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Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

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Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#51

Post by bpt3 »

nailer wrote: post #7

From the article: _____ The first cars were: - Loud and unreliable - Expensive and hard to repair - Starved for fuel in a world with no gas stations - Unsuitable for the dirt roads of rural America _____ Reminds me of Linux in the late 90s. Talking to Solaris, HPUX or NT4 advocates, many were sure Linux was not going to succeed because: - It didn't support multiple processors - There was nobody to pay for commercial…

Linux won on cost once it was "good enough". AI isn't free (by any definition of free) and is a long way away from "good enough" to be a general replacement for the status quo in a lot of domains.

The areas where it does make sense to use, it's been in use for years, if not longer, without anyone screaming from the rooftops about it.

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#52

Post by bluefirebrand »

johncole wrote: post #20
bluefirebrand wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I agree much Cynically, there's no difference from a CEO's perspective between a human employee and a horse They are both expenses that the CEO would probably prefer to do without whenever possible. A line item on a balance sheet, nothing more

I think ceos that think this way are a self fulfilling prophecy of doom. If they think of their employees as cogs that can be replaced, they get cogs that can be replaced.

Doesn't matter

The median CEO salary is in the millions, they do not have to ever worry about money again if they can just stick around for one CEO gig for a couple of years

Granted, people who become CEOs are not likely to think this way

But the fact is that when people have so much money they could retire immediately with no consequences, they are basically impossible for a business to hold accountable outside of actual illegal activity

And let's be real. Often it's difficult to even hold them accountable for actual illegal activity too

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#53

Post by myrmidon »

danbruc wrote: post #45
myrmidon wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The current generation of AI models will turn out to be essentially a dead end. It seems a matter of perspective to me whether you call it "dead end" or "stepping stone". To give some pause before dismissing the current state of the art prematurely: I would already consider LLM based current systems more "intelligent" than a housecat. And a pets intelligence is enough to have ethical implications, so we arguably re…

I think the main thing I want from an AI in order to call it intelligent is the ability to reason. I provide an explanation of how long multiplication works and then the AI is capable of multiplying arbitrary large numbers. And - correct me if I am wrong - large language models can not do this. And this despite probably being exposed to a lot of mathematics during training whereas in a strong version of this test I w…

I'm not sure if popular models cheat at this, but if I ask for it (o3-mini) I get correct results/intermediate values (for 794206 * 43124, chosen randomly).

I do suspect this is only achieveable because the model was specifically trained for this.

But the same is true for humans; children can't really "reason themselves" into basic arithmetic-- that's a skill that requires considerable training.

I do concede that this (learning/skill aquisition) is something that humans can do "online" (within days/weeks/months) while LLMs need a separate process for it.

> in a strong version of this test I would want nothing related to long multiplication in the training data.

Is this not a bit of a double standard? I think at least 99/100 humans with minimal previous math exposure would utterly fail this test.

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#54

Post by justinrubek »

baxtr wrote: post #50
jampa wrote: post #24

I like Steve's content, but the ending misses the mark. With the carriage / car situation, individual transportation is their core business, and most companies are not in the field of Artificial Intelligence. I say this as someone who has worked for 7 years implementing AI research for production, from automated hardware testing to accessibility for nonverbals: I don't think founders need to obsess even more than the…

Just today I used the AI service on the amazon product page to get more information about a specific product, basically RAG on the reviews. So maybe your analysis is outdated?

The amazon store chatbot is mongst the worst implementations I've seen. The old UI which displayed the customer questions and allowed searching them was infinitely better.

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#55

Post by johncole »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #52
johncole wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think ceos that think this way are a self fulfilling prophecy of doom. If they think of their employees as cogs that can be replaced, they get cogs that can be replaced.

Doesn't matter The median CEO salary is in the millions, they do not have to ever worry about money again if they can just stick around for one CEO gig for a couple of years Granted, people who become CEOs are not likely to think this way But the fact is that when people have so much money they could retire immediately with no consequences, they are basically impossible for a business to hold accountable outside of a…

If you’re playing at that level, you’re not thinking about subsistence living and never having to work again. You are driven by ego, by winning, by legacy. All three incentivize you to do well if your board consists of non-asshats. You are playing a multi-shot game.

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#56

Post by johncole »

nemomarx wrote: post #43
johncole wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think ceos that think this way are a self fulfilling prophecy of doom. If they think of their employees as cogs that can be replaced, they get cogs that can be replaced.

Isn't this good for the CEO? if your employees aren't cogs then what do you do if they leave? the more replaceable they are the better bargaining power you have as a capitalist right

If you have all cogs, the scope of your business is almost always local. You’re running a lawn mowing business or a subway. And I’m not denigrating those businesses just making the point that they’re not the bulk of the economy. If you’re running a serious business part of your business may be cogs but there’s a very important layer of non cogs that you spend most of your time recruiting, keeping, and guiding. These folks are irreplaceable.

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#57

Post by Davidzheng »

jayd16 wrote: post #33
Davidzheng wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but to say current LLMs are a "dead end" is kind of insane if you compare with the previous records at general AI before LLMs. The earlier language models would be happy to be SOTA in 5 random benchmarks (like sentiment or some types of multiple choice questions) and SOTA otherwise consisted of some AIs that could play like 50 Atari games. And out of nowhere we have AI models that can do tasks which are not in…

Something can be much better than before but still be a dead end. Literally a dead end road can take you closer but never get you there.

But dead end to what? All progress eventually plateaus somewhere? It's clearly insanely useful in practice. And do you think there will be any future AGI whose development is not helped by current LLM technology? Even if the architecture is completely different the ability of LLMs to understand humans data automatically is unparalleled.

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#58

Post by geoka9 »

justinrubek wrote: post #54
baxtr wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just today I used the AI service on the amazon product page to get more information about a specific product, basically RAG on the reviews. So maybe your analysis is outdated?

The amazon store chatbot is mongst the worst implementations I've seen. The old UI which displayed the customer questions and allowed searching them was infinitely better.

FWIW, the old UI (which I agree is better) is still available. Once the "AI search" is done, there's a dropdown you can click and it will show all the reviews that include the word you searched.

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#59

Post by danbruc »

myrmidon wrote: post #53
danbruc wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the main thing I want from an AI in order to call it intelligent is the ability to reason. I provide an explanation of how long multiplication works and then the AI is capable of multiplying arbitrary large numbers. And - correct me if I am wrong - large language models can not do this. And this despite probably being exposed to a lot of mathematics during training whereas in a strong version of this test I w…

I'm not sure if popular models cheat at this, but if I ask for it (o3-mini) I get correct results/intermediate values (for 794206 * 43124, chosen randomly). I do suspect this is only achieveable because the model was specifically trained for this. But the same is true for humans; children can't really "reason themselves" into basic arithmetic-- that's a skill that requires considerable training. I do concede that thi…

I just tested it with Copilot with two random 45 digit numbers and it gets it correct by translating it into Python and running it in the background. When I asked to not use any external tools, it got the first five, the last two, and a hand full more digits in the middle correct, out of 90. It also fails to calculate the 45 intermediate products - one number times one digit from the other - including multiplying by zero and one.

The models can do surprisingly large numbers correctly, but they essentially memorized them. As you make the numbers longer and longer, the result becomes garbage. If they would actually reason about it, this would not happen, multiplying those long numbers is not really harder than multiplying two digit numbers, just more time consuming and annoying.

And I do not want the model to figure multiplication out on its own, I want to provide it with what teachers tell children until they get to long multiplication. The only thing where I want to push the AI is to do it for much longer numbers, not only two, three, four digits or whatever you do in primary school.

And the difference is not only in online vs offline, large language models have almost certainly been trained on heaps of basic mathematics, but did not learn to multiply. They can explain to you how to do it because they have seen countless explanation and examples, but they can not actually do it themselves.

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#60

Post by jmathai »

danbruc wrote: post #15

Let us see how this will age. The current generation of AI models will turn out to be essentially a dead end. I have no doubt that AI will eventually fundamentally change a lot of things, but it will not be large language models [1]. And I think there is no path of gradual improvement, we still need some fundamental new ideas. Integration with external tools will help but not overcome fundamental limitations. Once th…

This is a surprising take. I think what's available today can improve productivity by 20% across the board. That seems massive.

Only a very small % of the population is leveraging AI in any meaningful way. But I think today's tools are sufficient for them to do so if they wanted to start and will only get better (even if the LLMs don't, which they will).

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