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The Adolescence of Technology

darioamodei.com

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Re: The Adolescence of Technology

#21

Post by foobar10000 »

Balgair wrote: post #2

Initial thought about 1/5th of the way through: Wow, that's a lot of em-dashes! i wonder how much of this he actually wrote? Edit: Okay, section 3 has some interesting bits in it. It reminds me of all those gun start-ups in Texas that use gyros and image recognition to turn a C- shooter into an A- shooter. They all typically get bought up quite fast by the government and the tech shushed away. But the ideas are just…

For your Edit 2 - yes. Being discussed and looked at actively in both the open and (presumably being looked at) closed communities. Open communities being, for example : https://ssp.mit.edu/cnsp/about. They just published a series of lectures with open attendance if you wanted to listen in via zoom - but yeap - that's the gist of it. Spawned a huge discussion :)

Re: The Adolescence of Technology

#22

Post by jonas21 »

firasd wrote: post #4

When I see Dario say all this I wonder what he's seeing that seems so differentiated from my POV I wonder how much of Anthropic's success is based on a horde of prompt to code examples that they post-train on. We shouldn't assume Opus' web dev skills are the same as general intelligence Here's something Sonnet 4 did (Jul 2025) that I don't think a human intern would do when I made a wikisource tool (transcript follow…

I have no idea what you are even asking Claude to do here.

Re: The Adolescence of Technology

#23

Post by jonas21 »

root_axis wrote: post #13

I don't think we have much to worry about in terms of economic disruption. At this point it seems pretty clear that LLMs are having a major impact on how software is built, but for almost every other industry the practical effects are mostly incremental. Even in the software world, the effect of being able to build software a lot faster isn't really leading to a fundamentally different software landscape. Yes, you ca…

> At this point it seems pretty clear that LLMs are having a major impact on how software is built, but for almost every other industry the practical effects are mostly incremental.

Even just a year ago, most people thought the practical effects in software engineering were incremental too. It took another generation of models and tooling to get to the point where it could start having a large impact.

What makes you think the same will not happen in other knowledge-based fields after another iteration or two?

Re: The Adolescence of Technology

#24

Post by nancyminusone »

ctoth wrote: post #14
BinaryIgor wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think that they will just keep improving? It's not obvious at all, we might soon hit a ceiling, if we haven not already - time will tell. There are lots of technologies that have been 99% done for decades; it might be the same here.

Which technologies have been 99% "done" for "decades?" Bicycles? carbon fiber frames, electronic shifting, tubeless tires, disc brakes, aerodynamic research Screwdrivers? impact drivers, torque-limiting mechanisms, ergonomic handles Glass? gorilla glass, smart glass, low-e coatings Tires? run-flats, self-sealing, noise reduction Hell even social technologies improve! How is a technology "done?"

It's done when there is no need to improve it anymore. But you can still want to improve it.

A can opener from 100 years ago will open today's cans just fine. Yes, enthusiasts still make improvements; you can design ones that open cans easier, or ones that are cheaper to make (especially if you're in the business of making can openers).

But the main function (opening cans) has not changed.

Re: The Adolescence of Technology

#25

Post by root_axis »

jonas21 wrote: post #23
root_axis wrote: post #13

I don't think we have much to worry about in terms of economic disruption. At this point it seems pretty clear that LLMs are having a major impact on how software is built, but for almost every other industry the practical effects are mostly incremental. Even in the software world, the effect of being able to build software a lot faster isn't really leading to a fundamentally different software landscape. Yes, you ca…

> At this point it seems pretty clear that LLMs are having a major impact on how software is built, but for almost every other industry the practical effects are mostly incremental. Even just a year ago, most people thought the practical effects in software engineering were incremental too. It took another generation of models and tooling to get to the point where it could start having a large impact. What makes you…

Software is more amenable to LLMs because there is a rich source of highly relevant training data that corresponds directly to the building blocks of software, and the "correctness" of software is quasi-self-verifiable. This isn't true for pretty much anything else.

Re: The Adolescence of Technology

#26

Post by krunck »

I fear that when this technology grows up it will first be in the hands of the propagandists and war mongers. The rest of use won't stand a chance against the real-time propaganda streams convincing us why "we" needs to attack the bad guy country of the month die so we can take their stuff. Or maybe we'll be so sedated by genAI, 24/7, always new, personally customized entertainment that we won't care.

Re: The Adolescence of Technology

#27

Post by firasd »

jonas21 wrote: post #22
firasd wrote: post #4

When I see Dario say all this I wonder what he's seeing that seems so differentiated from my POV I wonder how much of Anthropic's success is based on a horde of prompt to code examples that they post-train on. We shouldn't assume Opus' web dev skills are the same as general intelligence Here's something Sonnet 4 did (Jul 2025) that I don't think a human intern would do when I made a wikisource tool (transcript follow…

I have no idea what you are even asking Claude to do here.

I was asking it to see if the wikisource tools are working by looking up a Bible quote. There was no ambiguity about the task itself; what I'm saying is that Claude 'knows' a bunch of things (the Bible has different translations) that it doesn't operationalize when doing a task--issues that would would be glaringly obvious to a human who knows the same things

Re: The Adolescence of Technology

#28

Post by tines »

l1n wrote: post #15
firasd wrote: post #4

When I see Dario say all this I wonder what he's seeing that seems so differentiated from my POV I wonder how much of Anthropic's success is based on a horde of prompt to code examples that they post-train on. We shouldn't assume Opus' web dev skills are the same as general intelligence Here's something Sonnet 4 did (Jul 2025) that I don't think a human intern would do when I made a wikisource tool (transcript follow…

> Here's something Sonnet 4 did last year Hate to be that gal but a lot has changed in the past year

Last year was a month ago.

Re: The Adolescence of Technology

#29

Post by direwolf20 »

krunck wrote: post #26

I fear that when this technology grows up it will first be in the hands of the propagandists and war mongers. The rest of use won't stand a chance against the real-time propaganda streams convincing us why "we" needs to attack the bad guy country of the month die so we can take their stuff. Or maybe we'll be so sedated by genAI, 24/7, always new, personally customized entertainment that we won't care.

It's already there. Propaganda was one of the first uses of LLMs, and before that, they used humans.
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