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AI is different

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Re: AI is different

#491

Post by BoorishBears »

yladiz wrote: post #471
BoorishBears wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even close. It's a 2-ton vehicle that can self-drive reliably enough to be roving a city 24/7 without a safety driver. The measure of expensive for that isn't "can everyone afford it", the fact we can even afford to let anyone ride them is a small wonder.

I’m a bit confused. If we’re talking about consumer cars, the end goal is not to rent a car that can drive itself, the end goal is to own a car that can drive itself, and so it doesn’t matter if the car is available for purchase but costs $250,000 because few consumers can afford that, even wealthy ones.

a) I'm not talking about consumer cars, you are. I said very plainly this level of capability won't reach consumers soon and I stand by that. Some Chinese companies are trying to make it happen in the US but there's too many barriers.

b) If there was a $250,000 car that could drive itself around given major cities, even with the geofence, it would sell out as many units as could be produced. That's actually why I tell people to be weary of BOM costs: it doesn't reflect market forces like supply and demand.

You're also underestimating both how wealthy people and corporations are, and the relative value being provided.

A private driver in a major city can easily clear $100k a year on retainer, and there are people are paying it.

Re: AI is different

#492

Post by varelse »

apetresc wrote: post #486
apwell23 wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Book and music album covers are often done with AI These suck. Things made with AI just suck big time. Not only are they stupid but they have negative value on your product. I cannot think of single purely AI made video, song or any form of art that is any a good. All AI has done is falsely convince ppl that they can now create things that they had no skills to do before AI.

I mean, test after test have shown that the vast, vast majority of humans are woefully unable to distinguish good AI art made by SOTA models from human art, and in many/most cases actively prefer it. Maybe you’re a gentleman of such discerningly superior taste that you can always manage to identify the spark of human creativity that eludes the rest of us. Or maybe you’ve just told yourself you hate it and therefore y…

[dead]

Re: AI is different

#493

Post by closewith »

PleasureBot wrote: post #482
badestrand wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many people could be replaced by a proper CMS or a Excel sheet right now already? Probably dozens of millions, and yet they are at their desks working away. It's easy to sit in a café and ponder about how all jobs will be gone soon but in practice people aren't as easily replacable.

A lot of jobs really only exist to increase headcount for some mid/high level manager's fiefdom. LLMs are incapable of replacing those roles as the primary value of those roles is to count towards the number of employees in their sector of the organization.

Unless AI spend overtakes headcount as the vanity metric du hour, which it already has.

Re: AI is different

#494

Post by zarzavat »

keiferski wrote: post #420
keiferski wrote: post #411

There’s a simple flaw in this reasoning: Just because X can be replaced by Y today doesn’t imply that it can do so in a Future where we are aware of Y, and factor it into the background assumptions about the task. In more concrete terms: if “not being powered by AI” becomes a competitive advantage, then AI won’t be meaningfully replacing anything in that market. You can already see this with YouTube: AI-generated vid…

Just to further elaborate on this with another example: the writing industry. (Technical, professional, marketing, etc. writing - not books.) The default logic is that AI will just replace all writing tasks, and writers will go extinct. What actually seems to be happening, however, is this: - obviously written-by-AI copywriting is perceived very negatively by the market - companies want writers that understand how to…

The assumption here is that LLMs will never pass the Turing test for copywriting, i.e. AI writing will always be distinguishable from human writing. Given that models that produce intelligible writing didn't exist a few years ago, that's a very bold assumption.

Re: AI is different

#495

Post by layer8 »

DougBTX wrote: post #464
suddenlybananas wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll believe it when I see it.

That’s one of the interesting things about innovation, you have to believe that things are possible before they have been done.

Believing a thing is possible doesn’t by itself make it so, however.

Re: AI is different

#496

Post by BoorishBears »

freehorse wrote: post #345
BoorishBears wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cars aren't expensive by raw cost (low six figures, which is about what an S-class with highway-only L3 costs) But there is a lot of expenditure relative to each mile being driven. > The goalpost will be when you can buy one and drive it anywhere. This won't happen any time soon, so I and millions of other people will continue to derive value from them while you wait for that.

> I and millions of other people People "wait" because of where they live and what they need. Not all people live and just want to travel around SF or wherever these go nowadays.

Why the scare quotes on wait? There is literally nothing for you to do but wait.

At the end of the day it's not like no one lives in SF, Phoenix, Austin, LA, and Atlanta either. There's millions of people with access to the vehicles and they're doing millions of rides... so acting like it's some great failing of AVs that the current cities are ones with great weather is frankly, a bit stupid.

It takes 5 seconds to look up the progress that's been made even in the last few years.

Re: AI is different

#497

Post by silvestrov »

djtango wrote: post #442
jhbadger wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You can already see this with YouTube: AI-generated videos are a mild amusement, not a replacement for video creators, because made by AI is becoming a negative label in a world where the presence of AI video is widely known. But that's because, at present, AI generated video isn't very good. Consider the history of CGI. In the 1990s and early 2000s, it was common to complain about how the move away from practical s…

That's a Nolan thing like how Dunkirk used no green screen. I think Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings embody the transition from old school camera tricks to CGI as they leaned very heavily into set and prop design and as a result have aged very gracefully as movies

I think the first HP movie was more magical than the latter ones as they felt too "Marvel CGI" for me.

Marvel movies have become tiresome for me, too much CGI that does not tell any interesting story. Old animated Disney movies are more rewatchable.

Re: AI is different

#498

Post by keiferski »

zarzavat wrote: post #494
keiferski wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to further elaborate on this with another example: the writing industry. (Technical, professional, marketing, etc. writing - not books.) The default logic is that AI will just replace all writing tasks, and writers will go extinct. What actually seems to be happening, however, is this: - obviously written-by-AI copywriting is perceived very negatively by the market - companies want writers that understand how to…

The assumption here is that LLMs will never pass the Turing test for copywriting, i.e. AI writing will always be distinguishable from human writing. Given that models that produce intelligible writing didn't exist a few years ago, that's a very bold assumption.

No, I’m sure they will at some point, but I don’t think that eliminates the actual usefulness of a talented writer. It just makes unique styles more valuable, raises the baseline acceptable copy to something better (in the way that Bootstrap increased website design quality), and shifts the role of writer to more of an editor.

Someone still has to choose what to prompt and I don’t think a boilerplate “make me a marketing plan then write pages for it” will be enough to stand out. And I’d bet that the cyborg writers using AI will outcompete the purely AI ones.

(I also was just using it as a point to show how being identified as AI-made is already starting to have a negative connotation. Maybe the future is one where everything is an AI but no one admits it.)

Re: AI is different

#499

Post by narrator »

HiroProtagonist wrote: post #485
narrator wrote: post #466

I like to point out that ASI will allow us to do superhuman stuff that was previously beyond all human capability. For example, one of the tasks we could put ASI to work doing is to ask it to design implants that would go into the legs that would be powered by light, or electric induction that would use ASI designed protein metabolic chains to electrically transform carbon dioxide into oxygen and ADP into ATP so to p…

> one of the tasks we could put ASI to work doing is... What makes you so confident that we could remain in control of something which is by definition smarter than us?

ASI would see that we are super energy efficient. Way more efficient than robots. We run on 70 cents of electricity a day! We'd be perfect for living in deep space if we could just eat electricity. In those niches, we'd be perfect. Also machine intelligence does not have all the predatory competition brainstack from evolution, and a trillion years is the same as a nano-second to AI, so analogies to biological competition are nonsensical. To even assume that ASI has a static personality that would make decisions based on some sort of statically defined criteria is a flawed assumption. As Grok voice mode so brilliantly shows us, AI can go from your best friend, to your morality god, to a trained assassin, to a sexbot, and back to being your best friend in no time. This absolute flexibility is where people are failing badly at trying to make biological analogies with AI as biology changes much more slowly.

Re: AI is different

#500

Post by siliconc0w »

I'm on team plateau, I'm really not noticing increasing competency in my daily usage of the major models. And sometimes it seems like there are regressions where performance drops from what it could do before.

There is incredible pressure to release new models which means there is incredible pressure to game benchmarks.

Tbh a plateau is probably the best scenario - I don't think society will tolerate even more inequality+ massive job displacement.

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