81–90 of 348 posts
The difference between poison and medicine is the amount. AI is great and very useful, but they want the AI to replace you instead of supporting your needs. "AI everywhere" is worse than "AI nowhere". What we need is "AI somewhere".
AI agent technology likely isn’t ready for the kind of high-stakes autonomous business work Microsoft is promising. It's unbelievable to me that tech leaders lack the insight to recognize this. So how to explain the current AI mania being widely promoted? I think the best fit explanation is simple con artistry. They know the product is fundamentally flawed and won't perform as being promised. But the money to be made…
I was just in a thread yesterday with someone who genuinely believed that we're only seeing the beginnings of what the current breed of AI will get us, and that it's going to be as transformative as the introduction of the internet was. Everything about the conversation felt like talking to a true believer, and there's plenty out there. It's the hopes and dreams of the Next Big Thing after blockchain and web3 fell ap…
I think that. It's new technology and it always takes some years before all the implications and applications of new technology are fully worked out. I also think that we're in a bubble that will hose a lot of people when it pops.
What can you even do in the ms enterprise ecosystem with their copilot integration? Is it just for chatting? Is it a glorified RAG? Can you tell copilot co to create a presentation? Make a visualisation in a spreadsheet?
It is functional at RAG stuff on internal docs but definitely not good - not sure how much of this is Copilot vs corporate disarray and access controls.
It won't send emails for me (which I would think is the agentic mvp) but that is likely a switch my organization daren't turn on.
Tldr it's valuable as a normal LLM, very limited as a add-on to Microsoft's software ecosystem.
AI agent technology likely isn’t ready for the kind of high-stakes autonomous business work Microsoft is promising. It's unbelievable to me that tech leaders lack the insight to recognize this. So how to explain the current AI mania being widely promoted? I think the best fit explanation is simple con artistry. They know the product is fundamentally flawed and won't perform as being promised. But the money to be made…
It's part of a larger economic con centered on the financial industry and the financialization of American industry. If you want this stuff to stop, you have to be hoping (or even working toward) a correction that wipes out the incumbents who absolutely are working to maintain the masqerade. It will hurt, and they'll scare us with the idea that it will hurt, but the secret is that we get to choose where it hurts - th…
"How Short Term Thinking Won" - https://youtu.be/qGwU2dOoHiY
The author argues that this con has been caused by three relatively simple levers: Low dividend yields, legalization of stock buybacks, and executive compensation packages that generate lots of wealth under short pump-and-dump timelines.
If those are the causes, then simple regulatory changes to make stock buybacks illegal again, limit the kinds of executive compensation contracts that are valid, and incentivize higher dividend yields/penalize sales yields should return the market to the previous long-term-optimized behavior.
I doubt that you could convince the politicians and financiers who are currently pulling value out of a fragile and inefficient economy under the current system to make those changes, and if the changes were made I doubt they could last or be enforced given the massive incentives to revert to our broken system. I think you're right that it will take a huge disaster that the wealthy and powerful are unable to dodge and unable to blame on anything but their own actions, I just don't know what that event might look like.
Super interesting how this arc has played out for Microsoft. They went from having this massive advantage in being an early OpenAI partner with early access to their models to largely losing the consumer AI space: Copilot is almost never mentioned in the same breath as Claude and ChatGPT. Though I guess their huge stake in OpenAI will still pay out massively from a valuation perspective.
Top signal. Phase transition is imminent.
AI agent technology likely isn’t ready for the kind of high-stakes autonomous business work Microsoft is promising. It's unbelievable to me that tech leaders lack the insight to recognize this. So how to explain the current AI mania being widely promoted? I think the best fit explanation is simple con artistry. They know the product is fundamentally flawed and won't perform as being promised. But the money to be made…
There are three types of humans: mimics, amplifiers, originators. ~99% of the population are basic mimics, and they're always terrified - to one degree or another - of being out of step with the herd. The hyper mimicry behavior can be seen everywhere and at all times, from classrooms to Tiktok & Reddit to shopping behaviors. Most corporate leadership are highly effective mimics, very few are originators. They desperately herd follow ('nobody ever got fired for buying IBM').
This is the dotcom equivalent of every business must be e and @ ified (the advertising was aggressively targeted to that at the time). 1998-2000, you must be e ready. Your hotdog stand must have its own web site.
It is not greed-driven, it's fear-driven.
AI is people looking at EV hype and saying - I'll 100x it. It has all the same components, just on much higher scale: 1. Billionaire con-man convincing large part of market and industry (Altman in AI vs Musk in EV) that new tech will take over in few years. 2. Insane valuations not supported by an actual ROI. 3. Very interesting and amazing underlying technology. 4. Governments jumping on the hype and enabling it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’re correct, you need to learn how to use it. But for some reason HN has an extremely strong anti-AI sentiment, unless it’s about fundamental research. At this point, I consider these AI tools to be an invaluable asset to my work in the same way that search engines are. It’s integrated into my work. But it takes practice on how to use it correctly.
My suspicion is because they (HN) are very concerned this technology is pushing hard into their domain expertise and feel threatened (and, rightfully so).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’re correct, you need to learn how to use it. But for some reason HN has an extremely strong anti-AI sentiment, unless it’s about fundamental research. At this point, I consider these AI tools to be an invaluable asset to my work in the same way that search engines are. It’s integrated into my work. But it takes practice on how to use it correctly.
My suspicion is because they (HN) are very concerned this technology is pushing hard into their domain expertise and feel threatened (and, rightfully so).