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AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

chrbutler.com

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Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#281

Post by haritha-j »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #266
haritha-j wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> 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

Call me a romantic, but in my book, its very much a capability, and a desireable one at that.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#282

Post by automatic6131 »

whstl wrote: post #218
monkaiju wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All I see it doing, as a SWE, is limiting the speed at which my co-workers learn and worsening the quality of their output. Finally many are noticing this and using it less...

I recently had a very interesting interaction in a few small startups I freelanced for recently. In a 1-year company, the only tech person that's been there for more than 3-4 months (the CTO), only really understands a tiny fraction of the codebase and infrastructure, and can't review code anymore. Application size has blown up tremendously despite being quite simple. Turnover is crazy and people rarely stay for more…

>Turnover is crazy and people rarely stay for more than a couple months. The team works nights and weekends

Oh, look, you've normalized deviance. All of these things are screaming red flags, the house is burning down around you.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#283

Post by adrian_b »

thepuglor wrote: post #273
adrian_b wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I greatly appreciate this type of thinking. If you debone the meat yourself, do you make stock or use the bones in any way? You obviously care about personal process optimization and health factors, and I'm curious to what extent you are thinking of the entire food/ingredient supply chain.

Yes, making stock is normally the appropriate use for bones.

However, I am frequently lazy, when I buy breasts/thighs without bones.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#284

Post by elevatortrim »

sockgrant wrote: post #14

“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…

I disagree. I think, as software developers, we also mostly speak to other software developers, and we like to share around AI fail stories, so we are biased to think that AI works for swe better than other areas...

However, while I like using AI for software development, as also a middle-manager, it increased my output A TON because AI works better for virtually anything that's not software development.

Examples: Update Jira issues in bulk, write difficult responses and incident reports, understand a tool or system I'm not familiar with, analyse 30 projects to understand which of them have this particular problem, review tickets in bulk to see if they have anything missing that was mentioned in the solution design, and so on ... All sorts tasks that used to take hours, now take minutes.

This is in line with what I'm hearing from other people: My CFO is complaining daily about running out of tokens. My technical sales relative says it is now taking him minutes to create tech specs from requirements of his customers, while it used to take hours.

While devs are rightfully "meh" because they truly need to review every single line generated by AI and type-writing the code is not their bottleneck anyway. It is harder to realise the gains for them.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#285

Post by adrian_b »

LtWorf wrote: post #269
adrian_b wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Some of us also like the food tasting nice besides the reproducibility of the results.

Like I have said, meat prepared in this way is the tastiest that I have ever eaten, except if you are one of those who like real meat less than the burned crust of meat.

Even for the burned-crust lovers, many microwave ovens have lamps for this purpose, but I cannot say whether the lamps are good at making tasty burned crusts, because I have never used them, since I like more to eat meat than to eat burned crusts.

The good taste of meat prepared in this way is not surprising, because the meat is heated very uniformly and the flavor of the meat is not leached away by added water or oil, but it is concentrated due to the loss of water from the meat, so the taste is very similar to that of meat well cooked on a grill, neither burned nor under-cooked, and also without adding anything but salt and spices.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#287

Post by DougBTX »

adrian_b wrote: post #238
ccppurcell wrote: post #185

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…

> Then you can roast the meat pieces in a closed glass vessel

It sounds like this is steamed meat, as opposed to roasted. Your cooking time seems to match a quick search for steamed chicken recipes: https://tiffycooks.com/20-minutes-chinese-steamed-chicken/

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#288

Post by Version467 »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #80
xeckr wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not hard to believe that adding AI researchers to an AI company marginally increases the rate of progress, otherwise why would the companies be clamouring for talent with eye-watering salaries? In any case, I'm not just talking about AI researchers—AGI will not only help with algorithmic efficiency improvements, but will probably make spinning up chip fabs that much easier.

The eye-watering salary you probably have in mind is for a manager at Meta, same company that just laid of 600 actual developers. Why just Meta, not other companies - because they are blaming poor LLama performance on the manager, it seems. Algorithmic efficiency improvements are being made all the time, and will only serve to reduce inference cost, which is already happening. This isn't going to accelerate AI advanc…

Not the person you're responding to, but I think the salary paid to the researchers / research-engineers at all the major labs very much counts as eye-watering.

What happened at meta is ludicrous, but labs are clearly willing to pay top-dollar for actual research talent, presumably because they feel like it's still a bottleneck.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#290

Post by dominicrose »

sexeriy237 wrote: post #198
corry wrote: post #41

"The best case scenario is that AI is just not as valuable as those who invest in it, make it, and sell it believe." This is the crux of the OP's argument, adding in that (in the meantime) the incumbents and/or bad actors will use it as a path to intensify their political and economic power. But to me the article fails to: (1) actually make the case that AI's not going to be 'valuable enough' which is a sweeping and…

10% of Meta's revenue was from AI backed scams on users, that's $16 billion. They have no intent to stop it, merely to not get caught and fined.

I was aware of that. Not everyone reads HN but enough people will surely know about this if they continue. If they are not fined then people should just stop being so naive. I'm tired of seeing well-designed lies on Facebook and people clearly believing the lies in the comment section.

edit: by well designed I mean that they put the lies in a chart or something. The lies themselves may be quite obvious to spot, like saying that 86% of marriages in Spain end in divorces (when the reality is hard to measure but more likely about 50%). Still, Facebook users don't seem to spot them (or maybe the ones spotting them don't comment?).

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