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AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

theguardian.com

41–50 of 107 posts

Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

#41
post #28

> Start with monopolies: tech companies are gigantic and they don’t compete, they just take over whole sectors, either on their own or in cartels. >Google and Meta control the ad market. Google and Apple control the mobile market, “Tech companies are monopolies”, proceeds to describe how tech companies compete with each other.

A market with only two players isn't much of a market.

Or nowadays, any number of players.

Now that market data is made available by brokers and decisions can be colluded based on such data.

Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My work involves reading papers, doing high level math, coding it, reasoning about the business environment, etc. etc. My work is important and I find the classic HN impulse to stigmatize people for saying this to be silly. It is you who is the fool if you haven’t managed to use these things to massively accelerate what you can do and if you cannot see the clear trend. Again, it has been three years since chatgpt cam…

> My work involves reading papers And yet you did not read this essay, or at least did not understand it. Whatever LLM you used to summarize it has let you down. I wonder how often that is happening in your day to day work, perhaps that's why you feel your job is at risk.

I am commenting on something in the background space of assumptions of the essay. Just because it is not the main thrust doesn’t mean I didnt read the article or used an LLM to summarize it for me. Take care

Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

#43

It’s funny reading this parallel world that some portion of people have constructed for themselves. It has been three years and these tools can do a considerable portion of my day to day work. Salvage the wreckage? Unfortunately I think that many people’s jobs are essentially in the “Coyote running off a cliff but not realizing it yet” phase or soon to be.

Nothing AI can do replaces the important part of my work.

Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

#44
It’s so strange to see people accusing tech companies of using AI to concentrate power and wealth when thus far, AI has almost entirely been all consumer surplus. You have crazily high competition in the industry that allows you the consumer to use SOTA models for free, or even run them yourself.

My prediction is that this will keep going all the way to the AGI stage. Someone will release (or leak) an AGI capable model that’s able to design AI chips, as well as the Fabs needed to build them, as well as robots to build and operate the Fabs and robot factories and raw material mines and refineries.

Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah it’s all branding. there is totally nothing different about this technology that might cause someone to say that… e:tone

The technology is different, but we've been told that we'll be replaced by foreign teams for years. It's had some impact, but in all but two of the cases I've personally seen it has been significantly detrimental. In the majority of cases, the offshore team was either replaced or relegated to pointless busy work.

i don’t find that at all a compelling argument, but maybe others will

Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

#46
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’ll find the essay much more nuanced than that. It only incidentally discusses what you’re thinking about. > Think of AI software generation: there are plenty of coders who love using AI. Using AI for simple tasks can genuinely make them more efficient and give them more time to do the fun part of coding, namely, solving really gnarly, abstract puzzles. But when you listen to business leaders talk about th…

I disagree. The article leads with the sentiment that I mention and has it woven throughout. The theme is AI is obviously not capable of doing your job, the problem is that the stupid managerial class will get convinced it is and make things shitty. > This is another key to understanding – and thus deflating – the AI bubble. The AI can’t do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace y…

You're in half the comment replies with a confrontational tone and, at times, quite aggressively. It does not feel as though you're sincerely engaging, but instead have an ideological world view that makes it difficult to reconcile different perspectives.

I'm working directly with these tools and have several colleagues who do as well. Our collective anecdotal experience keeps coming back to the conclusion that the tech just isn't where the marketing is on its capabilities. There's probably some value in the tech here, which leads others like yourself to be so completely sold on it, but it's just not materializing that much in my day-to-day outside of creating the most basic code/scaffolding where I then have to go back and fix/correct because there are subtle errors. It's actually hard to tell if my productivity is better because I have to spend time fixing the generated output.

Maybe it would help to recognize that your experience is not the norm. And if the tech were there, where are the actual profits from selling it? It's increasingly more common for it to be "under development" for selling to consumers or only deployed as a chatbot in scenarios where it's acceptable to be wrong and warnings to verify output yourself.

Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

#47
post #2

It's disappointing how so many people blame AI for our problems. I see this pattern over and over; people never blame the socio-economic system and blame technology instead. Technological improvement is the only thing which allows us to survive the social, cultural and moral decline that we've been experiencing. People blame tech because it allows the system to be highly inefficient and still hold together. But if pe…

The first 500+ words of this article are focused almost exclusively on the dynamics of corporate capitalism, not AI.

Read the article.

Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My work involves reading papers And yet you did not read this essay, or at least did not understand it. Whatever LLM you used to summarize it has let you down. I wonder how often that is happening in your day to day work, perhaps that's why you feel your job is at risk.

I am commenting on something in the background space of assumptions of the essay. Just because it is not the main thrust doesn’t mean I didnt read the article or used an LLM to summarize it for me. Take care

[flagged]

Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

#49
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this comment is reacting to a different argument than the one the article is actually making. The piece isn’t claiming that AI tools are useless or that they don’t materially improve day-to-day work. In fact, it more or less assumes the opposite. The critique is about the economic and organizational story being told around AI, not about whether an individual developer can ship faster today. Saying “these tool…

> I think this comment is reacting to a different argument than the one the article is actually making. The headline.

We’re supposed to pretend people read articles instead of just the headline (it is in the posting guidelines). To play along with that rule, people will write as if the poster they are responding to missed some nuance of the article.

Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

#50
post #2

It's disappointing how so many people blame AI for our problems. I see this pattern over and over; people never blame the socio-economic system and blame technology instead. Technological improvement is the only thing which allows us to survive the social, cultural and moral decline that we've been experiencing. People blame tech because it allows the system to be highly inefficient and still hold together. But if pe…

Well it's kinda both. One step towards socio-economic change would be if everyone just stopped giving billionaires upwards of $200/month, and didn't have their companies give it to them on their behalf.
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