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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

#151

Post by Capricorn2481 »

overfeed wrote: post #123
monkaiju wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So instead of firing and replacing me with AI my boss will pay me to use AI he would've used..?

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

#152

Post by jibal »

kulahan wrote: post #68
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…

An agentic git interface might be nice, though hallucinations seem like they could create a really messy problem. Still, you could just roll back in that case, I suppose. Anyways, it would be nice to tell it where I'm trying to get to and let it figure out how to get there.

Lots of things might be nice when the expenditure accounts for 92% of GDP growth.

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

#153

Post by jibal »

bawolff wrote: post #120
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…

> 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. I think you should say succesful "general purpose technologies". What you describe is what happens when things work out. Sometimes things stall at step 1, and the technol…

Yeah, that comment is heavy on survivor bias. The universal theme is that things go the way they go.

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

#154

Post by morshu9001 »

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…

Yeah, I'll gladly AI-gen code, but I still write docs by hand. Have yet to see one good AI generated doc, they're all garbage.

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

#155

Post by jibal »

njarboe wrote: post #7

Many people use AI as the source for knowledge. Even though it is often wrong or misleading, it's advice is better on average than their own judgement or the judgement of people they know. When an AI is "smarter" than 95%? of the population, even if it does not reach superintelligence, will be a very big deal.

The 95th percentile IQ is 125, which is about average in my circle. (Several of my friends are verified triple nines.)

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

#156

Post by jibal »

apsurd wrote: post #19
njarboe wrote: post #7

Many people use AI as the source for knowledge. Even though it is often wrong or misleading, it's advice is better on average than their own judgement or the judgement of people they know. When an AI is "smarter" than 95%? of the population, even if it does not reach superintelligence, will be a very big deal.

This means to me AI is rocket fuel for our post-truth reality. Post-truth is a big deal and it was already happening pre-AI. AGI, post-scarcity, post-humanity are nerd snipes. Post-truth on the other hand is just a mundane and nasty sociologically problem that we ran head-first into and we don't know how to deal with. I don't have any answers. Seems like it'll get worse before it gets better.

What "gets better"? Rapid global warming will lead to societal collapse this century.

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

#157

Post by perfmode »

SoftTalker wrote: post #132
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'm a SWE, DBA, SysAdmin, I work up and down the stack as needed. I'm not using LLMs at all. I really haven't tried them. I'm waiting for the dust to settle and clear "best practices" to emerge. I am sure that these tools are here to stay but I am also confident they are not in their final form today. I've seen too many hype trains in my career to still be jumping on them at the first stop.

How could you not at least try?

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

#158

Post by dcre »

SoftTalker wrote: post #132
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'm a SWE, DBA, SysAdmin, I work up and down the stack as needed. I'm not using LLMs at all. I really haven't tried them. I'm waiting for the dust to settle and clear "best practices" to emerge. I am sure that these tools are here to stay but I am also confident they are not in their final form today. I've seen too many hype trains in my career to still be jumping on them at the first stop.

The tools have reached the point where no special knowledge is required to get started. You can get going in 5 minutes. Try Claude Code with an API key (no subscription required). Run it in the terminal in a repo and ask how something works. Then ask it to make a straightforward but tedious change. Etc.

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

#159

Post by jibal »

xeckr wrote: post #69
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's not hard to believe that adding AI researchers to an AI company marginally increases the rate of progress, otherwise why would the companies be clamouring for talent with eye-watering salaries? In any case, I'm not just talking about AI researchers—AGI will not only help with algorithmic efficiency improvements, but will probably make spinning up chip fabs that much easier.

There's no path from LLMs to AGI.

> spinning up chip fabs that much easier

AI already accounts for 92% of U.S. GDP growth. This is a path to disaster.

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

#160

Post by smoody07 »

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…

This. Design tends to explore a latent space that isn't well documented. There is no Stack Overflow or Github for design. The closest we have are open sourced design systems like Material Design, and portfolio sites like Behance. These are not legible reference implementations for most use cases.

If LLMs only disrupt software engineering and content slop, the economy is going to undergo rapid changes. Every car wash will have a forward deployed engineer maintaining their mobile app, website, backend, and LLM-augmented customer service. That happens even if LLMs plateau in six months.

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