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AI is different

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Re: AI is different

#581

Post by perryizgr8 »

vrighter wrote: post #435
ACCount37 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans use only cameras. And humans don't even have true 360 coverage on those cameras. The bottleneck for self-driving technology isn't sensors - it's AI. Building a car that collects enough sensory data to enable self-driving is easy. Building a car AI that actually drives well in a diverse range of conditions is hard.

which cameras have stereoscopic vision and the dynamic range of an eye? Even if what you're saying is true, which it's not, cameras are so inferior to eyes it's not even funny

> which cameras have stereoscopic vision

Any 2 cameras separated by a few inches.

> dynamic range of an eye

Many cameras nowadays match or exceed the eye in dynamic range. Specially if you consider that cameras can vary their exposure from frame to frame, similar to the eye, but much faster.

Re: AI is different

#582

Post by kannanvijayan »

leshow wrote: post #198
kannanvijayan wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue against the entire perspective of evaluating every policy idea along one-dimensional modernist polemics put forwards as "the least worst solution to all of human economy for all time". Right now the communists in China are beating us at capitalism. I'm starting to find the entire analytical framework of using these ideologies ("communism", "capitalism") to evaluate _anything_ to be highly suspect, and maybe…

It's the same here. Calling what the west has a "free-market capitalist" system is also a lie. At every level there is massive state intervention. Most discoveries come from publicly funded work going on at research universities or from billions pushed into the defense sector that has developed all the technology we use today from computers to the internet to all the technology in your phone. That's no more a free-ma…

My thoughts on these ideologies lately have shifted to viewing them as "secular religions". There are many characteristics that line up with that perspective.

Both communist and capitalist purists tend to be enriched for atheists (speaking as an atheist myself). Maybe some of that is people who have fallen out with religion over superstitions and other primitivisms, and are looking to replace that with something else.

Like religions, the movements have their respective post-hoc anointed scriptural prophets: Marx for one and Smith for the other.. along with a host of lesser saints.

Like religions, they are very prescriptive and overarching and proclaim themselves to have a better connection with some greater, deeper underlying truth (in this case about human behaviour and how it organizes).

For analytical purposes there's probably still value in the underlying texts - a lot of Smith and Marx's observations about society and human behaviour are still very salient.

But these ideologies, the outgrowths from those early analytical works, seem utterly devoid of any value whatsoever. What is even the point of calling something capitalist or communist. It's a meaningless label.

These days I eschew that model entirely and try to keep to a more strict analytical understanding on a per-policy basis. Organized around certain principles, but eschewing ideology entirely. It just feels like a mental trap to do otherwise.

Re: AI is different

#583

Post by andai »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #177

> However, if AI avoids plateauing long enough I'm not sure how someone can seriously write this after the release of GPT-5. Models have started to plateau since ChatGPT came out (3 years ago) and GPT-5 has been the final nail in this coffin.

o3 was actually GPT-5. They just gave it a stupid name, and made it impractical for general usage.

But in terms of wow factor, it was a step change on the order of GPT-3 -> GPT-4.

So now they're stuck slapping the GPT-5 label on marginal improvements because it's too awkward to wait for the next breakthrough now.

On that note, o4-mini was much better for general usage (speed and cost). It was my go-to for web search too, significantly better than 4o and only took a few seconds longer. (Like a mini Deep Research.)

Boggles the mind that they removed it from the UI. I'm adding it back to mine right now.

Re: AI is different

#584

Post by monknomo »

aurareturn wrote: post #16

We are not there, yet, but if AI could replace a sizable amount of workers, the economic system will be put to a very hard test. Moreover, companies could be less willing to pay for services that their internal AIs can handle or build from scratch. There will be fewer very large companies in terms of human size. There will be many more companies that are much smaller because you don't need as many workers to do the s…

if these small companies are all just fronts on the prompts (a "feature" if you will) of the large ai companies, why do the large ai companies not just add that feature and eat the little guy's lunch?

Re: AI is different

#585

Post by exasperaited »

> It was not even clear that we were so near to create machines that could understand the human language

It's not really clear to me to what extent LLMs even do *understand* human language. They are very good at saying things that sound like a responsive answer, but the head-scratching, hard-to-mentally-visualise aspect of all of this is that this isn't the same thing at all.

Re: AI is different

#586

Post by glhaynes »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #546
keiferski wrote: post #411

There’s a simple flaw in this reasoning: Just because X can be replaced by Y today doesn’t imply that it can do so in a Future where we are aware of Y, and factor it into the background assumptions about the task. In more concrete terms: if “not being powered by AI” becomes a competitive advantage, then AI won’t be meaningfully replacing anything in that market. You can already see this with YouTube: AI-generated vid…

It's becoming a negative label because they aren't as good. I'm not saying it will happen, but it's possible to imagine a future in which AI videos are generally better, and if that happens, almost by definition, people will favor them (otherwise they aren't "better").

I'm not on Facebook, but, from what I can tell, this has arguably already happened for still images on it. (If defining "better" as "more appealing to/likely to be re-shared by frequent users of Facebook.")

Re: AI is different

#587

Post by andai »

jongjong wrote: post #154

People thought it was the end of history and innovation would be all about funding elaborate financial schemes; but now with AI people are finding themselves running all these elaborate money-printing machines and they're unsure if they should keep focusing on those schemes as before or actually try to automate stuff. The risk barrier has been lowered a lot to actually innovate, almost as low risk as doing a scheme b…

They've made it pretty clear with the GPT-5 launch that they don't understand their product or their users. They managed to simultaneously piss off technical and non-technical people.

It doesn't seem like they ever really wanted to be a consumer company. Even in the GPT-5 launch they kept going on about how surprised they are that ChatGPT got any users.

Re: AI is different

#588

Post by AIPedant »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #80

This is an accurate assessment. I do feel that there is a routine bias on HN to underplay AI. I think it's people not wanting to lose control or relative status in the world. AI is an existential threat to the unique utility of humans, which has been the last line of defense against absolute despotism (i.e. a tyrannical government will not kill all its citizens because it still needs them to perform jobs. If humans a…

> it's people not wanting to lose control or relative status in the world.

It's amazing how widespread this belief is among the HN crowd, despite being a shameless ad hominem with zero evidence. I think there are a lot of us who assume the reasonable hypothesis is "LLMs are a compelling new computing paradigm, but researchers and Big Tech are overselling generative AI due to a combination of bad incentives and sincere ideological/scientific blindness. 2025 artificial neural networks are not meaningfully intelligent." There has not been sufficient evidence to overturn this hypothesis and an enormous pile of evidence supporting it.

I do not necessarily believe humans are smarter than orcas, it is too difficult to say. But orcas are undoubtedly smarter than any AI system. There are billions of non-human "intelligent agents" on planet Earth to compare AI against, and instead we are comparing AI to humans based on trivia and trickery. This is the basic problem with AI, and it always has had this problem: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1045339.1045340 The field has always been flagrantly unscientific, and it might get us nifty computers, but we are no closer to "intelligent" computing than we were when Drew McDermott wrote that article. E.g. MuZero has zero intelligence compared to a cockroach; instead of seriously considering this claim AI folks will just sneer "are you even dan in Go?" Spiders are not smarter than beavers even if their webs seem more careful and intricate than beavers' dams... that said it is not even clear to me that our neural networks are capable of spider intelligence! "Your system was trained on 10,000,00 outdoor spiderwebs between branches and bushes and rocks and has super-spider performance in those domains... now let's bring it into my messy attic."

Re: AI is different

#589

Post by monknomo »

aurareturn wrote: post #54
breuleux wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'll be easy to make new software. I don't know if it's going to be easy to sell it. The more software AI can write, the more of a commodity software will become, and the harder the value of software will tank. It's not magic.

The more software AI can write, the more of a commodity software will become, and the harder the value of software will tank. It's not magic. Total size of the software industry will still increase. Today, a car repairshop might have a need for a custom software that will make their operations 20% more efficient. But they don't have nearly enough money to hire a software engineer to build it for them. With AI, it mig…

this seems pretty unlikely to me. I am not sure I have seen any non-digital business desire anything more custom than "a slightly better spreadsheet". Like, sure I can imagine a desire for something along the lines of "jailbroken vw scanner" but I think you are grossly overestimating how much software impacts a regular business's efficiency

Re: AI is different

#590

Post by monknomo »

jrvarela56 wrote: post #278

This whole ‘what are we going to do’ I think is way out of proportion even if we do end up with agi. Let’s say whatever the machines do better than humans, gets done by machines. Suddenly the bottleneck is going to shift to those things where humans are better. We’ll do that and the machines will try to replace that labor too. And then again, and again. Throughout this process society becomes wealthier, TVs get cheap…

you should check out what happened to steelworkers when the mills all moved to cheaper places.
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