Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

'AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making'

daringfireball.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 25 posts

Re: 'AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making'

#11

Post by Kiro »

sarchertech wrote: post #9
Kiro wrote: post #7

Is 100x even controversial anymore? Anyone can do it by just throwing the whole backlog at AI and let it go crazy. What's the bottleneck? You don't need to babysit LLMs anymore. The problem is that you can only keep up with so much, but it's obvious that a lot of people and companies don't care about that.

Yeah 100x is definitely still controversial. 100x means you should be able to whip up a new OS in a week. Looking at something like Anthropic's attempt to write a C compiler in rust. That definitely wasn’t 100x. It took 2 weeks to build something that wasn’t a viable c compiler. And that was best possible scenario. A very comprehensive spec, an existing implementation to act as an oracle, and existing compilers in th…

Not sure how you reached that conclusion and most people do not make OSes. A normal backlog at a standard company is not comparable.

Your edit is even more peculiar. Writing a C compiler in Rust? Come on. I'm obviously talking about normal grunt work. And what are you even using as a benchmark? It's not 100x compared to what?

Re: 'AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making'

#12

Post by cl42 »

I've been reflecting on Generative AI in the context of broader sociological and cultural theories. This article is reminding me of these things and I'm curious what other think.

#1: George Soros' concept of reflexivity, where human biases begin informing, distorting, and supporting asset prices not because of their underlying fundamentals, but because of the human biases that have contributed to their prior appreciation. As per the essay being cited, if you are a CEO committing to AI as a strategy, you will also commit resources to double down on the technology. Your own identity becomes tied to it, whether you realize it or not, and you'll keep pushing for it and maybe even ignore facts that challenge the success of your investment.

#2: Marshall McLuhan (of "The Medium is the Message" fame) argues that we need to understand communication and entertainment technologies in terms of the structure they impose on us. While social media is seen as a societal ill by many, its original idea of connecting people is fundamentally, well, social... GenAI is very much a non-social (i.e., you experience it on your own) convenience technology. It gives you answers, it writes code, and it implies an authoritative perspective that is always available to you, as an imperfect human. What will this mean for our own identities as human beings?

I am very much a supporter of foundation models, LLMs, AI, etc. but can't help and think about some of the ideas above. Curious what others think.

Re: 'AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making'

#13

Post by suprjami »

andsoitis wrote: post #4

Dupe. Prior discussion 7 days ago and 77pts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48956153

No.

Your link is the original post by Nikhil.

This page is Gruber's commentary on Nikhil's original post.

We make sure to click the link and read the article before posting here. Please follow that rule in future.

Re: 'AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making'

#14

Post by rubylimetea »

Feel like AI prep vanished cold blood ambushed into a 5-point kidney, thistle tea'd then MfD 5-point eviscerated my career, when all I was doing was gathering peaceblooms in silvermoon when I should've trinketed the kidney death coil into a fear. It is what it is

Re: 'AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making'

#16

Post by sarchertech »

Kiro wrote: post #11
sarchertech wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah 100x is definitely still controversial. 100x means you should be able to whip up a new OS in a week. Looking at something like Anthropic's attempt to write a C compiler in rust. That definitely wasn’t 100x. It took 2 weeks to build something that wasn’t a viable c compiler. And that was best possible scenario. A very comprehensive spec, an existing implementation to act as an oracle, and existing compilers in th…

Not sure how you reached that conclusion and most people do not make OSes. A normal backlog at a standard company is not comparable. Your edit is even more peculiar. Writing a C compiler in Rust? Come on. I'm obviously talking about normal grunt work. And what are you even using as a benchmark? It's not 100x compared to what?

You’re the one that said it’s a 100x productivity increase, so I assume you meant compared to a software developer writing without AI. What else are you using as a benchmark?

So it can’t 100x writing an OS even though it has tons of OS code in the training set. It can’t 100x a compiler. Based on personal experience (and number of games released on Steam compared to last year) it can’t 100x game development.

At my very large tech company it can’t 100x development of any of our customer facing products (and we still have a huge backlog). Judging by the fact that the vast majority of us still have jobs and big companies are still paying for Jira, Slack, and Teams, it doesn’t seem like it can 100x anything useful.

Re: 'AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making'

#17

Post by ebb_earl_co »

cl42 wrote: post #12

I've been reflecting on Generative AI in the context of broader sociological and cultural theories. This article is reminding me of these things and I'm curious what other think. #1: George Soros' concept of reflexivity, where human biases begin informing, distorting, and supporting asset prices not because of their underlying fundamentals, but because of the human biases that have contributed to their prior apprecia…

I’m curious what makes you a supporter, as you say? Supporting the companies that make them or the developers themselves pushing the technology forward or the impacts of the proliferation of the LLMs’ usage or something else?

Re: 'AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making'

#18

Post by ViktorRay »

suprjami wrote: post #13
andsoitis wrote: post #4

Dupe. Prior discussion 7 days ago and 77pts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48956153

No. Your link is the original post by Nikhil. This page is Gruber's commentary on Nikhil's original post. We make sure to click the link and read the article before posting here. Please follow that rule in future.

Ironically your comment here also breaks HN guidelines. Specifically the one where you aren’t supposed to accuse other people of not reading the articles.

Re: 'AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making'

#19

Post by andsoitis »

suprjami wrote: post #13
andsoitis wrote: post #4

Dupe. Prior discussion 7 days ago and 77pts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48956153

No. Your link is the original post by Nikhil. This page is Gruber's commentary on Nikhil's original post. We make sure to click the link and read the article before posting here. Please follow that rule in future.

I did click through and saw it was one person’s commentary on the same tipis we discussed here a week ago. It is probably nicer if all the commentary on a story live together.

Re: 'AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making'

#20

Post by cl42 »

ebb_earl_co wrote: post #17
cl42 wrote: post #12

I've been reflecting on Generative AI in the context of broader sociological and cultural theories. This article is reminding me of these things and I'm curious what other think. #1: George Soros' concept of reflexivity, where human biases begin informing, distorting, and supporting asset prices not because of their underlying fundamentals, but because of the human biases that have contributed to their prior apprecia…

I’m curious what makes you a supporter, as you say? Supporting the companies that make them or the developers themselves pushing the technology forward or the impacts of the proliferation of the LLMs’ usage or something else?

I’m a supporter of the technology and believe it is transformative.
Post reply on HN