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AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

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Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#211

Post by goatlover »

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…

Yes it's a useful tool. What does that have to do with the singularity, recursive ASI, fully automated economies or whatever is being hyped as the radical transformation of society?

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#212

Post by goatlover »

inigyou wrote: post #107
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…

Everyone uses chatgpt instead of Google now, but at least half of that is on Google.

Define "everyone". Google has an AI result before the search results. People do use that. People also still use search results when they're dissatisfied with the AI answer.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#213

Post by uwamamama »

reinitctxoffset wrote: post #201
uwamamama wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[dead]

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#214

Post by jaggederest »

variadix wrote: post #173
jaggederest wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right, and my point is that now that is the bar. If you'd told me in 2008 that markov chains would be smart enough to one-shot even a trivial video game from scratch I would certainly have called that AI even if you had to do some major rigamarole to get it to work.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#215

Post by jaggederest »

inigyou wrote: post #144
jaggederest wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Because AI meant "make computers smart like people". We taught the computer to spell check, but the computer still didn't feel smart like a person, just smart like a machine so that obviously wasn't AI. We taught it to do algebra, same thing. With LLMs though, now it really does feel like an artificial human, so this time it really is AI.

Right, but I remember when spellcheck first started to be a thing, and people were like "Wow proofreaders are out of a job, ai is so cool", but then it became normal.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#216

Post by rsync »

AnonymousPlanet wrote: post #199
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…

> - "Add these domains with these mailboxes to an SMTP server running on my homelab, forward all incoming and outgoing via mxroute" I laughed reading this. Have you actually tried it? I recently tried to get Claude (Opus) to give me a setup for a simple SMTP relay with Postfix. I had to constantly fight it not to include completely unnecessary components and configurations like Dovecot or just override my requirement…

"To someone who never did anything like this themselves the result might seem fantastic ..."

I've been "doing this" for over 30 years now and I consider these LLM results to be fantastic.

If one has a deep, conceptual understanding of tools, systems and protocols and if one has the ability to carefully provide careful, concise specifications, these LLM tools are like being granted superpowers.

In fact ...

My next project upon which to bring LLM tools to bear is a fully local, solar-powered, self-hosted LLM toolchain.

Not only do I intend to never work without these tools again, I intend to do so without the ongoing environmental externalities that they produce.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#217

Post by UncleMeat »

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…

LLMs are very good at programming. This is clear. Software engineering will look very different in 2030 than it did in 2020. There are also opportunities now for people to use code to solve problems that weren't previously economical because hiring a programmer was expensive.

Will AI function the same way in all domains? That is the current narrative.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#218

Post by Izkata »

Aerroon wrote: post #176
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 improvement…

The singularity is the tipping point where the AI can improve itself faster than humans can comprehend, so the software at least wouldn't be human-designed anymore.

It requires a level of self-driven intent and access to their own code LLMs aren't capable of on their own. They might be one component of such a future system though, we just don't know yet. Even then it would probably take quite a while to reach that tipping point. GP is just wrong, talking as if we'd already reached it.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#219

Post by treis »

tavavex wrote: post #174
treis wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Th…

I think this is off. LLMs are severely constrained by hardware and we've seen at least an order of magnitude improvement in flops since ChatGPT launched. Over the next couple of decades we are likely to see that level of improvement in memory capacity. There's likely at least a few step changes left.

Regardless, the point of the GP that we saw revolutionary changes in society within a few years of technology introduction is off. It took decades for the full impact of the pc, internet, or mobile to be seen. We're still in a very early phase of figuring out how to use LLMs.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#220

Post by goatlover »

rsync wrote: post #216
AnonymousPlanet wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - "Add these domains with these mailboxes to an SMTP server running on my homelab, forward all incoming and outgoing via mxroute" I laughed reading this. Have you actually tried it? I recently tried to get Claude (Opus) to give me a setup for a simple SMTP relay with Postfix. I had to constantly fight it not to include completely unnecessary components and configurations like Dovecot or just override my requirement…

"To someone who never did anything like this themselves the result might seem fantastic ..." I've been "doing this" for over 30 years now and I consider these LLM results to be fantastic. If one has a deep, conceptual understanding of tools, systems and protocols and if one has the ability to carefully provide careful, concise specifications, these LLM tools are like being granted superpowers. In fact ... My next pro…

But you do plan on continuing to work, not have the AI bootstrap itself into a machine god and do all possible work for humanity instead.
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