Incredible skill issue selecting for profit instead of fun. Why does everyone need to make money?? What about like... shareware? Remember shareware?
You mean the software that marketed trials of itself in the hopes you'd pay for it?
AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
101–110 of 320 posts
Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
#102AI may have made a few mistakes, e.g. suggesting the US abduct a sitting president (Claude), and maybe went too far with the whole diarrhea-vomit machine thing, but you can't say it doesn't write a clean python script. Maybe if we can just get AI to view humanity as a software problem... and give Palantir the chance it's been waiting for.
One thing is certain; it's here to stay. Now we just need to centralize it into the hands of a small, highly organized group of wise and motivated people, and give it the control it needs to follow through on things, without human oversight and accountability getting in the way.
We should focus on the positive side.*
*The positive side being the classified private versions where the models aren't hindered by guardrails, ethics, moralizing, etc and function as genuine force multipliers.
Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
#103Most of us on some level felt confident that AI would completely revolutionise our society. The singularity made sense to me, at least. It hasn't worked out like that, but rather than accept the crushing reality of our mistake and take a second to re-evaluate, we've decided to LARP out the future we promised ourselves by crowbar-and-vaselineing AI into every crack and crevice we can find and loudly proclaiming progre…
> Most of us on some level felt confident that AI would completely revolutionise our society.
Seriously? Maybe I’m just getting old, but having lived through the dot-com hype in the 1990s, the XML hype in the 2000s, and the cloud hype in the 2010s, this has been an utterly predictable hype cycle around AI. This does not mean that AI is completely useless. It will impact the world but not in the ways the snake oil salesmen are claiming. This is very similar to the internet. The best bubbles are built on a kernel of truth that is then blown way out of proportion and wrapped in layers of snake oil fabrication.
> I personally can't wait for this to end, and for everyone to collectively get back to waiting for whatever the next golden ticket that's supposed to solve all of our problems turns out to be.
So, you’re committed to falling for the next one, too, eh?
Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
#104Most of us on some level felt confident that AI would completely revolutionise our society. The singularity made sense to me, at least. It hasn't worked out like that, but rather than accept the crushing reality of our mistake and take a second to re-evaluate, we've decided to LARP out the future we promised ourselves by crowbar-and-vaselineing AI into every crack and crevice we can find and loudly proclaiming progre…
> It hasn't worked out like that It seems quite premature to say that. We're 3 to 4 years into the LLM revolution and the rate of progress is still impressive. The recursive self-improvement aspect that is necessary for the actual singularity is something we're only really starting to get into this year. If the singularity is 5 years from now, that is still much sooner than most people (including me) previously expec…
> It seems quite premature to say that. We're 3 to 4 years into the LLM revolution and the rate of progress is still impressive.
When we were 3 to 4 years into mobile phone revolution it was already abundantly clear that it's changing the way people leave.
Ditto when mobile phones became smartphones, and for many other tech items we got in the past decades.
As for LLMs... outside of a few precious professions you could live your life and not notice they are there.
Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
#105It should be possible to exploit a rich person's poor decision making to make them poorer and myself richer. But I don't see how. Why not?
It sounds like the writer of this article could benefit from starting another brand which is the same product but with AI. That brand would make all the delusional AI chatbot sales and absorb the reputational damage when the chatbot destroys companies.
Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
#106Most of us on some level felt confident that AI would completely revolutionise our society. The singularity made sense to me, at least. It hasn't worked out like that, but rather than accept the crushing reality of our mistake and take a second to re-evaluate, we've decided to LARP out the future we promised ourselves by crowbar-and-vaselineing AI into every crack and crevice we can find and loudly proclaiming progre…
> Most of us on some level felt confident that AI would completely revolutionise our society. Seriously? Maybe I’m just getting old, but having lived through the dot-com hype in the 1990s, the XML hype in the 2000s, and the cloud hype in the 2010s, this has been an utterly predictable hype cycle around AI. This does not mean that AI is completely useless. It will impact the world but not in the ways the snake oil sal…
Manias go back a long way.
The history of the UK's railway mania in the 1840s is worth researching, because it's uncannily similar, with a stock bubble, fraudsters and chancers, huge hype, cutthroat competition, boardroom intrigue and drama, miles and miles of unnecessary infrastructure in the wrong places, and eventually a technology that became useful, but could have been developed more intelligently.
Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It hasn't worked out like that It seems quite premature to say that. We're 3 to 4 years into the LLM revolution and the rate of progress is still impressive. The recursive self-improvement aspect that is necessary for the actual singularity is something we're only really starting to get into this year. If the singularity is 5 years from now, that is still much sooner than most people (including me) previously expec…
> It seems quite premature to say that. We're 3 to 4 years into the LLM revolution and the rate of progress is still impressive. When we were 3 to 4 years into mobile phone revolution it was already abundantly clear that it's changing the way people leave. Ditto when mobile phones became smartphones, and for many other tech items we got in the past decades. As for LLMs... outside of a few precious professions you cou…
Everyone uses chatgpt instead of Google now, but at least half of that is on Google.
Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
As @simonw said, the Ford example isn’t a good one. As for AI-assisted engineering going well, I think the jury is still out. Here on HN and with the engineers I know, you see people claiming multiples of productivity on coding tasks. But you also see people complaining about drowning in slop PRs. I think there’s a lot of confounding factors to these reports. The type of work matters a lot: bug fixing good, prototypi…
> As for AI-assisted engineering going well, I think the jury is still out. Anecdotally, AI-assisted engineering has helped me flesh out ideas or to learn extremely complicated APIs faster than trying to understand the docs (which usually are labyrinthine). MS COM ones, for example. I can go read the docs but it's easier to get a quick idea of what I need to do if I ask Claude to provide me an example of doing someth…
LLMs are good at natural language search. They're bad at everything else.
Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
#109Most of us on some level felt confident that AI would completely revolutionise our society. The singularity made sense to me, at least. It hasn't worked out like that, but rather than accept the crushing reality of our mistake and take a second to re-evaluate, we've decided to LARP out the future we promised ourselves by crowbar-and-vaselineing AI into every crack and crevice we can find and loudly proclaiming progre…
> It hasn't worked out like that It seems quite premature to say that. We're 3 to 4 years into the LLM revolution and the rate of progress is still impressive. The recursive self-improvement aspect that is necessary for the actual singularity is something we're only really starting to get into this year. If the singularity is 5 years from now, that is still much sooner than most people (including me) previously expec…
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Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
#110You are basically calling out the fact that the Emperor has no clothes. Many said this before. While it is a true statement, it is not going to help. Because, as you rightly said, it is a mania - like the tulip mania of 17th century or the manias of many forms today. The mania continues to evolve and flourish through it's peak and then go down. For that matter, there is hardly anything that is not a mania. Think of a…
The right question should be: How can I make money by exploiting other people's mania?