5 ms·

IMO many are still missing a big part of the picture. We're looking at the potential for a massive scale level of automation of [x], which happens to be a huge

IMO many are still missing a big part of the picture. We're looking at the potential for a massive scale level of automation of [x], which happens to be a huge part of the economy, and people are wondering which player in [x] is going to be the biggest winner. I think the historically precedented answer is none of them. When the Industrial Revolution came along it did create 'super farms' relative to the past through increased efficiency and production, but it also created a huge vacuum in the economy that was ultimately filled by industry, to the point that farming, super or not, became a vanishingly small part of the overall economy - even as production continued to increase. --- LLMs stand to do the same thing for software. If and when we reach the point of 'normal' people being able to reliably compose ultra customized software solutions to their problems, then software is basically done as a problem-solving industry in and of itself. Not 'done' as in dead, but 'done' as in solved. There's just nowhere to really go from there. And so I think this will do the exact same thing as the Industrial Revolution did to farming and create a vacuum opening the door to all sorts of new interesting expansions in the real world, as opposed to the digital one. I don't know what this means, because it's quite difficult to foresee the impact of the Industrial Revolution when living in agrarian world, but it's not so hard to see that the future will not be agrarian. --- So it's probably still myopic but my bet would be on the first major manufacturer of cheap customer/enterprise grade generalized robotics hardware shells.

x______________ 2mo ago
> We're looking at the potential for a massive scale level of automation of [x], which happens to be a huge part of the economy, and people are wondering which player in [x] is going to be the biggest winn.. Sorry to cut you off, but have you looked at Nvidia's numbers since the NFT craze? They won. Sell shovels in a gold rush, make better shovels, repeat on the next rush.
- altmanaltman 2mo ago
  Nvidia has been winning for decades, they got it right in gaming, they got it right in crypto, and they got it right in AI. People (outside of tech mostly) think they just got lucky but if that's the case, they have all the luck in the world.
petra 2mo ago
I agree that the winners would be doing stuff in the physical world. And there I think the winner would be China.
- eru 2mo ago
  We will all be winners.
  - josephg 2mo ago
    Maybe - we'll have to wait and see. By my reckoning, there's a significant chance most software engineers will be unemployable within a few years. But I'm not 100% confident that there'll be a utopia waiting for us, as an alternative.
    - eru 2mo ago
      Sorry, when I wrote 'all', I meant people all over the world (not just in China). Individuals can still get unlucky. Just like a coal miner might be out of a job, when solar panels become effectively free. Software engineers are a pretty small part of the general population. And they can move into general white collar work afterwards. Perhaps at a drop in pay compared to software engineering, but still pretty cushy by the standards of ordinary people. (And if we manage to automate all white collar work to be done cheaply and reliably by machines, well, then we are in utopia.)
    - somenameforme 2mo ago
      Ostensibly there is no reason this isn't already happening at large companies. I used to think it was an expertise bias, since the impact of LLMs is inversely proportional to your own ability - but I think this is also no longer the case. Even if you're extremely skilled, they can already greatly supplement, if not supplant, you on implementation and increasingly even planning/architecture. So my new pet theory is that this is one of the few times we're seeing a positive effect from the heads of all of these big businesses being part of weird public (e.g. WEF) and private (e.g. Bohemian Club) orgs where they get to together and conspire to conquer the world or whatever. Rapid replacement of labor would be horrifically self defeating, because you'd end up not only tanking your own economy but having a bunch of angry and increasingly desperate people with a whole lot of time on their hands. That doesn't tend to end well for the powers that be. So I think there's going to be a conscious effort to transition between this era, and whatever comes next, in a more controlled way than $$$ YOLO $$$.
deleted 2mo ago
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x______________ 2mo ago

> We're looking at the potential for a massive scale level of automation of [x], which happens to be a huge part of the economy, and people are wondering which player in [x] is going to be the biggest winn.. Sorry to cut you off, but have you looked at Nvidia's numbers since the NFT craze? They won. Sell shovels in a gold rush, make better shovels, repeat on the next rush.

altmanaltman 2mo ago
Nvidia has been winning for decades, they got it right in gaming, they got it right in crypto, and they got it right in AI. People (outside of tech mostly) think they just got lucky but if that's the case, they have all the luck in the world.

petra 2mo ago

I agree that the winners would be doing stuff in the physical world. And there I think the winner would be China.

eru 2mo ago
We will all be winners.
- josephg 2mo ago
  Maybe - we'll have to wait and see. By my reckoning, there's a significant chance most software engineers will be unemployable within a few years. But I'm not 100% confident that there'll be a utopia waiting for us, as an alternative.
  - eru 2mo ago
    Sorry, when I wrote 'all', I meant people all over the world (not just in China). Individuals can still get unlucky. Just like a coal miner might be out of a job, when solar panels become effectively free. Software engineers are a pretty small part of the general population. And they can move into general white collar work afterwards. Perhaps at a drop in pay compared to software engineering, but still pretty cushy by the standards of ordinary people. (And if we manage to automate all white collar work to be done cheaply and reliably by machines, well, then we are in utopia.)
  - somenameforme 2mo ago
    Ostensibly there is no reason this isn't already happening at large companies. I used to think it was an expertise bias, since the impact of LLMs is inversely proportional to your own ability - but I think this is also no longer the case. Even if you're extremely skilled, they can already greatly supplement, if not supplant, you on implementation and increasingly even planning/architecture. So my new pet theory is that this is one of the few times we're seeing a positive effect from the heads of all of these big businesses being part of weird public (e.g. WEF) and private (e.g. Bohemian Club) orgs where they get to together and conspire to conquer the world or whatever. Rapid replacement of labor would be horrifically self defeating, because you'd end up not only tanking your own economy but having a bunch of angry and increasingly desperate people with a whole lot of time on their hands. That doesn't tend to end well for the powers that be. So I think there's going to be a conscious effort to transition between this era, and whatever comes next, in a more controlled way than $$$ YOLO $$$.

deleted 2mo ago

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