AI isn’t good enough
skventures.substack.com
AI isn’t good enough
1–10 of 374 posts
Re: AI isn’t good enough
#2"We are quickly reaching the limits of current AI"
So many words in this piece, but nothing to back up this primary assertion.
Re: AI isn’t good enough
#3"too few people for all the jobs, for the most part"
- Are wages going up?
"But almost everywhere else needs people. Badly. Across retail, restaurants, manufacturing, trades, and on and on, companies are struggling to hire. " - Wow sounds like an exciting star trek future that I cant wait to be part of!
"labor became more expensive than capital" - So wages must be going up right?
"In essence, the authors show that for automation to have widespread benefits it must deliver high productivity gains to more than compensate for the high displacement of workers." - the reason why this sentence makes no sense is because it is written in two frames at the same time. One of a planned economy and the other of capitalism.
"We are in a middle zone, however, with AI able to displace huge numbers of workers quickly, but not provide compensatory and broader productivity benefits." - But what about the horses?
I tried my best to find the central thesis of this rambling multi-tone work. I think it is difficult because it was written with too many different frames.
Re: AI isn’t good enough
#4"too few people for all the jobs, for the most part" - Are wages going up? "But almost everywhere else needs people. Badly. Across retail, restaurants, manufacturing, trades, and on and on, companies are struggling to hire. " - Wow sounds like an exciting star trek future that I cant wait to be part of! "labor became more expensive than capital" - So wages must be going up right? "In essence, the authors show that fo…
Capital's willingness to ride out labor shortages without increasing wages seems to have become substantially greater in the last couple of decades.
TIRED: labor shortage -> wages rise!
WIRED: labor shortage -> y'all work harder for maybe a bit of overtime or maybe not, and we'll just absorb the complaints about customer service and product quality. Those damn employees aren't getting a penny more!
Re: AI isn’t good enough
#5With few prompts I just wrote a small script with a bunch of openssl commands. Saved me an hour. And it works. And it even explained it. There is AGI and then there is “practically agi”. The latter has been achieved with LLMs.
Re: AI isn’t good enough
#6"We are quickly reaching the limits of current AI" So many words in this piece, but nothing to back up this primary assertion.
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Re: AI isn’t good enough
#7As impressive as AI is and what it can do. I've felt the same way in my last job. It was almost there; it was almost good enough such that we could almost ship the project but we didn't. GPT3.5 was not good enough, GPT4 seemed like it was good enough in terms of accuracy but it was too slow and we were getting throttled like crazy. I lost my job over it. When I was worried about AI taking my job, I didn't picture it like this.
Re: AI isn’t good enough
#8"too few people for all the jobs, for the most part" - Are wages going up? "But almost everywhere else needs people. Badly. Across retail, restaurants, manufacturing, trades, and on and on, companies are struggling to hire. " - Wow sounds like an exciting star trek future that I cant wait to be part of! "labor became more expensive than capital" - So wages must be going up right? "In essence, the authors show that fo…
Capital's willingness to ride out labor shortages without increasing wages seems to have become substantially greater in the last couple of decades. TIRED: labor shortage -> wages rise! WIRED: labor shortage -> y'all work harder for maybe a bit of overtime or maybe not, and we'll just absorb the complaints about customer service and product quality. Those damn employees aren't getting a penny more!
Wages are rising: https://www.axios.com/2023/07/12/real-wage-gains-inflation
Re: AI isn’t good enough
#9As impressive as AI is and what it can do. I've felt the same way in my last job. It was almost there; it was almost good enough such that we could almost ship the project but we didn't. GPT3.5 was not good enough, GPT4 seemed like it was good enough in terms of accuracy but it was too slow and we were getting throttled like crazy. I lost my job over it. When I was worried about AI taking my job, I didn't picture it…
Our use case was that we needed to consider information from thousands of pages of documents to answer customer questions. I let GPT decide where to look based on content tables of the documents (thankfully each section was not more than ~500 words) and only fetched information from the relevant sections to let GPT answer the user's question. GPT3.5 was fast enough to be usable but often inaccurate; it would ignore some information or get confused about simple mathematical comparisons in the user's questions like 'greater than versus less than'. GPT4 was good and potentially fast enough but the API throttling was too restrictive and it was not possible to feed it less information and still get a good, nuanced answer every time.
Actually the trick to get GPT to find the information based on table of contents worked really well in narrowing down the information for the second-stage summary (to answer the user's question) but our use case nevertheless required a lot of information (often from multiple sections) with a lot of grey areas and nuance and the limited amount of throughout provided by GPT4 didn't cut it.
It was frustrating that, aside from accuracy issues (which depended on the complexity of the question), it often seemed to work very well and fast with GPT3.5 but the exact same code did not meet usability expectations when we switched over to GPT4 due to slow speed (though the accuracy was awesome).
I only spent 1 month and a half on this project but management didn't have the patience to wait for Open AI to remove GPT4 throttling and because they couldn't see it working (at the speed they wanted), they had no reason to believe me that my solution was designed correctly... That's startups I guess.
Anyway I still think there is a lot of hope for this technology and I'm confident that the problem can and will be solved. It was just unfortunate timing for me. Being an early adopter isn't always a good thing.
Re: AI isn’t good enough
#10"too few people for all the jobs, for the most part" - Are wages going up? "But almost everywhere else needs people. Badly. Across retail, restaurants, manufacturing, trades, and on and on, companies are struggling to hire. " - Wow sounds like an exciting star trek future that I cant wait to be part of! "labor became more expensive than capital" - So wages must be going up right? "In essence, the authors show that fo…
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