AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power • Hacker News Board

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

#331

Post by somenameforme » Thu, Nov 20, 2025, 1:00 PM UTC

d4rkn0d3z wrote: post #289

The list of technologies that have not become a front for consolidation of resources and power appears below:

I'm about as cynical as they come, but it has to be said that something like 99.9999% of all fundamental technologies are completely public at this point. Humans in the ancient past were unlikely to be that dramatically different in terms of present humans in terms of intellectual ability, but were held back by a lack of knowledge.

For instance, we still use steel - and for 99% of humanity's existence nobody knew how to make it. It turns out it's really easy, and it's just one amongst countless other techs along a similar lines. A human who spent a year dedicating himself to consuming freely accessible information, who was then warped back into the past, could send humanity forward by tens of thousands of years - all by himself.

We're all free to use these technologies in any way we see fit, but somehow we've created this weird society where we have all the potential in the world, but instead we spend inordinate amounts of time doing pointless things like shit posting on the internet and mostly being upset about what we can't do and/or have, even though even if we had access to such in all probability we'd again take it for granted and find something else to complain about.

This isn't really a condemnation of humanity. Probably this sort of eternal discontent we have is precisely what drove us to discover all of these great things. Like I mean who in their right mind would have left the basic oasis of Africa to go freeze their ass off and struggle just to live in the inhospitable areas up north? There's something wrong with that guy, and that guy is all of us, for the most part.

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

#332

Post by HarHarVeryFunny » Thu, Nov 20, 2025, 1:00 PM UTC

Version467 wrote: post #288

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Having the experience to build a frontier model is still a scare commodity, hence the salaries, but to advance AI you need new ideas and architectures which isn't what you are buying there.

A human-level AI wouldn't help unless it also had the experience of these LLM whisperers, so how would it gain that knowledge (not in the training data)? Maybe a human would train it? Couldn't the human train another developer if that really was the bottleneck?

People like Sholto Douglas have said that the actual bottleneck for development speed is compute, not people.

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

#333

Post by frm88 » Thu, Nov 20, 2025, 1:00 PM UTC

Havoc wrote: post #255

What’s wild to me is how comment sections on articles like these have strong Tower of Babel vibes That can’t be good

I feel like this has gotten worse in the last couple of months. I haven't been here long, but somehow the babelism is so much lore noticible now.

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

#334

Post by scottlamb » Thu, Nov 20, 2025, 1:06 PM UTC

CuriouslyC wrote: post #137

scottlamb wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're describing technology that has existed for 15+ years and is already pretty accurate. It's not even necessarily "AI"/ML. For example, I think OpenALPR (automated license plate recognition) is all "classical" computer vision. The most accurate facial/gait/etc. recognition is most likely ML-based with a state-of-the-art model, admittedly, and perhaps the threshold of accuracy for large-scale usefulness wa…

The difference is that AI makes annotating/combing through all that data much more feasible.

Can you explain what you mean? The queries in jrochkind1 are not something I'd expect AI (LLMs, I assume) to be necessary for. Too simple and factual. (Maybe just the last one would be where interpretation kicks in—knowing what to emphasize in a summary, describing actions.) Did you have something else in mind?

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

#335

Post by jstanley » Thu, Nov 20, 2025, 1:09 PM UTC

muldvarp wrote: post #259

jstanley wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is kind of a myopic view of what it means to be a programmer. If you're just in it to collect a salary, then yeah, maybe you do benefit from delivering the minimum possible productivity that won't get you fired. But if you like making computers do things, and you get joy from making computers do more and new things, then LLMs that can write programs are a fantastic gift.

> But if you like making computers do things, and you get joy from making computers do more and new things, then LLMs that can write programs are a fantastic gift. Maybe currently if you enjoy social engineering an LLM more than writing stuff yourself. Feels a bit like saying "if you like running, you'll love cars!" In the future when the whole process is automated you won't be needed to make the computer do stuff, s…

You're still focusing on "programming as a job" being fundamental to programming, and I'm saying it's not.

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

#336

Post by emp17344 » Thu, Nov 20, 2025, 1:17 PM UTC

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #250

atleastoptimal wrote: post #241

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…

People get very nervous about defending the value of the human brain "just because," I find. There is nothing logically wrong with simply stating that it seems to you that human beings are the only agents worthy of moral consideration, and that this is true even in the face of an ASI which can effortlessly beat them at any task. Competence does not require qualia. But it is an aggressive claim that people are uncomfo…

> ASI which can effortlessly beat them at any task

This doesn’t exist, though. The development of ASI is far from inevitable. Even AGI seems out of reach at this point.

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

#337

Post by cess11 » Thu, Nov 20, 2025, 1:17 PM UTC

_aavaa_ wrote: post #298

everdrive wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microwaves are pretty terrible, and proof that wide consumer adoption does not really indicate quality or suggest that consumers adopt technology which _should_ exist.

Why are they terrible?

They boil stuff but take up much more space than a kettle.

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

#338

Post by cess11 » Thu, Nov 20, 2025, 1:23 PM UTC

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…

Bones, tendons and skin provide a lot of taste and texture.

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

#339

Post by torginus » Thu, Nov 20, 2025, 1:28 PM UTC

Retric wrote: post #308

friendzis wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not my experience or look at the history at all, wrt general-ish purpose technologies. What usually happens is they either empower unskilled (in a particular context) personnel to perform some amount of tasks at "good enough" level or replace highly specialized machinery for some amount of tasks at again "good enough" level. At some point (typically, when a general purpose technology is able to do "good enoug…

> pure BEVs are still the significantly more expensive option New technology often has ‘new’ tradeoffs, are GPU’s are sill only situationally better than CPU’s. DC fast charging is several times more expensive than home charging which heavily influences the economics of buying an EV without subsidies. Same deal with plug in Hybrids or long range batteries on PEV, if you don’t need the range you’re just wasting money.…

GPUs are a good example - they started getting traction in the early 2000s/late 90s.

Once in the mid 2000s we figured out that single-thread perf won't scale, GPUs became the next scaling frontier and it was thought that they'd complement and supplant CPUs - with the Xbox and smartphones having integrated GPUs, and games starting to rely on general purpose compute shaders, a lot of folks (including me) thought that the software in the future will constantly pingpong between CPU and GPU execution? Got an array to sort? Let the GPU handle that. Got a JPEG to decode? GPU. Etc.

I took an in depth CUDA course back in the early 2010s, thinking that come 5 years or so, all professional signal processing will move to GPUs, and GPU algorithm knowledge will be just as widespread and expected as how to program a CPU, and I would need to Leetcode a bitonic sort to get a regular-ass job.

What happened? GPUs weren't really used, data sharing between CPU and GPU is still cumbersome and slow, dedicated accelerators like video decoders weren't replaced by general purpose GPU compute, we still have special function units for these.

There are technical challenges sure to doing these things, but very solvable ones.

GPUs are still stuck in 2 niches - video games, and AI (which incidentally got huge). Everybody still writes single-threaded Python and Js.

There was every reason to be optimistic about GPGPU back then, and there's every reason to be optimistic about AI now.

Not sure where this will go, but probably not where we expect it to.

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

#340

Post by torginus » Thu, Nov 20, 2025, 1:33 PM UTC

_aavaa_ wrote: post #298

everdrive wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microwaves are pretty terrible, and proof that wide consumer adoption does not really indicate quality or suggest that consumers adopt technology which _should_ exist.

Why are they terrible?

They are not. But they are the AI slop of cooking - it's easy to get an acceptable result, so people associate it with junk food made with zero effort.