Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 107 posts

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

#51

Post by NitpickLawyer »

ahachete wrote: post #31

There's a fundamental disconnect: OP refers to senior engineers being replaced with AI, whereas the evidence and logical reasoning points much more to junior engineers being replaced by AI. And that premise seems like a quite plausible one...

I think the junior thing started ~24, early ~25. Because back then the level of the current models was at or above that level, with somewhat flaky reliability. In the past year that's changed. We are now at "mostly reliable" in any junior-level stuff, and "surprisingly capable, maybe still needs some hand-holding" at advanced / senior-level stuff. And somewhat super-human if the problem is easily verifiable in a feedback loop (see the atcoder stuff).

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

#52

Post by [deleted] »

whimsicalism wrote: post #30
DetectDefect wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the work is important and I am the fool because ... you think so? That is not a very intellectually-defensible position to hold. One could even reason the argument is so flawed because LLMs degrade thinking capacity.

You’re arguing in a tautological fashion - anyone who suggests that AI can do a lot of their job must not have been doing important work in the first place. It’s a convenient psychological self defense mechanism that I see often here. Take care.

[deleted]

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

#53

Post by whimsicalism »

alpha_squared wrote: post #46
whimsicalism wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I’m replying to the people replying to me, which is hopefully permissible? I will respond aggressively to people who say that my work must not be very important or hard if I feel that AI can do a considerable portion of my day to day because I feel like that is initiating rudeness and find that the HN tendency to talk down to people expressing this opinion is chilling important conversations.

If my other replies come off as aggro, I apologize - I definitely can struggle with moderating tone in comments to reflect how I actually feel.

> 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

Let me be clear - I am not so completely sold on the current iteration. But I think there has been a significant improvement even since the midpoint of last year, the number of diffs I am returning mostly unedited is sharply increasing, and many people I am talking to are privately telling me they are no longer authoring any code themselves except for minor edits in diffs. Given that this has only been 3 years since chatgpt, really I am just looking at the curve and saying ‘woah.’

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

#54

Post by IAmGraydon »

whimsicalism wrote: post #4

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.

[flagged]

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

#55

Post by roxolotl »

whimsicalism wrote: post #35
kuerbel wrote: 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…

You can read my reply to another comment making a similar point. In short, I think you are giving Doctorow far too much credit - the assumption that these tools are fundamentally incapable is woven throughout the essay, the risk always comes from the fact that managers might think these tools (which are obviously inferior) can do your job. The notion that they can actually do your job is treated as invariable absurd,…

But Corey isn’t saying it’s oversold he’s saying the value capture by a few companies enabled by AI is dangerous to society.

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

#56

Post by kalkin »

alpha_squared wrote: post #46
whimsicalism wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I don't think the commenter to whom you're replying is any more aggressive than, e.g., this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46668988

It's unfortunately the case that even understanding what AI can and cannot do has become a matter of, as you say, "ideological world view". Ideally we'd be able to discuss what's factually true of AI at the beginning of 2026, and what's likely to be true within the next few years, independently of whether the trends are good for most humans or what we ought to do about them. In practice that's become pretty difficult, and the article to which we're all responding does not contribute positively.

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

#57

Post by happy_dog1 »

whimsicalism wrote: post #35
kuerbel wrote: 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…

You can read my reply to another comment making a similar point. In short, I think you are giving Doctorow far too much credit - the assumption that these tools are fundamentally incapable is woven throughout the essay, the risk always comes from the fact that managers might think these tools (which are obviously inferior) can do your job. The notion that they can actually do your job is treated as invariable absurd,…

I think we have to be careful when assuming that model capabilities will continue to grow at the same rate they have grown in recent years. It is very well-documented their growth in recent years has been accompanied by an exponential increase in the cost of building these models, see for example (of many examples) [1]. These costs include not just the cost of GPUs but also the cost for reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), which is not cheap either -- there is a reason that SurgeAI has over $1 billion in annual revenue (and ScaleAI was doing quite well before they were purchased by Meta) [2].

Maybe model capabilities WILL continue to improve rapidly for years to come, in which case, yes, at some point it will be possible to replace most or all white collar workers. In that case you are probably correct.

The other possibility is that capabilities will plateau at or not far above current levels because squeezing out further performance improvements simply becomes too expensive. In that case Cory Doctorow's argument seems sound. Currently all of these tools need human oversight to work well, and if a human is being paid to review everything generated by the AI, as Doctorow points out, they are effectively functioning as an accountability sink (we blame you when the AI screws up, have fun.)

I think it's worth bearing in mind that Geoffrey Hinton (infamously) predicted ten years ago that radiologists would all be out of a job in five years, when in fact demand for radiology has increased. He probably based this on some simple extrapolation from the rapid progress in image classification in the early 2010s. If image classification capabilities had continued to improve at that rate, he would probably have been correct.

[1] https://arxiv.org/html/2405.21015v1 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surge_AI

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

#58

Post by whimsicalism »

roxolotl wrote: post #55
whimsicalism wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can read my reply to another comment making a similar point. In short, I think you are giving Doctorow far too much credit - the assumption that these tools are fundamentally incapable is woven throughout the essay, the risk always comes from the fact that managers might think these tools (which are obviously inferior) can do your job. The notion that they can actually do your job is treated as invariable absurd,…

But Corey isn’t saying it’s oversold he’s saying the value capture by a few companies enabled by AI is dangerous to society.

I do not agree with your reading of the article. The premise - both implicit and stated explicitly throughout the article - is that companies are hyping this up because they want to be seen as growing, that this technology cannot do your job, that these are statistical tools foolishly being used to replace real workers. Look at the bits I quote in my other comment.

I would have been much more interested in reading the article you’re suggesting.

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

#59

Post by whimsicalism »

bee_rider wrote: post #49
sodapopcan wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I like that you all are having your own little side conversation making fun of me without engaging at all on the substance.

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

#60

Post by widowlark »

whimsicalism wrote: post #4

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.

If your job can be done with AI, why should your employer still pay you? Let us know what the title is so we can work to outmode your career
Post reply on HN