51–60 of 95 posts
> What really struck me was how Amazon's product decisions were driven by internal KPIs rather than user empathy. First day on the job or what?
It’s an ancient lesson that has to be relearned over and over. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woodcutter_and_the_Trees
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When there's something new and shiny progress is made fast until we reach the inevitable ceiling. AI has unsolved issues. The bubble will eventually pop and the damages will be astounding. I will sign the HA HA HAs. People are delusional.
Could you describe in what way do you find the current paradigms "new" or what unsolved issues you're talking about?
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Scientific breakthroughs happen, but they're notoriously difficult to make happen on command or on a schedule. Taking them for granted or as inevitable seems quite detached from reality.
True, but given how many breakthroughs we had in AI recently, for text, sound, images and video the odds of new breakthroughs happening are probably higher than otherwise. We have no idea how many of them we need till AGI or at least replacing software engineers though.
Assuming everything else the author believes is true, the real camps are "money" and "less money". Those camps already determine the success of businesses to a large extent. But especially in SWE where we traditionally cared less about degrees and more about skill, it's a new thing that "skill" and "experience" are directly cash related, something you can buy and out-source.
Looking for work and need a better github portfolio? Just up your Claude spend. Find yourself needing a promotion at work and in possession of some disposable income? Just pay out of pocket for the AI instead of expecting overtime from your employer or working nights and weekends, because you know you'll make up the difference when you're in charge of your department.
There is some historical precedent for this sort of thing; just read up on the buying and selling of army commissions. That works as well as you might expect, because when "expertise" is purchased like this it turns out that the officers you get are incompetent, and they mostly just fed soldiers into a meat-grinder. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchase_of_commissions_in_the...
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Not necessarily a reason to dismiss them. If they believe in the bright AI future, it's only natural to work for an AI company.
1. Working for an AI company is different from actively selling an AI company. 2. An AI ad generator is one of the worst possible uses of AI I can think of.
People who think this would work and want to make it happen walk among us.
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Could you describe in what way do you find the current paradigms "new" or what unsolved issues you're talking about?
Currently scaling limitations where gain outweighs the cost efficiency. True long term reasoning. Hallucinations and pattern matched reasoning over structural reasoning. Reasoning for novel tasks. Hitting a data wall so lack of training data. Stale knowledge. Biased knowledge. Oh and let's not forget about all the security related issues nobody likes to talk about.
We're doomed, when even supposed experts, working on these "AI" tools can't help but anthropomorphize those tools. "when edge cases emerge that the AI didn't anticipate" The only "anticipation" that is happening within those tools is on token level, the tools have no idea (and are fundamentally unable to even have an idea) what the code is even supposed to do in the real world.
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1. Working for an AI company is different from actively selling an AI company. 2. An AI ad generator is one of the worst possible uses of AI I can think of.
I read a human interest article where someone said they were working on an AI for automatically turning medical-speak into something sick kids could understand , which currently takes top spot on my ranking for worst AI idea. Fobbing off sick kids onto a chatbot to teach them about their condition, what could go wrong? People who think this would work and want to make it happen walk among us.