DE version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
Advertisement
Advertisement
⚡ Community Insights
Discussion Sentiment
76% Positive
Analyzed from 3340 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
#don#need#replace#more#better#binary#going#years#same#things
Discussion (73 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I realized all this was quite wrong, AI just helps people who already know become more efficient. It just gives confidence to people who dont know anything by the sycophantic nature of AI. AI is just a tool for smart people to become smarter.
Love AI and what it allows us to do. But, it does give some superpowers, but the problems that existed before still do and they need to be solved for. with or without AI.
AI may be a tool and add 50 IQ points to a 100 IQ person today but what happens when its adding 10000 IQ points. The 100 base doesn't quite matter as much does it? What does that world look like?
No, it's not just next word prediction. No you can't just wave your hand that it's probabilistic, so insert bad analogy to compiler or calculator and go about your day. And no, you can't just look at its limitations today, make a conclusion, and go back under your rock.
Maybe this is tongue-in-cheek, but in case it's not.
No, nobody does. Consider that a person in their lifetime could have seen the Wright Brothers first flight in 1903, then the first jet engine in 1939, then commercial jet travel in the 1950s. That is an amazing 50 years for air travel. If you were living in 1950 and were to extrapolate where air travel would be by 2026, you would think we would be taking routine trips to Mars. Instead what we got was TSA, cramped seats, and better safety. But "progress" leveled off dramatically. Commercial air flight has looked pretty much the same for my entire life.
We have no idea how far transformers and LLMs will take us. It certainly isn't obvious where this is going.
The parent comment could be interpreted as frustration from a lack of imagination about how weird the future could be.
Perhaps we're not at the recursive self improvement yet, but it seems increasingly naive to believe that it isn't possible.
Also, I think you've set up a straw man. I haven't seen anyone arguing that this future isn't possible. What I see is resistance to the idea that we can have any certainty about the future by drawing a straight line from the past.
I guess it's a matter of education. People with a mathematics or computer science background know that unless the dynamics of a process are known to be linear, extrapolation is usually wrong. Since we don't know that the dynamics here are linear and have every reason to believe they aren't, extrpolation is unlikely to teach us anything valuable.
What reason? To me recursive self improvement seems credible, it's just a question of when. It seems obvious that given RSI, trend lines will be at least linear.
The disagreement could just be about if RSI is currently meaningfully happening, but that seems very difficult to tell given the lack of public data.
It's certainly plausible that improvements will continue, but the pace is completely unpredictable. It's also plausible that the training material is polluted and progress will not continue. I'm just saying that predicting the rate of technological progress is not easy, and historically, it's rarely been smooth in the long run.
There are many complicating technical factors, but also non-technical ones. Technological improvement in the short term will not necessarily yield commensurate economic gains, in which case, investment may not grow enough to sustain the progress.
As for the recursive part, currently it's either hypothetical or based on too few data points. Not saying it won't happen, but it's far from being the only plausible trajectory.
one end is luddites nothing to see here, and the other end is omg humanity is cooked because programming is solved! and consciousness is coding so -> gg
yes there’s a wide surface of emergent behavior we haven’t fully explored, but why do you get the pass to draw a straight line to a conclusion? the naysayers are doing the same thing.
all things decay on a curve. pretty much all things in life are not modeled by a straight line.
so you’re saying no theres still more UP. sure, but that’s a tale as old as time. when where and how much in how long is the reality piece.
We’ve seen a lot of claims over the years substituting one metric (amount of code written) for another (useful code produced) to justify that AI are getting “better”. We just want a proper definition of better.
No, you don't have trends backing your claims that we are going to add 10,000 IQ points to the average person. Anymore than the S&P 500 is going to 100x in a decade years.
Presumably there are a lot of use cases that are essentially “solved” where more powerful models won’t matter.
You seem to be implying that there was nothing before. Obviously not true.
“AI may be a tool and add 50 IQ points to a 100 IQ person today but what happens when its adding 10000 IQ points.”
What is even IQ? What if it adds 50 now, 25 next month, 12.5 the month after, etc. You should check out Zeno.
Yes. If it looks like 10000 iq is possible, then money will be thrown at whoever is most likely to achieve it first, and whoever has the most intelligent models right now strongly predicts who will be first.
This is driven by the belief that whoever gets to 10000 iq first will likely dominate the majority of all economic activity, since it will be more efficient to trade with them than with some less efficient (dumber).
This does not depend on traditional economic demand, at some point this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Instead I can spend far less to use my 200 iq machine that already exceeds everything I could ever want. Im not ever going to personally fund a war of intellegence against other intellegences so anything more is of marginal value. The same reason I don't own a 2,000 horsepower truck or tractor, there are almost no uses for me to want it.
The only thing we can do is look at the current state of things, and we still have the same problems we've always had with these models, they need proper direction and input.
> [...] we are living in a society [that is out] virtually to satisfy and gratify each and every human need, except for one need, the most basic and fundamental need operant in man, the need for meaning.
https://youtu.be/GTbliwS0gS4?t=153
Maybe the Amish had it right, after all.
Take a step back and really take a look at what's going on. You are not thinking clearly.
(That posters can’t tell op is a low effort shitpost built on memes is concerning.)
Because most automations never capture the complete scope of the job/task ( not even close ). Just like neurons, if you don't use it you lose it and when the inevitable problems come, nobody knows the why, the how and the what. At that point someone smart would incorporate all those real costs and opportunity loses on the "automating everything" equation. But they usually don't.
Of course automating tasks is a must, but it's very far from being a black and white situation. These dynamics have been happening for centuries by now, nothing new.
Management likes to think otherwise for a variety of reasons and peons such as myself know it is rarely that simple. Case in point, our team uses Jira, but Jira is not great at.. capturing efforts that are umm.. less code oriented. In fact, there are times when it is genuinely better to leave some details out for considerations that may simply not be part of coding considerations.
In other words, automation assumes proper capture of the entirety of the task, but, I have seldom seen it capturing anything but simple workflows well.
Big companies are always doing bad things, but not because they use AI, because they have legal protections which prevents small companies (which could be anyone like you and me) to compete. The same small companies who could also benefit from using AI.
What? How does that follow?
We are looking forward to bring the same productivity gains to logistics and manufacturing (look at the advancements done in the last few decades!).
Why not bring this to white collar work too? I get so much more shit done today than I did a few years ago. It's a great time to be alive!
Think about all the security clearances no longer required to aggregate big data into intelligence reports. The conditions and incentives for LLMs seem almost laser focused on replacing those particular jobs.
It wasn't but ~20 years ago that people were concerned about Google slurping up all the world's data into spying programs. Now that the hardest part to hide is happening, people have forgotten or assumed it already had. Many other smaller and far less capable businesses have come and gone and taken tiny bits of blame until the public was satisfied they knew who the "real" scapegoats were. What they really had were overcomplicated theories built on a nebulous cloud of debatable evidence that led nowhere. This is how it succeeds in plain sight every time.
Instead, you can and probably should see technology as augmenting you and your coworkers.
Implementing labor protections and basic income is not seeing the forest for the trees. What we need is a more educated public that can contribute their ideas. All AI can do is lower the barrier to entry, but it does not replace the need for education.
My in laws smugly asked me what I would be doing for work since AI would take away all the programming jobs and I said its not gonna happen and they laughed in derision.
It's crazy how defensive (offensive) people can get when you're into programming/math/whatever. Almost like "I don't understand your world, I don't want to, and I hate it and hope you fail".
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/what-its-like
Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, this whole scene has gotten fucking insufferable and everyone who isn't in the cult hates AI and hates the world techies want to build, and justifiably so.
But yeah let's just assume "normies" are hateful and ignorant. Fearful peasants who simply don't understand what it takes to carry the world on one's shoulders. We really need to renormalize beating up nerds again.
Some people who "used to love programming" have jumped ship for precisely this reason. Ordinary software (not R&D) is getting serious. A broken or disagreeable app is no longer a mere inconvenience. There is growing alignment between business and politics and the older generation is retiring out.
It did replace draftsmen and designers, and changed the work that the engineers do. It's now more efficient to let engineers be their own draftsmen and designers. And design work has changed -- a lot less "hard" quantitative engineering, and a lot more "bureaucracy in three dimensions" as things have gotten more complex.
In the long run, this is as misleading as saying: Humans did not replace animals.
So, today, if I think really really really, and I mean, really fucking hard about that “number”, I really really really come up with a number close to 1 (we need one person to type in the instruction at least, maybe two? Maybe three? Definitely not a team … no not that at all).
That means, for everything that we build today, before we even build it, we’ve already mentally replaced people. People be replaced yo, in your mind, in your company, in your reality. That’s it.
It’s a replacement, not a tool. And if you reaaallly think a bit more, you’ll see that it is truly the stupidest possible thing if in your scoping of what needs to be built, you didn’t scope out people. You’d have to be crazy not to scope out people.
Trust me, I never thought we’d get to this point either. I thought it was going to be an “assistant” too.
—-
The layoff numbers still look “normal “ to us. 75k here, 20k there, all numbers we’ve heard before. It hasn’t even really happened yet, the true numbers should be in millions. I didn’t believe the number “trillion dollar company” until, BAM, here’s a trillion dollar company.
Best we can do is kinda get used to the numbers, like the number 0 on one end (how many people you need), and some number N (in millions) that we won’t need anymore. We’ll just slowly get used to these new numbers.
This shit ain’t no tool.
One programmer can know if the program is right. So N additional programmers, in that case, can truly be replaced.
I can know the SQL query came back right, I can know the drop down menu looks right, you know what I mean? I can even know if it’s any good. [Person .., ] of Type Y (let’s say Y is “programmer” for now) can be flattened down to 1 in that case (we no longer need the full array of people of a certain type anymore, just the one). Over time we’ll see all different “types” get collapsed down.
False, Anthropic didn’t claim what was linked in the article.
> OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speculates that enough AI compute could help figure out how to cure cancer
Idk likely true? What’s so wrong here.
> Elon Musk says there will be no need for compilers as AI will write the binary directly
What seems so off about this? AI can write binary and probably better in a few years. Higher level languages would still be efficient probably.
> Anthropic claims that Mythos is super dangerous, the people can’t possibly handle such a powerful cyberweapo
Well it was?
Assuming you mean an LLM, you'd have to train this LLM entirely on a parameter space of binary tokens. Or are you saying the LLM generating natural language tokens is going to be printing machine language in 3-5 years, because that claim kinda betrays a misunderstanding of LLM functions.
I assume that "AI can write binary" means "AI can use a toolset that results in a binary" because we've already seen GPTs use a combination of LLM and specialized math tools to do the things the original GPTs did.
Wouldn’t that make the AI the compiler?
We have no viable mechanism yet to get the same level of confidence if some LLM-based system writes the binary.
Perhaps we can get to a system that produces not just the binary but also a machine-verifiable proof that the binary implements some higher-level language description of the program.
Though then the question will be whether we've gained anything, or whether we've just replaced the compiler with something massively more expensive that does the same thing.
There's some potential here for the LLM-based system to drive better performance optimizations than a regular compiler could.
Of course this isn't what Elon is actually saying, and we'd be better off if fewer people listened to him.
We don't even have a solution to the halting problem, and it probably can't be solved. "Proof it implements a spec" is pure science fiction.
Hard agree that we'd all be better off muting Elon Musk though.