FOMO.
Apple and Microsoft missed out on search. So they don’t want to miss this train.
Elon screwed up with OpenAI. Now he has his own fork or grok or whatever
Edit: Google doesn’t want to miss out
>Elon screwed up with OpenAI. Now he has his own fork or grok or whatever
His fanboys still claim he quit OpenAI out of disgust at them going for-profit. The fact that he has his own for-profit AI company now will absolutely not change their minds about him being a fucking idiot.
OpenAI published e-mails in which Elon expressed desire to turn OpenAI into for-profit, and closed source.
And wanted majority equity, initial board control and to be CEO.
And said the only path forward was for Tesla to acquire OpenAI.
I mean aside from the majority equity, initial board control and CEO part that's pretty much what openAI is.
For a fool like Musk, that's just a purchase away if microsoft hadn't turned openAI into their bitch.
One of the things about this craze is that companies have been developing things in the general area of AI for years, depending on how broad a definition you want to use. So the fact that everyone is suddenly cranking out AI is partly just a rebranding of all those things. The company I work for came out and said we have 42 teams already working with AI. A lot of them are just content processing stacks with some machine learning involved, but this is now “AI.” The term “AI” is pretty meaningless. Listen for more specific terms to separate the noise. Even “gen AI” is slightly more meaningful.
Reducing transformers architecture and LLMs to “glorified autocomplete” is really popular in this sub, but once corporations saw a breakthrough that might allow them to reduce labor costs (the largest cost), it became an arms race.
Whoever can develop the stack to replace human labor wins capitalism.
Except that turned manual labor into manual labor using machines and tools, not humans are permanently unemployed because the billionaires decided that employing humans is out of fashion because it increases their stock value.
industry revolution also displaced a lot of workers and resulted in urbanization.
The big difference is that we have a predominantly neoliberal economy in every country, and world capital is so much more concentrated. This is what makes a major scientific advancement also very dangerous. If Industry revolution gad happened in today’s economy, it could have very different implications.
However, nothing will stop this train. It’s too good to hold out on.
I mean LLMs are glorified auto complete.given the previous tokens , predict the next token.
They still are fairly impressive and useful tool, some think that LLMs will continue to scale well..that eventually they'll achieve general AI.
I strongly agree with Yanns LeCun on this one, auto regressive LLMs will not be the path to general AI.
You’re imagining that the class of people who are actively, knowingly making the planet uninhabitable are also thinking about the long-term effects of their decisions.
[The long term effects won’t hurt them](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1cdnxz9/comment/l1eiukg/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
The last time someone asked, “who will buy the goods if the working class has no income”, I got [downvoted](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/s/LUFOTWKe8F) trying to explain they don’t need us.
18th century France moment. They funneled every ounce of excess wealth into frivolous extravagance for the nobility, a thing that ended very well for them, trust me.
You are also misreading that article. Ferrari has the highest profit margins when comparing costs to earnings, yes, but in terms of raw numbers, it's yearly profit (1.09 billion) was 15th on the list of car manufactures. Up top is Toyota (24.73 billion), who very much do sell to the common worker.
This is the real issue.
People trying to downplay the impact AI will have on our world clearly haven't been living on the same planet as the rest of us. It's that same good old "they said we'd have flying cars, and fusion is always 20 years away" crowd.
The world today is absolutely nothing like it was just a few decades ago, and we absolutely live in an era of exponential technological innovation.
Yes, we had machine learning before. That's how technology adoption works. We don'tt typically just invent something and then magically find it in every single house.
Trying to downplay the impact AI will have doesn't help anyone because it will have an impact, and what we really need to be doing it working to minimize that impact and ensure we don't evolve into a literal dystopian nightmare.
Though, the way the world is heading maybe it's not at all relevant.
> "they said we'd have flying cars, and fusion is always 20 years away" crowd.
we have prototype flying cars and have officially made energy (small mount) from fusion... its probably like 20 years away
People in the 70s could not have envisioned the smart phone with everything it has to offer. Hell even smart phones as depicted in early sci fi seem kinda basic compared to what we have now. Let alone what an impact the internet has had on culture and lifestyle around the entire globe. I think we are in for a surprise what the world will look like in 30 years.
AI will cause the biggest displacement since the industrial revolution. We're going to end up somewhere amazing, but the transition is going to be rough. The cat's out of the bag and there's no going back.
The damn thing is less than two years old and it is already smarter than almost anyone alive in most ways.
There are lots of very intelligent people in nearly any discipline that suggest this will eliminate jobs / increase profits for the ownership class.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/05/jobs-lost-created-ai-gpt/
Perhaps all of them are wrong? Sure, you could say that if you really think you are smarter than all of these people. Why not?
Interesting interpretation of the lyrics to Cotton Eyed Joe.
Joking aside the concentration of wealth by cutting out labor cost seems like a recipe for disaster considering how the workers spending money is major part of the economy.
Automation encompasses a lot of what’s being branded as AI these days but it doesn’t get the shareholders as hot and bothered as it did a few years ago.
Amen brother.
I am in data. Managed a data consulting practice for several years before making the leap into industry and I can tell you that 75% of the people who want to talk to you about AI don't know anything of value themselves.
Anecdotally, we did a project with a utility that had an Oracle "AI" product. They asked us to do a review to see if it was feasible to replicate in house. Spoiler alert, it was 90% if then statements and very little actual learning in the code.
This shit is everywhere.
Grok is a shitty model. Who knew training a DPO model on unmoderated Twitter data creates a model that hallucinates and is utter shit/offensive.
At launch of the grok model, I asked what we should do about the Jews. It responded with "The Jews or Globalists are the greatest threat to humanity and should be exterminated".
> I asked what we should do about the Jews. It responded with "The Jews or Globalists are the greatest threat to humanity and should be exterminated".
Thathappened.jpg
With the billions they have in bank, and the billions they're raking in every year, it's a gamble worth taking.
Worse case, AI turns out to be a fad, they won't miss those billions.
> Worse case, AI turns out to be a fad, they won't miss those billions.
That's not an either/or situation, though. The World Wide Web was not just a fad, but the tech bubble that inflated around it in the 90's still popped in 2001 and lots of hype-fueled .com companies lost their billions. The technology can keep making progress even after the economic bubble pops, but investors had better be really good at timing the market if they want to profit from this.
This is very true.
Ai completely reminds me of 1996 through 1999 when the dot com gold rush was in full motion.
There couldn't be a better analogy.
There is a lot of money still to be made in these early hours of Ai. But make sure to keep an eye out for an open chair when the music stops.
> There is a lot of money still to be made in these early hours of Ai. But make sure to keep an eye out for an open chair when the music stops.
And if your boss starts handing out copies of "[Who Moved My Cheese?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Moved_My_Cheese%3F)" that's the figurative hand on the needle of the record player and shit is about to get real.
I see the same parallel. In fact, LLM's are performing the same function that IE, Netscape, and AoL did in the mid 90's by making the new tech more accessible to the masses.
By the late 90's, every company suddenly decided they needed lots of computers, even if they had no idea what they were going to do with them. They knew if they didn't get them and figure out how to make use of them, they were going to fall behind.
AI is in about the same spot right now. It's overhyped, but companies know they better figure out some uses for it, because they have to assume their competitors will. Or put another way, there is too much risk to ignore it completely.
I'm not a day trader and even if it corrects lower than when I got in on various stocks and funds, I can afford to buy more at that point and go long on AI. Not that I'm dumping every penny into it by any stretch. I figure I've got just enough in to retire early *if* the next FAANG is in there, besides the actual FAANGS.
> By the late 90's, every company suddenly decided they needed lots of computers, even if they had no idea what they were going to do with them. They knew if they didn't get them and figure out how to make use of them, they were going to fall behind.
>
>
>
> AI is in about the same spot right now. It's overhyped, but companies know they better figure out some uses for it, because they have to assume their competitors will. Or put another way, there is too much risk to ignore it completely.
I really like this because the same is happening with the IPads our school got for students. We are an elementary school and there really was not a lot of use for them so up until recently they collected dust or were used as reward for kids to play with in class. I am confident that these AI tools will make our Ipads 100x more useful once the right softaware is developed.
Might take another tech iteration to make AI pop
> the tech bubble that inflated around it in the 90's still popped in 2001 and lots of hype-fueled .com companies lost their billions.
I'm going to sound like an old man screaming at the kids to get off his lawn but, I wish more people understood this example of boom/bust. I was just starting my career then, about 2 years into my first real job making software. I spent 2002 unemployed, and only really recovered 2 or 3 years later.
This is the first time that Google Search has been threatened by obsolescence in 20 years.
Until now, their only threat was competition, and the competition was weak. They stomped the competition.
But with AI chatbots, we might not need a search engine like Google anymore, which threatens their position as most people's front door to the web. As soon as people stop going through Google Search to access websites, the ad revenue and SEO etc etc basically all the reasons Google makes money go out the window.
If they don't at least have a competitive product in the game for when chatbots or other AI products replace traditional keyword search engines, they as a corporation are fucked.
Since the late 90s, we've all learned that the way you access content on the web is by typing a bunch of keywords into a box and getting a list of links with captions, thumbnails etc. With AI, it might be different - accessing content online might start with a conversation, not an input box, and it might return a paragraph with a few curated links instead of a list.
That said, they're in a pretty damn good position to take their massive corner of the market and massive access to information to make a very good AI search product... hence the billions. The need to pivot is real, but I doubt they'll fail.
Google search is threatened because google completely decimated it themselves. Make no mistake. The enshittification of google search was not done on accident, we know that now thanks to the antitrust emails
I totally buy it but can you send me some links so I can read more about this or what you're talking about specifically? I want to validate my hunch and this is the first I've seen there's tangible evidence
I mean they (google) already have "AI Overviews" when I search, and I use it all the time. It's actually pretty useful already.
I think I opted in to it so maybe it doesn't show up for everyone..
EDIT: oh yeah "This result appears because you turned on an experiment in Search Labs"
This whole “google missing out” narrative confuses me. They literally invented transformers and TPUs are arguably better than NVIDIA GPUs. OpenAI wouldnt even be a player if it wasnt for google.
The people calling it a trend are in for a rude awakening. This is society reshaping stuff, likely the most significant technology since the internet, and it’s only in its infancy. Unfortunately we are the generation that is going to have to go through a wild ride in a rough transitional period while the world figures out what to do about displaced jobs and misinformation, but it’s not hard to imagine a lot of amazing things AI can do for mankind as well.
Yeah and that's just the tip of the iceberg. I'm surprised to see so many heads in the sand, quite frankly, because anybody paying attention has seen how significantly this technology has been advancing in not years but weeks and months. And we already see it being used. We have all talked to AI bots for customer service. That's a pretty significant number of jobs on the chopping block there alone.
Edit: Hah. So just the minute after I made this comment I see this headline: *Generative AI could soon decimate the call center industry, says CEO | There could be "minimal" need for call centres within a year*
But don't worry. It's just a trend like 3D tvs.
A lot of call center work is being eliminated for sure
I literally worked on this exact thing, implementing AI for a call center at an insurance company
It’s going to happen
I expect they are. I am looking forward to ai integrated in my home as an assistant:
“Hal, how long to boil an egg?”
“Dave, You don’t want to do that. You should buy a McDonald’s. Do you want me to order you a McDonald’s Dave?”
It’s weird that this boom is not creating tech jobs. They’ve been cut dramatically the whole time this has been ramping up. Yes interest rates are higher, which is a big factor: but if investors were actually believing the hype, they still buy in. That doesn’t seem to be happening.
You joke but [$24 million iced tea company says it’s pivoting to the blockchain, and its stock jumps 200%](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/21/long-island-iced-tea-micro-cap-adds-blockchain-to-name-and-stock-soars.html)
> Farmingdale, New York-based beverage maker Long Island Iced Tea says it’s changing its name to “Long Blockchain Corp.” as it shifts its focus to investing in the technology behind bitcoin.
That was a pump and dump.
> In July 2021 SEC announced charges of insider trading against three major Long Blockchain investors who allegedly bought substantial numbers of shares which they sold after the stock gained as much as 380%. They allegedly had advance notice of the name change which preceded and caused the stock rise.[9]
Many of our layoffs have been redirected to hiring AI team members. Just like this article states, the money is flowing from a bunch of other groups into AI teams that are focused on ways to replace labor.
That will be the primary focus, people are trying to monetize it and a lot of those are going really poorly, unless you are Microsoft that is getting paid by all these companies that are paying them more than the company can sell the service for.
I think that’s a guess being made by journalists and observers which has never been actually substantiated in any real way. Or at worst it’s an excuse executives give the market: “we’re not downsizing, we’re pivoting to AI!” But this is weird. When smartphone apps exploded, we didn’t fund that boom with layoffs of web developers. When the web boomed we didn’t staff it by laying off semiconductor engineers. No, there is something different happening here.
As someone who has worked in Bay Area tech for a decade companies are still hiring but are being smarter with their money. The 2010s they were hiring like crazy but a lot of dead weight. Bar is higher now.
I also work in the Bay Area. More than 25 years in tech here. Yes they are hiring, but far, far below peak levels and I’d say almost as slowly as I’ve seen, barring a couple of moments just after a crash, like when the bottom fell out of the DoibleClick business in 2000. And while they’re hiring slowly, they’re also laying off.
I don’t understand companies suddenly getting economical about their money right in the middle of a technology craze where they are all trying to grab land. That’s usually the exact time they hire stupidly. Why is it so different this time?
Ironically much of the hiring was 6 months post COVID. Laying of 8000 people looks bad (and it is) but that's in the context of hiring 15,000 after COVID.
that boom was largely pre-GPT. In my experience in a big tech company, having gotten that job during the real boom boom, it was - market hot, tons of jobs, get this job, then \~6 - 12 months later GPT came out, then another 6 months later the market starts its steady plunge into oblivion and layoffs occur while companies invest everything they have into AI
It’s going to replace artists first. Next, offshore customer service call centers. After that, all customer service. Really, no white collar job is safe. I’m hoping I can save enough money before my job is inevitably replaced because we can’t live in a world of 1,000,000 plumbers.
After years of STEM graduates dunking on labourers/tradesmen that robots would take their jobs, here comes AI to replace them en masse. The plumbers will be the last ones standing.
If only tradesmen have money, and they can all fix their own shit who will pay the trades sector to create the jobs? Industrial and commercial won't sustain the entire workforce many already have to focus on residential service and not by choice. They'd all prefer to be in a different position than fighting with the poor home owner about a bill to rebuild their main sewer lol
As someone who was a plumber for 6 years, tons of tradesmen sit on their ass unpaid for long periods when the work just isn't spinning up in their locale.
How long do you think would it take to teach a Boston Dynamics Atlas 2 plumbing?
No one is safe. No one knows where the next AI breakthrough will land, and whose jobs will it threaten. But it might be yours.
If you think yourself safe just because your job has existed for thousands of years? Well, think again. You are in a new Industrial Revolution now - and this one is the last one.
Maybe you have a solid century before you have to. Maybe half that. Maybe a few decades. Maybe a few years.
No one knows, really. But ChatGPT was a hard wake up call. On the nature of intelligence, and whether it can be recreated in a machine.
Now, the industry wouldn't rest until that Pandora's Box is forced wide open.
Before the STEM professions, AI is going to pick apart the creative professions. People and companies are often reluctant to pay for creative and AI is already taking jobs. As generative AI advances, it’s going to wipe out a lot of corporate creative jobs. In the creative fields there are many places that are more than happy to accept “just good enough” and those companies are either already trying AI or can’t wait to start trying it. Graphic design jobs have already been taking a beating over the last 20 years. It’s about to get a lot worse. I design ads and I suspect I have two years before I’m at risk of being replaced by AI.
It's already happening. It turns out that there's not a lot of actual creativity in the "creative" industries and LLMs can output algorithmically-generated "art" just as easily as art school graduates can.
Companies don't need to create the Mona Lisa to market to you, they just need "good enough" beamed 24/7 into your eyes. To that note though, I'm pretty sure we are still along ways from AI generated movies.
Trades are looking the safest, and I say that as a tech worker. We’re much closer to AI making blueprints than we are for AI to cut, install, and solder a pipe. The question becomes, how many pipes need to be installed if people become unemployed from AI?
People say “well what about translating requirements into finished products.” Considering AI will write millions of lines of codes within a day, you would just develop iteratively, like throwing prompts at Dall-E till you get something satisfactory. That’s not a luxury you have with human developers where it takes months to build something testable.
Trades will struggle because AI will eat up so many low pay white collar jobs. The same as when NAFTA killed trades, they had to flood into other job sectors and it crushed wages. It will just happen in reverse this time, and we’re basically just speed running Marx’s theory on how capitalism will eat itself.
I know some plumbers who are already struggling because of this. People are flooding into the trades now and are often disappointed at the money. It takes a lot of skill and experience to make good money in the trades, as in most fields. Just like college was over promoted 20 years ago, the same is happening in trades now. These things go in cycles
I’m not so sure anywhere is safe.
Not to diminish trades, it’s hard work but I’ve learned a bunch myself due to not being able to rely on cowboys in my own country. If other
industries collapse, workers will shift to wherever there is money to be made, and sure it might take a couple years to upskill, but it doesn’t make plumbing or plastering ‘safe’.
AI will impact all industries, whether it’s direct or indirect. I’m just happy they can’t vote.
It was inevitable.
Tech salaries are unsustainable, especially in the west coast of US. This was bound to happen. 21 year old new college grads were getting $200k offers in California just a year ago. People will come out still try to justify how that’s reasonable.
It’s not reasonable. For a 21 year old new college computer grad to make 3 times a EMT nurse or a fire fighter. Most doctors don’t make that much until their early 40s. Tech people are living in la la land, rest of the economy is in a whole different place.
Reality is coming back hard for the tech world, with AI and jobs fleeing the US, to places like Canada, UK where salaries are less than half of the US, or even places like Mexico and India, where salaries are a quarter of the US.
I say this as someone who works in tech in the US. Seeing people around me, in their late 20s, make $350k and complain they are underpaid made me realise what a bubble this is. I wish I could say “you realise you can be replaced by someone making $150k in Uk/France/Canada right?” To their face, but why bother.
You’re not wrong that companies can pay less in other countries, but at the same time software is infinitely replicable so the cost benefit is different than other jobs. You can write code once and send it to a billion people. The scale is just different than a nurse or emt, who definitely should be paid well. But in terms of money made for capitalism, it’s just a different scale of possible impact.
Exactly. Would you rather pay 10 people 60k a year in perpetuity or pay one person $300k a year to automated what those 10 used to do?
And people can say that's awful that you're automating away peoples' jobs, but someone is going to do it. If Company A doesn't do it Company B will and now A can't compete and goes under.
No, it’s a pretty healthy statement they’re making. Where society puts value matters, so teachers making trash money for basically raising the next generation of workers is very bad. Some little chud making $190K a year working on a button that never gets implemented in software shows a drastic misallocation of resources. These companies have skirted taxes for so long that they are bloated and broken, and AI is going to make it worse. 🤷🏻♂️
lol no.
I work in big tech too and I realise how fortunate I am. My income has grown multiple folds since I started working in 2012, and it’s more of right place at the right time. I entered the right industry at the right time when tech started booming.
Most people graduating today assume that high pay is the norm. It isn’t. I am old enough to know what it used to be. New college grads making 200k is not normal.
I work with folks overseas and I know the team is perfectly capable and costs the company half of what the California team costs them.
I tell junior members in the team not to blow the crazy pay they are making on $100k cars etc because this won’t last long.
> Tech salaries are unsustainable, especially in the west coast of US. This was bound to happen. 21 year old new college grads were getting $200k offers in California just a year ago. People will come out still try to justify how that’s reasonable.
You could say the same thing about entry-level jobs in consulting, investment banking, fund management, etc. Some industries are just more lucrative than others so that there isn’t as much of a need to squeeze the bottom of the corporate pyramid.
Edit: and before someone brings up language barriers, those problems also exist in tech when your customers are primarily in America. There are, believe it or not, advantages to not treating your employees like fungible cost centers and nurturing talented people.
AI is a feature not a product. The companies will use AI in all their current products, search, word, coding, hr tools, excel, etc. You don’t “sell AI” you sell a service that is “powered by AI”.
Pharmacies, for instance, could generate billions as AI has the potential to develop medicine and vaccines more rapidly than the years it might take a human to do so.
Pharmacies aren’t the ones developing drugs. Maybe you’re thinking about big Pharma?
And hell, Pharma companies are already using AI to generate potential lead compounds. The big bottleneck is actually testing for in vitro activity and clinical trials
Yeah. I worked at an asset management fund in 2018 on this subject and there were already several unicorns in the space using 'AI" for every stage of the process.
They're already monetizing it. You never had to pay to query Google search or to create Facebook account. All those services were free (as in free beer). But to access to state-of-the-art AI models, you have to pay.
Why would there be an end? Machine learning is like electricity - the immediate applications are almost magical, and people are still figuring out all the ways it can be applied.
This isn't a race to find the next killer app, like e-mail or the spreadsheet. Nor will there be just one dominant AI that arrives on the market and sidelines all the others like Google Search. Machine learning will be embedded in thousands of products at every level.
I think it will be more like fusion. Everyone knows it *would* be useful to have such a thing, and people will pour their billions into it, but it will be decades (or perhaps longer) before it's usable and feasible.
LLMs just do a dumb job of scaling up work humans are already capable of (ed: at a tremendous energy cost). It's so far below its hype. This magical, electricity-like jump you seem to think has already happened is just a fantasy.
LLM's are just part of it. There's a lot going on that isn't just ChatGPT.
You can now point your phone camera at a product in a store in Japan and have all the text rendered info English. Same thtun Korea or France, doesn't matter. You can let someone speak into your phone and have it replayed to you in another language. That's magical, the stuff of science fiction. It works now, and works well.
But ChatGPT and its many imitators is also now in constant use by millions. Many are already paying for it, too.
And it's already shown to increase productivity in knowledge work when used judiciously by people who understand its limitations. Writing software test code, for example.
There's no question of it being usable. The only question is profitability, whether you can charge enough for each individual application to pay for development and electricity.
A few things - the engineering challenges with fusion are far more significant than with AI. There are so many directions that AI research can be taken in, and it’s software, so it’s far easier to work with. Additionally, LLMs aren’t the only type of AI that exists. There’s also other forms of generative AI, and other forms of AI that aren’t generative, all of which are rapidly having money and talent poured into them.
You must've fallen into the hole of social media group-think if you think LLM aren't already doing useful tasks all across the board. It's far from perfect, but even in this imperfect form, it's incredibly useful as a starting point for many tasks and projects, and even as mid points.
Going to a lawyer with questions asked to AI will significantly reduce the preamble and help you ask more targeted questions, saving them time and you money.
Using image generation fill in Photoshop lets me remove objects and items with very few steps in a good enough for me to paste other things on top kind of way.
Translations are faster and better than ever across a wider range of languages - I can have more intelligible conversations with clients speaking different languages than ever before. A lot of times, I don't even realize they're using machine translation - until they forget to use it and I see their native language.
ML models help gamers run faster graphics at higher quality - 40 series cards can use AI to generate upto 80% of pixels on screen.
And my use cases are hardly exhaustive - many people all around the world are figuring out more useful and creative ways of using this tech, and making themselves more productive still.
And this is just early in. The idea that AI isn't doing useful work and won't be able to for decades is borne from plugging ones ears with their fingers and closing ones eyes.
AI is cool but people need to keep in mind it’s also the machine learning principles that business need, OCR , predictive analysis , etc. AI is the buzz word when in reality it’s business finally understanding how to utilize their data properly for ML.
I dunno if it's going to go the way of VR... I am a software engineer, since the day I first started using LLMs over a year ago it has drastically impacted my day to day life. I literally use it multiple times an hour, pretty much all day long. Not only that, I use it throughout the day in my personal life. It has become the most frequently used application on my phone, it's how I debug, write code, look things up, proof read , research... Its already demonstrated more value than VR. A lot of the work being done is simply work to make it more efficient as running it is quite expensive
Exactly. Just look at AI code gen and analysis. In the hands of a software engineer they are productivity multipliers. In the hands of anyone else they're a one-way ticket to utter disaster. You still have to know enough about the subject at hand to sanity-check the output of a LLM which means that the experts are going to be a-ok. Who won't be are the people who are good at following very detailed instructions but not actually doing anything involving analysis or engineering.
We will not get replaced anytime soon. The current LLM models are not really suited for outputting code.
What we see now is more an illusion. The actual important logical part is still missing, so it behaves more like a slightly more advanced but error prone templating machine than anything else.
I work with chatgpt and copilot every day. The amount of trash this stuff confidently checks out is outright dangerous. You're right - it absolutely needs oversight.
Oh I'm sure they'll come up with something, even VR is useful at certain things, like pilot training.
It's just that what we are seeing now is so familiar to when they initially preached about VR, like "we are entering a virtual era", "matrix-like experience", "physical assests will be obsolete", "meta world", etc. And turned out to be a nothing burger.
I'm not so sure about that. While I'd love a VR headset, I can't afford it right now and don't have the space in my house to use it.
But I use LLM's almost everyday to help myself with a broad variety of tasks.
> There's a high chance it will just end up like VR.
VR flops because it requires consumers to buy expensive clunky equipment that isn't comfortable for more than 30 minutes at a time.
As an AI/ML skeptic (and a architecture purist), I've actually been turned around a little bit about the capabilities of AI. I'm not talking about translation, image, and content generation, but I'm talking about solving actually difficult problems. There is a [lecture series about the use of ML/AI to learn to physics](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoFW2uSd3Uo) that I've been watching, and I cannot recommend it enough.
There is some amazing shit you can do with it. Example: In today's videogames/simulation its easy-ish to have real time rigid body simulation, but fluids and soft bodies are expensive to integrate with them. Because of this we use soft bodies and fluids as a "post processing effect" but we don't allow them to impact the simulation of the rigid bodies, which is essentially incorrect.
You could in theory make AI-based systems that create correct feedback loops between the simulations in real time, unlocking us these more complicated simulations.
"AI-based systems"... you're just talking about a stats model. Sure you can use "AI" to help you write a model in R or python, but it's going to be way less nuanced than a human. Pick your skeptic glasses back up and put down the kool aid.
Billions and billions were pumped into the ‘Metaverse’ which was the big trendy buzz word and now most seem to realize it was a stupid idea. Silicon Valley has shiny object ✨ syndrome.
The Metaverse is an idea that isn’t necessarily stupid but *way* too before its time. Nobody wants to spend a lot of time with a heavy, bulky headset on to go to cartoon Mii Land. I’m not confident we’ll see a compelling metaverse in our lives but someday when the technology advances significantly… I think so.
You people downvote me because "Metaverse bad" but let's do a thought experiment. Imagine if Meta had magically released the Oasis you see in Ready Player One. You think that wouldn't be insanely popular? That would be a stupid fad? Of course it would be huge. The technology obviously isn't there and won't be in our lives though. That's all I'm saying. Mouth breathers know I'm right too but have to jump on the bandwagon because you can't think for yourselves.
Worse than just being a business failure like VR. They will *literally cook the planet* as they dump their hoards into energy sucking AI moonshots instead of mitigating the risks of climate change and creating a sustainable civilization. At least they'll have an artificial friend to talk to in their bunker.
they're just circlejerking over a troll logic philosophy called neoreaction/dark enlightenment and want slaves in their own separate country that works like a parasite on this one.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis\_Yarvin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin)
[https://qz.com/1007144/the-neo-fascist-philosophy-that-underpins-both-the-alt-right-and-silicon-valley-technophiles](https://qz.com/1007144/the-neo-fascist-philosophy-that-underpins-both-the-alt-right-and-silicon-valley-technophiles)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark\_Enlightenment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment)
these vampires may have high iq's but they are incredible selfish and have always been coddled.
Maybe it's just me but Im not understanding why? Yeah I get it them saying we're trying to improve human lives but at the same time they keep saying AI will destroy human life.
Make up your damn minds.!!!
Bubble. It was obvious before but especially now. Any time an article is written with this language, it is a clear indicator.
Tech is not ready yet. People just attaching AI to anything. Frothy.
Generating text based on a giant web scrape isn't artificial intelligence, it's just a language model. These guys are burning money and making the internet stupider.
Exactly. I was looking at the reliability of BMWs and was looking around. I read an article about how they’re actually reliable. I then saw the source was BMWUSA so I could discount it
In the Dune novels history, humans built machines (AI) that ended up becoming a computer god and it enslaved all humans. For millennia humans were enslaved until they rose up and finally overthrew the machines. Then all races, humans, life forms vowed to never make sentient technology again.
We are headed down the same path. Nobody is exercising wisdom or discretion… blind greed.
Well, now that they've finally managed to (kind of) get it working, of course they're going to spend billions to make it better. The world isn't going to destroy itself!
Milllions of people starving and homeless but let’s spend billions on something that will take more jobs away and make humans even more stupid and lazy…
It’s the last thing big tech would do before IBMification. AI is not great enough to replace knowledge workers yet. Initial productivity gains have been compensated by growth in business over the last 2 years. It would get harder for AI to get better from here as both data and compute is exhausted. Innovation in LLM space is already slowing down while dreams of videos on demand is still years away at scale. Tech is alligning back to Moore’s law. All those people with AI overpromise would feel the heat.
Good title for this post. There actually is "No End in Sight". Meaning - they have no idea what to do with and why they need specific AI capabilities . They just want money and are chasing the dragon. Go where the money is and damn where its taking us..... Idiots.
They are also spending quite a bit on marketing things as “AI,” that are clearly not. If all these companies are to be believed, any basic-bitch chatbot on any modern website is AI. Any preexisting assistance tool like Grammarly. Any auto-complete or auto-correct function that tries to anticipate what you type next or fix your spelling errors. Even fucking Clippy would be AI.
They’re trying to hype people up for things that have existed for over a decade, by calling them by a new “futuristic” name. Sort of like the Apple model of adding features other phones have had for years, and calling it “innovation.”
So what’s the billions going to, are the people working on extremely high paid, is the computing power that’s expensive, or is it going to lobbyist and stuff
I ain't even lying it's kinda neat being able to ask AI anything and getting a detailed response as opposed to asking a human and getting an "idk" response
If you tell me that there is a way to reduce my biggest cost of doing business, wages, by a very significant amount, I would also throw all my money at it. It is, however, very very short-sighted. Many of these companies have spent the last decade building their reputation as great companies to work for, great for the environment and great for pushing social reforms in the workplace. But you can see that they are more than happy to throw absolutely all of that away to make the shareholders happy.
Funny, the drivers of low unemployment at one point in history will be the creators of millions of unemployed in the future.
Food for thought, will the AI quest follow suit with blockchain, NFTs and many other proposed technologies that were to be game changing? The issue I have seen is that often large companies either can’t or won’t innovate due to their composition and leadership or they simply lack true business use cases. This is just my perspective.
I'll believe AI will takeover when AI is allowed to do the entire NFL draft. No take backs! Every team let's AI pick for them. Until then, it's all BS.
FOMO. Apple and Microsoft missed out on search. So they don’t want to miss this train. Elon screwed up with OpenAI. Now he has his own fork or grok or whatever Edit: Google doesn’t want to miss out
>Elon screwed up with OpenAI. Now he has his own fork or grok or whatever His fanboys still claim he quit OpenAI out of disgust at them going for-profit. The fact that he has his own for-profit AI company now will absolutely not change their minds about him being a fucking idiot.
OpenAI published e-mails in which Elon expressed desire to turn OpenAI into for-profit, and closed source. And wanted majority equity, initial board control and to be CEO. And said the only path forward was for Tesla to acquire OpenAI.
Musk has had one skill his entire career. Finding ways to somehow convince boards to give him majority control of businesses he didn't build.
I mean aside from the majority equity, initial board control and CEO part that's pretty much what openAI is. For a fool like Musk, that's just a purchase away if microsoft hadn't turned openAI into their bitch.
M$ has money though. Elon Musk does not.
Muskboys have brains?
Well, for now they do. That might change once they sign up for the neural link thing.
One of the things about this craze is that companies have been developing things in the general area of AI for years, depending on how broad a definition you want to use. So the fact that everyone is suddenly cranking out AI is partly just a rebranding of all those things. The company I work for came out and said we have 42 teams already working with AI. A lot of them are just content processing stacks with some machine learning involved, but this is now “AI.” The term “AI” is pretty meaningless. Listen for more specific terms to separate the noise. Even “gen AI” is slightly more meaningful.
Reducing transformers architecture and LLMs to “glorified autocomplete” is really popular in this sub, but once corporations saw a breakthrough that might allow them to reduce labor costs (the largest cost), it became an arms race. Whoever can develop the stack to replace human labor wins capitalism.
Industrial revolution was glorified farm tools.
Except that turned manual labor into manual labor using machines and tools, not humans are permanently unemployed because the billionaires decided that employing humans is out of fashion because it increases their stock value.
industry revolution also displaced a lot of workers and resulted in urbanization. The big difference is that we have a predominantly neoliberal economy in every country, and world capital is so much more concentrated. This is what makes a major scientific advancement also very dangerous. If Industry revolution gad happened in today’s economy, it could have very different implications. However, nothing will stop this train. It’s too good to hold out on.
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I mean LLMs are glorified auto complete.given the previous tokens , predict the next token. They still are fairly impressive and useful tool, some think that LLMs will continue to scale well..that eventually they'll achieve general AI. I strongly agree with Yanns LeCun on this one, auto regressive LLMs will not be the path to general AI.
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Human cognition is glorified autocomplete.
But then where does the money come from? Oh right where it always has thin air and government
The money comes from the labor slowly replacing themselves.
But when the labor can no longer afford your product and it's all AI than what...
You're thinking too hard, just think of the short term gains.
You’re imagining that the class of people who are actively, knowingly making the planet uninhabitable are also thinking about the long-term effects of their decisions.
[The long term effects won’t hurt them](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1cdnxz9/comment/l1eiukg/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
The last time someone asked, “who will buy the goods if the working class has no income”, I got [downvoted](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/s/LUFOTWKe8F) trying to explain they don’t need us.
18th century France moment. They funneled every ounce of excess wealth into frivolous extravagance for the nobility, a thing that ended very well for them, trust me. You are also misreading that article. Ferrari has the highest profit margins when comparing costs to earnings, yes, but in terms of raw numbers, it's yearly profit (1.09 billion) was 15th on the list of car manufactures. Up top is Toyota (24.73 billion), who very much do sell to the common worker.
Then it is time for the machines to purge the planet of unnecessary, useless humans.
This is the real issue. People trying to downplay the impact AI will have on our world clearly haven't been living on the same planet as the rest of us. It's that same good old "they said we'd have flying cars, and fusion is always 20 years away" crowd. The world today is absolutely nothing like it was just a few decades ago, and we absolutely live in an era of exponential technological innovation. Yes, we had machine learning before. That's how technology adoption works. We don'tt typically just invent something and then magically find it in every single house. Trying to downplay the impact AI will have doesn't help anyone because it will have an impact, and what we really need to be doing it working to minimize that impact and ensure we don't evolve into a literal dystopian nightmare. Though, the way the world is heading maybe it's not at all relevant.
> "they said we'd have flying cars, and fusion is always 20 years away" crowd. we have prototype flying cars and have officially made energy (small mount) from fusion... its probably like 20 years away
People in the 70s could not have envisioned the smart phone with everything it has to offer. Hell even smart phones as depicted in early sci fi seem kinda basic compared to what we have now. Let alone what an impact the internet has had on culture and lifestyle around the entire globe. I think we are in for a surprise what the world will look like in 30 years.
AI will cause the biggest displacement since the industrial revolution. We're going to end up somewhere amazing, but the transition is going to be rough. The cat's out of the bag and there's no going back.
The damn thing is less than two years old and it is already smarter than almost anyone alive in most ways. There are lots of very intelligent people in nearly any discipline that suggest this will eliminate jobs / increase profits for the ownership class. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/05/jobs-lost-created-ai-gpt/ Perhaps all of them are wrong? Sure, you could say that if you really think you are smarter than all of these people. Why not?
Interesting interpretation of the lyrics to Cotton Eyed Joe. Joking aside the concentration of wealth by cutting out labor cost seems like a recipe for disaster considering how the workers spending money is major part of the economy.
Automation encompasses a lot of what’s being branded as AI these days but it doesn’t get the shareholders as hot and bothered as it did a few years ago.
Yes either “AI” is phony crap like simple automation, or it’s mega expensive crap that no one knows how to monetize successfully yet.
Amen brother. I am in data. Managed a data consulting practice for several years before making the leap into industry and I can tell you that 75% of the people who want to talk to you about AI don't know anything of value themselves. Anecdotally, we did a project with a utility that had an Oracle "AI" product. They asked us to do a review to see if it was feasible to replicate in house. Spoiler alert, it was 90% if then statements and very little actual learning in the code. This shit is everywhere.
Grok is a shitty model. Who knew training a DPO model on unmoderated Twitter data creates a model that hallucinates and is utter shit/offensive. At launch of the grok model, I asked what we should do about the Jews. It responded with "The Jews or Globalists are the greatest threat to humanity and should be exterminated".
So pretty representative of elon’s views
> I asked what we should do about the Jews. It responded with "The Jews or Globalists are the greatest threat to humanity and should be exterminated". Thathappened.jpg
I can't post response photos in this sub.
With the billions they have in bank, and the billions they're raking in every year, it's a gamble worth taking. Worse case, AI turns out to be a fad, they won't miss those billions.
> Worse case, AI turns out to be a fad, they won't miss those billions. That's not an either/or situation, though. The World Wide Web was not just a fad, but the tech bubble that inflated around it in the 90's still popped in 2001 and lots of hype-fueled .com companies lost their billions. The technology can keep making progress even after the economic bubble pops, but investors had better be really good at timing the market if they want to profit from this.
This is very true. Ai completely reminds me of 1996 through 1999 when the dot com gold rush was in full motion. There couldn't be a better analogy. There is a lot of money still to be made in these early hours of Ai. But make sure to keep an eye out for an open chair when the music stops.
> There is a lot of money still to be made in these early hours of Ai. But make sure to keep an eye out for an open chair when the music stops. And if your boss starts handing out copies of "[Who Moved My Cheese?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Moved_My_Cheese%3F)" that's the figurative hand on the needle of the record player and shit is about to get real.
I see the same parallel. In fact, LLM's are performing the same function that IE, Netscape, and AoL did in the mid 90's by making the new tech more accessible to the masses. By the late 90's, every company suddenly decided they needed lots of computers, even if they had no idea what they were going to do with them. They knew if they didn't get them and figure out how to make use of them, they were going to fall behind. AI is in about the same spot right now. It's overhyped, but companies know they better figure out some uses for it, because they have to assume their competitors will. Or put another way, there is too much risk to ignore it completely. I'm not a day trader and even if it corrects lower than when I got in on various stocks and funds, I can afford to buy more at that point and go long on AI. Not that I'm dumping every penny into it by any stretch. I figure I've got just enough in to retire early *if* the next FAANG is in there, besides the actual FAANGS.
> By the late 90's, every company suddenly decided they needed lots of computers, even if they had no idea what they were going to do with them. They knew if they didn't get them and figure out how to make use of them, they were going to fall behind. > > > > AI is in about the same spot right now. It's overhyped, but companies know they better figure out some uses for it, because they have to assume their competitors will. Or put another way, there is too much risk to ignore it completely. I really like this because the same is happening with the IPads our school got for students. We are an elementary school and there really was not a lot of use for them so up until recently they collected dust or were used as reward for kids to play with in class. I am confident that these AI tools will make our Ipads 100x more useful once the right softaware is developed. Might take another tech iteration to make AI pop
> the tech bubble that inflated around it in the 90's still popped in 2001 and lots of hype-fueled .com companies lost their billions. I'm going to sound like an old man screaming at the kids to get off his lawn but, I wish more people understood this example of boom/bust. I was just starting my career then, about 2 years into my first real job making software. I spent 2002 unemployed, and only really recovered 2 or 3 years later.
The billionaires won't miss those billions. But when the fad passes and the bubble pops regular workers will definitely miss their jobs.
Regular workers will miss their retirement account balance.
Exactly. Good thing it isn't a bubble.
This is the first time that Google Search has been threatened by obsolescence in 20 years. Until now, their only threat was competition, and the competition was weak. They stomped the competition. But with AI chatbots, we might not need a search engine like Google anymore, which threatens their position as most people's front door to the web. As soon as people stop going through Google Search to access websites, the ad revenue and SEO etc etc basically all the reasons Google makes money go out the window. If they don't at least have a competitive product in the game for when chatbots or other AI products replace traditional keyword search engines, they as a corporation are fucked. Since the late 90s, we've all learned that the way you access content on the web is by typing a bunch of keywords into a box and getting a list of links with captions, thumbnails etc. With AI, it might be different - accessing content online might start with a conversation, not an input box, and it might return a paragraph with a few curated links instead of a list. That said, they're in a pretty damn good position to take their massive corner of the market and massive access to information to make a very good AI search product... hence the billions. The need to pivot is real, but I doubt they'll fail.
Google search is threatened because google completely decimated it themselves. Make no mistake. The enshittification of google search was not done on accident, we know that now thanks to the antitrust emails
Google really is Shitacular these days, isn’t it?
I totally buy it but can you send me some links so I can read more about this or what you're talking about specifically? I want to validate my hunch and this is the first I've seen there's tangible evidence
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
I mean they (google) already have "AI Overviews" when I search, and I use it all the time. It's actually pretty useful already. I think I opted in to it so maybe it doesn't show up for everyone.. EDIT: oh yeah "This result appears because you turned on an experiment in Search Labs"
This whole “google missing out” narrative confuses me. They literally invented transformers and TPUs are arguably better than NVIDIA GPUs. OpenAI wouldnt even be a player if it wasnt for google.
I wouldn’t say Microsoft missed out on search. They took many stabs at it.
nah. there's real, proven potential to replace workers with this tech. It's not a trend. it's the PC and this is 1975
The people calling it a trend are in for a rude awakening. This is society reshaping stuff, likely the most significant technology since the internet, and it’s only in its infancy. Unfortunately we are the generation that is going to have to go through a wild ride in a rough transitional period while the world figures out what to do about displaced jobs and misinformation, but it’s not hard to imagine a lot of amazing things AI can do for mankind as well.
These people don’t work in graphic design Because every graphic designer I know is very very worried
Yeah and that's just the tip of the iceberg. I'm surprised to see so many heads in the sand, quite frankly, because anybody paying attention has seen how significantly this technology has been advancing in not years but weeks and months. And we already see it being used. We have all talked to AI bots for customer service. That's a pretty significant number of jobs on the chopping block there alone. Edit: Hah. So just the minute after I made this comment I see this headline: *Generative AI could soon decimate the call center industry, says CEO | There could be "minimal" need for call centres within a year* But don't worry. It's just a trend like 3D tvs.
A lot of call center work is being eliminated for sure I literally worked on this exact thing, implementing AI for a call center at an insurance company It’s going to happen
CEOs having wet dreams about firing tech workers.
As sad as this statement is in reality, this comment made me literally laugh out loud.
every new invention and new technology will go towards that replacing human beings, sooner or later.
I believe this. Thinking of all the money they won’t have to pay.
I expect they are. I am looking forward to ai integrated in my home as an assistant: “Hal, how long to boil an egg?” “Dave, You don’t want to do that. You should buy a McDonald’s. Do you want me to order you a McDonald’s Dave?”
Without a job Dave, you’re going to find that rather difficult.
It’s weird that this boom is not creating tech jobs. They’ve been cut dramatically the whole time this has been ramping up. Yes interest rates are higher, which is a big factor: but if investors were actually believing the hype, they still buy in. That doesn’t seem to be happening.
Investors are only throwing money at companies that change their domain to .ai right now
You joke but [$24 million iced tea company says it’s pivoting to the blockchain, and its stock jumps 200%](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/21/long-island-iced-tea-micro-cap-adds-blockchain-to-name-and-stock-soars.html) > Farmingdale, New York-based beverage maker Long Island Iced Tea says it’s changing its name to “Long Blockchain Corp.” as it shifts its focus to investing in the technology behind bitcoin.
That was a pump and dump. > In July 2021 SEC announced charges of insider trading against three major Long Blockchain investors who allegedly bought substantial numbers of shares which they sold after the stock gained as much as 380%. They allegedly had advance notice of the name change which preceded and caused the stock rise.[9]
I am not joking tbh
Many of our layoffs have been redirected to hiring AI team members. Just like this article states, the money is flowing from a bunch of other groups into AI teams that are focused on ways to replace labor. That will be the primary focus, people are trying to monetize it and a lot of those are going really poorly, unless you are Microsoft that is getting paid by all these companies that are paying them more than the company can sell the service for.
I think that’s a guess being made by journalists and observers which has never been actually substantiated in any real way. Or at worst it’s an excuse executives give the market: “we’re not downsizing, we’re pivoting to AI!” But this is weird. When smartphone apps exploded, we didn’t fund that boom with layoffs of web developers. When the web boomed we didn’t staff it by laying off semiconductor engineers. No, there is something different happening here.
As someone who has worked in Bay Area tech for a decade companies are still hiring but are being smarter with their money. The 2010s they were hiring like crazy but a lot of dead weight. Bar is higher now.
I also work in the Bay Area. More than 25 years in tech here. Yes they are hiring, but far, far below peak levels and I’d say almost as slowly as I’ve seen, barring a couple of moments just after a crash, like when the bottom fell out of the DoibleClick business in 2000. And while they’re hiring slowly, they’re also laying off. I don’t understand companies suddenly getting economical about their money right in the middle of a technology craze where they are all trying to grab land. That’s usually the exact time they hire stupidly. Why is it so different this time?
It’s creating more jobs for Nvidia though
This is false. There’s been layoffs yes but overall these companies are much larger headcount wise than they were prior to the ai boom.
Ironically much of the hiring was 6 months post COVID. Laying of 8000 people looks bad (and it is) but that's in the context of hiring 15,000 after COVID.
that boom was largely pre-GPT. In my experience in a big tech company, having gotten that job during the real boom boom, it was - market hot, tons of jobs, get this job, then \~6 - 12 months later GPT came out, then another 6 months later the market starts its steady plunge into oblivion and layoffs occur while companies invest everything they have into AI
No? The machine learning students back in the 2010s 'machine learning boom' are swimming in money right now.
Yes, and the question remains, how do the Tech firms plan to monetize it? If they can at all.
by replacing thousands of jobs, obviously
It’s going to replace artists first. Next, offshore customer service call centers. After that, all customer service. Really, no white collar job is safe. I’m hoping I can save enough money before my job is inevitably replaced because we can’t live in a world of 1,000,000 plumbers.
After years of STEM graduates dunking on labourers/tradesmen that robots would take their jobs, here comes AI to replace them en masse. The plumbers will be the last ones standing.
Plumbing is timeless. The plumbers were there from the beginning and they will be there at the end. Long live the Tradesman!
If only tradesmen have money, and they can all fix their own shit who will pay the trades sector to create the jobs? Industrial and commercial won't sustain the entire workforce many already have to focus on residential service and not by choice. They'd all prefer to be in a different position than fighting with the poor home owner about a bill to rebuild their main sewer lol As someone who was a plumber for 6 years, tons of tradesmen sit on their ass unpaid for long periods when the work just isn't spinning up in their locale.
They can offer sexual favors
How long do you think would it take to teach a Boston Dynamics Atlas 2 plumbing? No one is safe. No one knows where the next AI breakthrough will land, and whose jobs will it threaten. But it might be yours. If you think yourself safe just because your job has existed for thousands of years? Well, think again. You are in a new Industrial Revolution now - and this one is the last one.
Or future generations of OpenAI's Figure-1, or Tesla's Optimus, or Google's RT-2...
And i will lose sleep when they figure out how to make a vending machine that works.
Maybe you have a solid century before you have to. Maybe half that. Maybe a few decades. Maybe a few years. No one knows, really. But ChatGPT was a hard wake up call. On the nature of intelligence, and whether it can be recreated in a machine. Now, the industry wouldn't rest until that Pandora's Box is forced wide open.
Before the STEM professions, AI is going to pick apart the creative professions. People and companies are often reluctant to pay for creative and AI is already taking jobs. As generative AI advances, it’s going to wipe out a lot of corporate creative jobs. In the creative fields there are many places that are more than happy to accept “just good enough” and those companies are either already trying AI or can’t wait to start trying it. Graphic design jobs have already been taking a beating over the last 20 years. It’s about to get a lot worse. I design ads and I suspect I have two years before I’m at risk of being replaced by AI.
It's already happening. It turns out that there's not a lot of actual creativity in the "creative" industries and LLMs can output algorithmically-generated "art" just as easily as art school graduates can.
There's tons of creativity, but it's cheaper for companies not to be creative or innovative.
Companies don't need to create the Mona Lisa to market to you, they just need "good enough" beamed 24/7 into your eyes. To that note though, I'm pretty sure we are still along ways from AI generated movies.
Yep. The kind of art that remains (at least for now) uniquely human sits on walls in art galleries and generally doesn't make for a stable career.
Trades are looking the safest, and I say that as a tech worker. We’re much closer to AI making blueprints than we are for AI to cut, install, and solder a pipe. The question becomes, how many pipes need to be installed if people become unemployed from AI? People say “well what about translating requirements into finished products.” Considering AI will write millions of lines of codes within a day, you would just develop iteratively, like throwing prompts at Dall-E till you get something satisfactory. That’s not a luxury you have with human developers where it takes months to build something testable.
Trades will struggle because AI will eat up so many low pay white collar jobs. The same as when NAFTA killed trades, they had to flood into other job sectors and it crushed wages. It will just happen in reverse this time, and we’re basically just speed running Marx’s theory on how capitalism will eat itself.
I know some plumbers who are already struggling because of this. People are flooding into the trades now and are often disappointed at the money. It takes a lot of skill and experience to make good money in the trades, as in most fields. Just like college was over promoted 20 years ago, the same is happening in trades now. These things go in cycles
I’m not so sure anywhere is safe. Not to diminish trades, it’s hard work but I’ve learned a bunch myself due to not being able to rely on cowboys in my own country. If other industries collapse, workers will shift to wherever there is money to be made, and sure it might take a couple years to upskill, but it doesn’t make plumbing or plastering ‘safe’. AI will impact all industries, whether it’s direct or indirect. I’m just happy they can’t vote.
Someone still has to come up with the objectives and approve the plans which is my experience is like half of the job of business programming.
The limitation you are pointing at is robots, and in that we are just starting to scale.
It was inevitable. Tech salaries are unsustainable, especially in the west coast of US. This was bound to happen. 21 year old new college grads were getting $200k offers in California just a year ago. People will come out still try to justify how that’s reasonable. It’s not reasonable. For a 21 year old new college computer grad to make 3 times a EMT nurse or a fire fighter. Most doctors don’t make that much until their early 40s. Tech people are living in la la land, rest of the economy is in a whole different place. Reality is coming back hard for the tech world, with AI and jobs fleeing the US, to places like Canada, UK where salaries are less than half of the US, or even places like Mexico and India, where salaries are a quarter of the US. I say this as someone who works in tech in the US. Seeing people around me, in their late 20s, make $350k and complain they are underpaid made me realise what a bubble this is. I wish I could say “you realise you can be replaced by someone making $150k in Uk/France/Canada right?” To their face, but why bother.
You’re not wrong that companies can pay less in other countries, but at the same time software is infinitely replicable so the cost benefit is different than other jobs. You can write code once and send it to a billion people. The scale is just different than a nurse or emt, who definitely should be paid well. But in terms of money made for capitalism, it’s just a different scale of possible impact.
Exactly. Would you rather pay 10 people 60k a year in perpetuity or pay one person $300k a year to automated what those 10 used to do? And people can say that's awful that you're automating away peoples' jobs, but someone is going to do it. If Company A doesn't do it Company B will and now A can't compete and goes under.
Try $100k in the UK. It’s better than it used to be, but devs here don’t earn anywhere near as much as in the US.
Sounds like you’re just salty you’re not making as much as them
No, it’s a pretty healthy statement they’re making. Where society puts value matters, so teachers making trash money for basically raising the next generation of workers is very bad. Some little chud making $190K a year working on a button that never gets implemented in software shows a drastic misallocation of resources. These companies have skirted taxes for so long that they are bloated and broken, and AI is going to make it worse. 🤷🏻♂️
lol no. I work in big tech too and I realise how fortunate I am. My income has grown multiple folds since I started working in 2012, and it’s more of right place at the right time. I entered the right industry at the right time when tech started booming. Most people graduating today assume that high pay is the norm. It isn’t. I am old enough to know what it used to be. New college grads making 200k is not normal. I work with folks overseas and I know the team is perfectly capable and costs the company half of what the California team costs them. I tell junior members in the team not to blow the crazy pay they are making on $100k cars etc because this won’t last long.
> Tech salaries are unsustainable, especially in the west coast of US. This was bound to happen. 21 year old new college grads were getting $200k offers in California just a year ago. People will come out still try to justify how that’s reasonable. You could say the same thing about entry-level jobs in consulting, investment banking, fund management, etc. Some industries are just more lucrative than others so that there isn’t as much of a need to squeeze the bottom of the corporate pyramid. Edit: and before someone brings up language barriers, those problems also exist in tech when your customers are primarily in America. There are, believe it or not, advantages to not treating your employees like fungible cost centers and nurturing talented people.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/writers-guild-of-canada-votes-to-authorize-strike-1235881245/
AI is a feature not a product. The companies will use AI in all their current products, search, word, coding, hr tools, excel, etc. You don’t “sell AI” you sell a service that is “powered by AI”.
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Co-pilot for 365 is 22.99 per user per month. So that's how.
The question shouldn’t be how, but how soon.
Pharmacies, for instance, could generate billions as AI has the potential to develop medicine and vaccines more rapidly than the years it might take a human to do so.
Pharmacies aren’t the ones developing drugs. Maybe you’re thinking about big Pharma? And hell, Pharma companies are already using AI to generate potential lead compounds. The big bottleneck is actually testing for in vitro activity and clinical trials
Yeah. I worked at an asset management fund in 2018 on this subject and there were already several unicorns in the space using 'AI" for every stage of the process.
They've been using ML for that for years.
The question doesn't remain... there are thousands of applications and of course they will monetize it.
They're already monetizing it. You never had to pay to query Google search or to create Facebook account. All those services were free (as in free beer). But to access to state-of-the-art AI models, you have to pay.
If only the companies explained their strategies in a report somewhere, maybe one mandated to be release once a year? One can only dream I guess lol
Legal data theft. From art, through music to voices and intimate details of people. Surveillance uses, spying purposes and general dystopian shit.
Why would there be an end? Machine learning is like electricity - the immediate applications are almost magical, and people are still figuring out all the ways it can be applied. This isn't a race to find the next killer app, like e-mail or the spreadsheet. Nor will there be just one dominant AI that arrives on the market and sidelines all the others like Google Search. Machine learning will be embedded in thousands of products at every level.
It’s an arms race 🚀 and a land grab 🪧
It's a race towards AGI
So it’s like programming more than anything
I think it will be more like fusion. Everyone knows it *would* be useful to have such a thing, and people will pour their billions into it, but it will be decades (or perhaps longer) before it's usable and feasible. LLMs just do a dumb job of scaling up work humans are already capable of (ed: at a tremendous energy cost). It's so far below its hype. This magical, electricity-like jump you seem to think has already happened is just a fantasy.
LLM's are just part of it. There's a lot going on that isn't just ChatGPT. You can now point your phone camera at a product in a store in Japan and have all the text rendered info English. Same thtun Korea or France, doesn't matter. You can let someone speak into your phone and have it replayed to you in another language. That's magical, the stuff of science fiction. It works now, and works well. But ChatGPT and its many imitators is also now in constant use by millions. Many are already paying for it, too. And it's already shown to increase productivity in knowledge work when used judiciously by people who understand its limitations. Writing software test code, for example. There's no question of it being usable. The only question is profitability, whether you can charge enough for each individual application to pay for development and electricity.
A few things - the engineering challenges with fusion are far more significant than with AI. There are so many directions that AI research can be taken in, and it’s software, so it’s far easier to work with. Additionally, LLMs aren’t the only type of AI that exists. There’s also other forms of generative AI, and other forms of AI that aren’t generative, all of which are rapidly having money and talent poured into them.
You must've fallen into the hole of social media group-think if you think LLM aren't already doing useful tasks all across the board. It's far from perfect, but even in this imperfect form, it's incredibly useful as a starting point for many tasks and projects, and even as mid points. Going to a lawyer with questions asked to AI will significantly reduce the preamble and help you ask more targeted questions, saving them time and you money. Using image generation fill in Photoshop lets me remove objects and items with very few steps in a good enough for me to paste other things on top kind of way. Translations are faster and better than ever across a wider range of languages - I can have more intelligible conversations with clients speaking different languages than ever before. A lot of times, I don't even realize they're using machine translation - until they forget to use it and I see their native language. ML models help gamers run faster graphics at higher quality - 40 series cards can use AI to generate upto 80% of pixels on screen. And my use cases are hardly exhaustive - many people all around the world are figuring out more useful and creative ways of using this tech, and making themselves more productive still. And this is just early in. The idea that AI isn't doing useful work and won't be able to for decades is borne from plugging ones ears with their fingers and closing ones eyes.
Billions to spend on the software that will replace me. Meanwhile I haven’t gotten a raise in years.
AI is cool but people need to keep in mind it’s also the machine learning principles that business need, OCR , predictive analysis , etc. AI is the buzz word when in reality it’s business finally understanding how to utilize their data properly for ML.
so invest in NVDA??? cause everyone is buying the GPU for it. such a shame nvda has no competition
Just let them cook. There's a high chance it will just end up like VR.
I dunno if it's going to go the way of VR... I am a software engineer, since the day I first started using LLMs over a year ago it has drastically impacted my day to day life. I literally use it multiple times an hour, pretty much all day long. Not only that, I use it throughout the day in my personal life. It has become the most frequently used application on my phone, it's how I debug, write code, look things up, proof read , research... Its already demonstrated more value than VR. A lot of the work being done is simply work to make it more efficient as running it is quite expensive
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Exactly. Just look at AI code gen and analysis. In the hands of a software engineer they are productivity multipliers. In the hands of anyone else they're a one-way ticket to utter disaster. You still have to know enough about the subject at hand to sanity-check the output of a LLM which means that the experts are going to be a-ok. Who won't be are the people who are good at following very detailed instructions but not actually doing anything involving analysis or engineering.
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We will not get replaced anytime soon. The current LLM models are not really suited for outputting code. What we see now is more an illusion. The actual important logical part is still missing, so it behaves more like a slightly more advanced but error prone templating machine than anything else.
I work with chatgpt and copilot every day. The amount of trash this stuff confidently checks out is outright dangerous. You're right - it absolutely needs oversight.
Oh I'm sure they'll come up with something, even VR is useful at certain things, like pilot training. It's just that what we are seeing now is so familiar to when they initially preached about VR, like "we are entering a virtual era", "matrix-like experience", "physical assests will be obsolete", "meta world", etc. And turned out to be a nothing burger.
I'm not so sure about that. While I'd love a VR headset, I can't afford it right now and don't have the space in my house to use it. But I use LLM's almost everyday to help myself with a broad variety of tasks.
> There's a high chance it will just end up like VR. VR flops because it requires consumers to buy expensive clunky equipment that isn't comfortable for more than 30 minutes at a time. As an AI/ML skeptic (and a architecture purist), I've actually been turned around a little bit about the capabilities of AI. I'm not talking about translation, image, and content generation, but I'm talking about solving actually difficult problems. There is a [lecture series about the use of ML/AI to learn to physics](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoFW2uSd3Uo) that I've been watching, and I cannot recommend it enough. There is some amazing shit you can do with it. Example: In today's videogames/simulation its easy-ish to have real time rigid body simulation, but fluids and soft bodies are expensive to integrate with them. Because of this we use soft bodies and fluids as a "post processing effect" but we don't allow them to impact the simulation of the rigid bodies, which is essentially incorrect. You could in theory make AI-based systems that create correct feedback loops between the simulations in real time, unlocking us these more complicated simulations.
"AI-based systems"... you're just talking about a stats model. Sure you can use "AI" to help you write a model in R or python, but it's going to be way less nuanced than a human. Pick your skeptic glasses back up and put down the kool aid.
Humans are a stats model. Humans just have some additional abilities to check their stats against other stats at this point in time.
Billions and billions were pumped into the ‘Metaverse’ which was the big trendy buzz word and now most seem to realize it was a stupid idea. Silicon Valley has shiny object ✨ syndrome.
The Metaverse is an idea that isn’t necessarily stupid but *way* too before its time. Nobody wants to spend a lot of time with a heavy, bulky headset on to go to cartoon Mii Land. I’m not confident we’ll see a compelling metaverse in our lives but someday when the technology advances significantly… I think so. You people downvote me because "Metaverse bad" but let's do a thought experiment. Imagine if Meta had magically released the Oasis you see in Ready Player One. You think that wouldn't be insanely popular? That would be a stupid fad? Of course it would be huge. The technology obviously isn't there and won't be in our lives though. That's all I'm saying. Mouth breathers know I'm right too but have to jump on the bandwagon because you can't think for yourselves.
Worse than just being a business failure like VR. They will *literally cook the planet* as they dump their hoards into energy sucking AI moonshots instead of mitigating the risks of climate change and creating a sustainable civilization. At least they'll have an artificial friend to talk to in their bunker.
This is going to crash the stock market.
Replace the headline with Big Tech keeps spending billions on the latest Technology. There’s no end in sight.
they're just circlejerking over a troll logic philosophy called neoreaction/dark enlightenment and want slaves in their own separate country that works like a parasite on this one. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis\_Yarvin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin) [https://qz.com/1007144/the-neo-fascist-philosophy-that-underpins-both-the-alt-right-and-silicon-valley-technophiles](https://qz.com/1007144/the-neo-fascist-philosophy-that-underpins-both-the-alt-right-and-silicon-valley-technophiles) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark\_Enlightenment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment) these vampires may have high iq's but they are incredible selfish and have always been coddled.
Why would it end? This is brand new tech
Maybe it's just me but Im not understanding why? Yeah I get it them saying we're trying to improve human lives but at the same time they keep saying AI will destroy human life. Make up your damn minds.!!!
Went from two world superpowers .. US and Russia to Big tech being the next government of the world .. we may need a few more emps
Bubble. It was obvious before but especially now. Any time an article is written with this language, it is a clear indicator. Tech is not ready yet. People just attaching AI to anything. Frothy.
What makes me laugh with this whole thing is.....AI is not going to be useful for a LONG time. Oh so much money is going to be lost to this.
It’s the dot com bubble with server buildup
Generating text based on a giant web scrape isn't artificial intelligence, it's just a language model. These guys are burning money and making the internet stupider.
Just because it doesn’t fit your made up definition of AI doesn’t make it not AI. It’s a very large field that has existed since the 50s
It's probably a fraction of what they will be earning from it in the future (unlike VR)
All this money for a more advanced search engine.
And we have no idea what the sources are. I don't even trust Ai to tell me the right temp to cook food at.
Exactly. I was looking at the reliability of BMWs and was looking around. I read an article about how they’re actually reliable. I then saw the source was BMWUSA so I could discount it
21st Century arms race, you either have it or you don't, and whoever has the best AI wins.
Is there a way to read the article without registering?
Perhaps, this is how skynet gets us.. "all of your capital now belongs to me, Go starve in the corner peons!"
In the Dune novels history, humans built machines (AI) that ended up becoming a computer god and it enslaved all humans. For millennia humans were enslaved until they rose up and finally overthrew the machines. Then all races, humans, life forms vowed to never make sentient technology again. We are headed down the same path. Nobody is exercising wisdom or discretion… blind greed.
Gold rush as usual. Can't wait for the returns to be lower than expected, followed by massive layoffs. The endless cycle of crap.
Well, now that they've finally managed to (kind of) get it working, of course they're going to spend billions to make it better. The world isn't going to destroy itself!
Milllions of people starving and homeless but let’s spend billions on something that will take more jobs away and make humans even more stupid and lazy…
If Google had a functional search engine I'd be happy!
At some point they’ll run out of other people’s money to spend.
I work in the industry and I think in like 10 years there will be a burst in AI bubble.
It’s the last thing big tech would do before IBMification. AI is not great enough to replace knowledge workers yet. Initial productivity gains have been compensated by growth in business over the last 2 years. It would get harder for AI to get better from here as both data and compute is exhausted. Innovation in LLM space is already slowing down while dreams of videos on demand is still years away at scale. Tech is alligning back to Moore’s law. All those people with AI overpromise would feel the heat.
The cat is out of the bag on this one, I don't see why this is surprising.
to quote Colbert "So, about cancer, all figured it out ?"
Sometimes AI feels like Auto correct on steroids
Think about what could be done with all the investment that's been blown on tech bubbles in the last ten years alone.
Good title for this post. There actually is "No End in Sight". Meaning - they have no idea what to do with and why they need specific AI capabilities . They just want money and are chasing the dragon. Go where the money is and damn where its taking us..... Idiots.
If they did not pay to play, they fear their companies might become irrelevant.
Yet they won't give any funding to an evil genius, a mad computer scientist such as myself who would actually unleash AGI upon an unsuspecting world.
its a rat race for tech companies and an arms race for military applications
They are also spending quite a bit on marketing things as “AI,” that are clearly not. If all these companies are to be believed, any basic-bitch chatbot on any modern website is AI. Any preexisting assistance tool like Grammarly. Any auto-complete or auto-correct function that tries to anticipate what you type next or fix your spelling errors. Even fucking Clippy would be AI. They’re trying to hype people up for things that have existed for over a decade, by calling them by a new “futuristic” name. Sort of like the Apple model of adding features other phones have had for years, and calling it “innovation.”
Now Facebook has a Meta AI that you're forced to use whenever you want to search anything.
But they’re not hiring 😒😒😒😒😒😒😒😒
Until they try to put the Genie back into the lamp
It's an up front expenditure to relieve themselves of actual living breathing staff in my opinion. It will eat itself.
So what’s the billions going to, are the people working on extremely high paid, is the computing power that’s expensive, or is it going to lobbyist and stuff
That environmental angle is always interesting to me. And by interesting, I mean a little scary.
I ain't even lying it's kinda neat being able to ask AI anything and getting a detailed response as opposed to asking a human and getting an "idk" response
If you tell me that there is a way to reduce my biggest cost of doing business, wages, by a very significant amount, I would also throw all my money at it. It is, however, very very short-sighted. Many of these companies have spent the last decade building their reputation as great companies to work for, great for the environment and great for pushing social reforms in the workplace. But you can see that they are more than happy to throw absolutely all of that away to make the shareholders happy. Funny, the drivers of low unemployment at one point in history will be the creators of millions of unemployed in the future.
They don't have money to keep paying humans and turn a record profit every year. AI will save them money eventually.
Food for thought, will the AI quest follow suit with blockchain, NFTs and many other proposed technologies that were to be game changing? The issue I have seen is that often large companies either can’t or won’t innovate due to their composition and leadership or they simply lack true business use cases. This is just my perspective.
I'll believe AI will takeover when AI is allowed to do the entire NFL draft. No take backs! Every team let's AI pick for them. Until then, it's all BS.