Nice to know our options (at least according to this perspective) are either our current state of cronyism or being completely at the mercy of machines (ie: likely extinction).
>No one seems to be contradicting anything he's saying here
So the exact same thing PG is guilty of in the article?
He disagrees with the opposing statement, gives a lazy counterexample with 0 evidence that introduces at least two major assumptions that do the the entirety of the work for his "argument", and then takes another few paragraphs to effectively say "just grow exponentially, bro".
There's nothing to push back against except vague hand-wavey nonsense. PG is washed and the level of discourse in the thread matches the quality bar of his post, so I'd say it's pretty appropriate.
His core premise is that one's not required to cheat, use immoral loopholes or abuse anyone to become filthy rich, as a prominent US politician has claimed. That stands unchallenged.
>His core premise is that one's not required to cheat
His core premise is terrible if not outright facetious given the case he made. That the girl who is going to become a billionaire in his example has a startup that makes a product that everyone loves does nothing to disprove the point. Billions of people love VLC media player but Jean-Baptiste Kempf didn't become a billionaire.
The difference isn't the product, it's that what makes the startup founder a billionaire is that they're willing to pawn off their invention to people who do all the unethical things, while they laugh on their way to the bank, that's the point of the big check.
In some sense I prefer the robber Barron over the startup founder because at least the former doesn't pretend they're a saint between they've put one level of indirection between themselves and the exploitation.
The distinction is if Mr. Kempf tried to charge all these people 1 dollar a year he would have gotten maybe a few million, and probably wouldn't have gotten much of the annual ~100 people to contribute to his product so the product wouldn't have been so awesome in the first place. There's just no money in being somewhat better than your OS's built-in player.
One can't be held responsible for unethical things done by his creation once it's sold.
>One can't be held responsible for unethical things done by his creation once it's sold.
In a free market everybody can choose to sell or not, who to sell to and under which terms. Therefore, he should be held morally responsible for giving away control of his creation to the wrong people, or for not ensuring his creation can't be turned into something bad.
The founders typically don't get to choose, they have the obligation to respect minority investors' interests and sell to the highest bidder. Also the gold standard is going public, which would make figuring out who's "bad" pretty hard.
Then again, they don't get rich by cheating, abusing or whatever, they build a legal thing and sell it. You wouldn't go after a knife maker if someone used his knife to stab someone.
If they don't get to choose, they already gave up control in an earlier stage. Just as with going public, they're relinquishing partial or total control of their company and this is a moral decision.
If you make a successful crowdsourced reviews website by building trust over time with contributors and users, and by any mechanism it ends up getting owned by an advertisement company that makes a business out of making it pay-to-win, should you not be held responsible?
I'm not talking about legal responsibility here, just moral responsibility. Ideally the former should follow the latter but it's not always the case.
I get this is just another speculative opinion piece and nobody really knows what is going to happen, but I kind of wish shit would either happen or not already.
I'm absolutely fucking exhausted from this bullshit discourse after almost 4 years of it at this point.
These AI companies need to stop bloviating and administering verbal self-fellatio and either replace everyone or fuck off already. I don't even care which it is anymore, I just want to be done with this hype cycle and move on with my life/career.
Except the entire value proposition of these tools is that there is no skill or mastery to be built.
The entire slop factory workflow, or sorry I mean "AI-native" workflow is:
"Woah, I cajoled a chatbot into building something I don't understand at all, I'm so good at my job!"
It's the participation trophy of building. Something else builds it, I take credit for it despite not understanding much about about it. There's no compounding return on my effort. No lessons learned. No understanding built. No insights gleaned for possible future innovation. No differentiation. Just mind-numbingly screaming into a void until the slot machine shits out some slop amalgam that seems "good enough", and then I do it all again the next day.
If that's the game, count me out. It's nice that others apparently enjoy it, I guess. But to think there's any sort of mastery here is delusion. The only requirement to be "successful" with these tools is to stop giving a shit and surrender to it.
I think there will always be some sort of mastery element to communicating with AI. You can see that nowadays with juniors who blow through tokens and still don’t produce good results. There will always be some group of people using AI better than others. Maybe the results will be equal in the far future, but some other dimension like cost may be better used by some people
>> Something else builds it, I take credit for it despite not understanding much about about it.
How much you understand what was built is entirely up to you. Literally nothing is stopping you, or anyone else, from having the AI walk you through it, or reading the code yourself if you don’t trust the AI.
What about the threat of unemployment due to not meeting AI usage/output metrics? I've personally found it has effectively coerced me to stop trying to understand pretty much anything, and instead just send out whatever passes basic test to "keep up".
Unless you want to just play bad-faith word games and say that "technically it's still not stopping you" in which case yeah man you got me good job buddy.
these tools cannot read your mind. every time you prompt it you condition what it will give you on what you gave it. there will either always be a limit to how good that will be or none of this will matter because no human will ever matter again.
so far the skill is to condition it to give you the best results.
there used to be a time where you had to hack together silly idiosyncratic prompts to get the model to do what you wanted. now you just go into the engineering and describe the object you want it to conjure for you in as much detail as possible (including the high level description of the internals if able) and any constraints you want on it.
Are there really companies losing right now for using less AI?
Think - would you rather your telecom company’s customer support be AI-forward? Would you pay an extra $5 per month to ensure that you get humans solving your problems immediately when you call with an issue?
What about your backup software? Would you rather choose the company that comes out with new innovations in backing up your data and tons of features, but occasionally breaks everything? Or would you want to choose a company for backup software that is slow at adding anything new and reliable? Isn’t it good if this is deterministic?
What about even a fitness tracking watch. Are there really that many missing features that need to be released way faster? Or is it better if it just tracks your heart rate and workouts well and then gets out of your way? Same here, don’t you want the features to be reliable and deterministic?
I'd be fine with an LLM for customer support, as long as it's empowered to solve my problem. There's nothing a low-level CS representative does that couldn't be handled by an LLM. In both cases, the limiting factor is the authority granted to them by their employer.
Nobody uses an LLM for watches or data backup AFAIK so those seem like moot points.
>There's nothing a low-level CS representative does that couldn't be handled by an LLM.
This kind of reductionist take is an immediate tell that one has no experience in that kind of role. More worryingly, it hints of something antisocial and misanthropic. Do you not enjoy talking with other people during your day? Have you never experienced the resolution of complexity or ambiguity from a person that is intimately familiar with a product, its documentation, or internal processes?
Do you not enjoy talking with other people during your day?
CS reps? No. You must be very lonely, yourself, if your mind went there in the context of this conversation.
Have you never experienced the resolution of complexity or ambiguity from a person that is intimately familiar with a product, its documentation, or internal processes?
Yes, and it's universally something that should have been possible online without talking to anyone, AI or human. That's my real hope.
Stage 1: Corporations replace impotent CS reps with AI.
Stage 2: Corporations gradually empower the AI to interface with their existing internal systems in order to get the customer off the phone faster and avoid social-media brouhahas. Yes, they could have empowered the people in stage 1 to do that, but they didn't.
Stage 3: Corporations realize the AI is just another unnecessary middleman on their payroll, and empower customers to check status, report and escalate issues, handle SLA and billing problems, and obtain RMAs directly via their websites. Which should have been how it worked all along.
No, not lonely, I simply choose to not dehumanize those who work in that role.
> it's universally something that should have been possible online without talking to anyone
why do you think it is the case that quite literally zero medium+ sized companies have no customer support? do you think it’s possible that not every single iota of knowledge or edge case is immediately digitized and ready for consumption by an LLM?
is it also possible that customers that pay serious money for a service don’t want to click about on a website to solve a problem they didn’t cause? wasting someone’s time like that when you already fucked up is a very quick way to lose a customer; one throat to choke, as they say.
but since you’ve drawn the rest of the owl with those stages, I can only assume you’re raking in mad consultant fees for companies like Meta - they certainly haven’t had any issues replacing their humans with AI recently!
Are you shocked that techbros (and especially their CEO leaders) are misanthropists? We have probably empowered the most society adverse group of people in human history. Ones that didn't even need to speak to other humans to become rich.
no, not shocked; just willing to check that perspective more publicly than most.
the vonnegut quote is hitting hard today -
“why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is, is we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals.”
So, this is a complete nonsense take. Why do people keep making this kind of comparison? Is there really such a lack of critical thinking being taught these days?
What you were taught no longer matters, compared to what some of the rest of have learned over the past couple of years. Sorry. Shoot the messenger if it makes you feel better, but it won't change anything.
This comment has no substance to it. It's the same as posting "I am right and you are wrong. 'Sorry' if me being right makes you feel bad, but you are wrong."
People are asking legitimate questions whenever this is brought up, because the comparison is wrong. Compilers are an optimization of the previous paradigm, they let you do the exact same thing as what was done in the preceding decades, just faster. LLMs are not that, they are just a completely separate thing that exists alongside regular programming. Arguing that their use isn't just another option, but a superior and total replacement doesn't explain why you think that randomness is a perfect substitute for determinism. The only people I see promoting this view are ones who only want to look at graphs where lines are going up without caring about anything else. Because I think that even if LLMs get 10 times better, we'll still have industries and use cases where determinism will dominate, ones where you get one take to get things right. For instance, I would not fly on a plane with firmware that was created by a guy hitting Generate, going for a coffee break, coming back and saying "yea looks good".
> I understand this probably does not work if you're on some subscription and not using the API (tokens burn fast), but this has been extremely productive for me.
This timeline is straight ass.
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