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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

#121

Post by anonymouskimmer »

m463 wrote: post #64
Dilettante_ wrote: post #26

My experience with AI in the design context tends to reflect what I think is generally true about AI in the workplace: the smaller the use case, the larger the gain. This might be the money quote, encapsulating the difference between people who say their work benefits from LLMs and those who don't. Expecting it to one-shot your entire module will leave you disappointed, using it for code completion, generating docume…

> frees you up from a lot of little trivial distractions. I think one huge issue in my life has been: getting started If AI helps with this, I think it is worth it . Even if getting started is incorrect, it sparks outrage and an "I'll fix this" momentum.

I'm in the sciences, but at my first college I took a programming course for science majors. We were partnered up for an end of semester project. I didn't quite know how to get started, but my partner came to me with a bunch of pieces of the project and it was easy to put them together and then tinker with them to make it work.

Perhaps a human coworker or colleague would help?

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

#122

Post by portanus »

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…

We don’t argue that microwaves will be ubiquitous (which they aren’t, but close enough). We argue that microwaves are not an artificial general barbecue, as the makers might wish were true.

And we argue that microwaves will indeed never replace your grill as the makers, again, would love you to believe.

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

#123

Post by overfeed »

monkaiju wrote: post #88
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…

All I see it doing, as a SWE, is limiting the speed at which my co-workers learn and worsening the quality of their output. Finally many are noticing this and using it less...

Your probably bosses think it's worth it if the outcome is getting rid of the whole host of y'all and replace you with AWS Elastic-SWE instances. Which is why it's imperative that you maximize AI usage.

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

#124

Post by ksynwa »

jdkee wrote: post #116

"A datacenter takes years to construct." Not for Elon, apparently. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_(supercomputer)

A small catch

> Using an existing space rather than building one from the ground up allowed the company to begin working on the computer immediately.

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

#125

Post by chii »

lumost wrote: post #111
awinter-py wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There are a thousand "nuisance" problems which matter to me and me alone. AI allows me to bang these out faster, and put nice UIs on it. When I'm making an internal tool - there really is no reason not to put a high quality UX on top. The high quality UX, or existence of a tool that only I use does not mean my value went up - just that I can do work that my boss would otherwise tell me not to do.

personal increase in satisfaction (such as "work that my boss would otherwise tell me not to do") is valuable - even if only to you.

The fact is, value is produced when something can be produced at a fraction of the resources required previously, as long as the cost is borne by the person receiving the end result.

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

#126

Post by lumost »

elliotto wrote: post #118
lumost wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a thousand "nuisance" problems which matter to me and me alone. AI allows me to bang these out faster, and put nice UIs on it. When I'm making an internal tool - there really is no reason not to put a high quality UX on top. The high quality UX, or existence of a tool that only I use does not mean my value went up - just that I can do work that my boss would otherwise tell me not to do.

Under this definition, could any tool at all be considered to produce more value?

no - this is a lesson an engineer learns early on. The time spent making the tool may still dwarf the time savings you gain from the tool. I may make tools for problems that only ever occurred or will occur once. That single incident may have occurred before I made the tool.

This also makes it harder to prioritize work in an organization. If work is perceived as "cheap" then it's easy to demand teams prioritize features that will simply never be used. Or to polish single user experiences far beyond what is necessary.

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

#127

Post by ninetyninenine »

AI is not overhyped. It's like saying going to the moon is overhyped.

First of all this AI stuff is next level. It's as great, if not greater than going to space or going to the moon.

Second the rate at which is improving makes it such that the hype is relevant and realistic.

I think what's throwing people off are two things. First people are just over exposed to AI. So the overexposure is causing people to feel AI is boring and useless slop. Investments are heavy into AI but the people who throw that money around are a minority, overall the general public is actually UNDER hyping AI. Look at everyone on this thread. Everyone and I mean Everyone isn't overly optimistic about AI. instead the irony is... Everyone and I mean everyone again strangely thinks the world is overhyped about AI and they are wrong. This thread and practically every thread on HN is a microcosm of the world and the sentiment is decidedly against AI. Think about it like this, if Elon Musk invented a car that cost 1$ and this car could travel at FTL speeds to anywhere in the universe, than interstellar travel will be routine and boring within a year. People will call it overhyped.

Second the investment and money spent on AI is definitely overhyped. Right? Think about it. If we quantify the utility and achievement of what AI can currently do and what it's projected to achieve the math works out. If you quantify the profitability of AI the math suddenly doesn't work out.

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

#128

Post by dasil003 »

muldvarp wrote: post #75
DennisP wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software engineers been automating our own work since we built the first assembler. So far it's just made us more productive and valuable, because the demand for software has been effectively unlimited. Maybe that will continue with AI, or maybe our long-standing habit will finally turn against us.

> Software engineers been automating our own work since we built the first assembler. The declared goal of AI is to automated software engineering entirely. This is in no way comparable to building an assembler. So the question is mostly about whether or not this goal will be achieved. Still, nobody is building these systems _for_ me. They're building them to replace me, because my living is too much for them to pay.

Automating away software engineering entirely is nothing new. It goes all the way back to BASIC and COBOL, and later visual programming tools, Microsoft Access, etc. There have been innumerable attempts to do somehow get by without need those pedantic and difficult programmers and all their annoying questions and nit picking.

But here's the thing: the hard part of programming was never really syntax, it was about having the clarity of thought and conceptual precision to build a system that normal humans find useful despite the fact they will never have the patience to understand let alone debug failures. Modern AI tools are just the next step to abstracting away syntax as a gatekeeper function, but the need for precise systemic thinking is as glaringly necessary as ever.

I won't say AI will never get there—it already surpasses human programmers in many of the mechanical and rote knowledge of programing language arcana—but it it still is orders of magnitude away from being able to produce a useful system when specified by someone who does not think like a programmer. Perhaps it will get there. But I think the barrier at that point will be the age old human need to have a throat to choke when things go sideways. Those in power know how to control and manipulate humans through well-understood incentives, and this applies all the way to the highest levels of leadership. No matter how smart or competent AI is, you can't just drop it into those scenarios. Business leaders can't replace human accountability with an SLA from OpenAI, it just doesn't work. Never say never I suppose, but I'd be willing to bet the wheels come off modern civilization long before the skillset of senior software engineers becomes obsolete.

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

#129

Post by Teever »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #55
xeckr wrote: post #35

The AI race is presumably won by whomever can automate AI R&D first, thus everyone who is in an adjacent field will see the incremental benefits sooner than those further away. The further removed, the harder the takeoff once it happens.

This notion of a hard takeoff, or singularity, based on self-improving AI, is based on the implicit assumption that what's holding AI progress back is lack of AI researchers/developers, which is false. Ideas are a penny a dozen - the bottleneck is the money/compute to test them at scale. What exactly is the scenario you are imagining where more developers at a company like OpenAI (or maybe Meta, which has just laid o…

Agreed.

To me the hard take off won't happen until a humanoid robot can assemble another humanoid robot from parts, as well as slot in anywhere in the supply chain where a human would be required to make those parts.

Once you have that you functionally have a self-replicating machine which can then also build more data centers or semi fabs.

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

#130

Post by bgwalter »

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…

If you want to steal code, you can take it from GitHub and strip the license. That is what the Markov chains (https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.02724) do.

It's a code laundering machine. Software engineering has a higher number of people who have never created anything by themselves and have no issues with copyright infringement. Other professions still tend to take a broader view. Even unproductive people in other professions may have compunctions about stealing other people's work.

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