4 ms·

Yeah, the guy running a trillion dollar scam is totally the exception to CEO-ism

ben_w 9d ago
What's the old quote from WW2? I couldn't help but notice how each successive headline reporting our glorious victories seemed to draw closer to Tokyo. Something like that. Well. I can't help but notice how each successive headline reporting how this scam/stochastic parrot/"scare quotes intelligence" seems to be solving more and more things that were but a few years ago widely regarded as being indicators of high intelligence.
- freejazz 9d ago
  Year 3 of being told my job will be replaced by AI, and the only thing that's happened so far is that AI vendors keep showing up to my office, begging me to pay them to use it is a tool. If you're only seeing the charts go up - you're not looking in the right places.
  - ben_w 9d ago
    I'm looking at the millennium puzzles, and independently of those puzzles I had asked it for a fluid dynamics simulation engine that runs in my browser, and it put one together for me so I could play with aerospikes and watch the formation of Mach diamonds in rocket engines. The isochrone map generator has also been stuck on my to-do list for years, and yet now thanks to Claude, I have it, and it's real-time and multimodal. Even before then, the free trials of Claude Code and Codex at the end of last year and start of this year… despite their flaws, they could write all the code I've ever been paid to write. Sure, limited speedup, Amdahl's law and coding is not the only part of the job, but anyone who was fine at PM and QA but not code no longer needs a coder. Even before then, I looked at the maths puzzles they were doing well at, and I found I did not understand the questions let alone the answers. I remember when the ability to generate music and art was "uniquely human", and sure there's a lot of cringe there with those models, but they're also winning awards and causing controversy by doing so, and artists are losing clients; I remember when the board game Go was considered to require "human intuition we could never make a computer solve, totally different to chess" (and I remember when chess was so, too). When I was a kid, cheques and letters on addresses often got read by a human; the OCR which automated this is also AI, though these days image-to-numbers is the "hello world" of the field.
    - freejazz 9d ago
      >Even before then, I looked at the maths puzzles they were doing well at, and I found I did not understand the questions let alone the answers. okay, and? >Even before then, the free trials of Claude Code and Codex at the end of last year and start of this year… despite their flaws, they could write all the code I've ever been paid to write. Boy, programmers sure do think programming is like the only thing in the world I'll repeat it for you again: If you're only seeing the charts go up - you're not looking in the right places.
      - ben_w 9d ago
        > Boy, programmers sure do think programming is like the only thing in the world You're the one who called it a trillion dollar scam. The compensation paid to professional software developers worldwide is currently around US$1.5 trillion per year.
        freejazz 8d ago
        >You're the one who called it a trillion dollar scam. Don't pretend like the AI companies are saying its only useful for programming. You've been arguing against that the entire time.
        ben_w 7d ago
        They're not only useful for programming, it's just that programming is by itself a trillion dollar a year industry. This, by itself, is sufficient to not be the scam you assert it to be. They may not work for your industry, but then again I don't know what your industry is. Bluntly, over my lifetime, I've heard "AI will never/not in my lifetime do X" repeatedly within a year of it doing X, for many different X. It's good at getting good. The most recent one being "make useful contributions to millennium prize maths problems". A year or two before that, it was even "do well on degree-level economics essays". Artists are unhappy, not only because it rips off their work, but because businesses that were previously hiring them now use it instead. This is much smaller (strictly in terms of money) than with software, but is also measurable. Now, if you said Tesla's self-driving cars (another AI) are a trillion dollar scam, that I would even agree with. At least, for the market cap part, for actual sales it's more like a billion dollar (ish) scam.

What's the old quote from WW2? I couldn't help but notice how each successive headline reporting our glorious victories seemed to draw closer to Tokyo. Something like that. Well. I can't help but notice how each successive headline reporting how this scam/stochastic parrot/"scare quotes intelligence" seems to be solving more and more things that were but a few years ago widely regarded as being indicators of high intelligence.

freejazz 9d ago
Year 3 of being told my job will be replaced by AI, and the only thing that's happened so far is that AI vendors keep showing up to my office, begging me to pay them to use it is a tool. If you're only seeing the charts go up - you're not looking in the right places.
- ben_w 9d ago
  I'm looking at the millennium puzzles, and independently of those puzzles I had asked it for a fluid dynamics simulation engine that runs in my browser, and it put one together for me so I could play with aerospikes and watch the formation of Mach diamonds in rocket engines. The isochrone map generator has also been stuck on my to-do list for years, and yet now thanks to Claude, I have it, and it's real-time and multimodal. Even before then, the free trials of Claude Code and Codex at the end of last year and start of this year… despite their flaws, they could write all the code I've ever been paid to write. Sure, limited speedup, Amdahl's law and coding is not the only part of the job, but anyone who was fine at PM and QA but not code no longer needs a coder. Even before then, I looked at the maths puzzles they were doing well at, and I found I did not understand the questions let alone the answers. I remember when the ability to generate music and art was "uniquely human", and sure there's a lot of cringe there with those models, but they're also winning awards and causing controversy by doing so, and artists are losing clients; I remember when the board game Go was considered to require "human intuition we could never make a computer solve, totally different to chess" (and I remember when chess was so, too). When I was a kid, cheques and letters on addresses often got read by a human; the OCR which automated this is also AI, though these days image-to-numbers is the "hello world" of the field.
  - freejazz 9d ago
    >Even before then, I looked at the maths puzzles they were doing well at, and I found I did not understand the questions let alone the answers. okay, and? >Even before then, the free trials of Claude Code and Codex at the end of last year and start of this year… despite their flaws, they could write all the code I've ever been paid to write. Boy, programmers sure do think programming is like the only thing in the world I'll repeat it for you again: If you're only seeing the charts go up - you're not looking in the right places.
    - ben_w 9d ago
      > Boy, programmers sure do think programming is like the only thing in the world You're the one who called it a trillion dollar scam. The compensation paid to professional software developers worldwide is currently around US$1.5 trillion per year.
      - freejazz 8d ago
        >You're the one who called it a trillion dollar scam. Don't pretend like the AI companies are saying its only useful for programming. You've been arguing against that the entire time.
        ben_w 7d ago
        They're not only useful for programming, it's just that programming is by itself a trillion dollar a year industry. This, by itself, is sufficient to not be the scam you assert it to be. They may not work for your industry, but then again I don't know what your industry is. Bluntly, over my lifetime, I've heard "AI will never/not in my lifetime do X" repeatedly within a year of it doing X, for many different X. It's good at getting good. The most recent one being "make useful contributions to millennium prize maths problems". A year or two before that, it was even "do well on degree-level economics essays". Artists are unhappy, not only because it rips off their work, but because businesses that were previously hiring them now use it instead. This is much smaller (strictly in terms of money) than with software, but is also measurable. Now, if you said Tesla's self-driving cars (another AI) are a trillion dollar scam, that I would even agree with. At least, for the market cap part, for actual sales it's more like a billion dollar (ish) scam.