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Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

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Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#531

Post by 9rx »

vlovich123 wrote: post #491
9rx wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What planet are you on? The one where computers don't magically run all by themselves. It's amazing how out of touch HN has become with technology. Thinking that you can throw something up into the cloud, or whatever was imagined, needing no human oversight to operate it... Unfortunately, that's not how things work in this world. "The cloud" isn't heaven, despite religious imagery suggesting otherwise. It requires…

The amount of people it takes to maintain a server rack is minimal and low cost labor. Most of the money is spent on hardware and paying people to right software for that hardware. Writing that software is becoming automated and it’s not hard to imagine that buying will as well. So you’re left with the equivalent of a plumber running your data center based on what automated systems flag as issues and other automated…

> The amount of people it takes to maintain a server rack is minimal and low cost labor.

So what you're saying is that it requires human oversight. Got it.

Glad you finally caught up to where the rest of us were many comments ago. But why did it take so long? Inquiring minds want to know.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#532

Post by twodave »

shaka-bear-tree wrote: post #140
twodave wrote: post #126

Horses eat feed. Cars eat gasoline. LLMs eat electricity, and progress may even now be finding its limits in that arena. Besides the fact that just more compute and context size aren’t the right kind of progress. LLMs aren’t coming for your job any more than computer vision is, for a lot of reasons, but I’ll list two more: 1. Even if LLMs made everyone 10x as productive, most companies will still have more work to do…

Funny the original post doesn’t mention AI replacing the coding part of his job. There seems to be a running theme of “okay but what about” in every discussion that involves AI replacing jobs. Meanwhile a little time goes by and “poof” AI is handling it. I want to be be optimistic. But it’s hard to ignore what I’m doing and seeing. As far as I can tell, we haven’t hit serious unemployment yet because of momentum and…

Well, I would just say to take into account the fact that we're starting to see LLMs be responsible for substantial electricity use, to the point that AI companies are lobbying for (significant) added capacity. And remember that we're all getting these sub-optimal toys at such a steep discount that it would be price gouging if everyone weren't doing it.

Basically, there's an upper limit even to how much we can get out of the LLMs we have, and it's more expensive than it seems to be.

Not to mention, poorly-functioning software companies won't be made any better by AI. Right now there's a lot of hype behind AI, but IMO it's very much an "emperor has no clothes" sort of situation. We're all just waiting for someone important enough to admit it.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#533

Post by abustamam »

vidarh wrote: post #506
abustamam wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Google search kinda sucks. And I find it helpful to provide context that I can't otherwise provide to any standard search engine.

Because the responses are often distilled down from the same garbage Google serves up, but presented as the opinion of Claude, whom she increasingly trusts. I use Claude a lot . I have the most expensive Claude Max subscription both for my own consultancy and at client sites, separately. I'm increasingly close to an AI maximalist on many issues, so I'm not at all against extensive use of these models. But it's not qu…

> unless you specifically prompt it to search.

Ah, that's a good call-out. I don't use Claude aside from in Cursor; I use ChatGPT for normal queries and it's pretty good about doing searches when it doesn't think it knows the answer. Of course it'll search when prompted, but it'll often search without prompting too. I just mistakenly assumed that your fiancée's usage of Claude implied Claude was actually searching as well.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#534

Post by twodave »

Den_VR wrote: post #161
twodave wrote: post #126

Horses eat feed. Cars eat gasoline. LLMs eat electricity, and progress may even now be finding its limits in that arena. Besides the fact that just more compute and context size aren’t the right kind of progress. LLMs aren’t coming for your job any more than computer vision is, for a lot of reasons, but I’ll list two more: 1. Even if LLMs made everyone 10x as productive, most companies will still have more work to do…

If there’s more work than resources, then is that low value work or is there a reason the business is unable to increase resources? AI as a race to the bottom may be productive but not sure it will be societally good.

Not low-value or it just wouldn't be on the board. Lower value? Maybe, but there are many, many reasons things get pushed down the backlog. As many reasons as there are kinds of companies. Most people don't work at one of the big tech companies where work priorities and business value are so stratified. There are businesses that experience seasonality, so many of the R&D activities get put on the backburner until the busy season is over. There are businesses that have high correctness standards, where bigger changes require more scrutiny, are harder to fit into a sprint, and end up getting passed over for smaller tasks. And some businesses just require a lot of contextual knowledge. I wouldn't trust an AI to do a payroll calculation or tabulate votes, for instance, any more than I would trust a brand new employee to dive into the deep end on those tasks.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#536

Post by heavyset_go »

abustamam wrote: post #503
vidarh wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love AI, but I'm exasperated by the extent to which my fiancee uses Claude instead of search, and for everything ...

Why? Google search kinda sucks. And I find it helpful to provide context that I can't otherwise provide to any standard search engine.

Garbage in, garbage out + chat bots will be monetized which means they will show you things their ad partners want you to see vs what you actually want.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#537

Post by twodave »

ben_w wrote: post #334
twodave wrote: post #126

Horses eat feed. Cars eat gasoline. LLMs eat electricity, and progress may even now be finding its limits in that arena. Besides the fact that just more compute and context size aren’t the right kind of progress. LLMs aren’t coming for your job any more than computer vision is, for a lot of reasons, but I’ll list two more: 1. Even if LLMs made everyone 10x as productive, most companies will still have more work to do…

> 1. Even if LLMs made everyone 10x as productive, most companies will still have more work to do than resources to assign to those tasks. The only reason to reduce headcount is to remove people who already weren’t providing much value. They have more work to do until they don't. The number of bank tellers went up for a while after the invention of the ATM, but then it went down, because all the demand was saturated.…

I agree mostly, though personally I expect LLMs to basically give me whitewashing. They don't innovate. They don't push back enough or take a step back to reset the conversation. They can't even remember something I told them not to do 2 messages ago unless I twist their arm. This is what they are, as a technology. They'll get better. I think there's some impact associated with this, but it's not a doomsday scenario like people are pretending.

We are talking about trying to build a thing we don't even truly understand ourselves. It reminds me of That Hideous Strength where the scientists are trying to imitate life by pumping blood into the post-guillotine head of a famous scientist. Like, we can make LLMs do things where we point and say, "See! It's alive!" But in the end people are still pulling all the strings, and there's no evidence that this is going to change.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#538

Post by heavyset_go »

palmotea wrote: post #461
cryptonector wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have been completely shocked by the number of people in the tech industry who seem to genuinely place no value on humanity [...] Who do they think will make their ventures profitable? Who do they think will take their dollars and provide goods and services in exchange? If automation reaches the point where 99% of humans add no value to the "owners" then the "owners" will own nothing.

> If automation reaches the point where 99% of humans add no value to the "owners" then the "owners" will own nothing. I don't think that's right. The owners will still own everything . If or when that happens, I think the economy would morph into a new thing completely focused on serving the whims of those "owners." There's an old Isaac Asimov book with something similar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_uni…

See also: Citigroup's plutonomy thesis[1] from 2006

tldr: the formal economy will shift to serving plutocrats instead of consumers, it's much more profitable to do so and there are diminishing returns serving the latter

[1] https://www.sourcewatch.org/images/b/bc/CITIGROUP-MARCH-5-20...

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#539

Post by selfmodruntime »

maciejzj wrote: post #353

I may have developed some kind of paranoia reading HN recently, but the AI atmosphere is absolutely nuts to me. Have you ever thought that you would see a chart showing how population of horses was decimated by the mass introduction of efficient engines accompanied by an implication that there is a parallel to human population? And the article is not written in any kind of cautionary humanitarian approach, but rather…

Even scarier when you consider that this entire technology has reached the public only three years ago.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#540

Post by heavyset_go »

cryptonector wrote: post #472
palmotea wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If automation reaches the point where 99% of humans add no value to the "owners" then the "owners" will own nothing. I don't think that's right. The owners will still own everything . If or when that happens, I think the economy would morph into a new thing completely focused on serving the whims of those "owners." There's an old Isaac Asimov book with something similar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_uni…

What would they get from the plebs? Suppose we went through The Phools and so the plebs were exterminated, then what? Perhaps we'd finally have Star Trek economics, but only for them, the "owners". Better be an "owner", then.

Consider being a significant shareholder in the future as analogous to citizenship as it exists today. Non-owners will be persona non gratae, if they're allowed to live at all.
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