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Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster

theatlantic.com

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Re: Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster

#51

Post by andy_ppp »

simianwords wrote: post #50
andy_ppp wrote: post #4

The ultra wealthy will out compete you for the resources you need if we don’t start taxing them has been a discussion from the left for quite some time. It seems to keep coming true in new and disastrous ways, we are going to see more and more extreme concentrations of capital and power distort things and pretty soon it won’t just be middle and poor people who cannot afford anything, the whole value chain is being re…

[flagged]

The article opens with a discussion about how AI investments are forcing up the price of computer hardware, so it’s not off topic at all.

I don’t believe point 1 at all, or the skill atrophy point of 2. and the billionaires think AI will indeed make them richer otherwise there would be no investment in these companies would there?

Re: Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster

#52

Post by simianwords »

vanuatu wrote: post #6

i dont think the comparison to traditional vc saas is very good yes, in traditional venture you want cost per marginal user to decrease and leverage your platform at scale but improving llms shifts the frontier of their capability and unlocks entirely new use cases. so far, every mega training run has resulted in a model that has paid itself off profitably fully loaded. perhaps the TAM of intelligence has no ceiling?…

you think companies are not focusing on efficiency but in reality they are both almost fully correlated. if you make a model more efficient, you get to make it do more reasoning and we know that the upper limit for reasoning is very very high.

we have real proof - GPT 5.6 Luna is 50% cheaper than 5.5. And this keeps repeating.

Re: Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster

#53

Post by satvikpendem »

dofm wrote: post #45
satvikpendem wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Due to said industrial revolution, people's quality of life went up a thousandfold, same as in China and other countries now adopting capitalist principles.

Not at all quickly. People's lives got immediately worse — well within a working lifetime. Life expectancy fell and infant mortality worsened for well over a hundred years. In particular the quality of life for people displaced by the second agricultural revolution degraded radically. It took until the early 1900s for people in cities in the west to be as healthy as a pre-industrial revolution farm worker.

China did it in a generation. It is not like it was before, we have the economic tools and knowledge to accelerate it.

Re: Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster

#54

Post by satvikpendem »

tharmas wrote: post #32
throwaway323929 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of just rejecting the future like a Roman fatalist because you've decided that it's just going to be someone else controlling you, maybe a better plan is to adopt emerging technology when it comes into play (like for example when the Internet came into play) and use it to start your own company, or make yourself more productive, or disrupt an industry that desperately needs it. I shouldn't have to explain the…

If AI was utilized to eliminate the "shitty" jobs I'd be more enthusiastic about it. AI Robots that clean toilets so humans don't have to? Yes, please. (Yes, I get it that at present its probably still cheaper to employ a human wage slave to do this job -> the economic argument). But at present AI seems to be just eliminating the junior programmer positions. That is, the apprentices. Once the more experienced enginee…

Won't anyone think of the software engineers? It's funny how hypocritical the tech worker world is when the very jobs they work are in the business of automating professions away. But when it comes for my profession? Oh the horror.

Re: Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster

#55

Post by satvikpendem »

watwut wrote: post #12
throwaway323929 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of just rejecting the future like a Roman fatalist because you've decided that it's just going to be someone else controlling you, maybe a better plan is to adopt emerging technology when it comes into play (like for example when the Internet came into play) and use it to start your own company, or make yourself more productive, or disrupt an industry that desperately needs it. I shouldn't have to explain the…

> disrupt an industry that desperately needs it. Why is the primary tech people impulse to disrupt, destroy and harm other industries? Maybe that is why we dont produce useful tech anymore. The primary impulse is always hostile, rarely something like "lets create and sell a useful thing for them". > adopt emerging technology when it comes into play (like for example when the Internet came into play) and use it to sta…

Sometimes the other industries are just bad, like Uber for taxis or Airbnb for hotels. Now the disrupted industries have gotten somewhat better but only due to competition.

And disruption doesn't always mean destruction, it's just a word that is used, not to necessarily be taken literally.

Re: Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster

#56

Post by satvikpendem »

andy_ppp wrote: post #29
satvikpendem wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Due to said industrial revolution, people's quality of life went up a thousandfold, same as in China and other countries now adopting capitalist principles.

Not true, that was WW2 and high taxation on the rich that created the middle class. The Industrial Revolution was 1750 onwards so maybe you’re okay with it taking nearly 200 years to get a good settlement for working people but I am not! If you look at most of the world, Nigeria or India say you’ll see disgraceful levels of poverty and a small number of people who are ultra wealthy. This is where we are heading in th…

India and Nigeria made many economic mistakes. My comparison is China and Vietnam who reduced poverty manifold in a single generation.

Re: Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster

#57

Post by dofm »

satvikpendem wrote: post #53
dofm wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all quickly. People's lives got immediately worse — well within a working lifetime. Life expectancy fell and infant mortality worsened for well over a hundred years. In particular the quality of life for people displaced by the second agricultural revolution degraded radically. It took until the early 1900s for people in cities in the west to be as healthy as a pre-industrial revolution farm worker.

China did it in a generation. It is not like it was before, we have the economic tools and knowledge to accelerate it.

1978 is two generations ago, really, and things are not better for everyone now. Working days are long, six days a week, pay is poor enough that people are living in dormitories or company housing, effectively indentured still.

And the question with the AI thing is: when you take some chunk of labour out of the employment market entirely (such is the promise of AI across all sectors — hire fewer people), where will the "economic tools" come from. Because you'll trigger demand collapse.

It is a fantasy. And even then, you're talking about a technological change that will ruin a very large number of people's livelihoods and economic security for decades as if it is just something someone will have to fix.

Re: Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster

#58

Post by dofm »

satvikpendem wrote: post #56
andy_ppp wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true, that was WW2 and high taxation on the rich that created the middle class. The Industrial Revolution was 1750 onwards so maybe you’re okay with it taking nearly 200 years to get a good settlement for working people but I am not! If you look at most of the world, Nigeria or India say you’ll see disgraceful levels of poverty and a small number of people who are ultra wealthy. This is where we are heading in th…

India and Nigeria made many economic mistakes. My comparison is China and Vietnam who reduced poverty manifold in a single generation.

So as long as nobody makes major economic mistakes it's fine?

Re: Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster

#59

Post by randysalami »

watwut wrote: post #12
throwaway323929 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of just rejecting the future like a Roman fatalist because you've decided that it's just going to be someone else controlling you, maybe a better plan is to adopt emerging technology when it comes into play (like for example when the Internet came into play) and use it to start your own company, or make yourself more productive, or disrupt an industry that desperately needs it. I shouldn't have to explain the…

> disrupt an industry that desperately needs it. Why is the primary tech people impulse to disrupt, destroy and harm other industries? Maybe that is why we dont produce useful tech anymore. The primary impulse is always hostile, rarely something like "lets create and sell a useful thing for them". > adopt emerging technology when it comes into play (like for example when the Internet came into play) and use it to sta…

I see your comment is not popular but I agree. I think it’s because it’s easier to take value than it is to create it from scratch. One requires empathy, creativity, the other only requires greed. Or maybe it is a zero-sum game.

Re: Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster

#60

Post by JackSlateur »

maxcb wrote: post #3

Comparing how traditional tech companies scale to how frontier AI companies scale doesn't seem very fair to me. AI is still relatively new territory, in comparison traditional software companies benefit from decades of investment in cloud infrastructure, networking, and hardware. I'm certain those technologies also went through periods of heavy investment before they became scalable. The author also talks about advan…

"They create value for many people"

They create value for many people because these people are not paying the cost of the tool;

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