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A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

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11–20 of 220 posts

Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#11
Hmm, I didn’t read the article but from the gist of other comments, we seem to have bought into Sama’s “agents so good, you don’t need developers/engineers/support/secretaries/whatever anymore”. Issue is, it is almost same as claiming, pocket calculators so good, we don’t need accountants anymore, even computers so good, we don’t need accountants anymore. This AI seems to claim to be that motor car moment when horse cart got replaced. But a horse cart got replaced with a Taxi(and they also have unions protecting them!). With AI, all these “to be replaced” people are like accountants, more productive, same as with higher level languages compared to assembly, many new devs are productive. Despite cars replacing the horse carts of the long past, we still fail to have self driving cars and still someone needs to learn to drive that massive hunk of metal, same as whoever plans to deploy LLM to layoff devs must learn to drive those LLMs and know what it is doing.

I believe it is high time we come out this madness and reveal the lies of the marketers and grifters of AI for what it is. If AI can replace anyone, it should begin with doctors, they work with rote knowledge and service based on explicit(though ambiguous) inputs, same as an LLM needs, but I still have doctors and wait for hours on end in the waiting room to get prescribed a cough hard candy only to later comeback again because it was actually covid and my doctor had a brain fart.

Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#13
> LLMs are not good in some domains and bad in others. Rather, they are incredibly good at some specific tasks and bad at other tasks. Even if both tasks are in the same domain, even if tasks A and B are very similar, even if any human that can do A will be able to do B.

i think this is true of ai/ml systems in general. we tend to anthropomorphise their capability curves to match the cumulative nature of human capabilities, where often times the capability curve of the machine is discontinuous and has surprising gaps.

Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#14

Let's imagine that we all had a trillion dollars. Then we would all sit around and go "well dang, we have everything, what should we do?". I think you'll find that just about everyone would agree, "we oughta see how far that LLM thing can go". We could be in nuclear fallout shelters for decades, and I think you'll still see us trying to push the LLM thing underground, through duress. We dream of this, so the bear cas…

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Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#17
post #5

I think all these articles begging the question: what's author's credential to claim these things. Be careful about consuming information from chatters, not doers. There is only knowledge from doing, not from pondering.

I'm generally more skeptical when reading takes and predictions from people working at AI companies, who have a financial interest in making sure the hype train continues. To make an analogy - most people who will tell you not to invest in cryptocurrency are not blockchain engineers. But does that make their opinion invalid?

The crypto people have no coherent story about why crypto is fundamentally earth-shaking more than a story about either gambling or regulatory avoidance, whereas the story for AI, if you believe it, is a second industrial revolution and labor automation where, to at least some small extent, it is undeniable.

Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#19
post #5

I think all these articles begging the question: what's author's credential to claim these things. Be careful about consuming information from chatters, not doers. There is only knowledge from doing, not from pondering.

I'm generally more skeptical when reading takes and predictions from people working at AI companies, who have a financial interest in making sure the hype train continues. To make an analogy - most people who will tell you not to invest in cryptocurrency are not blockchain engineers. But does that make their opinion invalid?

Of course I trust people who working on L2 chains to tell me how to scale Bitcoin and people who working on cryptography to walk me through the ETH PoS algorithms.

You cannot lead to truth by learning from people who don't know. People who know can be biased, sure, so the best way to learn is to learn the knowledge, not the "hot-takes" or "predictions".

Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#20
post #5

I think all these articles begging the question: what's author's credential to claim these things. Be careful about consuming information from chatters, not doers. There is only knowledge from doing, not from pondering.

> Be careful about consuming information from chatters, not doers

The doers produce a new javascript framework every week, claiming it finally solves all the pains of previous frameworks, whereas the chatters pinpoint all the deficiencies and pain points.

One group has an immensely better track record than the other.

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