Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

cnn.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

621–630 of 1001 posts

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#621

Post by fhd2 »

kergonath wrote: post #584
tdeck wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think the main bottlenecks are right now?

Quality control, for one. The state of commercial software is appalling. Writing code itself is not enough to get a useable piece of software. LLMs are also not very useful for long term strategy or to come up with novel features or combinations of features. They also are not great at maintaining existing code, particularly without comprehensive test suites. They are good at coming up with tests for boiler plate code…

Considering how software is increasingly made out of seperate components and services, integration testing can become pretty damn difficult. So quite often, the public release is the first serious integration test.

From my experience, this stuff is rarely introduced to save developers from typing in the code for their logic. Actual reasons I observe:

1. SaaS sales/marketing pushing their offerings on decision makers - software being a pop culture, this works pretty well. It can be hard for internal staff to push back on What Everyone Is Using (TM). Even if it makes little to no sense.

2. Outsourcing liability, maintenance, and general "having to think about it". Can be entirely valid, but often it indeed comes from an "I don't want to think of it" kind of place.

I don't see this stuff slowing down GenAI or not, mainly because it has usually little to do with saving time or money.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#622

Post by madaxe_again »

snowwrestler wrote: post #400

Historically, people have been pretty good at predicting the effects of new technologies on existing jobs. But quite bad at predicting the new jobs / careers / industries that are eventually created with those technologies. This is why free market economies create more wealth over time than centrally planned economies: the free market allows more people to try seemingly crazy ideas, and is faster to recognize good id…

When steam engines came along, an awful lot of people argued that being able to pump water from mines faster, while inarguably useful, would not have any broad economical impact. Only madmen saw the Newcomen engine and thought “ah, railways!”. Those madmen became extraordinarily wealthy. Vast categories of work were eliminated, others were created.

I think this situation is very similar in terms of the underestimation of scope of application, however differs in the availability of new job categories - but then that may be me underestimating new categories which are as yet as unforeseen as stokers and train conductors once were.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#623

Post by lozenge »

simonsarris wrote: post #465

I think the real white collar bloodbath is that the end of ZIRP was the end of infinite software job postings, and the start of layoffs. I think its easy to now point to AI, but it seems like a canard for the huge thing that already happened. just look at this: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1JmOr In terms of magnitude the effect of this is just enormous and still being felt, and never recovered to pre-2020 lev…

Macroeconomic policy always changes, recessions come and go, but it's not a permanent change in the way e-commerce or AI is.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#624

Post by imtringued »

Flemlo wrote: post #570
threeseed wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are we in 0.1 of GenAI ? It's been developed for nearly a decade now. And each successive model that has been released has done nothing to fundamentally change the use cases that the technology can be applied to i.e. those which are tolerant of a large percentage of incoherent mistakes. Which isn't all that many. So you can keep your 10x better and 100x cheaper models because they are of limited usefulness let al…

A decade? The explosion of funding, awareness etc only happened after gpt-3 launch

That was five years ago not yesterday.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#625

Post by seanhunter »

tsunamifury wrote: post #594
godelski wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet we're what? 5 years into "AI will replace programmers in 6 months"? 10 years into "we'll have self driving cars next year" We're 10 years into "it's just completely obvious that within 5 years deep learning is going to replace radiologists" Moravec's paradox strikes again and again. But this time it's different and it's completely obvious now, right?

[flagged]

I consulted a radiologist more than 5 years after Hinton said that it was completely obvious that radiologists would be replaced by AI in 5 years. I strongly suspect they were not an AI.

Why do I think this?

1) They smelled slightly funny. 2) They got the diagnosis wrong.

OK maybe #2 is a red herring. But I stand by the other reason.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#626

Post by bjt12345 »

bawolff wrote: post #488
bjt12345 wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem seems to be two-fold. Firstly, the capex is currently too high for all but the few. This is a rather obvious statement, sure. But the impact is a lot of companies "have tried language models and they didn't work", and the capex is laughable. Secondly, there's a corporate paralysis over AI. I received a panicky policy statement written in legalaise forbidding employees from using LLMs in any form. Written…

> Firstly, the capex is currently too high for all but the few. > This is a rather obvious statement, Nobody is saying companies have to make LLMs themselves. SASS is a thing.

By SAAS I assume you mean public LLMs, the problem is the hand-wringing occurring over intellectual property leaking from the company. Companies are actually writing policies banning their use.

In regards to Private LLMs, the situation has become disappointing in the 6 months.

I can only think of Mistral as being a genuine vendor.

But given the limitations in context window size, fine tuning is still necessary, and even that requires capex that I rarely see.

But my comment comes from the fact that I heard from several sources, smart people say "we tried language models at work and it failed".

However in my discussion with them, they have no concept of the size of the datacentres used by the webscalers.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#627

Post by imtringued »

wiseowise wrote: post #616
conradkay wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That only works if you're one of very few people with the tool. Otherwise the rest of your team is now 2x as productive as you.

That’s assuming they were as productive as me in the first place.

How would you know? What if they are following your strategy and are hiding their "power level"?

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#628

Post by GoblinSlayer »

saubeidl wrote: post #617
leflambeur wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's simply the old Capital vs Labor struggle. CEOs and VCs all sing in the same choir, and for the past 3 years the tune is "be leaner". p.s.: I'm a big fan of yours on Twitter.

Except Labor in Tech is unique in that it has zero class consciousness and often actively roots for their exploiters. If we were to unionize, we could force this machine to a halt and shift the balance of power back in our favor. But we don't, because many of us have been brainwashed to believe we're on the same side as the ones trying to squeeze us.

>If we were to unionize

Last time it was tried the union coerced everyone to root for their exploiters. People that unionize aren't magically different.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#629

Post by solumunus »

digitcatphd wrote: post #474
simonsarris wrote: post #465

I think the real white collar bloodbath is that the end of ZIRP was the end of infinite software job postings, and the start of layoffs. I think its easy to now point to AI, but it seems like a canard for the huge thing that already happened. just look at this: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1JmOr In terms of magnitude the effect of this is just enormous and still being felt, and never recovered to pre-2020 lev…

As of now yes. But we are still in day 0.1 of GenAI. Do you think this will be the case when o3 models are 10x better and 100x cheaper? There will be a turning point but it’s not happened yet.

I use LLM’s daily and live them but at the current rate of progress it’s just not really something worth worrying about. Those that are hysterical about AI seem to think LLM’s are getting exponentially better when in fact diminishing returns are hitting hard. Could some new innovation change that? It’s possible but it’s not inevitable or at least not necessarily imminent.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#630

Post by hengheng »

tsunamifury wrote: post #594
godelski wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet we're what? 5 years into "AI will replace programmers in 6 months"? 10 years into "we'll have self driving cars next year" We're 10 years into "it's just completely obvious that within 5 years deep learning is going to replace radiologists" Moravec's paradox strikes again and again. But this time it's different and it's completely obvious now, right?

[flagged]

I have a fusion reactor to sell to you.
Post reply on HN