"AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing

You can’t project trends out endlessly. If you could, FB would have 20B users right now based on early growth (just a random guess, you get the point). The planet would have 15B people on it based on growth rate up until the 90s. Google would be bigger than the world GDP. Etc.

One of the more bullish AI people has said the models performance scales with log of compute (Sam Altman). Do you know how hard it will be to move that number? We are already well into diminishing returns with current methodologies and there is no one pointing the way to a break through that will get us to expert level performance. RLHF is underinvested in currently but will likely be the path to get us from Junior contributor to Mid in specific domains, but that still leaves a lot of room for humanity.

The most likely reason for my PoV to be wrong is that AI labs are investing a lot of training time into programming, hoping the model can self improve. I’m willing to believe that will have some payoffs in terms of cheaper, faster models and perhaps some improvements in scaling for RLHF (a huge priority for research IMO). Unsupervised RL would also be interesting, albeit with alignment concerns.

What I find unlikely with current models is that they will show truly innovative thinking, as opposed to the remixed ideas presented as “intelligence” today.

Finally, I am absolutely convinced today’s AI is already powerful enough to affect every business on the planet (yes even the plumbers). I just don’t believe they will replace us wholesale.

Sometimes the involvement or effort from an actual human is part of the perceived value / willingness of the customer to pay.

- People will pay more to go to a concert performed by live human musicians than they would to listen to a recording or to go see an artificial performer (e.g. chuck e cheese?)

- A "handmade" product, or a "made in house" dish is valued above a mass-production or factory-frozen meal

- A therapist, doctor etc may be valued partly for their bedside manner or ability for form genuine rapport with a patient

- Even in AI _defining and measuring value_ ultimately comes from people. E.g. we wouldn't have the LLMs we do if there hadn't been teams of humans providing input to the RL.

I'll create more work no less. I have a client with zero programming experience who is shipping slope UIs and then asking me to fix them. I barely have time as it is for all the low-quality work I have to fix that he sends me daily.

With AI, companies will ship more features, but their competitors will too. This will likely result in a net-zero gain, similar to the current situation.

The problem with “AI will replace all jobs” hype, is that it also comes with a flavor of “and we all will do creative work”, while in reality AI replaces all the creative work and people go back to collecting garbage or other physically demanding and mundane jobs.

"Jobs" aren't people, but these headlines are making that emotional appeal for engagement. AI will transform work like many technologies of the past and most people will be doing different things or the same things differently in a few years. Just like computers or mobile phones.