my favorite part was where the graphs are all unrelated to each other
Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
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Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#62funny how we have all of this progress yet things that actually matter (sorry chess fans) in the real world are more expensive: health care, housing, cars. and what meager gains there are seem to be more and more concentrated in a smaller group of people. plenty of charts you can look at - net productivity by virtually any metric vs real adjusted income. the example I like are kiosks and self checkout. who has encoun…
It would be kinda funny if not so tragic how economists will argue both "[productive improvement] will make things cheaper" and then in the next breath "deflation is bad and must be avoided at all costs"
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#63funny how we have all of this progress yet things that actually matter (sorry chess fans) in the real world are more expensive: health care, housing, cars. and what meager gains there are seem to be more and more concentrated in a smaller group of people. plenty of charts you can look at - net productivity by virtually any metric vs real adjusted income. the example I like are kiosks and self checkout. who has encoun…
Those are all expensive because of artificial barriers meant to keep their prices high. Go to any Asian country and houses, healthcare and cars are priced like commodities, not luxuries. Tech and AI have taken off in the US partially because they’re in the domain of software, which hasnt bee regulated to the point of deliberate inefficiency like other industries in the US.
If we had less regulation of insurance companies, do you think they’d be cheaper?
(I pick this example because our regulation of insurance companies has (unintuitively) incentivized them to pay more for care. So it’s an example of poor regulation imo)
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#64I've also noticed that LLMs are really good at speeding up onboarding. New hires basically have a friendly, never tired mentor available. It gives them more confidence in the first drafted code changes / design docs. But I don't think the horse analogy works.
It's really changing cultural expectations. Don't ping a human when an LLM can answer the question probably better and faster. Do ping a human for meaningful questions related to product directions / historical context.
What LLMs are killing is:
- noisy Slacks with junior folks questions. Those are now your Gemini / chat gpt sessions.
- tedious implementation sessions.
The vast majority of the work is still human led from what I can tell.
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#65Cost per word is a bizarre metric to bring up. Since when is volume of words a measure of value or achievement?
It also puts a thumb on the scale for AI, which tends to emit pages of text to answer simple questions.
Sounds like any post-secondary, graduate student, or management consultant out there being there are, very often, page/word count or hours requirements. Considering the model corpora, wordiness wins out.
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#66> And not very long after, 93 per cent of those horses had disappeared. > I very much hope we'll get the two decades that horses did. > But looking at how fast Claude is automating my job, I think we're getting a lot less. This "our company is onto the discovery that will put you all out of work (or kill you?)" rhetoric makes me angry. Something this powerful and disruptive (if it is such) doesn't need to be owned or…
Well, tbf the author was hired to answer newbie questions. Perhaps the position is that of an evangelist, not a scientist.
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#67I've never visited this blog before but I really enjoy the synthesis of programming skill (at least enough skill to render quick graphs and serve them via a web blog) and writing skill here. It kind of reminds me of the way xkcd likes to drive home his ideas. For example, "Surpassed by a system that costs one thousand times less than I do... less, per word thought or written, than ... the cheapest human labor" could just be a throwaway thought, and wouldn't serve very well on its own, unsupported, in a serious essay, and of course the graph that accompanies that thought in Jones's post here is probably 99.9% napkin math / AI output, but I do feel like it adds to the argument without distracting from it.
(A parenthetical comment explaining where he ballparked the measurements for himself, the "cheapest human labor," and Claude numbers would also have supported the argument, and some writers, especially web-focused nerd-type writers like Scott Alexander, are very good at this, but text explanations, even in parentheses, have a way of distracting readers from your main point. I only feel comfortable writing one now because my main point is completed.)
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#68It's astounding how subtly anti-AI HN has become over the past year, as the models keep getting better and better. It's now pervasive across nearly every AI thread here. As the potential of AI technical agents has gone from an interesting discussion to extraordinarily obvious as to what the outcome is going to be, HN has comically shifted negative in tone on AI. They doth protest too much. I think it's a very clear c…
> The hollowing out of Silicon Valley is imminent I think AI tools are great, and I use them daily and know their limits. Your view is commonly held by management or execs who don't have their boots on the ground.
But they do have their hands on your budget, and they are responsible for creating and filling positions.
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#69funny how we have all of this progress yet things that actually matter (sorry chess fans) in the real world are more expensive: health care, housing, cars. and what meager gains there are seem to be more and more concentrated in a smaller group of people. plenty of charts you can look at - net productivity by virtually any metric vs real adjusted income. the example I like are kiosks and self checkout. who has encoun…
To give backing i’m from Australia which has ~2.5x the median wealth per capita of US citizens but a lower average wealth. This shows through in the wealth of a typical citizen. Less homelessness, better living standards (hdi in australia is higher) etc.
Compare sorting by median vs average to get a sense of the issue; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...
This is a recent development where the median wealth of citizens in progressively taxes nations has quickly overtaken the median wealth of USA citizens.
All it takes is tax on the extremely wealthy and lessening taxes on the middle class… seems obvious right? Yet things gave consistently been going the other way for along time in the USA.
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#70funny how we have all of this progress yet things that actually matter (sorry chess fans) in the real world are more expensive: health care, housing, cars. and what meager gains there are seem to be more and more concentrated in a smaller group of people. plenty of charts you can look at - net productivity by virtually any metric vs real adjusted income. the example I like are kiosks and self checkout. who has encoun…
yeah that my question to the author too - if A.I is to really earn its keep it means A.I should help in getting more physical products into people's hands & helping with producing more energy.
physical products & energy are the two things that are relevant to people's wellbeing.
right now A.I is sucking up the energy & the RAM - so is it gonna translate into a net positive ?