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Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D

epoch.ai

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Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D

#91

Post by stego-tech »

VladVladikoff wrote: post #75
sterlind wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wanted fully-automated luxury communism, but I got fully-automated neo-feudalism instead. It feels bad.

Pretty much every piece of technology we have known so far which had creator restrictions has been jailbroken. Sure the future might be Elon & Bezos androids, but what’s stopping us from jailbreaking them and using them off grid?

Police forces protecting the interests of capital first, citizens second, e.g. private police forces (Pinkertons) and strikebreaking.

Militaries being used by Governments to protect the interests of capital at the expense of citizens, e.g. the Battle of Blair Mountain.

Government legislation enshrining the rights of capital and profit over the rights of citizens, e.g. copyright laws and DRM protections.

Centralization of systems and dependency of products on remote compute, e.g. public cloud service providers, social media networks, shifting from wired to wireless home ISPs and networks to reduce stability of private hosting.

They made it illegal to break DRM on their devices, send the police to protect their property, leverage the military to annihilate opposition, and now use modern technologies to prohibit end user control by requiring remote dependencies for operation.

That's how they stop you.

Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D

#92

Post by stego-tech »

jgilias wrote: post #30
jajko wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody sane and smart I know is advocating for AI now . All keep saying 'one day', 'soon' etc. Our megacorp very effectively blocked all of this and we don't have anything internal yet, but we are in specific market. And basically all I saw so far was a snake oil from people trying to push it or benefit from it, even here. Trust me bro... well no, show me some hard facts and we can start building trust. Sure assistan…

Advocate or not, it’s here to stay. And if you’re not adjusting to it, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Last week I did the amount of work that would’ve taken me give or take a month. A significant part of it was writing an API client for a system I needed to use. Pretty run of the mill stuff. Doing this ‘by hand’ just takes time. Go look at the docs, type out your data structures, wire things up for the new call,…

> So this is my thesis now - if you’re a senior who neglects this new tool, you’re going to be out of a job soon-ish.

Work(ed) for a company super big on a force of agents. Brought them into my workflows early on, before the company even pivoted. Ran them at home on private hardware (that 3090 had to do something), at work when access was opened up. Provided valuable feedback on hallucinations (e.g., fabricating the existence of a MongoDB CLI module wholesale, documentation and all) and barriers to adoption. Pitched an integration of four disparate systems across ~20 data points to create tenancy in a core product line from scratch, with said AI at the center of it for customer service and workload creation, reducing engineers to approvals only for ~20 tickets a week averaging ~40hrs of work, freeing up said engineers for actually valuable work instead of handholding customers through routine tasks. Got great feedback and enthusiasm on it.

RIFed this year.

Doesn't matter whether you're bullish or bearish on it, the only thing that ever really matters is if scrubbing your line item from a spreadsheet will net someone higher up than you a bonus. That's what's driving this AI mania, and what needs to be addressed via policy before these employers gut themselves and the economy in the process.

Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D

#93

Post by stego-tech »

It's the Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions all over again. Broad automation of labor will not result in societal uplift, but Capital uplift, absent worker action to enforce equal distribution of gains (like how Unions brought us the 40hr work week and the end of Child Labor w/ the Industrial Revolution). Worse yet, the irrationality of these techbro arguments shows their complete lack of long-term thinking or systems analysis.

They cite "societal disruption" through the wholesale (or significant) replacement of labor via AI, but then shrug off the problem as one for government to solve - governments they own, control, and/or influence. Yet if we take them at their word and they get rid of labor - who the heck do they expect to buy their stuff, and with what income? Capital's plan is very much (Eliminate Labor) + (Continued Sales of Products) = (We Keep All The Money), and I'd like to believe the HN community at the very least can see how that math does not work.

Capital would have to concede to a complete rework of civilization away from consumption and towards a higher goal, but that would entail tearing down the power and wealth structures they benefit from now with no guarantee of a brighter future tomorrow. Plowing ahead with AI while prohibiting any attempts at systemic revolution isn't just irresponsible, it's insane, and I'm tired of having pretend it's not for the sake of a stock price somewhere.

Present systems are incompatible with an AI-dominated future, full stop.

Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D

#94

Post by lukevp »

wolfcola wrote: post #88
SequoiaHope wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well: though we are not particularly likely to I do think that replacing people with machines would be fantastic if we actually just let people relax and work less, and so rather than lament the state of things I tend to focus on the need to promote the value of social systems which support human thriving. On the second point, I guess I would say that most of the marketing talk we see is unlikely to manifest but the…

right, and we all got to work 20 hour weeks bc of the industrial revolution.

Huh? 40 hr work weeks are a recent thing, many people in history worked 12 hr days 6 days a week. Technology and social progress definitely leads to fewer work hours.

Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D

#95

Post by sumedh »

User23 wrote: post #70
bashfulpup wrote: post #69

Very typical SV argument that R&D is "complex" and everything else is "simple". Would it blow your mind if I told you 10yrs ago that we'd have AI that can do math/code better than 99% of humans but ordering a hotdog on doordash would be cutting edge and barely doable? I don't disagree that "common" tasks are more valuable. I only argue that the argument these are easily automatable is a viewpoint based on ignorance.…

The code that AI is good at currently is exactly common tasks. Good luck getting it to write a competitive video card driver for Nvidia hardware or anything else that requires actual creative problem solving that isn’t github boilerplate.

> Good luck getting it to write a competitive video card driver for Nvidia hardware

Jensen says they use AI to build their chips.

Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D

#96

Post by jgilias »

stego-tech wrote: post #92
jgilias wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advocate or not, it’s here to stay. And if you’re not adjusting to it, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Last week I did the amount of work that would’ve taken me give or take a month. A significant part of it was writing an API client for a system I needed to use. Pretty run of the mill stuff. Doing this ‘by hand’ just takes time. Go look at the docs, type out your data structures, wire things up for the new call,…

> So this is my thesis now - if you’re a senior who neglects this new tool, you’re going to be out of a job soon-ish. Work(ed) for a company super big on a force of agents. Brought them into my workflows early on, before the company even pivoted. Ran them at home on private hardware (that 3090 had to do something ), at work when access was opened up. Provided valuable feedback on hallucinations (e.g., fabricating the…

Man, that’s rough. I hope you’re doing well!

Totally agree with you on the line-item point. My point there was that if a 50% RIF is in the works, the people who haven’t figured out how to become more efficient using AI would be more likely to be affected. Statistically.

But again, hope you’re doing well and everything has worked out for you!

Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D

#97

Post by jgilias »

pjmlp wrote: post #43
jgilias wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advocate or not, it’s here to stay. And if you’re not adjusting to it, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Last week I did the amount of work that would’ve taken me give or take a month. A significant part of it was writing an API client for a system I needed to use. Pretty run of the mill stuff. Doing this ‘by hand’ just takes time. Go look at the docs, type out your data structures, wire things up for the new call,…

Eventually only the arquitect will be required, no need for seniors, the offshoring team is the cloud instead of some folks on the other side of the planet. This is the future to prepare, not AI generating a couple of files.

Maybe. But that future is definitely not yet here. Generating a couple of files though is here. And that compounds. So people who’re still typing those files by hand… yeah.

Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D

#98

Post by gnulinux »

bashfulpup wrote: post #69

Very typical SV argument that R&D is "complex" and everything else is "simple". Would it blow your mind if I told you 10yrs ago that we'd have AI that can do math/code better than 99% of humans but ordering a hotdog on doordash would be cutting edge and barely doable? I don't disagree that "common" tasks are more valuable. I only argue that the argument these are easily automatable is a viewpoint based on ignorance.…

> if I told you 10yrs ago that we'd have AI that can do math/code better than 99% of humans

This not even remotely close to true. Like not even a little bit. I use Cursor and Gemini for work daily and I'd be hard pressed to think AI is a "better" programmer than any professional software engineer. Sure it makes writing code faster and more efficient, because you just click tab and three lines are written for you. It absolutely isn't better than me at coding though.

The claim about math is even more unbelievable than the claim about coding. We still don't have a single theorem proved and published by a LLM without human aid. LLMs barely follow a discussion in basic topology. It's incredibly ridiculous to state they're better than 99% of people. More like 0% of mathematicians and maybe 50% of college freshman.

Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D

#99

Post by stego-tech »

jgilias wrote: post #96
stego-tech wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So this is my thesis now - if you’re a senior who neglects this new tool, you’re going to be out of a job soon-ish. Work(ed) for a company super big on a force of agents. Brought them into my workflows early on, before the company even pivoted. Ran them at home on private hardware (that 3090 had to do something ), at work when access was opened up. Provided valuable feedback on hallucinations (e.g., fabricating the…

Man, that’s rough. I hope you’re doing well! Totally agree with you on the line-item point. My point there was that if a 50% RIF is in the works, the people who haven’t figured out how to become more efficient using AI would be more likely to be affected. Statistically. But again, hope you’re doing well and everything has worked out for you!

I’m a month in, and it’s rough as hell. But I at least have a runway for the first time in my career, so I’m profoundly grateful for that.

Still optimistic that my generalist skillset and adaptability to new technologies (like AI) will make me an asset for IT teams who can’t afford multiple specialists in rough economic times like these.

Re: Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D

#100

Post by falkensmaize »

fjdjshsh wrote: post #90
NAHWheatCracker wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea. Watch a sci-fi film - nifty gadgets, robots taking care of chores, and widespread spaceflight. Real life is some unreliable chat bots. Then there's the depressing practical stuff. AI being forced down our throats. AI as an excuse lay people off. AI as an excuse for massive data hoarding. AI flooding the internet, making it harder to find good content.

>AI as an excuse lay people off. Why do you think the managers/business owners need an excuse to lay people off? If it's legal and economically beneficial to them, they'll fire people. Having AI won't help them as an excuse. In fact, I would say it sounds like a much worse excuse than "the economy is on a rough spot" or something like that

Are you serious? The obvious benefit is they get to lay a bunch of people off and pretend it’s because they’re forward thinking innovators instead of poor managers that are having difficulty growing their business. There’s a huge incentive to present this fiction to stockholders, which is the only opinion they care about.
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