Earlier quoted context omitted.
Places that luckily avoided colonialism haven’t improved a zilch.
> Places that luckily avoided colonialism haven’t improved a zilch Thailand and China would like a word.
So would Liberia and Ethiopia.
Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits
581–590 of 668 posts
Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits
#582Earlier quoted context omitted.
With telecom, we benefited from skipping generations. I got into a telecom management program because in 2001-ish, I was passed by on a village street by a farmer bicycling while talking on his cellphone. Mind you my family could not afford cellphone call rates at the time. In fact, the technology was introduced out here assuming corporate / elite users. The market reality became such that telcos were forced kicking…
That kind of extreme poverty juxtaposed to extreme wealth, and all of the social ills that come along with it, have always been a fixture of the American experience. I don’t think it’s a good barometer or whether the USA is in decline when there has long been pockets of urban decay, massive inequality, drug use etc. Jump back to any point in American history and you’ll find something similar if not much, much worse.…
Yeah, I sort of recounted a stark memory. That juxtaposition was a bit too much.
However, it wasn't just that, and the feeling has only solidified in three further visits. It isn't rational, very much a nose thing, coming from an ordinary software programmer (definitely not an economist, sociologist, think tank).
Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits
#583He's (unsurprisingly) making an analogy to the dotcom bubble, which seems to me correct. There was a bubble, many non-viable companies got funded and died, and nevertheless the internet did eventually change everything.
The analogy to the dot com bubble is leaky at best. AI will hit a point of exponential improvement, we are already in the outer parts of this loop. It will become so valuable so fast we struggle to comprehend it.
Then why has my experience with AI started to see such dramatically diminishing returns?
2022-2023 AI changed enough to be me to convert from skeptic, to a believer. I started working as an AI Engineer and wanted to be on the front lines.
2023-2024 Again, major changes, especially as far as coding goes. I started building very promising prototypes for companies, was able to build a laundry list of projects that were just boring to write.
2024-2025 My day to day usage has decreased. The models seem better at fact finding but worse for code. None of those "cool" prototypes from myself or anyone else I knew seemed to be able to become more than just that. Many of the cool companies I started learning about in 2022 started to reduce staff and are running into financial troubles.
The only area where I've been impressed is the relatively niche improvements in open source text/image to video models. It's wild that you can make sure animated films on a home computer now.
But even there I'm seeing no signs of "exponential improvement".
Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits
#584I'm paying for 3 different AI services and our company and most of my team is also paying money for various AI stuff. Sounds like a real industry to me. There's just going to be VC losers as always, where usually "losing" is getting bought by a bigger company or aquihires instead of 100xing or going public.
My team is doing the same, and yet all of us still aren't sure that we're actually more productive overall. If anything it seems to me like we've just swapped coding with what is effectively a lot more code review (of whatever the LLM spits out), at the cost of also losing that long term understanding of a block of code that actually comes from writing it yourself (let's not pretend that a reviewer has the same depth…
If you work in a team then you are likely already not writing most of the code yourself.
There will be point where ai will consistently write better prs - you can already start to see it here and there - finding and fixing bugs in existing code, refactoring, writing tests, writing and updating documentation and prototyping are some examples of areas where it often surpasses human contribution.
Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits
#585Earlier quoted context omitted.
The analogy to the dot com bubble is leaky at best. AI will hit a point of exponential improvement, we are already in the outer parts of this loop. It will become so valuable so fast we struggle to comprehend it.
Then why has my experience with AI started to see such dramatically diminishing returns? 2022-2023 AI changed enough to be me to convert from skeptic, to a believer. I started working as an AI Engineer and wanted to be on the front lines. 2023-2024 Again, major changes, especially as far as coding goes. I started building very promising prototypes for companies, was able to build a laundry list of projects that were…
I vibe coded 5 deep ML libraries this month. I'm an MLE by trade and it would have taken me ages without AI. This wasn't possible even a year ago. I have no idea how anyone thinks the models haven't improved
Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits
#586Earlier quoted context omitted.
The analogy to the dot com bubble is leaky at best. AI will hit a point of exponential improvement, we are already in the outer parts of this loop. It will become so valuable so fast we struggle to comprehend it.
While this remains possible my main impression now is that progress seems to be slowing down rather than accelerating.
If you keep up with the research this isn't the case, ML timelines have always been slower than anyone likes
Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits
#587Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're ever been to a third world country then you'd see how this is completely untrue. The dotcom boom has revolutionized the way of life for people in countries like India. Even for the average person in America, the ability to do so many activities online that would have taken hours otherwise (eg. shopping, research, DMV/government activities, etc). The fact that we see negative consequences of this like social…
I think you’re putting too much weight on cost (time, money), and not enough weight on “quality of life”, in your analysis. For sure, we can shop faster, and (attempt) research and admin faster. But… Shopping: used to be fun. You’d go with friends or family, discuss the goods together, gossip, bump into people you knew, stop for a sandwich, maybe mix shopping and a cinema or dinner trip. All the while, you’d be aware…
> I think you’re putting too much weight on cost (time, money), and not enough weight on “quality of life”, in your analysis.
"Quality of life" is a hugely privileged topic to be zooming in on. For the vast majority of people both inside and outside the US, Time and Money are by far the most important factors in their lives.
Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits
#588AI is a solution searching for a problem.
This is what he acknowledges.
Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits
#589Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you’re putting too much weight on cost (time, money), and not enough weight on “quality of life”, in your analysis. For sure, we can shop faster, and (attempt) research and admin faster. But… Shopping: used to be fun. You’d go with friends or family, discuss the goods together, gossip, bump into people you knew, stop for a sandwich, maybe mix shopping and a cinema or dinner trip. All the while, you’d be aware…
> I think you’re putting too much weight on cost (time, money), and not enough weight on “quality of life”, in your analysis. "Quality of life" is a hugely privileged topic to be zooming in on. For the vast majority of people both inside and outside the US, Time and Money are by far the most important factors in their lives.
Setting aside time, is money not downstream from quality of life? Meaning, in a better world one might not need to care as much about money? I believe that time and quality of life are congruent - good quality of life means control over one’s own time.
Re: Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits
#590Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then why has my experience with AI started to see such dramatically diminishing returns? 2022-2023 AI changed enough to be me to convert from skeptic, to a believer. I started working as an AI Engineer and wanted to be on the front lines. 2023-2024 Again, major changes, especially as far as coding goes. I started building very promising prototypes for companies, was able to build a laundry list of projects that were…
I vibe coded 5 deep ML libraries this month. I'm an MLE by trade and it would have taken me ages without AI. This wasn't possible even a year ago. I have no idea how anyone thinks the models haven't improved
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