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

Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

joincolossus.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 377 posts

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#111

Post by visarga »

AI is used by students, teachers, researchers, software developers, marketers and other categories and the adoption rates are close to 90%. Even if it does not make us more productive we still like using it daily. But when used right, it does make us slightly more productive and I think it justifies its cost. So yes, in the long run it will be viable, we both like using it and it helps us work better.

But I think the benefits of AI usage will accumulate with the person doing the prompting and their employers. Every AI usage is contextualized, every benefit or loss is also manifested in the local context of usage. Not at the AI provider.

If I take a photo of my skin sore and put it on ChatGPT for advice, it is not OpenAI that is going to get its skin cured. They get a few cents per million tokens. So the AI providers are just utilities, benefits depend on who sets the prompts and and how skillfully they do it. Risks also go to the user, OpenAI assumes no liability.

Users are like investors - they take on the cost, and support the outcomes, good or bad. AI company is like an employee, they don't really share in the profit, only get a fixed salary for work

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#112

Post by Tepix »

visarga wrote: post #111

AI is used by students, teachers, researchers, software developers, marketers and other categories and the adoption rates are close to 90%. Even if it does not make us more productive we still like using it daily. But when used right, it does make us slightly more productive and I think it justifies its cost. So yes, in the long run it will be viable, we both like using it and it helps us work better. But I think the…

We also know from studies that it makes us less capable, i.e. it rots our brains.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#113

Post by visarga »

Tepix wrote: post #112
visarga wrote: post #111

AI is used by students, teachers, researchers, software developers, marketers and other categories and the adoption rates are close to 90%. Even if it does not make us more productive we still like using it daily. But when used right, it does make us slightly more productive and I think it justifies its cost. So yes, in the long run it will be viable, we both like using it and it helps us work better. But I think the…

We also know from studies that it makes us less capable, i.e. it rots our brains.

Books also make us less capable at rote memorization. People used to do much more memorization. Search engines taught us to remember the keywords, not the facts. Calculators made us rarely do mental calculations. This is what happens - progress is also regress, you automate on one side and the skill gets atrophied on the other side, or replaced with meta-skills.

How many of us know how to use machine code? And we call ourselves software engineers.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#114

Post by jcelerier »

59nadir wrote: post #108
chii wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ironic if AI actually ended up destroying economic activity that's not destroying economic activity - it's removing a less efficient activity and replace it with a more efficient version. This produces economic surplus. Imagine saying this for someone digging a hole, that if they use a mechanical digger instead of a hand shovel, they'd destroy economic activity since it now cost less to dig that hole!

It doesn't cost less to get the thing you actually want in the end anyway, no one in their right mind would actually launch with the founder's AI-produced assets because they'd be laughed out of the market immediately. They're placeholders at best, so you're still going to need to get a professional to do them eventually.

You say this but I see ai generated ads, graphics, etc. daily nowadays and it doesn't seem like it affects at all people going or not going to buy what these people are proposing.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#115

Post by XenophileJKO »

jcelerier wrote: post #114
59nadir wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't cost less to get the thing you actually want in the end anyway, no one in their right mind would actually launch with the founder's AI-produced assets because they'd be laughed out of the market immediately. They're placeholders at best, so you're still going to need to get a professional to do them eventually.

You say this but I see ai generated ads, graphics, etc. daily nowadays and it doesn't seem like it affects at all people going or not going to buy what these people are proposing.

Case in point.. I listen to my own AI generated music now like 90% of the time.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#116

Post by zwnow »

Waterluvian wrote: post #17

I think the interesting idea with “AI” is that it seems to significantly reduce barriers to entry in many domains. I haven’t seen a company convincingly demonstrate that this affects them at all. Lots of fluff but nothing compelling. But I have seen many examples by individuals, including myself. For years I’ve loved poking at video game dev for fun. The main problem has always been art assets. I’m terrible at art an…

Funny how everyone is just okay with the basis for all this art being stolen art by actual humans. Zero sense of ethics.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#117

Post by LarsDu88 »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #61
Waterluvian wrote: post #17

I think the interesting idea with “AI” is that it seems to significantly reduce barriers to entry in many domains. I haven’t seen a company convincingly demonstrate that this affects them at all. Lots of fluff but nothing compelling. But I have seen many examples by individuals, including myself. For years I’ve loved poking at video game dev for fun. The main problem has always been art assets. I’m terrible at art an…

I'm wondering a good way to create 2D sprite sheets with transparency via AI. That would be a game changer, but my research has led me to believe that there isn't a good tool for this yet. One sprite is kind of doable, but a sprite animation with continuity between frames seems like it would be very difficult. Have you figured out a way to do this?

I was literally experimenting with this today.

Use Google Nano Banana to generate your sprite with a magenta background, then ask it to generate the final frame of the animation you want to create.

Then use Google Flow to create an animation between the two frames with Veo3

Its astoundingly effective, but still rather laborious and lacking in ergonomics. For example the video aspect ratio has to be fixed, and you need to manually fill the correct shade of magenta for transparency keying since the imagen model does not do this perfectly.

IMO Veo3 is good enough to make sprites and animations for an 2000s 2D RTS game in seconds from a basic image sketch and description. It just needs a purpose built UI for gamedev workflows.

If I was not super busy with family and work, I'd build a wrapper around these tools

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#118

Post by croes »

visarga wrote: post #113
Tepix wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We also know from studies that it makes us less capable, i.e. it rots our brains.

Books also make us less capable at rote memorization. People used to do much more memorization. Search engines taught us to remember the keywords, not the facts. Calculators made us rarely do mental calculations. This is what happens - progress is also regress, you automate on one side and the skill gets atrophied on the other side, or replaced with meta-skills. How many of us know how to use machine code? And we cal…

AI hits different. Books didn’t kill the thinking, AI does. If AI does the writing you can’t find your voice

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#119

Post by rwyinuse »

XenophileJKO wrote: post #115
jcelerier wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say this but I see ai generated ads, graphics, etc. daily nowadays and it doesn't seem like it affects at all people going or not going to buy what these people are proposing.

Case in point.. I listen to my own AI generated music now like 90% of the time.

Interesting. For me knowing that any form of entertainment has been generated by AI is a massive turn-off. In particular, I could never imagine paying for AI-generated music or TV-shows.

Re: Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?

#120

Post by [deleted] »

hansvm wrote: post #83
KPGv2 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With AI if you want 2x or 5x or 10x as much art Imagery AI does not produce art. Not that it matters to anyone but artists and art enjoyers.

Is that an argument against the quality, saying that AI cannot (or some weaker claim like that it does not usually) produce "art"? Else, is it an argument of provenance, akin to how copyright currently works, where the same visual representation is "art" if a human makes it and is not "art" if an AI makes it?

[deleted]
Post reply on HN