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AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

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Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#171

Post by quintushoratius »

tpmoney wrote: post #145
quintushoratius wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Supposedly 70% of software projects failed even before AI. Given the way LLMs are marketed, we should expect a vastly more favorable project success rate, not simply a close parity, and definitely not a decreased rate. Even if we consider that the number of attempts will rise if development becomes faster, we're told to expect a greater number of projects should also succeed because they're easier. They're supposed…

> Given the way LLMs are marketed, we should expect a vastly more favorable project success rate, not simply a close parity, and definitely not a decreased rate. > Even if we consider that the number of attempts will rise if development becomes faster, we're told to expect a greater number of projects should also succeed because they're easier. I'm not sure I follow why you would think this. Prior to AI was the reaso…

Generating code is not, and never was, a bottleneck to projects. Understanding the problem, designing a solution, organizing resources, testing, and customer buy-in and moving targets have always represented the real issues.

Now, with LLMs, we're supposed to be able to paper over some or all of these problems.

They're supposed to be able to understand and intuitively fill the assumptions present in vague requirements, then produce working applications. They're supposed to shrink the timelines from years and months to weeks and days. They're supposed to replace human expertise with a reliable service.

Why else would I hire an LLM service over a team of humans?

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#172

Post by pohl »

an0malous wrote: post #119
dinfinity wrote: post #97

Earlier 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…

> We're 3 to 4 years into the LLM revolution and the rate of progress is still impressive. The “Attention Is All You Need” paper came out in 2017 and OpenAI released GPT-1 in 2018. ChatGPT was released in late 2022 but that was not the beginning of LLMs. Transformers and generative AI go back even further.

Can you pinpoint the revolution by pinpointing moments of invention and release? Revolution takes time because it’s more about uptake, downstream effects, and feedback.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#173

Post by variadix »

jaggederest wrote: post #5
parpfish wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i feel like the useful applications of AI get silently integrated into workflows. the ill-conceived moonshots by and for a non-technical audience get labelled as "AI projects/initiatives" and they fail.

That has ever been the case. As soon as it works reliably, it's not "AI" any more. Take spellcheckers or collaborative filtering as examples, but there are lots more. Hofstadter in G.E.B. said it well: > There is a related “Theorem” about progress in AI: once some mental function is programmed, people soon cease to consider it as an essential ingredient of “real thinking”. The ineluctable core of intelligence is alwa…

Perhaps, but I think what people mean by intelligence is something that learns and adapts. If LLMs couldn’t do in context learning I don’t think people would think of them as AI, more as a kind of queryable database via natural language. There are other algorithms that learn and adapt, but in much more narrow circumstances that most people won’t obviously interact with.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#174

Post by tavavex »

treis wrote: post #153
pproe wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mobile phones at that time were 800g and cost $4000. Using your logic you could say we are almost 20 years into the age of LLMs because Cleverbot was released in 2008.

The first prototype of a cellphone was functional in the early 70s. Before that you had walkie talkies and farther back wireless communications. We're just shy of 10 years since attention is all you need and just a few years past the first commercially viable LLMs. So in cellphones we are something like early 90s.

What they're saying is that mobile phone tech didn't scale at the same rate as LLMs. How fast it takes a technology to unfold into full adoption varies depending on the industry and on what's blocking development at its inception.

Mobile phones were severely constrained by hardware that made them impractically expensive and unwieldy, and also by the time it took to set up wireless networks at a large enough scale. That's why it took mobile phones a few decades to really get going, and this is going to be different for every other technology.

LLMs, for instance, were not as hardware-constrained - we have a lot more compute now, but there wasn't a hardware paradigm shift or anything, things were already pretty good a few years ago - now it's just about scale. LLMs were also always relatively affordable - there wasn't a period where they cost $10/token, so we don't get the same kind of affordability scaling as with phones. They also utilize existing internet infrastructure and don't need to be rolled out in some new worldwide grid.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#175

Post by eth0up »

inigyou wrote: post #152
eth0up wrote: post #102

AI 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…

That's a great insight. I appreciate you sharing this perspective directly. But honestly, it's not diarrhea, it's not vomit, it's a lean mean machine—AI has become load-bearing and you're right to question that.

I think it's more accurate satire than insight, but you know, maybe people really don't see it. I suppose to some, it might not even make sense. Give it a few months though, when it might qualify as insight, or prescience.

All I can say on the bearing of loads is that you forgot the emdash and preceding 'not' statements.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#176

Post by Aerroon »

dtj1123 wrote: post #94

Most 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…

Even as a teenager the singularity didn't make sense to me. Why would AI capabilities suddenly improve by an astronomical amount? It's still going to be running on hardware and software that we (humans) design. Even if AI reached parity with human brains it would still need to improve efficiency by orders of magnitude to reach parity with human society's output. And only then could it start to outpace the improvements that humans are making.

Even if the AI singularity is possible, the acceleration would take a long time. Possibly a lifetime.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#177

Post by [deleted] »

phil21 wrote: post #168
bojan wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> As for LLMs... outside of a few precious professions you could live your life and not notice they are there. And old folks said the same thing about the internet and smart phones. Fads that would pass. While the younger generations lived an entirely different lifestyle. I’m personally seeing the same. I resisted AI being a “thing” for a long while, but since I’m around a lot of teens and young adults it was a choic…

[deleted]

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#178

Post by xyzelement »

smelendez wrote: post #167
xyzelement wrote: post #161

The range of ai approaches ranges from inappropriately betting on it to wholly ignoring it both of which are dumb. It helps to think of AI as analogous to previous game changers like electricity, computers, internet. If your business is bad or you have no game plan beyond "use internet" your are fucked. But at the same time almost every business has some angle in which these technologies are valuable and necessary an…

Ignoring it is hard to distinguish from waiting to see how other businesses successfully use it, then copying them, which will then be framed as adopting best practices.

It's often the difference between people saying "we are taking a wait and see approach"(wise) and saying "it's spicy auto complete that's totally useless" (dumb)

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#179

Post by treis »

59percentmore wrote: post #170
AussieWog93 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don't understand how someone could think we're going back to a pre-LLM world. Have you not used one since Opus 4.5 came out? Especially as somebody that's no longer in the software profession and so doesn't have 40 hours a week to just sit there and crank out code, agentic AI is a technological leap on the level of search engines, bulletin boards or compilers. You can literally just open Claude Code, say: - "A…

Because having a slave do whatever you say can also enable some pretty remarkable workflows, but that doesn't stop it from being too morally and economically expensive to become ubiquitous AND sustainable. LLM usage certainly doesn't involve sapient beings and so doesn't carry the same moral reprehensibility as slavery, but in real terms, it's probably even more of a financial quandary.

Nothing contradicts AI psychosis psychosis by comparing a computer program to slavery

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#180

Post by dehsge »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #156
dtj1123 wrote: post #94

Most 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…

I just don't understand how someone could think we're going back to a pre-LLM world. Have you not used one since Opus 4.5 came out? Especially as somebody that's no longer in the software profession and so doesn't have 40 hours a week to just sit there and crank out code, agentic AI is a technological leap on the level of search engines, bulletin boards or compilers. You can literally just open Claude Code, say: - "A…

It’s not going to go back to pre LLM times, it’s also not going to go to a generative ai utopia where we can turn off our brains and a model will understand every nuance of human existence without some from of defined guidance.

Just like block chain still exists, it just didn’t revolutionize decentralization. It created a new tool that can be implemented when you want the benefits of what the blockchain can do, same thing will happen with language models.

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