Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster
theatlantic.com
Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster
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Re: Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster
#2Re: Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster
#3Comparing how traditional tech companies scale to how frontier AI companies scale doesn't seem very fair to me. AI is still relatively new territory, in comparison traditional software companies benefit from decades of investment in cloud infrastructure, networking, and hardware. I'm certain those technologies also went through periods of heavy investment before they became scalable.
The author also talks about advances like smartphones as though they arrived without significant challenges or trade-offs. Every major technological shift has come with some cost, e.g environmental, shortages, investments.
I'd argue most things are difficult to scale in the beginning. Just because today's LLMs are expensive and resource intensive doesn't mean the technology is fundamentally flawed, it may simply mean the current approach isn't the one we'll end up with. But naturally, someone working on another approach would have something to criticise about others.
Finally, I'm not convinced by the claim that we're "stuck" with LLMs just because they're heavily marketed. They create value for many people, which is why they've been adopted so quickly. As the author points out, investors care about economics. I'm sure people would listen if someone developed a cheaper/more sustainable technology that delivered the same value.
Re: Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster
#4The ultra wealthy will out compete you for the resources you need if we don’t start taxing them has been a discussion from the left for quite some time. It seems to keep coming true in new and disastrous ways, we are going to see more and more extreme concentrations of capital and power distort things and pretty soon it won’t just be middle and poor people who cannot afford anything, the whole value chain is being redesigned around things billionaires want and what could be better for them than agents who replace all the white collar workers. You might think you’re safe from this, I don’t.
It’s worth remembering that during the industrial revolution in Britain, the fastest growing country the world had ever seen, most people were in abject poverty. This tech revolution might end up being worse.
Re: Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster
#5The ultra wealthy will out compete you for the resources you need if we don’t start taxing them has been a discussion from the left for quite some time. It seems to keep coming true in new and disastrous ways, we are going to see more and more extreme concentrations of capital and power distort things and pretty soon it won’t just be middle and poor people who cannot afford anything, the whole value chain is being re…
Yup. This is a policy problem.
Re: Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster
#6i dont think the comparison to traditional vc saas is very good
yes, in traditional venture you want cost per marginal user to decrease and leverage your platform at scale
but improving llms shifts the frontier of their capability and unlocks entirely new use cases. so far, every mega training run has resulted in a model that has paid itself off profitably fully loaded. perhaps the TAM of intelligence has no ceiling?
not to say that we shouldnt be investing in efficient models, but the efficiency comes after we create another mega shoggoth that we can make more efficient
Re: Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster
#7The ultra wealthy will out compete you for the resources you need if we don’t start taxing them has been a discussion from the left for quite some time. It seems to keep coming true in new and disastrous ways, we are going to see more and more extreme concentrations of capital and power distort things and pretty soon it won’t just be middle and poor people who cannot afford anything, the whole value chain is being re…
Instead of just rejecting the future like a Roman fatalist because you've decided that it's just going to be someone else controlling you, maybe a better plan is to adopt emerging technology when it comes into play (like for example when the Internet came into play) and use it to start your own company, or make yourself more productive, or disrupt an industry that desperately needs it.
I shouldn't have to explain the benefits of productivity improvements and computer technology to people on Hacker News, but the place for some reason has been hijacked by neo luddites from Reddit that apparently have nothing better to do than troll about AI on a web site that is literally dedicated to an industry they don't like. Sam Altman literally used to run Y Combinator. Why not use that energy you're wasting to adopt emerging technology instead of bashing it?
There are places that recognized manufacturing was going to go away, transitioned a service economy, and did well economically, and places that ignored reality and are now in disrepair. Now's a great time to decide if you want to be Seattle or Cleveland. Don't fight the future. And don't think it's a billionaires fault when certain places are more successful then others because they didn't ban AI and datacenters while other places squandered the opportunity because they didn't confront the pitchfork mob driven into a frenzy by yellow journalism.
Re: Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster
#8The ultra wealthy will out compete you for the resources you need if we don’t start taxing them has been a discussion from the left for quite some time. It seems to keep coming true in new and disastrous ways, we are going to see more and more extreme concentrations of capital and power distort things and pretty soon it won’t just be middle and poor people who cannot afford anything, the whole value chain is being re…
Instead of just rejecting the future like a Roman fatalist because you've decided that it's just going to be someone else controlling you, maybe a better plan is to adopt emerging technology when it comes into play (like for example when the Internet came into play) and use it to start your own company, or make yourself more productive, or disrupt an industry that desperately needs it. I shouldn't have to explain the…
I love AI and have built many projects with PyTorch and use LLMs daily for all my work and am building a startup in my spare time here: https://veloa.com/
Being concerned about how AI will concentrate power doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s extremely useful.
Re: Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster
#9Comparing how traditional tech companies scale to how frontier AI companies scale doesn't seem very fair to me. AI is still relatively new territory, in comparison traditional software companies benefit from decades of investment in cloud infrastructure, networking, and hardware. I'm certain those technologies also went through periods of heavy investment before they became scalable. The author also talks about advan…
Right, if you came out with a technology that worked just as well as LLMs at half the power people/companies would jump at it from the absolutely massive savings in hardware and power. AI companies are looking at every other method they can, and inventing new ones, none of them have worked as well as the transformer so far.
Re: Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster
#10Comparing how traditional tech companies scale to how frontier AI companies scale doesn't seem very fair to me. AI is still relatively new territory, in comparison traditional software companies benefit from decades of investment in cloud infrastructure, networking, and hardware. I'm certain those technologies also went through periods of heavy investment before they became scalable. The author also talks about advan…
> They create value for many people, which is why they've been adopted so quickly.
A lot of that adoption is completely useless crap tho. Like ai in vacuum cleaner that ads absolutely nothing useful to anything. AI buttons intentionally at places I randomly click at, so that I am forced to open it. Google search that defaults to ai, so that we have to use it after then nerfed real search.
There are useful usages of LLMs. But huge bulk of the adoption is companies realizing they wont get investors money if they dont add ai button, it does not have to be useful.