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Everyone in Seattle hates AI

jonready.com

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Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#931

Post by wartywhoa23 »

troyvit wrote: post #886
Rebuff5007 wrote: post #760

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why not? AI also has very powerful open models (that can actually be fine-tuned for personal use) that can compete against the flagship proprietary models. As an average consumer, I actually feel like i'm less locked into gemini/chatgpt/claude than I am to Apple or Google for other tech (i.e. photos).

That's what I was thinking as I was listening to the "be like clippy" video linked in the parent. Those local models probably won't be able to match the quality of the big guys' for a long time to come, but for now the local, open models have a lot of potential for us to escape this power consolidation before it's complete and still get their users 75-80% of the functionality. That remaining 20-25%, combined with the…

Hopes that we all will be running LLM models locally in the face of skyrocketing prices on all kinds of memory sound very similar to the cryptoanarchists' ravings about full copies of blockchain stored locally on every user's device in the face of exponential growth of its size.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#932

Post by joshwa »

indrora wrote: post #918
mlavrent wrote: post #819

I was at Microsoft until July of this year until I left for an SF-based company (not AI though). The difference between the two with regards to AI tool usage couldn’t be more different- at Microsoft, they had started penalizing you in perf if you didn’t use the AI tools, which often were under par and you didn’t have a choice in. At the new place, perf doesn’t care if you use AI or not- just what you actually deliver…

I too was at MSFT until the July layoffs. Hang around old Microsofties and you'll encounter a phrase: "The Deal." The Deal is this informal agreement: Microsoft doesn't pay amazingly but you're given the time to have work-life balance, you can be relatively assured that upper leadership gives a shit about the ICs, there's space for "... So I was thinking..." to become real "... and that's our next product" discussion…

URA quotas—I see the Amazon infection has spread from Seattle to Redmond.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#933

Post by taurath »

sunaookami wrote: post #773
taurath wrote: post #756

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seemingly the primary economic beneficiaries of AI are people who own companies and manage people. What this means for the average person working for a living is probably a lot of change, additional uncertainty, and additional reductions in their standard of living. Rich get richer, poor get poorer, and they aren't rich.

What has this to do with what I wrote? Go take your class conflict somewhere else.

Responding to your message:

> in what way is the opinion "generally negative"

I'm just trying to tell you what people outside your bubble think, that AI is VERY MUCH a class thing. Using AI images at people is seen as completely not cool, it makes one look like a corporate stooge.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#934

Post by waffletower »

adamhartenz wrote: post #802
raxxorraxor wrote: post #796

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still run your local cloud and AI providers will be heavily consolidated to a few. While for programming task I do use Claude currently, local models can be tuned to serve 80% of the time reduction you win by using AI. Depends a bit on the work you do. This will improve probably, while frontier models seem to hit hard ceilings. Where I would disagree is that joining concepts or knowledge works at all with cur…

Local models are fine for the way we have been using AI, like as a chatbot, or a fancy autocomplete. But everyone is craming AI into everything. Windows will be an agentic OS whether we like it or not. There will be no using your own local model for that use case. It is looking like everything is moving that way.

Hmmm, maybe use a different OS? I would never dream of using Windows to get any type of work done myself and there are many others like me. There certainly are choices. If you prefer to stay, MCP services can be configured to use local models, and people are doing so on Windows as well (and definitely with MacOS and Linux). From an OS instrumentation perspective, I think MacOS is probably the most mature -- Apple has acknowledged MCP and intends a hybrid approach defaulting to their own in house, on device, models, but by embracing MCP appears to be allowing local model access.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#935

Post by mlavrent »

stickfigure wrote: post #901
mlavrent wrote: post #819

I was at Microsoft until July of this year until I left for an SF-based company (not AI though). The difference between the two with regards to AI tool usage couldn’t be more different- at Microsoft, they had started penalizing you in perf if you didn’t use the AI tools, which often were under par and you didn’t have a choice in. At the new place, perf doesn’t care if you use AI or not- just what you actually deliver…

Microsoft is forcing the company to dogfood their own tools. They do this because they need the feedback so they can improve their tools, and they think these tools are a critical part of their future. Presumably your new company isn't building AI tools, so they don't care what you use. Imagine a developer in 1990s Microsoft saying "I want to use Borland C++ because it's better than the Microsoft IDE". Maybe it is, m…

They do actually build internal tooling! They key is that it’s actually good enough that feedback to the limited, targeted, and quickly actionable. Microsoft’s internal was immature enough that the general feedback you’d always have is “this is unusable”, which is something the teams building the tools could probably figure out themselves before making the whole company spend time beta testing the tools.

The main point is that the tools need to be of a certain quality/maturity for dogfooding to be effective.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#936

Post by troyvit »

wartywhoa23 wrote: post #931
troyvit wrote: post #886

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I was thinking as I was listening to the "be like clippy" video linked in the parent. Those local models probably won't be able to match the quality of the big guys' for a long time to come, but for now the local, open models have a lot of potential for us to escape this power consolidation before it's complete and still get their users 75-80% of the functionality. That remaining 20-25%, combined with the…

Hopes that we all will be running LLM models locally in the face of skyrocketing prices on all kinds of memory sound very similar to the cryptoanarchists' ravings about full copies of blockchain stored locally on every user's device in the face of exponential growth of its size.

The only difference is that memory prices skyrocketing is a temporary thing resulting from a spike in demand from incompetent AI megalomaniacs like Sam Altman who don't know how to run a company and are desperate to scale because that's the only kind of sustainability they understand.

Once the market either absorbs that demand (if it's real) or else over-produces for it, RAM prices are going to either slowly come back down (if it's real) or plunge (if it isn't).

People are already running tiny models on their phones, and there's a Mistral 3B model that runs locally in a browser (https://huggingface.co/spaces/mistralai/Ministral_3B_WebGPU).

So we'll see what happens. People used to think crypto currencies were going to herald a new era of democratizing economic (and other) activity before the tech bros turned Bitcoin into a pyramid scheme. It might be too late for them to do the same with locally-run LLMs but the NVidias and AMDs of the world will be there to take our $.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#937

Post by balamatom »

bwfan123 wrote: post #888
balamatom wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>a broader dichotomy between the people-persuation-plane, and the real-world-facts plane This right here is the real thing which AI is deployed to upset. The Enlightenment values which brought us the Industrial Revolution imply that the disparity between the people-persuasion-plane and the real-world-facts-plane should naturally decrease . The implicit expectation here is that as civilization as a whole learns more a…

> people would naturally become more rational, and thus more persuadable by reality-compliant arguments and less persuadable by reality-denying ones. likely not. Our natural state tuned by evolution is one of an emotional creature persuaded by pleasing rhetoric - like a bird which responds to another bird's call.

What's irrational about a bird responding to another bird's call, though?

I always figured, unlike human speech, bird song contained only truth - 100% real-time factual representation of reproductive fitness/compatibility, 0% fractal bullshitting (such as arguing about definitions of abstract notions, or endless rumination and reflection, or command hierarchies built to leak, or...).

Although who knows, really! I'm just guessing here. Maybe what we oughtta do is ask some actual ornithologists to ask an actual parrot to translate for us the songs of its distant relatives. Sounds crazy enough to work -- though probably not in captivity.

Overall I see your point, and I see many people sharing that perspective; personally, I find it rather disheartening. Tbh I'm not even sure what would be a convincing argument one way or the other.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#938

Post by bluesnowmonkey »

afavour wrote: post #520
mjr00 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are many valid critiques of AI, but “there’s not much there” isn’t one of them. "There's not much there" is a totally valid critique of a lot of the current AI ecosystem. How many startups are simple prompt wrappers on top of ChatGPT? How many AI features in products are just "click here to ask Rovo/Dingo/Kingo/CutesyAnthropomorphizedNameOfAI" text boxes that end up spitting out wrong information? There's cer…

IMO if the market is going to punish anyone it’s the people who, today, find that AI is able to do all their coding for them. The skeptics are the ones that have tried AI coding agents and come away unimpressed because it can’t do what they do. If you’re proudly proclaiming that AI can replace your work then you’re telling on yourself.

> it can’t do what they do

That's asking the wrong question, and I suspect coming from a place of defensiveness, looking to justify one's own existence. "Is there anything I can do that the machine can't?" is the wrong question. "How can I do more with the machine's help?" is the right one.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#940

Post by LogicFailsMe »

mips_avatar wrote: post #685
LogicFailsMe wrote: post #356

The thing about dismissing AI in 2025 is that it's on par with dismissing the wearable computing group at MIT in the 1980s. But admittedly, if one had tried to productize their stuff in the 1980s it would have been hilarious. So the rewards here are going to go to the people who read the right tea leaves and follow the right path to what's inevitable. In the short term, a lot of not so smart, people are going to lose…

I might have written in broad strokes but I was really annoyed. Like I want to get out of the Amazon/Microsoft bubble. And yeah everyone is cranky rn

Microsoft and Amazon people in Seattle are as annoying as Hollywood people in LA. I feel your disenchantment with the monoculture.
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