Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nvidia CEO criticizes Anthropic boss over his statements on AI

tomshardware.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 195 posts

Re: Nvidia CEO criticizes Anthropic boss over his statements on AI

#111

Post by ffsm8 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #47
kbos87 wrote: post #19

Companies like Nvidia and OpenAI base their answers to any questions on economic risk on their own best interests and a pretty short view of history. They are fighting like hell to make sure they are among a small set of winners while waving away the risk or claiming that there's some better future for the majority of people on the other side of all this. To claim that all of the benefit isn't going to naturally accr…

"Massive disruption" of what kind? Current AI abilities make white-collar work more productive and potentially higher-paid, not less.

You seem to have the same opinion as kbos87 then, because given your higher productivity, do you honestly think there will not be less job openings from your employer going forward?

What you just said as a rebuttal was pretty much his point, you just didn't internalize what the productivity gains mean at the macro level, only looking at the select few that will continue to have a job

Re: Nvidia CEO criticizes Anthropic boss over his statements on AI

#112

Post by bluefirebrand »

MostlyStable wrote: post #80
bluefirebrand wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For the same reasons that, on average and in general, increases in productivity have lead to increases in wages across history Historically, increased productivity has almost literally never increased wages or benefits without worker uprisings Seriously look into the history of labor and automation

Cool. What worker uprising occurred in the US in 1995? I (and basically every economist) disagree with your interpretation of historical events. https://x.com/LettieriDC/status/1922704140834099370

Where is worker productivity on that graph exactly?

Re: Nvidia CEO criticizes Anthropic boss over his statements on AI

#113

Post by Aurornis »

hnlmorg wrote: post #54
kbos87 wrote: post #19

Companies like Nvidia and OpenAI base their answers to any questions on economic risk on their own best interests and a pretty short view of history. They are fighting like hell to make sure they are among a small set of winners while waving away the risk or claiming that there's some better future for the majority of people on the other side of all this. To claim that all of the benefit isn't going to naturally accr…

That backlash is already happening. Which is why we are seeing the rise in right wing extremism. People are voting for change. The problem is they’re also voting for the very establishment they’re protesting against.

AI doesn’t really register on polls of voter priorities.

Re: Nvidia CEO criticizes Anthropic boss over his statements on AI

#114

Post by seadan83 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #42
leetrout wrote: post #4

Anthropic warns unemployment is a serious risk. Nvidia has an inflated stock and knows how to play the game so of course they deny any such thing with a view not much past the next quarterly earnings call. No surprises here.

Unemployment will be a serious risk indeed once the current AI bubble bursts and we enter a new economic downturn. As it is, AI-generated unemployment is just FUD.

When that bubble bursts, perhaps non-AI tech companies will start receiving VC funds again.

Re: Nvidia CEO criticizes Anthropic boss over his statements on AI

#115

Post by davnicwil »

hollowturtle wrote: post #94
solumunus wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really is night and day. Most of them feel like cool toys, Claude Code is a genuine work horse. It immediately became completely integral to my workflow. I own a small business and I can say with absolute confidence this will reduce the amount of devs I need to hire going forward.

I don't get claims like that, if AI let me do more and be more productive with less people I could also grow and scale more, that means that I can also hire more and again multiply growth because each dev will bring more and more... I'm skeptic because I don't see it happening, actually the contrary more people doing more things maybe, but the not 10x nor 100x otherwise we would see products built in 5 years coming o…

It might be that the value more software can add is already at its limit in any given business - or at least returns will be diminishing. Meaning in those particular businesses the appetite to hire devs might stay flat (or even shrink!) as AI makes existing devs more efficient.

The more interesting question is whether this is true across the economy as a whole. In my view the answer is clearly no. Are we already operating at the limit of more software to add value at the margin? No.

So though any particular existing business might stop hiring or even cut staff, it won't matter if more businesses are created to do yet more things in the world with software. We might even end up in a place where across the economy, more dev jobs exist as a result of more people doing more with software in a kind of snowball effect.

More conservatively, though, you'd at least expect us to just reach equilibrium with current jobs if indeed there is new demand for software to soak up.

Re: Nvidia CEO criticizes Anthropic boss over his statements on AI

#116

Post by andsoitis »

thayne wrote: post #103
MostlyStable wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not true. Wages did stagnate from about the mid 70s until about the mid 90s, but median, real wages have been increasing steadily since then [0] [0] https://x.com/LettieriDC/status/1922704140834099370

Increasing and stagnating are not mutually exclusive. Wages may be increasing, but the benefits of productivity gains have not been evenly distributed. Productivity has increased faster than wages have, and difference has gone to the already wealthy.

> Productivity has increased faster than wages have, and difference has gone to the already wealthy.

What/who has financed productivity increases? Isn’t it tools and infrastructure etc. for the most part, paid for by asset owners? There are likely exceptions, but big picture.

Re: Nvidia CEO criticizes Anthropic boss over his statements on AI

#117

Post by lend000 »

kbos87 wrote: post #19

Companies like Nvidia and OpenAI base their answers to any questions on economic risk on their own best interests and a pretty short view of history. They are fighting like hell to make sure they are among a small set of winners while waving away the risk or claiming that there's some better future for the majority of people on the other side of all this. To claim that all of the benefit isn't going to naturally accr…

Friends and others who have described the details of their non-technical white collar work to me over the last 15 or so years have typically evoked the unspoken response... "Hmm, I could probably automate about 50-80% of your job in a couple weeks." That's pre-AI. And yet years later, they would still have similar jobs with repetitive computer work.

So I'm quite confident the future will be similar with AI. Yes, in theory, it could already replace perhaps 90% of the white collar work in the economy. But in practice? It will be a slow, decades-long transition as old-school / less tech savvy employers adopt the new processes and technologies.

Junior software engineers trying to break into high paying tech jobs will be hit the hardest hit IMO, since employers are tech savvy, the supply of junior developers is as high as ever, and they simply will take too long to add more value than using Claude unless you have a lot of money to burn on training them.

Re: Nvidia CEO criticizes Anthropic boss over his statements on AI

#118

Post by DrillShopper »

MostlyStable wrote: post #65
kbos87 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would my employer pay me more for using their AI? I am already massively more productive at work using AI. I'm not getting paid more, and I'm not working fewer hours. The road we are headed down is one where all of the economic benefits go straight to the owning class.

For the same reasons that, on average and in general, increases in productivity have lead to increases in wages across history. It's not universal and it's not instantaneous, but the base level assumption should be that increases in productivity will lead to increases in wages in the long run and we should have specific reasons why it won't happen for a given case to believe otherwise.

> For the same reasons that, on average and in general, increases in productivity have lead to increases in wages across history.

Not in the last 40 years in real income terms: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

This trend is likely to accelerate (productivity skyrocketing, wages stagnant)

Re: Nvidia CEO criticizes Anthropic boss over his statements on AI

#119

Post by skeledrew »

falcor84 wrote: post #64
dsign wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> we can always eat the rich! As long as they are not made out of silicon....

And even then, we could perhaps genetically engineer ourselves to metabolize silicon.

What about metabolizing light and carbon dioxide directly instead?

Re: Nvidia CEO criticizes Anthropic boss over his statements on AI

#120

Post by zozbot234 »

ffsm8 wrote: post #111
zozbot234 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Massive disruption" of what kind? Current AI abilities make white-collar work more productive and potentially higher-paid, not less.

You seem to have the same opinion as kbos87 then, because given your higher productivity, do you honestly think there will not be less job openings from your employer going forward? What you just said as a rebuttal was pretty much his point, you just didn't internalize what the productivity gains mean at the macro level, only looking at the select few that will continue to have a job

Were there "less job openings from our employers" when the software industry shifted en masse from coding in FORTRAN to C/C++, then to Java and later on to Python and JavaScript? Each of these choices came with a massive gain in productivity. Why then did the software sector grow and not shrink at the macro level?
Post reply on HN