is multi-million dollars.

spider-mario 4mo ago

> And that can be catastrophic in high risk environments, like legal, medical or high risk software products where being wrong in the wrong place can mean bankruptcy or even cost a life. Which also happens with humans – does it do so at a lower rate? On its own, it kind of sounds like similar anti-self-driving-car arguments.

wouldbecouldbe 4mo ago
yeah thats why I mentioned it works well IF guided by the correct expert. I agree that you can create a set of domain specific rules, reinforcement layer validation tools, like self driving, that vastly improves the accuracy of au & llm's. Making humans less and less needed. But where LLM's comes from the magic of generic knowledge, this will be the opposite, narrowing it down.

nonethewiser 4mo ago

Yeah but even what you describe makes it an extremely useful tool and productivity boost. Sure, we're not going to deploy a lawyer agent with full autonomy and no more oversight than a real lawyer. But isn't it wild that's now the frontier? It's not like self driving cars where better than a human 80% of the time isn't good enough and they aren't really usable until its 95%, 99% etc.

promptalex53 4mo ago

[flagged]