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AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

ludic.mataroa.blog

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Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#201

Post by reinitctxoffset »

uwamamama wrote: post #198
reinitctxoffset wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a vocal advocate for the use of machine intelligence in certain contexts and a skeptic of claims they are useless or always hallucinate or whatever... It hasn't been even close to even the recent claims! It's been like three straight years where it was supposed to utterly transform society any minute now . I think we more or less have a fragile consensus that in like, computer programming and really very little el…

Uncritical use of today's AI beats all of the optimized use of yesterday's AI by far. I think people like the idea that their success is a result of their efforts, but this is just not the truth.

I don't think anyone's disputing that the models are better than a year ago (though clearly all this, recursive self improvement stuff is utterly hypothetical and that's being generous, most of the progress has been on cost and fit and finish stuff). When it's on the plan, I'll use Fable for some stuff. If I'm paying for Opus? It's 4.5 or 4.6 which were dramatically better aligned and token efficient in the trace at a capability gap that's "you win some and lose some".

That can be true while it also being the case that to someone who has no idea how this stuff works under the hood, it's basically Dunning Kreuger in a box. The next person to go /u/PhdInEverything on me with Fable is getting an education in the history of hardware support for mixed precision training or something. Fable is a masterclass in refusal to ground and a dozen other alignment catastrophes.

So yeah, the models are still getting a little better, but from here out I think it's rapidly becoming a skill game.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#202

Post by DiscourseFan »

amalcon wrote: post #191
DiscourseFan wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps I should have specified Anti-AI. Its just the thing that upsets me the most about your everyday liberal professional, how much they hate AI just because Trump is pro AI

I think "your everyday liberal professional" is more likely to be anti-AI because it is being advertised as a direct threat to their livelihoods, rather than for any more abstract reason. The latter includes both political allegiance stuff and the reasons those professionals would likely cite, like its energy requirements or the economic damage if the bubble bursts. Whether or not you think it likely that this threat…

No, because most people in say, California, which is very pro-tech, are perfectly fine with AI. But people in the Northeast are angry at it. It’s entirely cultural.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#203

Post by drob518 »

dofm wrote: post #196
drob518 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This hype cycle is much more like the NFT hype cycle — it's just that it has a more easily understood product. Impossible to see Beeple's Everydays as anything other than a harbinger, IMO.

Yea, I forgot a big one: blockchain.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#204

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

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…

> "And old folks said the same thing about the internet and smart phones."

Ironic how LLM promoters like to hallucinate citations, much like the tools they espouse.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#205

Post by timmytokyo »

nfg wrote: post #122
hliyan wrote: post #65

This part toward the end of the article resonated with me: > If you’re being asked to review huge volumes of terrible AI code, just assume that the organisation is going to burn you out and fire you. You will not convince the person drowning you in 2000 line PRs to stop. Start looking for a new job as if you have already been fired. I have seen this happen many times now I suspect we will see this phenomenon more and…

I don’t buy it - if you’re an engineering leader and this is happening it’s your responsibility to get out there and fix the problem through education, process improvements, improved automated quality checks, better planning. Sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting “no!” is not a sustainable strategy. Figure out what would allow your throughput to double, triple etc and go organise it. Focus on bottlenecks an…

This sounds to me like a demand that engineers fully submit to their future as reverse centaurs [0]. "Submit to the slop tsunami, become a glorified and burnt out button pusher!"

[0] https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washin...

[1] https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-whe...

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#206

Post by drob518 »

dtj1123 wrote: post #115
drob518 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> having lived through the dot-com hype in the 1990s Having not lived through this, I'm actually curious as to how similar it was to the current hype cycle. Was there a general sense that something singularity-like was approaching? I don't and wouldn't claim that AI is completely useless, I personally use it for at least a couple hours out of each working day and feel that it boosts my productivity significantly. My…

If you read the media from 1998 - 1999, there was than overarching message that EVERYTHING was changing. EVERY business needed to be on the Internet right now. Any business that wasn’t investing in the internet was going to be slaughtered. Brick and mortar stores were viewed as a negative on your balance sheet. All commerce would be e-commerce in just a couple of years. Startups with no revenue and no prospects for profitability for at least a decade were IPOing for hundreds of millions of dollars, sometimes with 2x-3x the valuation of brick and mortar peers in the same segment who had established brands going back decades. Whenever anyone questioned the lunacy, everyone responded that, “This time it’s different because the Internet changes everything. None of the old rules apply.”

And then the crash happened and we learned that all the old rules still did apply, and while the Internet was hugely transformative, the simplistic idea that brick and mortar was bad and e-commerce was the only way forward was fundamentally wrong. Yea, surely some segments did change (Amazon killing Borders and Waldenbooks, Netflix crushing Blockbuster, etc.), but investors ultimately look at profit even if they’re willing to ignore it for a while to grab market share.

So, I suspect that AI is going to play out similarly. Right now everyone is frothy, screaming that anyone not token maxing will die. Yes, AI is going to be impactful, and, yes, it’s not going away. But the hype is surely overblown. When was the singularity supposed to arrive? Three years ago, Altman was saying it was going to be 2025, right?

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#207

Post by drob518 »

dingaling wrote: post #190
dtj1123 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> having lived through the dot-com hype in the 1990s Having not lived through this, I'm actually curious as to how similar it was to the current hype cycle. Was there a general sense that something singularity-like was approaching? I don't and wouldn't claim that AI is completely useless, I personally use it for at least a couple hours out of each working day and feel that it boosts my productivity significantly. My…

> Was there a general sense that something singularity-like was approaching? To a degree. There was breathless expectation that this was a turning point for commerce, government and society and that everyone had to stake their claim now . Everything was going to change. What was it going to change into? Beyond "$OLDTHING but on the Internet!!!", nobody really knew. Those first steps were just webbifying existing proc…

Exactly. If I could upvote you twice, I would.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#208

Post by amalcon »

DiscourseFan wrote: post #202
amalcon wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think "your everyday liberal professional" is more likely to be anti-AI because it is being advertised as a direct threat to their livelihoods, rather than for any more abstract reason. The latter includes both political allegiance stuff and the reasons those professionals would likely cite, like its energy requirements or the economic damage if the bubble bursts. Whether or not you think it likely that this threat…

No, because most people in say, California, which is very pro-tech, are perfectly fine with AI. But people in the Northeast are angry at it. It’s entirely cultural.

That observation[0] isn't particularly useful for arguing that it's a political allegiance thing. A lower fraction of voters in the pro-tech part of California (SFO, roughly) voted for Trump than, say, in NYC. Your observation cuts against the argument that political allegiance is the main driver, not in favor of it.

[0]- Assuming it's true, which in my experience it isn't especially, but this isn't the best argument.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#209

Post by dinfinity »

idiotsecant wrote: post #126
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…

It's clear that while LLM progress is continuing, it's at something like a linear rate, or slower. The singularity requires exponential improvement. That's not happening. Maybe we will develop something that sets that off, but there's no indication of that right now.

Yet. If the exponential improvement had already started, the singularity would already have happened or happen very, very soon.

The logic has always been that the AI would have to have significant tools and agency to do self-improvement for the singularity to occur. This is exactly the thing that a bunch of the AI labs are working on hard right now.

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