261–270 of 467 posts
I don’t know a single developer who is NOT using LLMs in some form, so either they or their company are paying for it. And that’s just a single service - they probably have a home account, and another few different services to test things, so it’s not exactly making zero. Lately I’ve been finding LLM output to be hit and miss, but at the same time, I wouldn’t say they’re useless… I guess the ultimate question is - if…
I feel people were much more sensible about AI back when their thoughts about it weren't mixed with their antipathy for big tech. In this article we see a sentiment I've often seen expressed: > I doubt the AGI promise, not just because we keep moving the goal posts by redefining what we mean by AGI, but because it was always an abstract science fiction fantasy rather than a coherent, precise and measurable pursuit. A…
Why big tech ? Big corps in general have been fucking us over since the industrial revolution, why do you think it will change now lol ? If half of their promises had materialized we'd be working 3 days a week and retire at 40 already
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But rather than AGI god building, a regular technology. A valuable one, but not infinite growth. AGI is a lot of things, a lot of ever moving targets, but it's never (under any sane definition) "infinite growth". That's already ASI territory / singularity and all that stuff. I see more and more people mixing the two, and arguing against ASI being a thing, when talking about AGI. "Human level competences" is AGI. Su…
Once you have AGI, you can presumably automate AI R&D, and it seems to me that the recursive self-improvement that begets ASI isn't that far away from that point.
Like we can theoretically build a spaceship that can accelerate to 99.9999% C - just a constant 1G accel engine with "enough fuel".
Of course the problem is that "enough fuel" = more mass than is available in our solar system.
ASI might have a similar problem.
I feel people were much more sensible about AI back when their thoughts about it weren't mixed with their antipathy for big tech. In this article we see a sentiment I've often seen expressed: > I doubt the AGI promise, not just because we keep moving the goal posts by redefining what we mean by AGI, but because it was always an abstract science fiction fantasy rather than a coherent, precise and measurable pursuit. A…
“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.
I feel people were much more sensible about AI back when their thoughts about it weren't mixed with their antipathy for big tech. In this article we see a sentiment I've often seen expressed: > I doubt the AGI promise, not just because we keep moving the goal posts by redefining what we mean by AGI, but because it was always an abstract science fiction fantasy rather than a coherent, precise and measurable pursuit. A…
> AGI isn't difficult at all to describe The fact that there are multiple research papers written on the subject, as well as the fact that OpenAI needs an independent commission to evaluate this, suggest that it is indeed difficult. Also, "everything a human can" is an incredibly vague definition. Should it be able to love?
We can leave that question to the philosophers, but the whole debate about AGI is about capabilities, not essence, so it isn't relevant imo to the major concerns about AGI
I'd like more people to talk about AI and surveillance. I think that is going to be one of it's biggest impacts on society(ies). We are a decade or two in to having massive video coverage, such that you are probably on someone's camera much of your day in the world, and video feeds that are increasingly cloud hosted. But nobody could possibly watch all that video. Even cameras specifically controlled by the police, i…
I find it truly strange that people hold both positions simultaneously - AI is good enough to do "bad" things as to scare us - AI is also bad enough to do "good" things as to be undesireable otherwise
If I'm trying to oppress a minority group, I don't really care about false positives or false negatives. If it's mostly harming the people I want to harm, it's good enough.
If I'm trying to save sick people, the I care whether it's telling me the right things or not - administering the wrong drugs because the machine misdiagnosed someone could be fatal, or worse.
Edit: so a technology can simultaneously be good enough to be used for evil, while not being good enough to be used for good.
I feel people were much more sensible about AI back when their thoughts about it weren't mixed with their antipathy for big tech. In this article we see a sentiment I've often seen expressed: > I doubt the AGI promise, not just because we keep moving the goal posts by redefining what we mean by AGI, but because it was always an abstract science fiction fantasy rather than a coherent, precise and measurable pursuit. A…
> I feel people were much more sensible about AI back when their thoughts about it weren't mixed with their antipathy for big tech. Why big tech ? Big corps in general have been fucking us over since the industrial revolution, why do you think it will change now lol ? If half of their promises had materialized we'd be working 3 days a week and retire at 40 already
And yet your computer, all the food you eat, the medicine that keeps you alive if you get sick, etc is all due to the organizational industrial and productive capacity of large corporations. The existence of large corporations is just a consequence of demand for goods and services and the advantages of scale, and they exist because of the enormous demand for reliable systems to provide them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was a lot of hubris around microwaves. I remember a lot of images of full chickens being roasted in them. I've never once seen that "in the wild" as it were. They are good for reheating something that was produced earlier. Hey the metaphor is even better than I thought!
There are many years since I have switched to cooking only with microwaves, due to minimum wasted time and perfect reproducibility. And I normally eat only food that I cook myself from raw ingredients. Attempting to roast a full chicken or turkey is not the correct way to use microwaves. You must first remove the bones from the bird, then cut the meat into bite-sized chunks. After using a boning knife for the former…
Some of us also like the food tasting nice besides the reproducibility of the results.
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…
We don’t argue that microwaves will be ubiquitous (which they aren’t, but close enough). We argue that microwaves are not an artificial general barbecue, as the makers might wish were true. And we argue that microwaves will indeed never replace your grill as the makers, again, would love you to believe.