691–700 of 920 posts
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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.
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Humans are notoriously bad at driving, especially in poor weather. There are more than 6 million accidents annually in the US, which is >16k a day. Most are minor, but even so - beating that shouldn't be a high bar. There is no good reason not to use LIDAR with other sensing technologies, because cameras-only just makes the job harder.
Self-driving cars beat humans on safety already. This holds for Waymos and Teslas both. They get into less accidents, mile for mile and road type for road type, and the ones they get into trend towards less severe. Why? Because self-driving cars don't drink and drive. This is the critical safety edge a machine holds over a human. A top tier human driver in the top shape outperforms this generation of car AIs. But a c…
Generally you are comparing Apples and Oranges if you are comparing the safety records of i.e. Waymos to that of the general driving population.
Waymos drive under incredibly favorable circumstances. They also will simply stop or fall back on human intervention if they don't know what to do – failing in their fundamental purpose of driving from point A to point B. To actually get comparable data, you'd have to let Waymos or Teslas do the same type of drives that human drivers do, under the same curcumstances and without the option of simply stopping when they are unsure, which they simply are not capable of doing at the moment.
That doesn't mean that this type of technology is useless. Modern self-driving and adjacent tech can make human drivers much safer. I imagine, it would be quite easy to build some AI tech that has a decent success rate in recognizing inebriated drivers and stopping the cars until they have talked to a human to get cleared for driving. I personally love intelligent lane and distance assistance technology (if done well, which Tesla doesn't in my view). Cameras and other assistive technology are incredibly useful when parking even small cars and I'd enjoy letting a computer do every parking maneuver autonomously until the end of my days. The list could go on.
Waymos have cumulatively driven about 100 million miles without a safety driver as of July 2025 (https://fifthlevelconsulting.com/waymos-100-million-autonomo...) over a span of about 5 years. This is such a tiny fraction of miles driven by US (not to speak of worldwide) drivers during that time, that it can't usefully be expressed. And they've driven these miles under some of the most favorable conditions available to current self-driving technology (completely mapped areas, reliable and stable good weather, mostly slow, inner city driving, etc.). And Waymo themselves have repeatedly said that overcoming the limitations of their tech will be incredibly hard and not guaranteed.
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…
Add LED lighting on there. It is easy to forget what a difference that made. The light pollution, but also just how dim houses were. CFL didn't last very long as a thing between incandescent and LED and houses lit with incandescents have a totally different feel.
But, for clarity, I do agree with your sentiment about their use in appropriate situations, I just have an indescribable hatred for driving at night now
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>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 democrati…
What is your alternative to democracy then? I also don't buy that groups don't make better decisions than individuals. We know that diversity of thought and opinion is one way to make better decisions in groups compared to individuals; why would there be harm in believing that consensus building, debates, adversarial processes, due process, and systems of appeal lead to worse outcomes in decision making? I'm not buyi…
I didn't say that. My example of the market includes companies that are groups of people.
> We know that diversity of thought and opinion is one way to make better decisions in groups compared to individuals; why would there be harm in believing that consensus building, debates, adversarial processes, due process, and systems of appeal lead to worse outcomes in decision making?
I can see this about myself. I don't need to use hypotheticals. Time ago, I voted for a referendum that made nuclear power impossible to build in my country. I voted just like the majority. Years later, I became passionate about economics, and only then did I realise my mistake.
It's not that I was stupid, and there were many, many debates, but I didn't put the effort into researching on my own.
The feedback in a democracy is very weak, especially because cause and effect are very hard to discern in a complex system.
Also, consensus is not enough. In various countries, there is often consensus about some Deity existing. Yet large groups of people worldwide believe in incompatible Deities. So there must be entire countries where the consensus about their Deity is wrong. If the consensus is wrong, it's even harder to get to the reality of things if there is no incentive to do that.
I think, if people get this, democracy might still be good enough to self-limit itself.
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Humans are notoriously bad at driving, especially in poor weather. There are more than 6 million accidents annually in the US, which is >16k a day. Most are minor, but even so - beating that shouldn't be a high bar. There is no good reason not to use LIDAR with other sensing technologies, because cameras-only just makes the job harder.
Self-driving cars beat humans on safety already. This holds for Waymos and Teslas both. They get into less accidents, mile for mile and road type for road type, and the ones they get into trend towards less severe. Why? Because self-driving cars don't drink and drive. This is the critical safety edge a machine holds over a human. A top tier human driver in the top shape outperforms this generation of car AIs. But a c…
Most non-impaired humans outperform the current gen. The study I saw had FSD at 10x fatalities per mile vs non-impaired drivers.
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 .…
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…
But there are plenty of us who try and walk a middle course. A lot of us have changed our opinions over time. ("When the facts change, I change my mind.") I didn't think AI models were much use for coding a year ago. The facts changed. (Claude Code came out.) Now I do. Frankly, I'd be suspicious of anyone who hasn't changed their opinions about AI in the last year.
You can believe all these things at once, and many of us do:
* LLMs are extremely impressive in what they can do. (I didn't believe I'd see something like this in my lifetime.)
* Used judiciously, they are a big productivity boost for software engineers and many other professions.
* They are imperfect and make mistakes, often in weird ways. They hallucinate. There are some trivial problems that they mess up.
* But they're not just "stochastic parrots." They can model the world and reason about it, albeit imperfectly and not like humans do.
* AI will change the world in the next 20 years
* But AI companies are overvalued at the present time and we're mostly likely in a bubble which will burst.
* Being in a bubble doesn't mean the technology is useless. (c.f. the dotcom bubble or the railroad bubble in the 19th century.)
* AGI isn't just around the corner. (There's still no way models can learn from experience.)
* A lot of people making optimistic claims about AI are doing it for self-serving boosterish reasons, because they want to pump up their stock price or sell you something
* AI has many potential negative consequences for society and mental health, and may be at least as nasty as social media in that respect
* AI has the potential to accelerate human progress in ways that really matter, such as medical research
* But anyone who claims to know the future is just guessing
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Obvious ChatGPT. I don't know how it is even a question... if you showed GPT3.5 to people from < 20th centuries there would've been a worldwide religion around it.
Interesting perspective.
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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…
There was also wide understanding that those architectures were trying to imitate small bits of what we understood was happening in the brain (see marvin minsky's perceptron etc). The hope was, as I understood it that there would be some breakthrough in neuroscience that would let the computer scientists pick up the torch and simulate what we find in nature.
None of that seems to be happening anymore and we're just interested in training enough to fool people.
"AI" companies investing in brain science would convince me otherwise. At this point they're just trying to come up with the next money printing machine.
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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.
After the trade, the tier 2 person would still be richer than they were before the trade. So tier 2 would become richer in absolute terms by trading with tier 1 in this manner. And it's very likely that what tier 2 wants from tier 1 is whatever they need to build their own AIs. So my argument still stands. They wouldn't be poorer than they are now.