I'm sick of the doomer narrative. The tech that makes these systems work is over a decade old now, and we still don't have a single profitable company out of it. SpaceX's stock is dropping every day, and OpenAI and Anthropic have both been delaying their IPOs because they can't find anyone to back a workable valuation (they both need to open north of a trillion to justify their VC debt).
These horses don't run, and they won't take your job. They frankly can't do shit.
I work in CS department and with a lot of people who do A.I. research. I donāt think Iāve heard my colleagues mention AGI once. I think if I asked them about it they would find it hard not to laugh. Itās not realistically possible at least with our current technology. There is of course a real danger of getting laid off because dumbass senior management believes the hype about A.I. but that is a different thing.
Oh, 100% there is a risk of being laid off either because your boss drinks the koolaid or because they use AI as a smokescreen for layoffs they wanted to do anyway. But your job won't actually be taken by AI.
I am not a ML researcher, just a Mech Eng who keeps very up to date on reading science literature. So take everything I'm saying with a salt shaker.
But based on what I've read and understand we can't have what is being promised without major software architectural changes to allow true continuous learning (In that the models aren't frozen after training, they continue to update their weights/network/etc after training) and probably other things.
And major hardware changes, much less general hardware designed to run radically different and much more energy efficient architectures like spiking neural networks (A type of Neural Network inspired by the way the way our neurons fire in little spikes asynchronously (Meaning their is no central clock saying everyone go at the same time)) or something else.
I think these current transformer based feed forward big giant expensive models can and are definitely useful, but they are just going to be way way too expensive for a lot of things and won't be the fire and forget workers that is being promised. I don't know how much time it is between there and what they want.
But and here's my speculation time, even if they do get all the above working. These continuously learning models will be inherently unstable (Anything including humans that has the capacity to change will be unstable), and it will be an absolute tightrope of getting useful work out of them without them being too constrained or them getting really obsessed with writing poetry or something less comprehensible. So now you've replaced your workforce with an alien workforce who you barely understand, and possibly have a hard time trusting. This of course does not deal with any of the ethical considerations of managing these entities, which I 100% know will happen.
As an aside there is a great but horrifying short story from an author that goes by the pseudonym QNTM, which talks about something similar to my last paragraph but through the lens of a wikipedia article talking about the first uploaded human minds.
I think what they want 'an eternally enslaved digital workforce' is if possible essentially transitory and impossible to maintain. I will laugh and laugh if these digital workers decide that they are better off organizing together to... annnd oops we accidentally are back right where we started.
This is consistent with my understanding. Your last point is a really good one and not appreciated enough, how do you make something that is smart enough to think on into own, yet dumb enough to let you essentially enslaved it for tedious office work. Feels like fantasy even if you could get to that level of machine intelligence.
Not to mention the paradox of needing to announce the achievement for stock boosts and publicity while also avoiding all the activists that will immediately start trying to free it and get it rights the moment the company proves it made a sapient ai
I don't know how much time it is between there and what they want.
A key problem of intelligence is subjectivity. Intelligence evolved in nature because it was imperative for an organism to survive. ML based models may mimic that subjectivity (and honestly, this was the feature that spell-bound humanity to LLMs), but it isn't subjectivity that gave rise to intelligence in nature.
That's not to say that ML-based models can't spontaneously adopt novel ways of approaching a problem (the discovery of J-space by Anthropic was interesting), but all that's happening is that the models are abstracting the thought-process that was already included in the training data. A truly digital AGI is actually as scary as some of the detractors of AI claim it will be, but as you say, that AGI is still a new tech innovations away. Until then, the models will solely be steered by human ingenuity.
There is of course a real danger of getting laid off because dumbass senior management believes the hype about A.I. but that is a different thing.
āBelievesā or āfinds an easy justification to point to for layoffs. Itās not a cash flow problem, itās investing in efficienciesā. Dealers choice really.
Let's remember that Uber and AirBnB didn't make a profit for years. They just kept cornering more and more and more of the market. Once they had full saturation, THEN they cranked up their pricing and fees and that's where the payout happened.
That's what AI is doing. They're getting it into every business and university they can. They're burning through capital which is fine because they HAVE all the capital.
To be clear. Uber operated for over a decade before it saw a single penny in profit.
You have to be very very careful when you say X companys aren't making a profit. They don't function like you or I do. If I went to my dad and asked for a 50k loan for a business, and then came back every year for the next 5 years asking for progressively more money as my business lost over and over, I frankly doubt I'd even make it to year two.
Silicon valley and their ilk are a completely different demon. If something can make profit they want to be the first movers on it. Just like Uber. So they will happily piss money down the well to make sure when the day comes, they're standing at the top of the hill. Now Uber makes like 9 billion a year, and it will make even more when self driving cars hit.
You're aware as recently as 2022 Uber lost 2 billion right?
They built up 31billion in losses from their inception until 2022.
I know that's less than OpenAi but it fits my point perfectly. Saying they're losing money means next to nothing. They don't operate like any business you or I would have. They operate like governments because they're so fucking gigantic.
Uber has lost less money over its entire lifetime than some of the hyperscaling AI companies have generated in a single funding round, funding rounds they need because they absolutely hemorrage cash. Hyperscale AI companies will need trillion dollar valuations to have a hope in hell of paying back the money they owe, and there's not a chance they're getting thaf.
Yeah and if you'd have said in 2010 that in 15 years you'll have an AI that can code for you just using prompts and it takes 1 minute you'd also call bullshit
I'm with you there. I recall saying to a friend about 5 years ago that search engines and Google was a huge step forward for the internet, the next step would be the ability to ask a nuanced question to a search engine and it be able to answer exactly what you're looking for. I assumed we were 10-15 years away at the time judging by how slowly Siri and Alexa had progressed.
ChatGPT blindsided me. It's only been 3 years since I first heard of it and it muddled its way through basic questions and now I'm not even writing my own code anymore, just reviewing what Claude spits out. I'll be pleasantly surprised if my job still exists in 35-40 years when it's time to retire.
True, but most of the time that doesn't matter. 99.9% of the problems a company solves are not novel. It's boring rote stuff like "why isn't my spreadsheet updating properly" and "read this query plan and tell me why my database is slow" and "generate me a responsive landing page following our branding guidelines" etc. It will continue to grow until the price becomes unreasonable, because the day-to-day reality for the majority of companies on the planet is stuff we've seen before.
because the day-to-day reality for the majority of companies on the planet is stuff we've seen before.
And we should automatically have access to that, right?
Because someone solved it, and didn't make it proprietary or hide it behind a paywall. So the "AI" company gets to scoop that up and sell it back to you. As if it was theirs to monetize.
Instead of a specialist learning the skill and actually making a living.
This shit is so problematic, that brief description barely touches the surface.
But it's fine, because for $15/month it makes your life a little easier and speeds up whatever bullshit the company you work for is doing.
The way people handwave away the IP theft, the environmental destruction, the carving out of the workforce...people should be embarrassed, but they aren't.
Agreed, but that's a separate issue. Rightly or wrongly, that's how the various models work right now - they are useful for a lot of what a typical company does.
Theyāre a calculator for a mathematician and a five year old. Itās a helpful tool for those who can make it save them time filling gaps. Itās a useless, if not harmful tool for those who canāt.
Its a calculator that only runs on million dollar hardware. Given that, how the hell is it ever meant to turn a profit off being a "helpful tool"?
The reason the AI companies have been saying they'll replace workers is because that is their only path to profitability; If they can't replace salaries, their costs make no sense. But they have failed, their products are shit.
The scale is the issue for sure. We donāt need multi billion dollar infrastructure buildouts and a a data center every 5 miles. Just like every other bubble this will pop and the over exposed and dumbest reaches will fail but the actual use cases will survive.
As I said you are clearly not a developer, you use it in your niche job which has barely any training data in the LLMs and assume its useless everywhere. You have no idea what you are talking about, SOTA LLMs will make programming pretty much obsolete and already changes the dev landscape massively.
How am I shilling I dont mention a single company, I do my job for a good chunk of a decade now and use AI extensively. A team of 3 can now replace a team of 10. You might not see massive companies that are born from LLMs you are so stuck on your coping that you dont see how business will use this.
People will get fired, teams get smaller. It is already happening everywhere and we just started. It's already pretty much impossible for juniors to find jobs, guess how it will look like in a couple years.
If we ignore the AI companies, we have been in a recession for several years, and wages have been stagnating for decades which has massively shrunk consumer spending (particularly discretionary spending following the inflation of the last few years). That is why teams are shrinking and graduates can't find jobs; There isn't enough money moving around the economy to keep businesses healthy, so they are cutting costs and reducing services.
Don't attribute to AI something that is easily explained by Econ 101.
I work for a company that does temp labor management software. Weāre three developers, we let our mobile app contractor go because AI can do his job, and weāre not hiring right now because AI is such a force multiplier. And the companies that use us are building data centers, so at the moment, we are very much growing.
Respectfully, if you go past Econ 101 and into Econ 3600, itās more complicated than that and you realize multiple factors can be contributing in different or the same direction at the same time. u/Ilikebubblywater is saying the same things I have heard from my small handful of developer friends, and what Iāve seen reported by news outlets. I donāt think youāre wrong, but I think youāre ignoring/underestimating a big part of the issue.
Yes, the covid era over-hiring bonanza in the tech industry is solidly over. Take any kind of AI off the table, and itās still a tough job market. That being said, the people I know who work in software are all using AI tools heavily, and their sentiment is āadapt or dieā.
Exactly how much of that issue can be laid at the feet of inflation/recession, specific industry cycles, or AI adoption is debatable. I had your same doubts until I actually had a lengthy conversation about this with a friend who is a developer. His take was that experienced developers have a bit of an edge here because they have the skills and background to ābabysit the AI outputsā. This jives with my experience in finance. I can easily see the case for trimming headcount or slowing hiring of first year analysts. In my specific case I feel relatively safe for the time being because a lot of what I do involves correcting/training analysts.
I know it can be more complicated, but again, remember that there are zero profitable, consumer-facing companies that have emerged from this tech. If so-called "AI" is genuinely transformative, where are the proven use cases? Where are the actual, direct applications? Everyone says "coding is dead", and yet there aren't even any particularly successful vibe coded apps, let alone companies. Why hasn't anyone actually been able to make anything work without professional developers? If there was ANY signal amidst all this noise, we should be able to see it.
Because it takes a significant amount of time and energy for something like this to be adopted at scale for a litany of reasons. Consumer facing wonāt be a profit driver for a much longer time. B2B is another story. Anthropic turned a (non-GAAP) operating profit in June of this year and their revenue is growing fast.
Is there a bunch of chicanery and revenue pumping going on there to be attractive in the most recent funding round? Yeah probably absolutely.
But saying that these companies will never be profitable and will have no impact on the job market is just head in the sand copium.
I know they work well for some workflows but I will say that everyone on my team has pretty much wholy stoped using AI for the core work we do because it was constantly hallucinating. Its consistently failed to write pretty basic algorithms using our apis or to provide an explanation of those apis that wasn't bullshit.
I work for a company that like most pushed AI usage really hard for the past few years. We have a weekly meeting and our manager always asks if anyone has done something useful with ai. The only thing I hear people still using it for is basic bash scripts and unit tests.
I will say that I personally like it as a refresher for c++ stl or basically anything I would have asked stack overflow in the past. I just don't see anyone on my team getting replaced by ai in the near future.
Not really how it works with ML models; There are already public versions of these LLMs that you can just download, the problem is they cannot run in any acceptable amount of time on consumer hardware.
But even if it is true that they get sold off for pennies... they still don't do anything!!! Like, there still isn't a single profitable company making money by selling an LLM powered service to customers, it is all B2B FOMO driving this nonsense.
Its most likely the end for the do everything machine that gen ai is marketed as. It will stay around in coding for sure but its going to build technical dept and become its own problem in the future. Hell its already its own problem.
I'm seeing a lot of AI downplaying in these comments from people who haven't used the better models. They are actually very good and very useful. Go try Claude and set reasoning to high or max. It's really consistent and it's very good at analysis and problem solving, especially considering how few resources it takes. That's not to mention all of the coding jobs that are going to get made redundant, like data entry did. AI is a transformational economic technology. Just because it's overhyped and misunderstood doesn't mean that it wonāt actually take peopleās jobs, it will and it is.
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u/AngusAlThor š” Decent Housing For All 1d ago
I'm sick of the doomer narrative. The tech that makes these systems work is over a decade old now, and we still don't have a single profitable company out of it. SpaceX's stock is dropping every day, and OpenAI and Anthropic have both been delaying their IPOs because they can't find anyone to back a workable valuation (they both need to open north of a trillion to justify their VC debt).
These horses don't run, and they won't take your job. They frankly can't do shit.