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Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

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Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#151

Post by danbruc »

snowwrestler wrote: post #145
danbruc wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just tested it with Copilot with two random 45 digit numbers and it gets it correct by translating it into Python and running it in the background. When I asked to not use any external tools, it got the first five, the last two, and a hand full more digits in the middle correct, out of 90. It also fails to calculate the 45 intermediate products - one number times one digit from the other - including multiplying by…

When kids learn multiplication, they learn it on paper, not just in their heads. LLMs don’t have access to paper. “Do long arithmetic entirely in your mind” is not a test most humans can pass. Maybe a few savants. This makes me suspect it is not a reliable test of reasoning. Humans also get a training run every night. As we sleep, our brains are integrating our experiences from the day into our existing minds, so we…

They have access to paper, the model output, that is what reasoning models use to keep track of the chain of thought. When I asked Copilot what kind of external resources it can use, it also claimed that it has access to some scratchpad memory, which might or might not be true, did not try to verify that.

Also I am not asking to learn it in one day, you can dump everything that a child would hear and read during primary school into the context. You can even do it interactively, maybe the model has questions.

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#152

Post by andsoitis »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #117
worik wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Being fired is not being held accountable, it is being terminated Termination is the end result of a process It is not unreasonable to think that is an accountability process of some sort...

You're talking about being accountable to shareholders I am talking about being accountable to society

What do you recommend then instead of losing your job and by extension the ability to affect society in a big way?

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#153

Post by standardUser »

DrewADesign wrote: post #84
standardUser wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mobility is not an analogy for AI, it's an analogy to whichever industry you work in. If you publish a magazine, you may think you're in the 'publishing' business and that AI as a weak competitor, maybe capable of squashing crappy blogs but not prestigious media like yours. But maybe what you're really in is the 'content' business, and you need to recognize that sooner or later, AI is going to beat you at the content…

Or more likely, you are in the publishing business but the tech world unilaterally deemed everything creative to be a fungible commodity and undertook a multi-billion dollar campaign to ingest actual creative content and compete with everyone that creates it in the same market with cheap knockoffs. Our society predictably considers this progress because nothing that could potentially make that much money could possib…

Tell it to the carriage-makers I guess.

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#154

Post by jmathai »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #79
jmathai wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a surprising take. I think what's available today can improve productivity by 20% across the board. That seems massive. Only a very small % of the population is leveraging AI in any meaningful way. But I think today's tools are sufficient for them to do so if they wanted to start and will only get better (even if the LLMs don't, which they will).

I think that what's available today is a drain on productivity, not an improvement, because it's so unreliable that you have to babysit it constantly to make sure it hasn't fucked up. That is not exactly reassuring as to the future, in my view.

This is definitely some people's experience. It's not mine.

I think the distinction is due to different tools being used, how the tool is being used and the use case it's being used for.

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#155

Post by jiveturkey »

I don't like this article one bit, starting from the title "Missed" the Future.

It implies that not jumping on the latest disruptive technology, at the early stage where the tech hasn't taken hold yet and it's not known if it will (see: disruptive tech graveyard), reducing or pivoting from your established business, is a bad thing, or a failure.

It's also ok to go out of business. Really disruptive technology often (usually?) spurs growth and jobs shift, so there's no loss in aggregate. Of course a few people that can't retrain will be left behind. For his specific example of carriage to car, there were 4000 carriage makers because they were fairly small businesses, with shallow supply chains. Just a couple of car makers (and the full supply chain) dwarf the total employment required for all those 4000 carriage makers.

This article is simply written with the benefit of hindsight.

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#156

Post by nailer »

bpt3 wrote: post #44
nailer wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's the varying value-add mentioned in the comment you're replying to. I pay 3.5% of every card transaction to Square. I don't get 3.5% cash/rewards back.

Do you get a discount for paying with cash (or blockchain)? In general the answer is no, meaning you aren't paying the 3.5% transaction fee, the merchant is.

That's correct, much like the roads not being paved was a hassle for cars.

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#157

Post by bluefirebrand »

andsoitis wrote: post #152
bluefirebrand wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're talking about being accountable to shareholders I am talking about being accountable to society

What do you recommend then instead of losing your job and by extension the ability to affect society in a big way?

Jail, mostly

I just think that "our company got caught doing seriously illegal / negligent shit but don't worry we fired the CEO who oversaw all of it after paying them 10s of millions of dollars" is really not a punishment to either the company or the CEO

It's kind of a rigged system that ensures no one is held accountable

Oh, "the company" gets fined a fraction of the value they gained from behaving illegally, the shareholders get a ton of money, the executive team gets a golden parachute, and society gets fucked

Honestly we should be putting people to death for this behavior, instead many of us applaud what great business sense everyone involved has

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#158

Post by majormajor »

hedgehog wrote: post #115
majormajor wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But when the product can shift from "give me an app that makes it easier to do my taxes" to "keep me current on my taxes and send me status updates" that's a pretty radical difference in what the customer sees. For a bunch of stuff - banks, online shopping, booking a taxi, etc - this shift already happened with non-LLM-based "send me notifications of unusual account activity" or even the dead-simple "send me an ema…

No the shift hasn't happened yet at all. Let's take those examples one by one. Banks: Normal retail customers are responsible for managing their account balances, importing transaction data into whatever book keeping system, downloading their tax forms for filing, adjusting their services and strategy based on whatever they're planning to do in their life etc. Private banking is a reasonable model for the service tha…

This was your pitch, right? "product can shift from "give me an app that makes it easier to do my taxes" to "keep me current on my taxes and send me status updates"

How is that not Mint from 15 years ago? Actual integration into the US tax system is a government problem, not an LLM problem.

Now it sounds like you're suggesting more of a even-more-centralized Mint-replacement that aggregates everything for you to try to be a single AI assistant.

But do I want an LLM pulling the trigger on ordering new products for me based on what it thinks I'd want when? Or changing the investment strategy on my accounts? Not really.

"Personal assistant for keeping track of your receipts for when you need to return something" is mildly interesting except... if you're buying online, the receipt's already basically trivially to find 99% of the time. And if you're buying offline, are you scanning all the receipts by hand? And unlike a personal assistant, the LLM isn't driving to drop off those packages.

Booking transit at the same time as travel, also something that's existed for a long time. And a third party Google Calendar "hey, we see a flight here, and a hotel there, do you want us to pre-book an Uber between the two" feature would not require LLMs at all.

So what am I gaining from this super-Mint-app and how is it LLM-specific if I don't have financials that need super-heavy-oversight and I don't want to outsource my grocery and shirt shopping to a personal assistant?

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#159

Post by DrewADesign »

standardUser wrote: post #153
DrewADesign wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or more likely, you are in the publishing business but the tech world unilaterally deemed everything creative to be a fungible commodity and undertook a multi-billion dollar campaign to ingest actual creative content and compete with everyone that creates it in the same market with cheap knockoffs. Our society predictably considers this progress because nothing that could potentially make that much money could possib…

Tell it to the carriage-makers I guess.

More like the American manufacturing sector that was sold out because executives liked money more than the people that built their company. They were wrong then, are wrong now, and now the US manufacturing sector is irreparably harmed because of it. Following investor profit at the expense of everyone and everything else isn't the inevitable, natural path of progress-- every day we walk down this path mindlessly chasing profit at the expense of commercial artists is a deliberate choice. Beyond that, cars, trucks, and busses were FAR more of an improvement over animal-powered transportation, while the current LLM and image-generating NN stuff is choking the internet with complete garbage made by hucksters trying to make a cheap buck by fooling people into thinking there's something valuable on the other side of a link. ::slow clap:: Then there's the scammers, extortionists, political disinformation peddlers, etc. Now that's what I call progress!

The American creative sector is going to atrophy exactly as the American manufacturing sector did. The whole idea that "well everybody's still gonna do art" isn't going to save the best cohort of commercial artists in the world any more than hobby home machinists saved America's collective knowledge of tool and die making.

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#160

Post by falcor84 »

andrewflnr wrote: post #69
myrmidon wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The current generation of AI models will turn out to be essentially a dead end. It seems a matter of perspective to me whether you call it "dead end" or "stepping stone". To give some pause before dismissing the current state of the art prematurely: I would already consider LLM based current systems more "intelligent" than a housecat. And a pets intelligence is enough to have ethical implications, so we arguably re…

Intelligence alone does not have ethical implications w.r.t. how we treat the intelligent entity. Suffering has ethical implications, but intelligence does not imply suffering. There's no evidence that LLMs can suffer (note that that's less evidence than for, say, crayfish suffering).

While I agree that suffering has ethical connotations, I don't think it makes sense to treat it as a requirement. A Buddhist who manages to achieve enlightenment and overcome suffering does not immediately cease to be a moral patient, right?
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