151–160 of 296 posts
I have an alternative explanation: for the areas where AI is giving employees serious productivity gains, they're working for 20 minutes, playing wordle/resting/relaxing for 7 hours, 40 minutes, and delivering exactly as much as they were before.
I’ll do the Minority Report here: I loved the article, the point being that rich people hyping AI for their own enrichment have somewhat shutdown rational arguments of benefits vs. costs, the costs being: energy use, environmental impact of using environmentally unfriendly energy sources out of desperation, water pollution from by products of electronics production and recycling and from water use in data centers, di…
I've literally not met one person in tech who thinks LLMs will become sentient or conscious. But I always see people online claiming that there are lots of people who believe that. Where are they? Are we sure that's not a misunderstanding of the terminology? Artificial diamonds, such as cubic zirconia, are not diamonds, and nobody thinks they are. 'Artificial' means it's not the real thing. When will conscious, actua…
And nobody working in the space either as ML/AI practitioners, or as philosophers, or as cognitive scientists, even thinks we know what consciousness is, or what is required to create it. So there would be no way to tell if an AI is conscious because we haven’t yet managed to reliably tell if humans, or dogs, or chimpanzees or whales are conscious.
The claim that is often made is that more work on the current generation of AI tech will lead to AGI at a human or better level. I agree with Yann Lecun that this is unlikely.
Andrej Karpathy said that major revolutions like the Internet, smartphones, and AI often don’t show up clearly in GDP statistics, even when they radically change how people work. GDP measures total spending, not productivity or usefulness. These revolutions improved efficiency and quality of life, but GDP mostly continued along its long-term trend. See his interview in Dwarkesh's podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watc…
I'm genuinely not sure. We are all computer people in this forum, so it may have improved our lives. But for many people, information technology has lessened the time spent in a given week or year on activities they find meaningful.
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> AI in particular doesn't have a high requirement at the consumer side. Everyone already has everything they need to use it. That isn’t actually true though, right now everyone has a hard dependency on a cloud service. That is currently sold to them at deep discount by companies that are losing billions. When the market eventually corrects it’ll be interesting to see how much AI ends up costing. At the very least it…
Is it actually being sold at a steep discount? Anthropic CEO has stated they have high margins on inference, so training is the big cost center.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/23/ai-econ...
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I've literally not met one person in tech who thinks LLMs will become sentient or conscious. But I always see people online claiming that there are lots of people who believe that. Where are they? Are we sure that's not a misunderstanding of the terminology? Artificial diamonds, such as cubic zirconia, are not diamonds, and nobody thinks they are. 'Artificial' means it's not the real thing. When will conscious, actua…
>LLMs will become sentient or conscious. People who declare that AGI is coming.
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Why do I get the feeling that AI skeptics will treat it as definitive and irrefutable proof that they were right all along even though it’s one data point in an industry that’s hasn’t even been around for 5 years.
You're right, it is tempting to dunk on AI boosters every time an article like this comes out and puts a damper on their sci fi fan fiction fantasies. There's just something about a grown person getting all excited like a child that makes it really satisfying.
Adult life doesn’t have to be boring drudgery, you know. I mean, it mostly is, but the rare moments of childlike joy and excitement are some of the best parts.
As far as the putting a damper on anything, nope it doesn’t. And it never will.
The people excited about AI are excited because of the impacts they see on their own jobs and daily lives. We don’t care what Goldman Sachs has to say about productivity.
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"The lemmings can't be wrong, they're all doing it". I think you're overlooking the incentive structures here.
I am certainly not saying that this can’t all come crashing down for the big boys, surely it can. I just am putting a little more weight on them than on people on the internet and doomsdayers hunting for clicks is all
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Is it actually being sold at a steep discount? Anthropic CEO has stated they have high margins on inference, so training is the big cost center.
Does the cumulative earnings from inference on a single model exceed its training costs? That’s.. kinda the question.
And also that may be the case for Anthropic who have fewer free users, a large enterprise business, and less generous rate limits on their subscriptions. I don't know if OpenAI or Google have commented. I suspect OpenAI is in a worse position given their massive non-paying consumer base.