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AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

chrbutler.com

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Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#71

Post by emp17344 »

Kiro wrote: post #61
mwhitfield wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had *very* much the opposite experience. Very nearly every AI skeptic take I read has exactly this opinion, if not always so well-articulated (until the last section, which lost me). But counterarguments always attack the complete strawman of "AI is utterly useless," which very few people, at least within the confines of the tech and business commentariat, are making.

Maybe I'm focusing too much in the hardliners but I see it everywhere, especially in tech.

Where’s all the data showing productivity increases from AI adoption? If AI is so useful, it shouldn’t be hard to prove it.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#72

Post by layer8 »

redorb wrote: post #49
hollowturtle wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are the products? This site and everywhere around the internet, on x, linkedin and so is full of crazy claims and I have yet to see a product that people need and that actually works. What I'm experiencing is a gigantic enshittification everywhere, Windows sucks, web apps are bloated, slow and uninteresting. Infrastructure goes down even with "memory safe rust" burning millions and millions of compute for scaff…

I think chatGPT itself is an epic product, Cursor has insane growth and usage. I also think they are both over-hyped, have too much a valuation.

Citing AI software as the only examples of how AI benefits developing software, has a bit of a touch of self-help books describing how to attain success and fulfillment by taking the example of writing self-help books.

I don’t disagree that these are useful tools, by the way. I just haven’t seen any discernible uptick in general software quality and utility either, nor any economic uptick that should presumably follow from being able to develop software more efficiently.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#73

Post by mattmanser »

helterskelter wrote: post #51
Dilettante_ wrote: post #26

My experience with AI in the design context tends to reflect what I think is generally true about AI in the workplace: the smaller the use case, the larger the gain. This might be the money quote, encapsulating the difference between people who say their work benefits from LLMs and those who don't. Expecting it to one-shot your entire module will leave you disappointed, using it for code completion, generating docume…

Honestly one the best use cases I've found for it is creating configs. It used to be that I was able to spend a week fiddling around with, say, nvim settings. Now I tell an LLM what I want and it basically gives it to me without having to do trial and error, or locating some obscure comment from 2005 that tells me what I need to know.

Depends what you're doing.

If it's a less trodden path expect it to hallucinate some settings.

Also a regular thing I see is that it adds some random other settings without comment and then when you ask it about them it goes, whoops, yeah, those aren't necessary.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#74

Post by emp17344 »

redorb wrote: post #49
hollowturtle wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are the products? This site and everywhere around the internet, on x, linkedin and so is full of crazy claims and I have yet to see a product that people need and that actually works. What I'm experiencing is a gigantic enshittification everywhere, Windows sucks, web apps are bloated, slow and uninteresting. Infrastructure goes down even with "memory safe rust" burning millions and millions of compute for scaff…

I think chatGPT itself is an epic product, Cursor has insane growth and usage. I also think they are both over-hyped, have too much a valuation.

It doesn’t matter what you think. Where’s all the data proving that AI is actually valuable? All we have are anecdotes and promises.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#75

Post by muldvarp »

DennisP wrote: post #65
muldvarp wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IMHO the bleeding edge of what’s working well with LLMs is within software engineering because we’re building for ourselves, first. How are we building _for_ ourselves when we literally automate away our jobs? This is probably one of the _worst_ things someone could do to me.

Software engineers been automating our own work since we built the first assembler. So far it's just made us more productive and valuable, because the demand for software has been effectively unlimited. Maybe that will continue with AI, or maybe our long-standing habit will finally turn against us.

> Software engineers been automating our own work since we built the first assembler.

The declared goal of AI is to automated software engineering entirely. This is in no way comparable to building an assembler. So the question is mostly about whether or not this goal will be achieved.

Still, nobody is building these systems _for_ me. They're building them to replace me, because my living is too much for them to pay.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#76

Post by layer8 »

Kiro wrote: post #61
mwhitfield wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had *very* much the opposite experience. Very nearly every AI skeptic take I read has exactly this opinion, if not always so well-articulated (until the last section, which lost me). But counterarguments always attack the complete strawman of "AI is utterly useless," which very few people, at least within the confines of the tech and business commentariat, are making.

Maybe I'm focusing too much in the hardliners but I see it everywhere, especially in tech.

If you’re talking about forums and social media, or anything attention-driven, then the prevalence of hyperbole is normal.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#77

Post by oblio »

redorb wrote: post #49
hollowturtle wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are the products? This site and everywhere around the internet, on x, linkedin and so is full of crazy claims and I have yet to see a product that people need and that actually works. What I'm experiencing is a gigantic enshittification everywhere, Windows sucks, web apps are bloated, slow and uninteresting. Infrastructure goes down even with "memory safe rust" burning millions and millions of compute for scaff…

I think chatGPT itself is an epic product, Cursor has insane growth and usage. I also think they are both over-hyped, have too much a valuation.

I agree with everyone else, where is the Microsoft Office competitor created by 2 geeks in a garage with Claude Code? Where is the Exchange replacement created by a company of 20 people?

There are many really lucrative markets that need a fresh approach, and AI doesn't seem to have caused a huge explosion of new software created by upstarts.

Or am I missing something? Where are the consumer facing software apps developed primarily with AI by smaller companies? I'm excluding big companies because in their case it's impossible to prove the productivity, the could be throwing more bodies at the problem and we'd never know.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#78

Post by JohnMakin »

w_for_wumbo wrote: post #59

This is what I wonder to, what is the end game? Advance technology so that we can have anything that we want, whenever we want it. Fly to distant galaxies. Increase the options available to us and our offspring. But ultimately, what will we gain from that? Is it to say that we did it or is it for the pleasure of the process? If it's for pleasure, then why have we made our processes so miserable for everyone involved?…

> Fly to distant galaxies

Unless AI can change the laws of physics, extremely unlikely.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#79

Post by layer8 »

qoez wrote: post #11

Best case is hardly a bubble. I definitely think this is a new paradigm that'll lead to something , even if the current iteration won't be the final version and we've probably overinvested a slight bit.

The author thinks that the bubble is a given (and doesn’t have to spell doom), and the best case is that there isn’t anything worse in addition.

Re: AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

#80

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

xeckr wrote: post #69
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This notion of a hard takeoff, or singularity, based on self-improving AI, is based on the implicit assumption that what's holding AI progress back is lack of AI researchers/developers, which is false. Ideas are a penny a dozen - the bottleneck is the money/compute to test them at scale. What exactly is the scenario you are imagining where more developers at a company like OpenAI (or maybe Meta, which has just laid o…

It's not hard to believe that adding AI researchers to an AI company marginally increases the rate of progress, otherwise why would the companies be clamouring for talent with eye-watering salaries? In any case, I'm not just talking about AI researchers—AGI will not only help with algorithmic efficiency improvements, but will probably make spinning up chip fabs that much easier.

The eye-watering salary you probably have in mind is for a manager at Meta, same company that just laid of 600 actual developers. Why just Meta, not other companies - because they are blaming poor LLama performance on the manager, it seems.

Algorithmic efficiency improvements are being made all the time, and will only serve to reduce inference cost, which is already happening. This isn't going to accelerate AI advance. It just makes ChatGPT more profitable.

Why would human level AGI help spin up chip fabs faster, when we already have actual humans who know how to spin them up, and the bottleneck is raising the billions of dollars to build them?

All of these hard take-off fantasies seem to come down to: We get human-level AGI, then magic happens, and we get hard take-off. Why isn't the magic happening when we already have real live humans on the job?

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