211–220 of 668 posts
I do wonder where all the novel products produced by 10x devs who are now 100x with LLMs, the “idea guys” who can now produce products from whole clothe without having to hire pesky engineers.. where is the one-man 10 billion dollar startups, etc? We are 3-4 years into this mania and all I see on the other end of it is the LLMs themselves.
Why hasn’t anything gotten better?
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The question is whether it’s more important to be able to do things, or more important to have a good sense and a keen eye for what to do at any given moment. I personally think both are really important, and I also think AI won’t be able to do both better than any human could for another while, and moreso when it comes to doing both at the same time (though I’m not going to claim it’s never going to). My point is th…
> The question is whether it’s more important to be able to do things, or more important to have a good sense and a keen eye for what to do at any given moment. Those aren't mutually exclusive. "People who do things" can do both, and doing the latter is a function of doing the former, so they tend to do the latter sufficiently well. "People who prompt things" can only do the latter, and they routinely do it poorly.
Right, but what I don’t agree with here is the idea that this category of people will never be able to improve into the first category of people. The value of an experienced anything is that they realize there is a big chasm between something that works now and something that will continue to work long into the future.
I don’t agree that doing everything yourself manually is the only thing that can grant you that understanding, because I don’t think that understanding is domain-specific. It evolves naturally as soon as someone realizes that their list of unknown unknowns is FAR larger than their list of known anythings, and that the first step in attempting to solve a problem is to prune that list as far as you can get it while realizing you will never ever be able to reduce it to zero.
You can do that by spending two weeks to build a brick wall by hand, or you can do that by spending two weeks having your magical helpers build ten brick walls that eventually collapse. I don’t think the tools are some sort of fundamental threat to cognition, I think they’re - within this society - a fundamental threat to safety, because the relentless pursuit of profit means even those that realize those ten brick walls should never actually ever be used to hold anything up will find themselves pressured to put a roof on them and hope, pray, they hold.
And this isn’t an LLM-specific thing. The vast diverse space of building codes around the world proves this, and coincidentally, the countries with laxer building codes tend to get a lot more done a lot faster; and they also tend to deal with a big tragic collapse every now and then, which I suppose someone will file away as collateral somewhere.
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It probably is still subsidized, just not as much. We won't know if these APIs are profitable unless these companies go public, and till then it's safe to bet these APIs are underpriced to win the market share.
Anthropic has shared that API inference has a ~60% margin. OpenAI's margin might be slightly lower since they price aggressively but I would be surprised if it was much different.
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Precisely. The first 10 rungs of the ladder will be removed, but we still expect you to be able to get to the roof. The AI won't get you there and you won't have the knowledge you'd normally gain on those first 10 rungs to help you move past #10.
People would have said the same about graphing calculators or calculators before that. Socrates said the same thing about the written word. The determining factor is always "did I come up with this tool". Somehow, subsequent generations always manage to find their own competencies (which, to be fair, may be different). This isn't guaranteed to play out, but it should be the default expectation until we actually see g…
And yes yes you can pull up the quote or ask your AI, but they will be wrong. The quote is from Socrates reciting a "myth", as is pretty typical in a middle late dialogue like this.
But here, alas we can recognize the utter absurdity, that this just points out why writing can be bad, as Socrates does pose. Because you get guys 2000 years in future using you and misquoting you for their dumb cause! No more logos, only endless stochastic doxa. Truly a future of sophists!
I like this article and it reads well, but I have to say, that to me it really reads as something written by an LLM. Probably under supervision by a human that knew what it should say. I don't know if I mind. Example. This paragraph, to me, has a eerily perfect rhythm. The ending sentence perfectly delivers the twist. Like, why would you write in perfect prose an argument piece in the science realm? > Unlike Alice, w…
> why would you write in perfect prose If you could, why wouldn't you? LLM witch-hunts over every halfway competent writer are becoming quite tiresome
Again, I appreciate the article very much and I'm glad the other comments are on the article's content.
The thing is, agents aren’t going away. So if Bob can do things with agents, he can do things. I mourn the loss of working on intellectually stimulating programming problems, but that’s a part of my job that’s fading. I need to decide if the remaining work - understanding requirements, managing teams, what have you - is still enjoyable enough to continue. To be honest, I’m looking at leaving software because the job…
Let’s wait until they a business model that creates profit.
Most of them won’t go away, but many will become outdated or slow or enshittificated.
Imagine building your career based on the quality of google‘s search
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> Aren't they currently propped up by investor money? Are Chinese model shops propped up by investor money? Is Google? Open weights models are only 6 months behind SOTA. If new model development suddenly stopped, and today's SOTA models suddenly disappeared, we would still have access to capable agents.
Well, the Chinese shops are propped up by the CCP instead.
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This comment sounds like hand-waving to me. The author describes specifically how specialists are produced and how AI undermines their production. No, we won't get more and more specialists literally "the same way" as the agricultural revolution. You need to be much more specific about how we'll get more specialists under the incentive structure created by AI, otherwise this sounds like some kind of religious faith i…
I can't tell what specialists we will get the same way you wouldn't be able to tell me we will have Linux Kernel specialists at the year 1945. People do more things with AI. More things = more inventions = the field growing. The field grows and people become specialists on what used to be a small or trivial. A mathematician in 1500's wouldn't think algebraic topology would be a specialisation.
How about addressing astrophysics specifically. What are you claiming about it? Are you claiming that in the future, we won't need astrophysicists at all, AI can do all of our astrophysics for us, freeing humans to specialize in... other subjects?
And doesn't the same problem exist for Linux kernel specialists? Why even become a Linux kernel specialists when AI can write your source code for you?
> people become specialists
This is precisely what is in question.
> A mathematician in 1500's wouldn't think algebraic topology would be a specialisation.
The specific subjects have changed over time, but the production of specialist mathematicians hasn't really changed. It takes hard work, grunt work, struggling, making mistakes and learning from them, as well as expert supervision. The problem with AI is that it encourages and incentivizes intellectual laziness, the opposite of what is required to produce specialists.
A related problem: LLMs have been trained with papers written and supervised by Alice-type specialists. There's a common claim that LLMs will hallucinate less in the future, but I think that LLMs will hallucinate more in the future, when specialty fields become dominated by Bob-type "specialists" who have a harder time distinguishing fact from fiction. When LLMs have to train on material produced by earlier versions of LLMs, the quality trend will go down, not up.