401–410 of 575 posts
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Companies that use AI well will replace the companies that use AI badly. There is no world in which AI is not used extensively in all employment going forward.
Right now LLMs are heavily subsidized. When that ends, the actual cost of the service may exceed its usefulness for many use cases.
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No one should have more than $140MM. That is a ludicrous amount of money.
Additionally, it's kinda funny to see someone arguing that an individual who's famous for talking about how uncomfortable he is with massive wealth, including his own, should be more wealthy than he is.
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A thing that people have chosen to call AI is here today.
That just continues a tradition of moving the goalposts for "AI" to just beyond what's currently possible.
More to the point, there has always been a cottage industry in predicting an amazing future, just around the corner. 'AGI' is just the latest incarnation.
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Its not a rambling but sad fact of life, one of the failures of mankind so far. And we don't need to talk about some backwater 3rd world country (actually we do) - US has big issues allowing basic science to be taught to kids, because of some set of stories and anecdotes from various people gathered over centuries together about some potential events around one mason who started yet another sect 2k years ago, and the…
I just yesterday watched a scathing video about why the US has always had a major strain of anti-intellectualism, starting from the very first colonists: https://youtu.be/j9MubNsh3rs?si=wpG1YLDz_Y9cOECQ
If your thesis is "The US was founded on anti-intellectual principles" and your only supporting facts are:
- Some of the early colonists were religiously-driven
- The inconvenient examples otherwise (e.g. the Enlightenment-influenced founders) can be ignored because some people at the time disliked them
- Some presidents since have been populists
... and also, that could have been a 15 min video without the histrionics.
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>Would you prefer the harsh unpopular truth of Erich Schmidt, or a sweet lie of Wozniak? What Erich Schmidt is doing is not about describing hard reality. He is trying to make a particular version of the future come true by painting it as inevitable. It's literally a propaganda technique.
"The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed." AI has made my life so much easier. If I need to change non-standard lightbulbs (e.g., G9, MR11, A19), I'm taking a picture and asking my AI what kind are they. If I need to create the first pass of test scripts, I ask my AI. It's reduced technical debt and let me focus on the things I care about.
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Its not a rambling but sad fact of life, one of the failures of mankind so far. And we don't need to talk about some backwater 3rd world country (actually we do) - US has big issues allowing basic science to be taught to kids, because of some set of stories and anecdotes from various people gathered over centuries together about some potential events around one mason who started yet another sect 2k years ago, and the…
Religion is a lot broader than Christian fundamentalism and zealots. It's sort of like applied philosophy: how do you live a flourishing life in relationship to other people and to the god(s). Modernity has an implicit materialist worldview (matter is all that is) and an explicit rejection of the divine. However, if matter is all there is, then there is no meaning in the world. This is not a way to flourish in the wo…
If you don’t believe me, explain to me how human rights, universal equality, democracy etc are based in science. You can’t, because they aren’t. Sorry for blaspheming. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do them, by the way, it just means that it’s our religion to do them.
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A bit off topic, but about commencement speeches... Marvin Minsky spoke at my graduation. It was around the time when it seemed like genetic therapies might solve all kinds of problems, and there was a big debate, moral objections, etc. Most of the talk was a rambling rant against religion holding us back from scientific improvements to life. It did not go over in the mostly christian crowd. I loved it.
> Marvin Minsky spoke at my graduation. I don't know about mentioning that one.
Actual intelligence is useless when decision makers send new weekly AI rules to be better employees. It’s race to the bottom. Race to an endless technical debt. Some companies will implode when codebases stop being manageable. The small minority will thrive. But majority not. I see it used in hardware world. Clever dudes without prior experience with software craft working Python scripts, automate tests, control hard…
The man is hailed as a brilliant nerd in our circles. I didn't realize he's a great public speaker. He really read the room. The "McKenzie"-style lady and Schmidt from Google (who really seemed to resent the pushback and chided graduates), can go to hell. I'm happy that someone is telling the young people who are likely to suffer because of this tech that they matter. I can't imagine how much angst much exist after t…
I've been thinking about the expression "Reading the Room" for the last ten years. I've come to the conclusion finally that it is extremely pernicious.
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No AI company is addressing the elephant in the room that you need someone experienced constantly monitoring any agentic workflows. This means that the cost savings of agents are a myth. My company actually did an internal study of agent usage for coding and found it only improved productivity by 10-20%, basically on the same level as good code templates or an autocomplete.
Less and less true with every new generation of AI systems. AI gets better and better at operating self-supervised, and the amount of skill needed to supervise an AI in a useful fashion only ever goes up.