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AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

chrbutler.com

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Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#101

Post by awinter-py »

lumost wrote: post #87
sockgrant wrote: post #14

“As a designer…” IMHO the bleeding edge of what’s working well with LLMs is within software engineering because we’re building for ourselves, first. Claude code is incredible. Where I work, there are an incredible number of custom agents that integrate with our internal tooling. Many make me very productive and are worthwhile. I find it hard to buy in to opinions of non-SWE on the uselessness of AI solely because I t…

I think the question is whether those ai tools make you produce more value . Anecdotally, the ai tools have changed the workflow and allowed me to produce more tools etc. They have not necessarily changed the rate at which I produce valuable outputs (yet).

can you say more about this? what do you mean when you say 'more tools' is not the same as 'valuable outputs'

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#102

Post by colecut »

awinter-py wrote: post #101
lumost wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the question is whether those ai tools make you produce more value . Anecdotally, the ai tools have changed the workflow and allowed me to produce more tools etc. They have not necessarily changed the rate at which I produce valuable outputs (yet).

can you say more about this? what do you mean when you say 'more tools' is not the same as 'valuable outputs'

Do using the tools increase ROI?

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#103

Post by ethanwillis »

sfgvvxsfccdd wrote: post #94
oblio wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with everyone else, where is the Microsoft Office competitor created by 2 geeks in a garage with Claude Code? Where is the Exchange replacement created by a company of 20 people? There are many really lucrative markets that need a fresh approach, and AI doesn't seem to have caused a huge explosion of new software created by upstarts. Or am I missing something? Where are the consumer facing software apps devel…

> Office…Exchange The challenge in competing with these products is not code. The challenge competing in lucrative markets that need a fresh approach is also generally not code. So I’m not sure that is a good metric to evaluate LLMs for code generation.

It's not that they failed to compete on other metrics, it's that they don't even have a product to fail to sell.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#104

Post by octoberfranklin »

bdw5204 wrote: post #89
eightman wrote: post #62

The use case for AI is spam.

Another major use case for it is enabling students to more easily cheat on their homework. Which is why it is probably going to end up putting Chegg out of business.

I am shocked when I talk to college kids about AI these days.

I try to explain stuff to them like regurgitating the training data, context window limits, and confabulation.

They stick their fingers in their ears and say "LA LA LA LA it does my homework for me nothing else matters LA LA LA LA i can't hear you"

They really do not care about the Turing Test. Today's LLMs pass the "snowed my teaching assistant test" and nothing else matters.

Academic fraud really is the killer app for this technology. At least if you're a 19-year-old.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#105

Post by walterbell »

w_for_wumbo wrote: post #82
JohnMakin wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fly to distant galaxies Unless AI can change the laws of physics, extremely unlikely.

I see, Fly was perhaps the wrong word to use here. Phase-Shift to new galaxies is probably the right term. Where you change your entire system's resonant frequency, to match what exists in the distant galaxy. Less of transportation, and more of a change of focus. Like the way we can daydream about a galaxy, then snap-back to work. It's the same mechanism, but with enhanced focus you go from not just visualising > fee…

Any favorite movies or TV episodes on the above themes?

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#106

Post by walterbell »

hollowturtle wrote: post #52

The best AI is the one hidden, silent, ubiquitous that works and you feel it's not there. Apple devices but really many modern devices before the LLM hype era had a lot of AI we didn't know about. Today if I read a product has AI i feel let down cause most of the time is a not very well integrated ChatBot that if you will to spend some time sooner or later will impersonate Adolf Hitler and, who knows, maybe leaks sen…

Seamless OCR from every iOS photo and screenshot has been magical in utility, reliability and usability.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#107

Post by highfrequency »

The universal theme with general purpose technologies is 1) they start out lagging behind current practices in every context 2) they improve rapidly, but 3) they break through and surpass current practices in different contexts at different times.

What that means is that if you work in a certain context, for a while you keep seeing AI get a 0 because it is worse than the current process. Behind the scenes the underlying technology is improving rapidly, but because it hasn’t cusped the viability threshold you don’t feel it at all. From this vantage point, it is easy to dismiss the whole thing and forget about the slope, because the whole line is under the surface of usefulness in your context. The author has identified two cases where current AI is below the cusp of viability: design and large scale changes to a codebase (though Codex is cracking the second one quickly).

The hard and useful thing is not to find contexts where the general purpose technology gets a 0, but to surf the cusp of viability by finding incrementally harder problems that are newly solvable as the underlying technology improves. A very clear example of this is early Tesla surfing the reduction in Li-ion battery prices by starting with expensive sports cars, then luxury sedans, then normal cars. You can be sure that throughout the first two phases, everyone at GM and Toyota was saying: Li-ion batteries are totally infeasible for the consumers we prioritize who want affordable cars. By the time the technology is ready for sedans, Tesla has a 5 year lead.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#108

Post by logicprog »

emp17344 wrote: post #71
Kiro wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm focusing too much in the hardliners but I see it everywhere, especially in tech.

Where’s all the data showing productivity increases from AI adoption? If AI is so useful, it shouldn’t be hard to prove it.

Measuring productivity in software development, or even white collar jobs in general, let alone the specific productivity gains of even things like the introduction of digital technology and the internet at all, let alone stuff like static vs dynamic types, or the productivity difference of various user interface modalities, is notoriously extremely difficult. Why would we expect to be able to do it here?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

https://danluu.com/keyboard-v-mouse/

https://danluu.com/empirical-pl/

https://facetation.blogspot.com/2015/03/white-collar-product...

https://newsletter.getdx.com/p/difficult-to-measure

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#109

Post by [deleted] »

highfrequency wrote: post #107

The universal theme with general purpose technologies is 1) they start out lagging behind current practices in every context 2) they improve rapidly, but 3) they break through and surpass current practices in different contexts at different times. What that means is that if you work in a certain context, for a while you keep seeing AI get a 0 because it is worse than the current process. Behind the scenes the underly…

[deleted]

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#110

Post by arkt8 »

I like to reduce things to absurdity to put them into perspective.

The hype of AI is to sell illusion to naive people.

It is like create a hammer that nails by itself... like cars that choose the path by itself.

So stop thinking AI is intelligent... it is merely an advanced tool that demands skill and creativity like any other. Its output is limited to the hability of its user.

The worry should be the amount of resources used to vanity (hammers into the newborn hands) or the nails in the wrong place (viral fake content targeted to unaware people).

Like in Industrial Revolution people got reduced to screw tighteners, mind will be reduced to bad prompters expecting wonders and producing bad content or the same. A step back in civilization except for the money makers and thinkers until AI revolution gives birth to its Karl Marx.

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