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

theguardian.com

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

#61

Post by pessimizer »

They're so obviously going to fail, but in a good way. The idea is that they were going to get the world addicted then raise the prices, but the reality is that there's going to be a race for the bottom in pricing because none of them are significantly better than the others. They don't own anything, it's just math; they can be undercut by an OSS bomb from China at any given moment.

Even worse, they've bet against the math not advancing. If it gets significantly more power-efficient, which literally could happen tomorrow if the right paper goes up on arxiv, maybe a 10 year old laptop could give "good enough" results. All those data centers are now trash and your companies are now worth a negative trillion dollars.

I think all of these factors are completely independent of whether AI works or not, or how well it works. Personally, I don't care if it replaces programmers: get another job. I just have experienced it, and it is at this point mediocre.

Of course I am not using the bleeding edge, and I am not privy to the top secret insider stuff which may well be orders of magnitude better. But if they've got it, why would they keep it a secret when people are desperate to give them money? If they're hiding it, it's something that they know that somebody could analyze and knock off, and then it's a race for the bottom again.

In a race for the bottom, we all win. Except the people and economies who bet their lives on it being a race to the top.

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

#62

Post by [deleted] »

whimsicalism wrote: post #59
bee_rider wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#63

Post by artninja1988 »

kuerbel wrote: post #6
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.

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…

> The piece isn’t claiming that AI tools are useless or that they don’t materially improve day-to-day work

Would you call something that could replace your labor "spicy auto complete"? He also evokes nfts and blockchain, for some reason. To me this phrasing makes it sound like he thinks they are damn near useless.

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

#64

Post by bee_rider »

whimsicalism wrote: post #59
bee_rider wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s fair.

I was accepting sodapopcan’s premise while responding to them. My joke was intended to be aimed at the posting guides and these little Hackernews traditions. But, it was a bit dismissive toward you, which is a little rude. Sorry.

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

#66

Post by sodapopcan »

whimsicalism wrote: post #59
bee_rider wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This isn't a conversation, lol.

I don't have much to offer here (and yes, sorry, after I made my snarky remark I realize you had indeed read the article). I recognize AI's capabilities but mainly don't use it primarily for political reasons but also because I just enjoy writing code. I'll sometimes use up the chatgpt free limit using it as a somewhat better search engine (and it's not always better) but there's no way I'm paying for agents, which is everything to do with where the money is going, not the money itself. Of course there are other reasons outside of how AI is used by programmers that would derail the general theme of these threads.

I'm just drawn to these threads for the drama and sometimes it triggers me and I write a snarky throwaway comment. If the discussions, and particularly the companies themselves, could shift to actual societal good it can do and how it is concretely getting there, that would hold my attention. Instead we get Sona etc.

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

#68

Post by Eggpants »

baron816 wrote: post #44

It’s so strange to see people accusing tech companies of using AI to concentrate power and wealth when thus far, AI has almost entirely been all consumer surplus. You have crazily high competition in the industry that allows you the consumer to use SOTA models for free, or even run them yourself. My prediction is that this will keep going all the way to the AGI stage. Someone will release (or leak) an AGI capable mod…

OpenAI and Microsoft have defined AGI as a revenue number so yeah maybe using that definition.

I believe AGI will require the ability to self tune its own Neutral network coefficients which the current tech cannot do because I can’t deduce it’s own errors. Oh sorry “hallucinations”. Developing brains learn from both pain and verbal feedback (no, not food!) etc.

It’s an interesting problem where just telling a LLM model it’s wrong is not enough to adjust Billions of parameters with.

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

#70

Post by nemo »

jader201 wrote: post #65
dayofthedaleks wrote: post #3

Maybe worth noting in the title this is from Cory Doctorow. https://archive.is/ctuVG

HN rarely (never?) attributes authors in the titles of articles. Why should we make an exception in this case?

For me it would be a strong signal to skip the article and discussion, YMMV.
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