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Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

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Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#221

Post by SR2Z »

awesomeMilou wrote: post #199
skybrian wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that work? Funding is useful, but we aren't seeing fully-automated startups, and often, founders don't need all that much funding.

By completely eliminating the need for a human workforce, therefore rendering a majority of humanity obsolete, therefore lots of social inequality, therefore lots of starvation, poverty and death. When billionaires say "think about the trillions of people that will benefit from AI" and some notion of living in a post scarcity world, they are talking about _their_ descendants, not yours.

If we're all broke/starving/being exterminated, who will the rich sell to?

Nobody wants to be king of the ashes. The future is going to be the same as now, just with a little less menial work.

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#222

Post by SR2Z »

marcosdumay wrote: post #179
zdragnar wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it surprise you that wealth takes time to accumulate? None of those people had a get rich quick scheme that made them billionaires in their 20's.

Those were mostly the same billionaires 20 years ago.

In 2006? No, there have been lots of changes since then. Lots of new billionaires.

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#223

Post by vrighter »

somebodythere wrote: post #164
cloche wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can only tell which part of the S-Curve you're on in retrospect. It's not something you can tell while you're experiencing it. Both scenarios of AI maxing out or continuing to improve are both likely.

That is not true. You can tell you are on the latter part of the S-Curve you are on, if the rate of change of capabilities has decreased compared to before. That is not what we are seeing right now. The rate of change is increasing, or is at best, stable.

you compare the derivative yesterday, you measure the derivative today. difference between them is the jerk. It tells you where you are on the S-curve

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#224

Post by Planktonne »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #207
watwut wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a visceral hate in the artistic community toward AI that doesn't really make sense to me tbh. Really? Have you seen how the CEOs marketed it and talked about people in that community? Artists hate it, because they listened to what AI community and leadership were openly saying. The weirdest thing on this all is how people find the hate puzzling considering initial rhetoric coming from the industry itself.…

Have you seen the arrogance of artists? They acted as though they were above replacement, above automation. They acted as though they were superior . We're all facing very hard times ahead of us, but I would be lying if I said it wasn't at least a little cathartic to watch this unfold. Programmers, too, were just as arrogant until only a few years ago. As were doctors, lawyers... The list goes on. How the mighty have…

Do you see how this sort of hate-filled malevolence, as a pro-AI position, might make people less excited about AI?

A lot of people are looking at AI now and seeing that its proponents sound like cartoon villains. That sends a message.

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#225

Post by sam_lowry_ »

an0malous wrote: post #122
sam_lowry_ wrote: post #93

Whenever someone complaints about LLMs eroding their career, I advise them to read The Profession by Isaac Asimov. TLDR: there will be less programmers and they will be better on average.

Do you do this because you hate these people? If I recall the story correctly, it’s basically confirming their worst fears

Because I love sci-fi.

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#226

Post by senordevnyc »

coffeefirst wrote: post #62
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * The curve of AI improvement will continue at the current pace Frontier AI is already good enough to be very useful for engineering. It's too costly for many places where it could be useful today. The cost for the same quality of output is going to drop at least 10x over the next 18-24 months. And likely again in the following 18-24 months. At the same time, the cost per watt is going to down ~25%, and at the same…

> The cost for the same quality of output is going to drop at least 10x over the next 18-24 months. How do you know that? In 2026 the prices have been spiking. It now costs orders of magnitude more than it did in November.

It now costs orders of magnitude more than it did in November.

Really? Care to do the math for me? Just curious about exactly how many orders of magnitude it's gone up.

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#227

Post by hootz »

>The reports I get from people I know are that my company is not on the extreme edge of vibecoding, so leaving it for a potentially worse environment is not a good trade.

I'm in a similar situation right now. I might get a job offer for a 60% pay raise, however that means leaving a company with conservative views on AI to join an "agent-first" AI focused one.

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#228

Post by therealdrag0 »

grebc wrote: post #211
therealdrag0 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure don’t be gullible, of course. I was never sold on blockchain, and there was major skepticism across the industry. I only know one person who works on crypto projects, and no one who uses crypto for purchases. Yet everyone I know in engineering and non-engineers use AI for work and personal tasks. This is a different ballgame. It could be the innovation curve stops here and we only have to adapt to Claude 4 level…

I don’t think it’s reasonable at all, but live your life as you see fit. It’s easy in retrospect to be say “sure, we were sceptical of crypto”. It certainly was not easy then to voice that, nor is it easy now to be sceptical of AI - without being labelled a Luddite or just negative. Money is a huge factor in all this, people love to discuss the current in thing and what’s more in than some tech that’s IPO’ing? Invest…

Investors made stupid money off speculation with crypto.

Investors make money off AI subscriptions for WORK. Thats a huge difference.

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#229

Post by ekjhgkejhgk »

queenkjuul wrote: post #95

I think people are far too dismissive of just how well-suited programming is to the exact form of LLMs. Extremely formal syntax, limited ambiguity, simple verifiable testing procedures, and colossal well-documented training sets. I don't yet buy that the successes of coding agents will apply nearly as well to other professions. "Correct more often than not when asked a random accounting question" really isn't any ind…

And what's the most important aspect, in my opinion: In programming the LLM can make an hypothesis, try, get feedback, and refine the hypothesis, until it works.

This isn't the case in most areas. For example in Law, where everythign is text, you can RL so that an LLM produces an argument which a human would believe to be more reasonable, but you can't get a really fast loop of: make an argument, test it in front of a judge, refine the argument until you win the case.

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#230

Post by ryanackley »

alfalfasprout wrote: post #188
ryanackley wrote: post #28

AI maximalism is making a lot of assumptions that I think are not a given * The curve of AI improvement will continue at the current pace * AI companies will have the capital continue to expand infrastructure * there will be some kind of functioning economy if all knowledge workers are replaced There are strong headwinds to all three of these. Hey it may come to pass but it’s very speculative at this point. I see a l…

This is probably one of the more level headed takes in the comment thread. There's been a concerted marketing push to frame AI maximalism as an inevitability. More or less a "it's going happen anyways so let's go all in". It's hardly an inevitability though (nothing is... and analogues to the industrial revolution are iffy at best, we haven't ever had an attempted replacement for intelligence itself before). Society…

The capital outlay is eye watering and it feels like an over extension. Neither of the two major pure AI providers are close to profitable (OpenAI, Anthropic) while having valuations close to a trillion dollars.

Their ROI is paradoxical. If they succeed in disrupting knowledge work. Who will be around to use or buy their product?

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