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A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

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Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#51

Post by roenxi »

This seems to be ignoring the major force driving AI right now - hardware improvements. We've barely seen a new hardware generation since ChatGPT was released to the market, we'd certainly expect it to plateau fairly quickly on fixed hardware. My personal experience of AI models is going to be a series of step changes every time the VRAM on my graphics card doubles. Big companies are probably going to see something similar each time a new more powerful product hits the data centre. The algorithms here aren't all that impressive compared to the creeping FLOPS/$ metric.

Bear cases always welcome. This wouldn't be the first time in computing history that progress just falls off the exponential curve suddenly. Although I would bet money on there being a few years left and AGI is achieved.

Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#52

Post by gmt2027 »

The typical AI economic discussion always focuses on job loss, but that's only half the story. We won't just have corporations firing everyone while AI does all the work - who would buy their products then?

The disruption goes both ways. When AI slashes production costs by 10-100x, what's the value proposition of traditional capital? If you don't need to organize large teams or manage complex operations, the advantage of "being a capitalist" diminishes rapidly.

I'm betting on the rise of independents and small teams. The idea that your local doctor or carpenter needs VC funding or an IPO was always ridiculous. Large corps primarily exist to organize labor and reduce transaction costs.

The interesting question: when both executives and frontline workers have access to the same AI tools, who wins? The manager with an MBA or the person with practical skills and domain expertise? My money's on the latter.

Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#54

Post by randomNumber7 »

drysine wrote: post #45
hattmall wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some fields though where they can replace humans in significant capacity. Software development is probably one of the least likely for anything more than entry level, but A LOT of engineering has a very very real existential threat. Think about designing buildings. You basically just need to know a lot of rules / tables and how things interact to know what's possible and the best practices. A purpose built…

>a main role of the engineer is to interface with the non-technical persons or other engineers The main role of the engineer is being responsible for the building not collapsing.

ChatGPT will probably take more responsibility than Boeing for their airplane software.

Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#55

Post by randomNumber7 »

demaga wrote: post #33
usaar333 wrote: post #30

Author also made a highly upvoted and controversial comment about o3 in the same vein that's worth reading: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ao4enANjWNsYiSFqc/o3?comment... Oh course lesswrong, being heavily AI doomers, may be slightly biased against near term AGI just from motivated reasoning. Gotta love this part of the post no one has yet addressed: > At some unknown point – probably in 2030s, possibly tomorrow (bu…

I would expect similar doom predictions in the era of nuclear weapon invention, but we've survived so far. Why do people assume AGI will be orders of magnitude more dangerous than what we already have?

Most people are just ignorant and dumb, dont listen to it.

Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#56

Post by roncesvalles »

csomar wrote: post #22

> LLMs still seem as terrible at this as they'd been in the GPT-3.5 age. Software agents break down once the codebase becomes complex enough, game-playing agents get stuck in loops out of which they break out only by accident, etc. This has been my observation. I got into Github Copilot as early as it launched back when GPT-3 was the model. By that time (late 2021) copilot can already write tests for my Rust function…

The last line has been my experience as well. I only trust what I've verified firsthand now because the Internet is just so rife with people trying to influence your thoughts in a way that benefits them, over a good faith sharing of the truth.

I just recently heard this quote from a clip of Jeff Bezos: "When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right.", and I was like... wow. That quote is the zeitgeist.

If it's so revolutionary, it should be immediately obvious to me. I knew Uber, Netflix, Spotify were revolutionary the first time I used them. With LLMs for coding, it's like I'm groping in the dark trying to find what others are seeing, and it's just not there.

Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#57

Post by nakedneuron »

blitzar wrote: post #39
andsoitis wrote: post #18

This poetic statement by the author sums it up for me: ”People are extending LLMs a hand, hoping to pull them up to our level. But there's nothing reaching back.”

When you (attempt to) save a person from drowning there is ridiculously high chance of them drowning you.

Haha.

Shame on you for making me laugh. That was very inappropriate.

Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#58

Post by randomNumber7 »

gmt2027 wrote: post #52

The typical AI economic discussion always focuses on job loss, but that's only half the story. We won't just have corporations firing everyone while AI does all the work - who would buy their products then? The disruption goes both ways. When AI slashes production costs by 10-100x, what's the value proposition of traditional capital? If you don't need to organize large teams or manage complex operations, the advantag…

Idk where you live, but in my world "being a capitalist" requires you to own capital. And you know what, AI makes it even better to own capital. Now you have these fancey machines doing stuff for you and you dont even need any annoying workers.

Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#60

Post by roenxi »

roncesvalles wrote: post #56
csomar wrote: post #22

> LLMs still seem as terrible at this as they'd been in the GPT-3.5 age. Software agents break down once the codebase becomes complex enough, game-playing agents get stuck in loops out of which they break out only by accident, etc. This has been my observation. I got into Github Copilot as early as it launched back when GPT-3 was the model. By that time (late 2021) copilot can already write tests for my Rust function…

The last line has been my experience as well. I only trust what I've verified firsthand now because the Internet is just so rife with people trying to influence your thoughts in a way that benefits them, over a good faith sharing of the truth. I just recently heard this quote from a clip of Jeff Bezos: "When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right.", and I was like... wow. That quote is t…

> I knew Uber, Netflix, Spotify were revolutionary the first time I used them.

Maybe re-tune your revolution sensor. None of those are revolutionary companies. Profitable and well executed, sure, but those turn up all the time.

Uber's entire business model was running over the legal system so quickly that taxi licenses didn't have time to catch up. Other than that it was a pretty obvious idea. It is a taxi service. The innovations they made were almost completely legal ones; figuring out how to skirt employment and taxi law.

Netflix was anticipated online by and is probably inferior to YouTube except for the fact that they have a pretty traditional content creator lab tacked on the side to do their own programs. And torrenting had been a thing for a long time already showing how to do online distribution of video content.

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