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Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

nytimes.com

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Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#351

Post by bandrami »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #244
bandrami wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The asymmetry is that lots of people want to use LLMs to produce things, and nobody wants to consume the things LLMs produce. The Nash equilibrium here is that the market has to find a way for the people producing things with LLMs to pay people to consume them, and the market always finds a way.

>the market always finds a way That may be the case but every day LLM’s feel less like the next big thing and more like 3D printing. Here to stay, but not nearly as ubiquitous and earth shattering as people made it out to be. If I had to guess right now, I would say LLM’s are more significant than 3D printers, but less significant than the Internet.

I've thought the 3D-printing analogy is pretty apt for about a year now. It had a lot of promise at first but it never quite has the impact people thought it would. There are still 3D printers for sale, and people still prototype with them, but nobody's printing out a dustpan when they need one.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#352

Post by bandrami »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #316
trollbridge wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say that's a pretty accurate analysis. Something that is easily generated by an LLM obviously has low value and there is no moat. Agentic coding is a bit different, particularly if a great deal of effort and intelligence goes into it, but that's a quite different thing than just cranking out slop apps.

Yeah there is no doubt that some companies are going to radically change their operations because of agentic coding in particular. But the revolution that is being promised, and the investment that has gone along with it, is going to smash against some pretty nasty shoals of reality sooner rather than later

Some are going to radically change their operations, but we have yet to actually see if the ROI on that comes through for them. It will be an interesting thing to watch.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#353

Post by stingraycharles »

adastra22 wrote: post #295
stingraycharles wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I often send out the LLM version, but still check if it contains the original thoughts correctly. Please don’t do this. You probably aren’t aware of how bad this can land. It’s not just about containing your original thoughts, it’s about the verbosity, repetitiveness, and absurdity of it all. Grammarly is a much better tool for these kinds of purposes, and it actually guides and teaches you to improve your writing…

Grammarly the honeypot?

You seem to be referring to something specific I’m not aware of, could you elaborate?

A Google search didn’t reveal anything specific other than them using famous author names for expert review.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#354

Post by dodu_ »

trollbridge wrote: post #247
erentz wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems AI has made it cheap to produce information but now you have to spend more time parsing the information. And it’s now the less competent/useful people spending less time producing more information with the more useful people spending more of their valuable time parsing that information. This is why I’m skeptical of LLMs ever becoming a net benefit in most organizations.

Well, you can use LLMs to parse LLM-generated slop. They make nice summaries. I have taken this approach to people who send me obviously generated LLM text; I simply run it through an LLM, paste the summary, and ask them "Is this an accurate summary?" and then I ask the for their original prompt.

Ah yes, take my single sentence, blow it up to 3 paragraphs with LLMs, and then the person reading it can have an LLM summarize it in a single sentence.

What the fuck are we even doing anymore?

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#355

Post by [deleted] »

scruple wrote: post #277
erentz wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems AI has made it cheap to produce information but now you have to spend more time parsing the information. And it’s now the less competent/useful people spending less time producing more information with the more useful people spending more of their valuable time parsing that information. This is why I’m skeptical of LLMs ever becoming a net benefit in most organizations.

LLMs are Brandolini's Law taken to an entirely different plane of existence.

[deleted]

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#356

Post by anonymars »

erentz wrote: post #210
Havoc wrote: post #8

I think there is a bit of wider social norms piece missing as well on AI use in knowledge work context. Someone forwarded an enormous amount of text over teams the other day at work. From someone (bless her) that always means well but usually averages about one spelling mistake per word and rarely goes over 20 words per message. Clearly copy paste chatgpt. For say hn gang that thinks in terms of context shifts, infor…

Seems AI has made it cheap to produce information but now you have to spend more time parsing the information. And it’s now the less competent/useful people spending less time producing more information with the more useful people spending more of their valuable time parsing that information. This is why I’m skeptical of LLMs ever becoming a net benefit in most organizations.

Intellectual denial of service

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#358

Post by dag100 »

vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #76
ost-ing wrote: post #3

As someone who has spent a vast portion of life believing technology would make life better, I've come to the realisation that this idea is a fallacy. Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation

"Technology amplifies power and until we collectively redefine and enforce a value system that benefits us all, the advancements in technology simply serve as a means of subjugation" My theory is that AI and robotics have the potential to break capitalism as we know it. We will probably reach a point where machines will be better than humans at pretty much anything and there will be almost no need for workers who jus…

> But if nobody has money to buy things then there is no point in producing anything.

The top 1% can still buy things. They can buy a lot of things, in fact. In 2024 in the US, the top 20% by income account consumed roughly the same amount as the bottom 60% (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm). This gap has widened over time (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1W5px) and will probably continue to widen even further.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#359

Post by jcgrillo »

It's hilarious they're using "AI" as the excuse to do all this dystopian zero theorem shit. This is web3 all over again, just bigger and more "disruptive". AI isn't useful in and of itself, just as a blanket excuse to justify the craven impulses of the most ethically bankrupt tech functionaries. Disgusting.

Re: Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

#360

Post by Rekindle8090 »

Havoc wrote: post #8

I think there is a bit of wider social norms piece missing as well on AI use in knowledge work context. Someone forwarded an enormous amount of text over teams the other day at work. From someone (bless her) that always means well but usually averages about one spelling mistake per word and rarely goes over 20 words per message. Clearly copy paste chatgpt. For say hn gang that thinks in terms of context shifts, infor…

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