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AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

chrbutler.com

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

#51

Post by helterskelter »

Dilettante_ wrote: post #26

My experience with AI in the design context tends to reflect what I think is generally true about AI in the workplace: the smaller the use case, the larger the gain. This might be the money quote, encapsulating the difference between people who say their work benefits from LLMs and those who don't. Expecting it to one-shot your entire module will leave you disappointed, using it for code completion, generating docume…

Honestly one the best use cases I've found for it is creating configs. It used to be that I was able to spend a week fiddling around with, say, nvim settings. Now I tell an LLM what I want and it basically gives it to me without having to do trial and error, or locating some obscure comment from 2005 that tells me what I need to know.

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

#52

Post by hollowturtle »

The best AI is the one hidden, silent, ubiquitous that works and you feel it's not there. Apple devices but really many modern devices before the LLM hype era had a lot of AI we didn't know about. Today if I read a product has AI i feel let down cause most of the time is a not very well integrated ChatBot that if you will to spend some time sooner or later will impersonate Adolf Hitler and, who knows, maybe leaks sensitive data or apis meta. The bubble needs to burst so we can go back to silently pack products with useful ai features without telling the world

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

#54

Post by hollowturtle »

redorb wrote: post #49
hollowturtle wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are the products? This site and everywhere around the internet, on x, linkedin and so is full of crazy claims and I have yet to see a product that people need and that actually works. What I'm experiencing is a gigantic enshittification everywhere, Windows sucks, web apps are bloated, slow and uninteresting. Infrastructure goes down even with "memory safe rust" burning millions and millions of compute for scaff…

I think chatGPT itself is an epic product, Cursor has insane growth and usage. I also think they are both over-hyped, have too much a valuation.

ChatGPT is... a chat with some "augmentation" feature aka outputting rich html responses, nothing new except the generative side. Cursor is a VSCode fork with a custom model and a very good autocomplete integration. Again where are the products? Where the heck is Windows without the bloat that works reliably before becoming totally agentic? And therefore idiotic since it doesn't work reliably

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

#55

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

xeckr wrote: post #35

The AI race is presumably won by whomever can automate AI R&D first, thus everyone who is in an adjacent field will see the incremental benefits sooner than those further away. The further removed, the harder the takeoff once it happens.

This notion of a hard takeoff, or singularity, based on self-improving AI, is based on the implicit assumption that what's holding AI progress back is lack of AI researchers/developers, which is false.

Ideas are a penny a dozen - the bottleneck is the money/compute to test them at scale.

What exactly is the scenario you are imagining where more developers at a company like OpenAI (or maybe Meta, which has just laid off 600 of them) would accelerate progress?

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

#56

Post by Kiro »

bix6 wrote: post #5
carlosjobim wrote: post #2

Let's take the highest perspective possible: What is the value of technology which allows people communicate clearly with other people of any language? That is what these large language models have achieved. We can now translate pretty much perfectly between all the languages in the world. The curse from the tower of Babel has been lifted. There will be a time in the future, when people will not be able to comprehend…

We could communicate with people before LLMs just fine though? We have hand gestures and some people learn multiple languages and google translate was pretty solid. I got by just fine in countries where I didn’t know the language because hand gestures work or someone speaks English. What is the value of losing our uniqueness to a computer that lies and makes us all talk the same?

Incredible that we happen to be alive at the exact moment humanity peaked in its interlingual communication. With Google Translate and hand gestures there is no need to evolve it any further.

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

#57

Post by mwhitfield »

Kiro wrote: post #53

> it’s a useful technology that is very likely overhyped to the point of catastrophe I wish more AI skeptics would take this position but no, it's imperative to claim that it's completely useless.

I've had *very* much the opposite experience. Very nearly every AI skeptic take I read has exactly this opinion, if not always so well-articulated (until the last section, which lost me). But counterarguments always attack the complete strawman of "AI is utterly useless," which very few people, at least within the confines of the tech and business commentariat, are making.

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

#58

Post by dwedge »

gizajob wrote: post #31
carlosjobim wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Machine translation was horrible and completely unreliable before LLMs. And human translators are very expensive and slow in comparison. LLM is for translation as computers were for calculating. Sure, you could do without them before. They used to have entire buildings with office workers whose job it was to compute.

Google translate worked great long before LLMs.

Not really long before, although I suppose it's relative. Google translate was pretty garbage until around 2016-2017 and then it started really improving

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

#59

Post by w_for_wumbo »

This is what I wonder to, what is the end game? Advance technology so that we can have anything that we want, whenever we want it. Fly to distant galaxies. Increase the options available to us and our offspring. But ultimately, what will we gain from that? Is it to say that we did it or is it for the pleasure of the process? If it's for pleasure, then why have we made our processes so miserable for everyone involved? If it's to say that we did it, couldn't we not and say that we did? That's the whole point of fantasy. Is Elon using AI to supplement his own lack of imagination?

I could be wrong, this could be nonsense. I just can't make sense of it.

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

#60

Post by muldvarp »

sockgrant wrote: post #14

“As a designer…” IMHO the bleeding edge of what’s working well with LLMs is within software engineering because we’re building for ourselves, first. Claude code is incredible. Where I work, there are an incredible number of custom agents that integrate with our internal tooling. Many make me very productive and are worthwhile. I find it hard to buy in to opinions of non-SWE on the uselessness of AI solely because I t…

> IMHO the bleeding edge of what’s working well with LLMs is within software engineering because we’re building for ourselves, first.

How are we building _for_ ourselves when we literally automate away our jobs? This is probably one of the _worst_ things someone could do to me.

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