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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

#31
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which languages couldn't we translate before? Not you, the individual. We, humanity?

Machine translation was horrible and completely unreliable before LLMs. And human translators are very expensive and slow in comparison. LLM is for translation as computers were for calculating. Sure, you could do without them before. They used to have entire buildings with office workers whose job it was to compute.

Google translate worked great long before LLMs.

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

#32

My experience with AI in the design context tends to reflect what I think is generally true about AI in the workplace: the smaller the use case, the larger the gain. This might be the money quote, encapsulating the difference between people who say their work benefits from LLMs and those who don't. Expecting it to one-shot your entire module will leave you disappointed, using it for code completion, generating docume…

And bug fixes

"This lump of code is producing this behaviour when I don't want to"

Is a quick way to find/fix bugs (IME)

BUT it requires me to understand the response (sometimes the AI hits the nail on the head, sometimes it says something that makes my brain - that's not it, but now I know exactly what it is

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

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read a little further in the article, the main point is _not_ that AI is useless. But rather than AGI god building, a regular technology. A valuable one, but not infinite growth.

> 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…

Sam Altman has been drumming[1] the ASI drum for a while now. I don't think it's a stretch to say that this is the vision he is selling.

[1] - https://ia.samaltman.com/#:~:text=we%20will%20have-,superint...

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

#34

“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'm curious if you could share something about custom agents. I love Claude Code and I'm trying to get it into more places in my workflow, so ideas like that would probably be useful.

I've been using Google ADK to create custom agents (fantastic SDK).

With subagents and A2A generally, you should be able to hook any of them into your preferred agentic interface

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

#36
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Machine translation was horrible and completely unreliable before LLMs. And human translators are very expensive and slow in comparison. LLM is for translation as computers were for calculating. Sure, you could do without them before. They used to have entire buildings with office workers whose job it was to compute.

Google translate worked great long before LLMs.

I disagree. It worked passably and was better than no translation. The depth, correctness, and nuance is much better with LLMs.

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

#37
post #11

Best case is hardly a bubble. I definitely think this is a new paradigm that'll lead to something , even if the current iteration won't be the final version and we've probably overinvested a slight bit.

Same as the dot-com bubble. Fundamentals were wildly off for some businesses, but you can also find almost every business that failed then running successfully today. Personally I don't think sticking AI in every software is where the real value is, it's improving understanding of huge sets of data already out there. Maybe OpenAI challenges Google for search, maybe they fail, I'm still pretty sure the infrastructure…

Something notable like pets.com is literally chewy just 20 years earlier

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

#38
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Machine translation was horrible and completely unreliable before LLMs. And human translators are very expensive and slow in comparison. LLM is for translation as computers were for calculating. Sure, you could do without them before. They used to have entire buildings with office workers whose job it was to compute.

Google translate worked great long before LLMs.

I don't think you understand how off that statement is. It's also pretty ignorant considering Google Translate barely worked at all for many languages. So no, it didn't work great and even for the best possible language pair Google Translate is not in the same ballpark.

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

#40

Let's take the highest perspective possible: What is the value of technology which allows people communicate clearly with other people of any language? That is what these large language models have achieved. We can now translate pretty much perfectly between all the languages in the world. The curse from the tower of Babel has been lifted. There will be a time in the future, when people will not be able to comprehend…

You could make the same argument about video conferencing: Yes, you can now talk to anyone anywhere anytime, and it's amazing. But somehow all big companies are convinced that in-person office work is more productive.
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