AI is different • Hacker News Board

Re: AI is different

#661

Post by Eggpants » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 4:47 PM UTC

vlovich123 wrote: post #646

thegrim33 wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

It’s not that the LLMs are better, it’s the internal tools/functions being called that do the actual work are better. They didn’t spend millions to retrain a model to statistically output the number of r’s in strawberry, but just offloaded that trivial question to a function call.

So I would say the overall service provided is better than it was, thanks to functions being built based on user queries, but not the actual LLM models themselves.

Re: AI is different

#662

Post by variadix » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 4:50 PM UTC

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…

Re: YT AI content. That is because AI video is (currently) low quality. If AI video generators could spit out full length videos that rivaled or surpassed the best human made content people wouldn’t have the same association. We don’t live in that world yet, but someday we might. I don’t think “human made” will be a desirable label for _anything_, videos, software, or otherwise, once AI is as good or better than humans in that domain.

Re: AI is different

#663

Post by m4nu3l » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 5:02 PM UTC

Davidzheng wrote: post #648

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

The marginal value of natural resources decreases with quantity, and natural resources would only have a much smaller value compared to the final products produced by the AI systems. At some point, there would be an equilibrium where tier 1 wouldn't want to increase it's consumption of natural resources w.r.t. tier 2 or if they did they'd have to trade with tier 2 at a price higher than they value the resources. I have no idea what this equilibrium would look like, but natural resources are already of little value compared to consumer goods and services. The US in 2023 consumed $761.4B. of oil, but the GPD for the same year was. $27.72T

There would be another valid argument to be made about externalities. But it's not what my original argument was about.

Re: AI is different

#664

Post by rootusrootus » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 5:03 PM UTC

ACCount37 wrote: post #479

vrighter wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if additional sensors improve the ai, then your last statement is categorically untrue. The reason it worked better is that those additional sensors gave it information that wac not available in the video stream

"If." So far, every self-driving accident where the self-driving car was found to be at fault follows the same pattern: the car had all the sensory data it needed to make the right call, and it didn't make the right call. The bottleneck isn't in sensors.

In that case we're probably even further from self-driving cars than I'd have guessed. Adding more sensors is a lot cheaper than putting a sufficient amount of compute in a car.

Re: AI is different

#665

Post by yks » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 5:04 PM UTC

rootusrootus wrote: post #659

Davidzheng wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If tier 2 amounts to 95% of the population, then the amount of power currently held by tier 1 is meaningless. It is only power so long as the 95% remain cooperative.

In practice the tier 1 has the tech and know-how to convince the tier 2 to remain cooperative against their own interests. See the contemporary US where the inequality is rather high, and yet the tier 2 population is impressively protective of the rights of the tier 1. The theory that if the tier 2 has it way worse than today, that will change, remains to be proven. Persecutions against the immigrants are also rather lightweight today, so there is definitely space to ramp them up to pacify the tier 2.

Re: AI is different

#666

Post by lotsoweiners » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 5:05 PM UTC

grues-dinner wrote: post #449

juniperus wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The taxes will be most burdensome for the wealthiest and most productive of institutions, which is generally why these arrangements collapse economies and nations. UBI is hard to implement because it incentivizes non-productive behavior and disincentivizes productive activity. This creates economic crisis, taxes are basically a smaller scale version of this, UBI is like a more comprehensive wealth redistribution sche…

The problem is the "productive activity" is rather hard to define if there's so much "AI" (be it classical ML, LLM, ANI, AGI, ASI, whatever) around that nearly everything can be produced by nearly no one. The destruction of the labour theory of value has been a goal of "tech" for a while, but if they achieve it, what's the plan then? Assuming humans stay in control of the AIs because otherwise all bets are off, in a…

> Assuming humans stay in control of the AIs because otherwise all bets are off, in a case where a few fabulously wealthy (or at least "onwing/controlling", since the idea of wealth starts to become fuzzy) industrialists control the productive capacity for everything from farming to rocketry and there's no space for normal people to participate in production any more

Why do the rest of humanity even have to participate in this? Just continue on the way things were before without any super AI. Start new businesses that don’t use AI and hire humans to work there.

Re: AI is different

#667

Post by lotsoweiners » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 5:08 PM UTC

CER10TY wrote: post #304

essnine wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The assumption here that UBI "incentivizes non-productive behavior and disincentivizes productive activity" is the part that doesn't make sense. What do you think universal means? How does it disincentivize productive activity if it is provided to everyone regardless of their income/productivity/employment/whatever?

I guess the thinking goes like this: Why start a business, get a higher paying job etc if you're getting ~2k€/mo in UBI and can live off of that? Since more people will decide against starting a business or increasing their income, productive activity decreases.

If everyone has 2k/mo then nobody has 2k/mo.

Re: AI is different

#668

Post by parineum » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 5:09 PM UTC

CPLX wrote: post #638

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…

I agree with you. I am a perpetual cynic about new technology (and a GenXer so multiply that by two) and I have deeply embraced AI in all parts of my business and basically am engaging with it all day for various tasks from helping me compare restaurant options to re-tagging a million contact records in salesforce. It’s incredibly powerful and will just clearly be useful. I don’t believe it’s going to replace intelli…

> But I think at least part of the dynamic is that the SV tech hype booster train has been so profoundly full of shit for so long that you really can’t blame people for skepticism.

They are still full of shit about LLMs, even if it is useful.

Re: AI is different

#669

Post by nicce » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 5:09 PM UTC

mrob wrote: post #521

manyaoman wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, if the author truly thinks the markets are wrong about AI, he should at least let us know what kind of bets he’s making to profit from it. Otherwise the article is just handwaving.

There's no way to profitably bet on the whole economy collapsing.

AI still does not own the land and can't grow the crops without it. So maybe people in agriculture are winners. We always need food.

Re: AI is different

#670

Post by azemetre » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 5:09 PM UTC

m4nu3l wrote: post #649

azemetre wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 valuab…

I think I'm more confused. Was trying to convey the idea that wealth doesn't have to limited to the idea of money and value. Many intangible things can provide wealth too.

I should probably read more books before commenting on things I half understand, my bad.