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AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

theguardian.com

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Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

#21

Post by fzeroracer »

whimsicalism wrote: post #14
DetectDefect wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It has been three years and these tools can do a considerable portion of my day to day work. Is this really something you want to have proudly said? Because it makes it sound like your "work" is not very important.

My work involves reading papers, doing high level math, coding it, reasoning about the business environment, etc. etc. My work is important and I find the classic HN impulse to stigmatize people for saying this to be silly. It is you who is the fool if you haven’t managed to use these things to massively accelerate what you can do and if you cannot see the clear trend. Again, it has been three years since chatgpt cam…

> My work involves reading papers, doing high level math, coding it, reasoning about the business environment, etc. etc. My work is important and I find the classic HN impulse to stigmatize people for saying this to be silly.

This is what every person who's been laid off by AI says. Every single time. People really like to assume that the work they do is important, except companies don't care about important they care about pushing shit out the door, faster and cheaper. Your high level math and business reasoning do not matter when they can just let someone cheaper go wild and deliver faster with no guard rails.

Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

#22

Post by kalkin »

Sharlin wrote: post #8
whimsicalism wrote: post #4

It’s funny reading this parallel world that some portion of people have constructed for themselves. It has been three years and these tools can do a considerable portion of my day to day work. Salvage the wreckage? Unfortunately I think that many people’s jobs are essentially in the “Coyote running off a cliff but not realizing it yet” phase or soon to be.

I think you’ll find the essay much more nuanced than that. It only incidentally discusses what you’re thinking about. > Think of AI software generation: there are plenty of coders who love using AI. Using AI for simple tasks can genuinely make them more efficient and give them more time to do the fun part of coding, namely, solving really gnarly, abstract puzzles. But when you listen to business leaders talk about th…

The article does a pretty lazy* job of defending its assumption that "solving really gnarly, abstract puzzles" is going to remain beyond AI capabilities indefinitely, but that is a load-bearing part of the argument and Doctorow does try to substantiate it by dismissing LLMs as next-word predictors. This is a description which is roughly accurate at some level of reduction but has not helped anyone predict the last three years of advances and so seems pretty unlikely to be a helpful guide to the next three years.

The other argument Doctorow gives for the limits of LLMs is the example of typo-squatting. This isn't an attack that's new to LLMs and, while I don't know if anyone has done a study, I suspect it's already the case in January 2026 that a frontier model is no more susceptible to this than the median human, or perhaps less; certainly in general Claude is less likely to make a typo than I am. There are categories of mistakes it's still more likely to make than me, but the example here is already looking out of date, which isn't promising for the wider argument.

*to be fair, it's clearly not aimed at a technical audience.

Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

#23

Post by zdragnar »

sodapopcan wrote: post #11
kuerbel wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this comment is reacting to a different argument than the one the article is actually making. The piece isn’t claiming that AI tools are useless or that they don’t materially improve day-to-day work. In fact, it more or less assumes the opposite. The critique is about the economic and organizational story being told around AI, not about whether an individual developer can ship faster today. Saying “these tool…

> I think this comment is reacting to a different argument than the one the article is actually making. The headline.

Ah yes, the notoriously accurate headline.

Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

#24

Post by DetectDefect »

whimsicalism wrote: post #14
DetectDefect wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It has been three years and these tools can do a considerable portion of my day to day work. Is this really something you want to have proudly said? Because it makes it sound like your "work" is not very important.

My work involves reading papers, doing high level math, coding it, reasoning about the business environment, etc. etc. My work is important and I find the classic HN impulse to stigmatize people for saying this to be silly. It is you who is the fool if you haven’t managed to use these things to massively accelerate what you can do and if you cannot see the clear trend. Again, it has been three years since chatgpt cam…

So the work is important and I am the fool because ... you think so? That is not a very intellectually-defensible position to hold. One could even reason the argument is so flawed because LLMs degrade thinking capacity.

Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

#25

Post by prmoustache »

kalkin wrote: post #7
whimsicalism wrote: post #4

It’s funny reading this parallel world that some portion of people have constructed for themselves. It has been three years and these tools can do a considerable portion of my day to day work. Salvage the wreckage? Unfortunately I think that many people’s jobs are essentially in the “Coyote running off a cliff but not realizing it yet” phase or soon to be.

> AI is a statistical inference engine. All it can do is predict what word will come next based on all the words that have been typed in the past. If we keep saying this hard enough over and over, maybe model capabilities will stop advancing. Hey, there's even a causal story here! A million variations of this cope enter the pretraining data, the model decides the assistant character it's supposed to be playing really…

> AI is a statistical inference engine. All it can do is predict what word will come next based on all the words that have been typed in the past.

Ironically, that is also how humans "think" 99.9% of the time.

Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

#26

Post by baron816 »

> Start with monopolies: tech companies are gigantic and they don’t compete, they just take over whole sectors, either on their own or in cartels.

>Google and Meta control the ad market. Google and Apple control the mobile market,

“Tech companies are monopolies”, proceeds to describe how tech companies compete with each other.

Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

#27

Post by whimsicalism »

fzeroracer wrote: post #21
whimsicalism wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My work involves reading papers, doing high level math, coding it, reasoning about the business environment, etc. etc. My work is important and I find the classic HN impulse to stigmatize people for saying this to be silly. It is you who is the fool if you haven’t managed to use these things to massively accelerate what you can do and if you cannot see the clear trend. Again, it has been three years since chatgpt cam…

> My work involves reading papers, doing high level math, coding it, reasoning about the business environment, etc. etc. My work is important and I find the classic HN impulse to stigmatize people for saying this to be silly. This is what every person who's been laid off by AI says. Every single time. People really like to assume that the work they do is important, except companies don't care about important they car…

My job is essentially delivering faster with no guard rails. I know it is a common HN sentiment that nobody can do my job better than me because I am the most thoughtful person to ever do it.

This is explicitly not what I am saying given that I am leading with AI getting close to being able to do much of what is currently my job. I find it hard to imagine a world where we stagnate right where we are and it takes a decade to do anything more aka I cannot imagine a world where a considerable portion of jobs are not automatable soon - and I do not even think it will be shittier.

Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

#28

Post by hippo22 »

baron816 wrote: post #26

> Start with monopolies: tech companies are gigantic and they don’t compete, they just take over whole sectors, either on their own or in cartels. >Google and Meta control the ad market. Google and Apple control the mobile market, “Tech companies are monopolies”, proceeds to describe how tech companies compete with each other.

A market with only two players isn't much of a market.

Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

#29

Post by an0malous »

whimsicalism wrote: post #4

It’s funny reading this parallel world that some portion of people have constructed for themselves. It has been three years and these tools can do a considerable portion of my day to day work. Salvage the wreckage? Unfortunately I think that many people’s jobs are essentially in the “Coyote running off a cliff but not realizing it yet” phase or soon to be.

What is your day to day work?

Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

#30

Post by whimsicalism »

DetectDefect wrote: post #24
whimsicalism wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My work involves reading papers, doing high level math, coding it, reasoning about the business environment, etc. etc. My work is important and I find the classic HN impulse to stigmatize people for saying this to be silly. It is you who is the fool if you haven’t managed to use these things to massively accelerate what you can do and if you cannot see the clear trend. Again, it has been three years since chatgpt cam…

So the work is important and I am the fool because ... you think so? That is not a very intellectually-defensible position to hold. One could even reason the argument is so flawed because LLMs degrade thinking capacity.

You’re arguing in a tautological fashion - anyone who suggests that AI can do a lot of their job must not have been doing important work in the first place. It’s a convenient psychological self defense mechanism that I see often here. Take care.
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