51–58 of 58 posts
I'm not sure any of those will make much difference beyond what's already happening?
Just wait for the economics to catch up and eat the marketing. No effort required.
With everybody investing on index funds, directly or indirectly through their 401k, does economics ever have a time to catch up? Being out of the market during the crazy hype means losing out on "easy" gains, so basically it keeps going up and up, these companies get even more hyped, and I wonder what's the end game. I keep hearing that retail investors are just small fry and have no power to affect any stock's valua…
The assets are valuable because they represent ownership of the most productive companies on the planet?
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While that's a bit cruel, I do have to wonder how exactly Doctorow got in the position he has -- he isn't somebody who has done great things and is now a tech critic like someone like Geoffrey Hinton. He seems a pleasant enough fellow, but basically he got fame from writing SF books that he gave away for free. How does this translate into being an expert that journalists fawn over?
> “The bubble doesn’t want cheap useful things,” Doctorow said. “It wants expensive ‘disruptive’ things That about sums it up. I challenge anyone to name five things that have gotten cheaper or better in their life thanks to AI. I can't think of anything that I consume that has gotten better, and the only thing that has gotten cheaper is the value of your skills to your employer, as it wants you to offload more of yo…
Funnily enough though, the benefits don't seem to scale to the work environment as smoothly across the board. It's almost as if, to use pg's famous line, they built things that don't scale.
The moment you scale AI beyond the personal context, the noisiness and non-determinism of the technology starts wrecking havoc in ripples through the industry, damn the productivity. Managing the slop you've created, but more importantly (I would normally put an emdash here) managing the slop others created turns out to be a problem as big as the tech that created it.
What is the evidence of this? Isn't it strange no revolutionary product has yet been created from the coding output of this technology? More to the point, the only thing that comes close is the Claw. So what we have as the first breakaway product is something to help orchestrate the slop generators, instead of say, a new Phone OS that rivals Android and iOS, or a Metaverse that is actually worthy of its name. Nothing to see here, just more shovels to shovel the shit essentially.
We are still in the grasp of the electric and information revolution. Peter Thiel said more than a decade ago that if you compare life in the 70s and now the only major visible difference would simply be more screens in various forms nowadays. This he presented as evidence that no new revolutionary technology has been created in the interim. At present, the same is more true of AI. It has made access to information faster than before. However, unlike other processes of learning, it has made it more difficult to ascertain the correctness of the information presented. It is doing this by actively removing the direct connection between the information it presents and the primary sources responsible for that information (think Google replacing its search field with an AI field).
The non-LLM AI stuff in the medical field is what I find most promising. Not the banal AI doctors and nurses replacing real doctors and nurses, but more the research end of things, where hallucinating and pattern matching to create new compounds to test seems promising. Of course, any technology that is able to routinely aid discoveries in applied maths and physics will also be welcome.
If this half decade saw an explosion of new bespoke hardware being built and sold aided by LLMs (think a tech shop of 10 employees being able to build and sell robust smartphones from scratch to a niche market sustainably etc), or jumpstarts an era of reverse engineering on crack that pierces through the tech oligopoly then that would be evidence of disruption on a macro scale... But no, alas, we are still waiting.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People seem to think it's all smoke and mirrors. IDK. My employer, in an industry as far removed from Silicon Valley as you can probably get, makes more and better use of it all the time. There's enormous amounts of work done every day in corporate America that amounts to "I need X, but X involves some data from legacy system Y and legacy system Z, and that's going to take me an hour to glue together because our enti…
>There's enormous amounts of work done every day in corporate America that amounts to "I need X, but X involves some data from legacy system Y and legacy system Z, and that's going to take me an hour to glue together because our entire enterprise runs on a system cobbled together over the past 50 years I did a bunch of that type of work pre covid. IME it's usually an hour to build and about 3-5 weeks to handle bureau…
> “The bubble doesn’t want cheap useful things,” Doctorow said. “It wants expensive ‘disruptive’ things That about sums it up. I challenge anyone to name five things that have gotten cheaper or better in their life thanks to AI. I can't think of anything that I consume that has gotten better, and the only thing that has gotten cheaper is the value of your skills to your employer, as it wants you to offload more of yo…
While I agree with your sentiment and observatin by and large, ideally you could have added a few constraints as a lot of people here have had "Holy shit" moments with AI, but often it's most pronounced in a very specific personal context . Learning topics faster, fixing things without having to call a repair man, life-saving medical tips (somewhat more of a thing because of a handicapped health system, but that's an…
You could extend Thiel's statement back even to the 1960's: beyond address and phone lookup, everything added by the WWW has been of little use to a wise consumer IMO.