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The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

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Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#161

Post by lm28469 »

com2kid wrote: post #47
pizlonator wrote: post #21

> AI inference demand is directed at improving actual earnings. Companies are deploying intelligence to reduce customer acquisition costs, lower operational expenses, and increase worker productivity. The return is measurable and often immediate, not hypothetical. Is the return measurable and immediate? Is it really?

Yes. Dentists offices that only need 1 receptionist instead of 2. A dramatic reduction in front line tier 1 customer support reps. Translation teams laid off. Documentation teams dramatically reduced. Data entry teams replaced by vision models.

Meanwhile I can't get a hold of my landlord because they removed both their support email and online formular in favor of an AI chatbot, which means I can't get them to repair my heaters and have been without heating since thursday

They're saving pennies but at what cost?

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#162

Post by Bluestrike2 »

striking wrote: post #74

I'm excited for the AI wildfire to come and engulf these AI-written thinkpieces. At this point I'd prefer a set of bullet points over having to sift through more "it's not X (emdash) it's Y" pestilence.

> it's not X (emdash) it's Y

No, no, no! Stop that! The em dash is an wonderful little punctuation mark that's damned useful when used with purpose. You can't turn it into some scarlet glyph just because normal people finally noticed they exist. LLMs use them because we used them, damn it.

For god's sake, are we supposed to go back to the dark ages of the double hyphen like typographic barbarians in the hopes that a future update won't ruin that, too? After all the work to get text editors to automatically substitute them in the first place?

What's funny is that, when people first started noticing that LLMs tended to like the em dash, I'd mentioned to a friend that I hoped—rather naively—it might lead to a resurgence and people would think to themselves "huh, that looks pretty useful." Needless to say, I got that one wrong. Are we really going to sacrifice the poor em dash just because people can't come up with a better signifier for LLM text?

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#163

Post by throw310822 »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #137
throw310822 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't understand what should this "wildfire" burn. My perspective is very limited, but where are the pets.com of AI today? Where are all the small companies with improbable business cases that are getting absurd valuations/ investments because they're in AI? The space seems mostly dominated by huge players that, while burning tons of cash, are still making real progress on something that will have more econom…

OpenAI and Anthropic. They have no business case - they are 'burn money and hope AI allows us to build something we can monetise'. That's not a business model.

Don't know about OpenAI, but Claude wrote almost all of my code in the past few days, multiplying my productivity by a factor of at least two. My feeling is that for some use cases Anthropic could already charge enterprises a significant fraction of each developer's salary and it would still be a net gain for customers.

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#164

Post by Sgt_Apone »

mNovak wrote: post #112

Is there an elegant term to describe a severely overburdened metaphor? I'm getting lost in the thick bark of an intertwined canopy root system here..

Glad I was the only one getting lost in that forest. I’ve never seen a metaphor get hammered so much in one piece (AI or otherwise).

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#165

Post by tim333 »

akomtu wrote: post #156
com2kid wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing this stuff is literally my job. Large banks have tens of thousands of call center employees and a large % of calls they handle are perfectly solvable with a good AI bot. They are working very hard to cut call center staff as quickly as possible. People don't realize how much a call to customers service costs. Back when I was at MSFT, a call to tech support for our product costs $20 to have someone pick up the p…

"Costs $20" really means "one of those poor call center reps got paid $20, barely enough to pay rent." Once you solve the supposed problem, all those people will be on the streets.

That's not how it's mostly gone historically. People tend to find different jobs.

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#166

Post by anthk »

debo_ wrote: post #133
striking wrote: post #74

I'm excited for the AI wildfire to come and engulf these AI-written thinkpieces. At this point I'd prefer a set of bullet points over having to sift through more "it's not X (emdash) it's Y" pestilence.

It makes me wonder what verbal tics / tells it has in other languages.

In Spanish: "En resúmen.." (in conclusion...)

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#167

Post by anonymars »

incompatible wrote: post #126
anonymars wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you're churning your own butter and manufacturing your own solar panels, isn't retirement inherently living off other people regardless of income?

Isn't getting wages in a wealthy country so that you can afford a multiple of work hours from poorly-paid people elsewhere inherently living off other people?

If one makes more as a software developer than a bus driver, it doesn't seem like location was the factor

Isn't the logical extension that everyone lives off other people?

This was basically the point of "you didn't build that" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_didn%27t_build_that)

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#168

Post by anonymars »

reactordev wrote: post #122
anonymars wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you're churning your own butter and manufacturing your own solar panels, isn't retirement inherently living off other people regardless of income?

Isn’t social security living off the backs of other people too?

Childhood too, no? Maybe it turns out life was the original "pyramid scheme"

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#169

Post by striking »

Bluestrike2 wrote: post #162
striking wrote: post #74

I'm excited for the AI wildfire to come and engulf these AI-written thinkpieces. At this point I'd prefer a set of bullet points over having to sift through more "it's not X (emdash) it's Y" pestilence.

> it's not X (emdash) it's Y No, no, no! Stop that! The em dash is an wonderful little punctuation mark that's damned useful when used with purpose. You can't turn it into some scarlet glyph just because normal people finally noticed they exist. LLMs use them because we used them, damn it. For god's sake, are we supposed to go back to the dark ages of the double hyphen like typographic barbarians in the hopes that a…

Oh, no thanks. The emdash is lazy writing, through and through, for the same reason a parenthetical expressed any other way might be. LLMs overuse them the same way humans do: to pack in context where it doesn't belong. I'd happily lay the emdash and all its terrible cousins upon the sacrificial altar to see a renaissance in editing and proper sentence construction.

Re: The AI wildfire is coming. it's going to be painful and healthy

#170

Post by credit_guy »

There is no wildfire coming. The model providers have narrowed down to 4: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI. The chip manufacturers are Nvidia, Google (TPUs) and AMD is trying to break in as well. Microsoft is position very well as a middleman. All these guys are giants already. Just Nvidia, Microsoft and Google together have a market cap above ten trillion. OpenAI, Anthropic, AMD and xAI probably add one trillion more.

Sure, there might be hundreds or thousands of small startups in the AI game, and some are probably as viable as the fabled Pets.com. But even if they all crash and burn, it's going to be a rounding error compared to the 7 companies I mentioned above. The AI will be alive and kicking, and nobody will even notice.

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