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AI is different

antirez.com

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Re: AI is different

#641

Post by m4nu3l »

azemetre wrote: post #629
m4nu3l wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having your life dependent on a government that controls all AIs would be much worse. The government could end up controlling something more intelligent than the entire rest of the population. I have no doubt it will use it in a bad way. I hope that AIs will end up distributed enough. Having a government controlling it is the opposite of that.

Why would this be worse than the current situation of private actors accountable to no one controlling this technology? It's not like I can convince Zuckerberg to change his ways. At least with a democratic government I have means to try and build a coalition then enact change. The alternative requires having money and that seems like an inherently undemocratic system. Why can't AIs be controlled with democratic inst…

>Why would this be worse than the current situation of private actors accountable to no one controlling this technology? It's not like I can convince Zuckerberg to change his ways.

As long as Zuckerberg has no army forcing me, I'm fine with that. The issue would be whether he could breach contracts or get away with fraud. But if AI is sufficiently distributed, this is less likely to happen.

>At least with a democratic government I have means to try and build a coalition then enact change. The alternative requires having money and that seems like an inherently undemocratic system.

I don't think of democracy as a goal to be achieved. I'm OK with democracy in so far it leads to what I value.

The big problem with democracy is that most of the time it doesn't lead to rational choices, even when voters are rational. In markets, for instance, you have an incentive to be rational, and if you aren't, the market will tend to transfer resources from you to someone more rational.

No such mechanism exists in a democracy; I have no incentive to do research and think hard about my vote. It's going to be worth the same as the vote of someone who believes the Earth is flat anyway.

Re: AI is different

#642

Post by nprateem »

antirez wrote: post #484
apwell23 wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Book and music album covers are often done with AI These suck. Things made with AI just suck big time. Not only are they stupid but they have negative value on your product. I cannot think of single purely AI made video, song or any form of art that is any a good. All AI has done is falsely convince ppl that they can now create things that they had no skills to do before AI.

This is not inherent to AI, but how the AI models were recently trained (by preference agreement of many random users). Look for the latest Krea / Black Forest Labs paper on AI style. The "AI look" can be removed. Songs right now are terrible. For the videos, things are going to be very different once people can create full movies in their computers. Many will have access to the ability to create movies, and a few wi…

The trouble is, I'm perfectly well aware I can go to the AI tools, ask it to do something and it'll do it. So there's no point me wasting time eg reading AI blog posts as they'll probably just tell me what I've just read. The same goes for any media.

It'll only stand on its own when significant work is required. This is possible today with writing, provided the AI is directed to incorporate original insights.

And unless it's immediately obvious to consumers a high level of work has gone into it, it'll all be tarred by the same brush.

Any workforce needs direction. Thinking an AI can creatively execute when not given a vision is flawed.

Either people will spaff out easy to generate media (which will therefore have no value due to abundance), or they'll spend time providing insight and direction to create genuinely good content... but again unless it's immediately obvious this has been done, it will again suffer the tarring through association.

The issue is really one of deciding to whom to give your attention. It's the reason an ordinary song produced by a megastar is a hit vs when it's performed by an unsigned artist. Or, as in the famous experiment, the same world class violinist gets paid about $22 for a recital while busking vs selling out a concert hall for $100 per seat that same week.

This is the issue AI, no matter how good, will have to overcome.

Re: AI is different

#643

Post by nikolayasdf123 »

breuleux wrote: post #43
aurareturn wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's so easy to make new software and sell it using AI, 6 of those 600 people who are unemployed will have ideas that require 100 engineers each to make. They will build a prototype, get funding, and hire 99 engineers each. There are also plenty of ideas that aren't profitable with 2 salaries but is with 1. Many will be able to make those ideas happen with AI helping.

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.

> sell it

exactly. have you seen App Store recently? over-saturaded with junk apps. try to sell something these days. it is notoriously hard to make any money there.

Re: AI is different

#644

Post by nikolayasdf123 »

deepfriedbits wrote: post #38

I am a relentlessly optimistic person and this is the first technology that I've seen that worries me in the decades I've been in the biz. It's a wonderful breakthrough, nearly indistinguishable from magic, but we're going to have to figure something out – whether that's Universal Basic Income (UBI) or something along those lines, otherwise, the loss of jobs that is coming will lead to societal unrest or worse.

probably "or worse"

Re: AI is different

#645

Post by mgradowski »

antirez wrote: post #461
mgradowski wrote: post #459

I wouldn't trust a taxi driver's predictions about the future of economics and society, why would I trust some database developer's? Actually, I take that back. I might trust the taxi driver.

The point is that you don't have to "trust" me, you need to argue with me, we need to discuss about the future. This way, we can form ideas that we can use to understand if a given politician or the other will be right, when we will be called to vote. We can also form stronger ideas to try to influence other people that right now have a vague understanding of what AI is and what it could be. We will be the ones that…

Sorry boss, I'm just tired of the debate itself. It assumes a certain level of optimism, while I'm skeptical that meaningfully productive applications of LLMs etc. will be found once hype settles, let alone ones that will reshape society like agriculture or the steam engine did.

Re: AI is different

#646

Post by vlovich123 »

thegrim33 wrote: post #632
gdubs wrote: post #622

AI has been improving at a very rapid pace, which means that a lot of people have really outdated priors. I see this all the time online where people are dismissive about AI in a way that suggests it's been a while since they last checked-in on the capabilities of models. They wrote off the coding ability of ChatGPT on version 3.5, for instance, and have missed all the advancements that have happened since. Or they t…

To play devil's advocate, how is your argument not a 'no true scottsman' argument? As in, "oh, they had a negative view of X, well that's of course because they weren't testing the new and improved X2 model which is different". Fast forward a year .. "Oh, they have a negative view on X2, well silly them, they need to be using the Y24 model, that's where it's at, the X2 model isn't good anymore". Fast forward a year .…

How is that different than the models today are actually usable for non trivial things and more capable than yesterdays and it’s also true that tomorrow’s models will also probably be more capable than today’s?

For example, I dismissed AI three years ago because it couldn’t do anything I needed it to. Today I use it for certain things and it’s not quite capable of other things. Tomorrow it might be capable of a lot more.

Yes, priors have to be updated when the ground truth changes and the capabilities of AI change rapidly. This is how chess engines on supercomputers were competitive in the 90s then hybrid systems became the leading edge competitive and then machines took over for good and never looked back.

Re: AI is different

#647

Post by nikolayasdf123 »

pton_xd wrote: post #103

AI is only different if it reaches a hard takeoff state and becomes self-aware, self-motivated, and self-improving. Until then it's an amazing productivity tool, but only that. And even then we're still decades away from the impact being fully realized in society. Same as the internet.

Internet did not take away jobs (only relocated support/SWE from USA to India/Vietnam)

these AI "productivity" tools straight up eliminating jobs. and in turn wealth that otherwise supported families, humans, and powered economy. it is directly "removing" humans from workforce and from what that work was supporting.

not even hard takeoff is necessary for collapse.

Re: AI is different

#648

Post by Davidzheng »

m4nu3l wrote: post #595

>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. Nor is it possible to imagine a system where a few mega companies are the only providers of intelligence: either AI will be eventually a commodity, or the governments wou…

Sorry this doesn't make sense to me. Given tier one is much richer and more powerful than tier two, any natural resources and land traded at tier two is only at mercy of tier one not interfering. As soon as tier one needs some land or natural resources from tier two, tier two needs are automatically superseded. It's like animal community bear human civ

Re: AI is different

#649

Post by m4nu3l »

azemetre wrote: post #618
kortilla wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Governments are not the source of wealth. They are just a requisite component to allow people to create it and maintain it.

This doesn't pass the sniff test, governments generate wealth all the time. Public education, public healthcare, public research, public housing. These are all programs that generate an enormous amount of wealth and allow citizens to flourish.

>governments generate wealth all the time. Public education, public healthcare, public research, public housing. > These are all programs that generate an enormous amount of wealth and allow citizens to flourish.

I thought you meant that governments generate wealth because the things you listed have value. If so, that doesn't prove they generate wealth by my argument, unless you can prove those things are more valuable than alternative ways to use the resources the government used to produce them and that the government is more efficient in producing those.

You can argue that those are good because you think redistribution is good. But you can have redistribution without the government directly providing goods and services.

Re: AI is different

#650

Post by Davidzheng »

keiferski wrote: post #474
antirez wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To understand why this is too optimistic, you have to look at things where AI is already almost human-level. Translations are more and more done exclusively with AI or with a massive AI help (with the effect of destroying many jobs anyway) at this point. Now ebook reading is switching to AI. Book and music album covers are often done with AI (even if this is most of the times NOT advertised), and so forth. If AI prog…

I can buy the idea that simple specific tasks like translation will be dramatically cut down by AI. But even then – any serious legal situation (like a contract) is going to want a human in the loop to verify that the translation is actually correct. This will require actual translator skills. AI art seems to basically only be viable when it can’t be identified as AI art. Which might not matter if the intention is to…

Isn't "But even then – any serious legal situation (like a contract) is going to want a human in the loop to verify that the translation is actually correct. This will require actual translator skills." only true if the false positive rate of the verifier is not much higher than the failure rate of the AI? At some point it's like asking a human to double check a calculator
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