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AI is different

antirez.com

681–690 of 920 posts

Re: AI is different

#681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't related to what I was commenting on where the other poster came across as not seeing government by the governed as having economic worth.

Synthesizing between you two’s thoughts, extrapolating somewhat: - human individuals create wealths - groups of humans can create kinds of wealth that isn’t possible for a single indovidual. This can be a wide variety of associations: companies, project teams, governments, etc. - governments (formal or less formal) create the playing field for individuals and groups of individuals to create wealth

Thanks for this comment. You definitely crystalized the two thoughts well and succinctly. Definitely a skill I wish I had. :D

Re: AI is different

#682
post #680
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AI has been improving at a very rapid pace, which means that a lot of people have really outdated priors.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…

Is there anything you can tell me that will help me drop the nagging feeling that gradient descent trained models will just never be good? I understand all of what you said, but I can't get over that fact that the term AI is being used for these architectures. It seems like the industry is just trying to do a cool parlor trick in convincing the masses this is somehow AI from science fiction. Maybe I'm being overly cy…

Wouldn’t you say that now, finally, what people call AI combines subsymbolic systems („gradient descent“) with search and with symbolic systems (tool calls)?

I had a professor in AI who was only working on symbolic systems such as SAT-solvers, Prolog etc. and the combination of things seems really promising.

Oh, and what would be really nice is another level of memory or fast learning ability that goes beyond burning in knowledge through training alone.

Re: AI is different

#683
post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but can the market not be wrong? Wrong in the sense that, failing to meet our expectations as a useful engine of society? As I understood, what was meant with this this article is that AI completely changes the equations across the board that current market direction appears dangerously irrational to OP. I'm not sure what was meant with your comment though besides haggling over semantics and attacking some in-exp…

Of course it can be wrong, and it is in many instances. It's a religion. The vast, vast majority of us would prefer to live in a stable climate with unpolluted water and some fish left in the oceans, yet "the market" is leading us elsewhere.

I don't like the idea of likening the market to a religion, but I think it definitely has some glaring flaws. In my mind the biggest is that the market is very effective at showing the consensus of short-term priorities, but it has no ability to reflect long-term strategic consensus.

Re: AI is different

#684
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the most sensible answer would be something like UBI. Having had the experience of living under communist regime prior to 1989 I have zero trust in the state providing support, while I am totally dependent and have no recourse. Instead I would rather rely on my own two hands like my grandparents did. I see a world where we can build anything we want with our own hands and AI automation. Jobs might become op…

In your world where jobs become "optional" because a private company has decided to fire half their workforce, and the state also does not provide some kind of support, what do all the "optional" people do?

Murder more CEOs and then start working your way down the org chart? Blow up corporate headquarters, data centers, etc? Lots of ways to be productive.

Re: AI is different

#685

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…

> 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.

Ive made a ton of songs I enjoy with suno. Theyre not the greatest, but theyre definitely not the worst either.

Re: AI is different

#686

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…

> because made by AI is becoming a negative label in a world

The negative label is the old world pulling the new one back, it rarely sticks.

I'm old enough to remember the folks saying "We used to have the paint the background blue" and "All music composers need to play an instrument" (or turn into a symbol).

Re: AI is different

#687
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

Not just land and natural resources: All means of production, including infrastructure, intellectual property, capital, the entire economy.

Re: AI is different

#688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who used to be in the writing industry (a whole range of jobs), this take strikes me as a bit starry-eyed. Throw-away snippets, good-enough marketing, generic correspondence, hastily compiled news items, flairful filler text in books etc., all this used to be a huge chunk of the work, in so many places. The average customer had only a limited ability to judge the quality of texts, to put it mildly. Transla…

What I understand is AI leads certain markets to be smaller in terms of economics. Wayy smaller actually. Only few industry will keep growing because of this.

Specifically markets where “good enough” quality is acceptable.

Translation is an good example. Still need humans for perfect quality, but most use cases arguably don’t require perfect.

And for the remaining translators their job has now morphed into quality control.

Re: AI is different

#689
post #72
post #59

I'm skeptical of arguments like this. If we look at most impactful technologies since the year 2000, AI is not even in my top 3. Social networking, mobile computing, and cloud computing have all done more to alter society and daily life than has AI. And yes, I recognize that AI has already created profound change, in that every software engineer now depends heavily on copilots, in that education faces a major integri…

> in that every software engineer now depends heavily on copilots That is maybe a bubble around the internet. Ime most programmers in my environment rarely use and certainly aren't dependent on it. They do also not only do code monkey-esque web programming so maybe this is sampling bias though it should be enough to refute this point.

Im on the core sql execution team at a database company and everyone on the team is using AI coding assistants. Certainly not doing any monkey-esque web programming.

Re: AI is different

#690
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This pisses me off so much. So many engineers are so excited to work on and with these systems, opening 20 prs per day to make their employers happy going “yes boss!” They think their $300k total compensation will give them a seat at the table for what they’re cheering on to come. I say that anyone who needed to go the grocery this week will not be spared by the economic downturn this tech promises. Unless you have y…

> I say that anyone who needed to go the grocery this week will not be spared by the economic downturn this tech promises. And we are getting to a point that is us or them. Big tech is investing so much money on this that if they do not succeed, they will go broke.

> Big tech is investing so much money on this that if they do not succeed, they will go broke.

Aside from what that would do to my 401(k), I think that would be a positive outcome (the going broke part).

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