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Policy on the AI Exponential
181–190 of 280 posts
Re: Policy on the AI Exponential
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
Working to keep a roof over the head of yourself and those you love is an identity. It's social proof that you have value, that you can do something for someone else.
Working to keep a roof over the head of yourself and those you love is a necessity . It can become an identity if you enjoy what you do, sure, but that is not a given for, I'd say, a big majority of the workforce, globally.
I agree with you, 99% of the people work just to pay bills, but that doesn't make the other part false.
I'm a software engineer and love thinking about problems methodically. Every time I hear a someone saying that programmers are no longer required (even if I don't agree with that) if feels really bad, it's equivalent to saying that what I do best in life has no value anymore.
To put it on other words: I really like philosophy, but what value do they provide in modern world? Who pays for the work of a philosopher? I think people will start of thinking of programmers like that eventually.
Re: Policy on the AI Exponential
#183Its hard to read the first half of this as anything other than regulatory capture propaganda. It really all ties together as: > AI has become a major commercial technology >Frontier AI models, like airplanes, should be required to go through technical testing and auditing, and their release should be blocked or reversed as a threat to public safety if they do not meet high standards of safety > AI companies that deve…
Working to keep a roof over the head of yourself and those you love is an identity. It's social proof that you have value, that you can do something for someone else.
I was funemployed for a 9 month stretch last year (layoff severance package, followed by waiting for a visa and traveling), and when I wasn't traveling, I found my life kind of falling apart with a lack of structure. I tried to schedule workout classes and hobbies, as well as involvement in my church, but it just didn't fill my time, and none of my friends were free during the day. I spent a lot of time with my retired parents, but the time we spent together became very low quality, and it was tinged with the knowledge that I ought to be doing something else with a lot of my time. I also spent a lot of time scrolling.
I started work again 3 weeks ago, and I find myself using the time outside of work much better because there is less of it.
I would still love a 30 hour work week, and if I had young children, I am certain that I would cherish time off much more.
Re: Policy on the AI Exponential
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Working to keep a roof over the head of yourself and those you love is an identity. It's social proof that you have value, that you can do something for someone else.
Working to keep a roof over the head of yourself and those you love is a necessity . It can become an identity if you enjoy what you do, sure, but that is not a given for, I'd say, a big majority of the workforce, globally.
You’re arguing to a subset of people who have made work their entire life and have retroactively justified their sacrifices with thoughts such as high compensation means what I do is socially valuable. However, at the same time they work at Meta or something making internal tools to make product developers 5% more efficient at tweaking the addiction algorithm to gain 0.2% more screen-time per user.
Re: Policy on the AI Exponential
#185I know this is likely just for IPO hype but when I read things like this I sometimes wonder if I must be missing something. I use agents everyday and find them really useful and they save me a lot of headache. At the same time I find that if I let it self-direct at a high level at all it generally makes bad choices that cause me headaches later so I can’t really give them autonomy. Enough people seem to believe this…
What did your AI-assisted workflow look like 1 year ago? I can only speak for myself, but I would carefully specify a class or module in great detail and then hand it off to the model to implement, then carefully review the result. How about 2 years ago? Back then, I wouldn't even trust it to write a 5-line function without making some sort of silly mistake. Today, I can leave an agent running by itself for 20 or 30…
I wonder if our difference in view could be an instance of the jagged nature of AI’s intelligence. I do computational research in a basic science so write code or build models basically all day that is (occasionally) novel. I would say that I’ve noticed exponential improvements in parts of my job but certainly not all. For example, if I’m trying to visualize a concept from a paper I now go straight to Codex, give it the paper, and describe a webapp which allows me to play with the model in a way that wasn’t possible one year ago (this is great for teaching btw). If I have a script that I want to generalize, add in better metrics, or setup for running on a cluster I use codex and it does great.
Where it fails me though is exactly when I’m doing something novel like developing a new model or trying to develop some new method to process data. I’ve tried many times to one shot these ideas with detailed descriptions of what I want, how I’d like to generate abstractions, etc and it almost always ends up changing what I want to what I can only describe as something which better matches its training data. It often quietly changes key details that means that I have to delete the whole thing and start over. Just today this happened. On this level of task I’ve found that my workflow and pace of iteration hasn’t really changed at all in the last year. I still have to go and explain in detail on a function by function level what I want in much the same way I did a year ago. While that’s obviously a harder task, it seems to me like the task this whole long term exponential argument hinges on. I obviously could be wrong and maybe LLM with eval loop will do all of this for us but it seems still quite bad at anything without a clear definition of “good”.
I’m personally much more concerned about autonomous weapons, surveillance, and people plugging these things into places they don’t belong to avoid responsibility than I am the general possibility of these models being smarter than me in every way but obviously I could be wrong on this and am just using it incorrectly, hence the question.
Re: Policy on the AI Exponential
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
Working to keep a roof over the head of yourself and those you love is an identity. It's social proof that you have value, that you can do something for someone else.
I was funemployed for a 9 month stretch last year (layoff severance package, followed by waiting for a visa and traveling), and when I wasn't traveling, I found my life kind of falling apart with a lack of structure. I tried to schedule workout classes and hobbies, as well as involvement in my church, but it just didn't fill my time, and none of my friends were free during the day. I spent a lot of time with my retir…
As somebody who is currently rounding month 6 of funemployment, I agree wholeheartedly with this statement.
Re: Policy on the AI Exponential
#187What will be Amodei's job after we have AIs that are better at evrything than humans? Is the AI going to care about our stock exchange playgrounds that reward the future Antropic stock holders?
> after we have AIs that are better at evrything than humans. That this is worded so definitively is a testament to the success of the AI industry. The idea that LLMs will be "better at evrything than humans"[sic] is far from certain. I suspect that if someone does invent a machine like this, it won't look like a 2026 LLM, and it will be far far in the future. everybody relax.
“Hey everyone, no need to worry, bigfishrunning suspects it’ll be fine!”
Re: Policy on the AI Exponential
#188I know this is likely just for IPO hype but when I read things like this I sometimes wonder if I must be missing something. I use agents everyday and find them really useful and they save me a lot of headache. At the same time I find that if I let it self-direct at a high level at all it generally makes bad choices that cause me headaches later so I can’t really give them autonomy. Enough people seem to believe this…
What did your AI-assisted workflow look like 1 year ago? I can only speak for myself, but I would carefully specify a class or module in great detail and then hand it off to the model to implement, then carefully review the result. How about 2 years ago? Back then, I wouldn't even trust it to write a 5-line function without making some sort of silly mistake. Today, I can leave an agent running by itself for 20 or 30…
I disagree with your assessment pretty strongly -- the models themselves hit a wall over a year ago once companies exhausted all existing training data. LLMs don't induce world models, and they aren't capable of real search an planning outside their training distributions. They, structurally, never will be.
I haven't noticed a change in what I trust a model to generate in response to a single prompt in a year. The failure modes are unchanged. Yes, specific failures have improved as they have been documented and passed into model training data, but the way the models fail has not changed. They still fail for me nearly every single day. I'm a pretty heavy user - 3-4 Claude code processes running at a time, all day every day.
What has gotten better is tooling around the model -- but there's no space for exponential growth there. At least, not without exponential cost increase, which would make the whole thing untenable anyway.
Re: Policy on the AI Exponential
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is normal, expected, and healthy to offer criticism of self interested proposals. And mock even. What is unhealthy is to imply someone said what they did not.
If that's what this is, a bank-shot snarky criticism of the proposal, fair enough. I read it instead as a criticism of a stakeholder having the temerity to make a proposal in the first place. It's not their job to anticipate and capture all your objections. That's your job!
Everyone holds a stake in this discussion. And intellectual honesty is everyone's obligation.
Re: Policy on the AI Exponential
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
N+1. This is my experience and for the most part the people that I work with share the same feeling. A highly enthusiastic concussion enthusiast with 10 hands is how one person put it. These are people in different fields but highly accomplished so I’m feeling comfortable sharing their assessment.
You're talking quite statically though. I don't think anyone is worried about today's models being a serious threat, but next year's, three years' time? Just three years' ago these models were useful bumbling fools and it's hard to judge where on the S-curve we currently are. I'd rather be thinking about these issues in advance rather than waiting until the problem becomes real.
The models are still useful bumbling fools. We're in the flat part of the curve because we've exhausted existing data sources.