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Every time an analyst gives the current state of AI-based tools as evidence supporting AI disruption being just a hype, I think of skeptics who dismissed the ex

Every time an analyst gives the current state of AI-based tools as evidence supporting AI disruption being just a hype, I think of skeptics who dismissed the exponential growth of covid19 cases due to their initial low numbers. Putting that aside, how is this article called an analysis and not an opinion piece? The only analysis done here is asking a labor economist what conditions would allow this claim to hold, and giving an alternative, already circulated theory that AI companies CEOs are creating a false hype. The author even uses everyday language like "Yeaaahhh. So, this is kind of Anthropic’s whole ~thing.~ ". Is this really the level of analysis CNN has to offer on this topic? They could have sketched the growth in foundation model capabilities vs. finite resources such as data, compute and hardware. They could have wrote about the current VC market and the need for companies to show results and not promises. They could have even wrote about the giant biotech industry, and its struggle with incorporating novel exciting drug discovery tools with slow moving FDA approvals. None of this was done here.

bckr 1y ago
That’s not what major news outlets are for. I’m not sure exactly what they’re for.
SoftTalker 1y ago
Analysis == Opinion when it comes to mainstream news reporting. It's one guy's thinking on something.
TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
I'm not seeing how comparing AI to a virus that killed millions and left tens of millions crippled is an effective way to support your argument.
- drewcon 1y ago
  Humans are not familiar with exponential change so they have almost no ability to manage through exponential change. Its an apt comparison. The criticisms in the cnn article are already out date in many instances.
  - const_cast 1y ago
    Viruses spread and propagate themselves, often changing along the way. AI doesn't, and probably shouldn't. I think we've made a few movies on why that's a bad idea.
  - geraneum 1y ago
    > Humans are not familiar with exponential change Humans are. We have tools to measure exponential growth empirically. It was done for COVID (i.e. epidemiologists do that usually) and is done for economy and other aspects of our life. If there's to be exponential growth, we should be able to put it in numbers. "True me bro" is not a good measure. Edit: typo
    - margalabargala 1y ago
      There's individual persons modelling exponential change just fine, and then there's what happens when you apply to the populace at large. "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it."
      - geraneum 1y ago
        > when you apply to the populace at large What does this mean? What do you apply to populace at large? Do you mean a populace doesn’t model the exponential change right?
        margalabargala 1y ago
        Yep that's what I meant! Context clues did you well here.
        geraneum 1y ago
        “A populace modeling exponential change”. Yeah, that’s just word salad.
        1y ago
- dingnuts 1y ago
  especially when the world population is billions and at the beginning we were worried about double digit IFR. Yeah. Imagine if COVID had actually killed 10% of the world population. Killing millions sucks, but mosquitos regularly do that too, and so does tuberculosis, and we don't shut down everything. Could've been close to a billion. Or more. Could've been so much worse.
- IshKebab 1y ago
  I think you missed the point. AI is dismissed by idiots because they are looking at its state now, not what it will be in future. The same was true in the pandemic.
aaronbaugher 1y ago
> Is this really the level of analysis CNN has to offer on this topic? Not just this topic.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
bgwalter 1y ago
Why not use the promised exponential growth of home ownership that led to the catastrophic real estate bubble that burst in 2008 as an example? We are still dealing with the aftereffects, which led to the elimination of any working class representation in politics and suppression of real protests like Occupy Wall Street. When this bubble bursts, the IT industry will collapse for some years like in 2000.
- michaeldoron 1y ago
  The growth of home ownership was an indicator of real estate investment, not of real world capabilities - once the value of real estate dropped and the bubble burst, those investments were worth less than before, causing the crisis. In contrast, the growth in this scenario is the capabilities of foundation models (and to a lesser extent, the technologies that stem out of these capabilities). This is not a promise or an investment, it's not an indication of speculative trust in this technology, it is a non-decreasing function indicating a real increase in performance.
PeterStuer 1y ago
"Is this really the level of analysis CNN has to offer on this topic?" It's not CNN exlusive. Newsmedia that did not evolve towards clicks, riling up people, hatewatching and paid propaganda to the highest bidder went extinct a decade ago. This is what did evolve.
- biophysboy 1y ago
  This is outdated. Most of journalism has shifted to subscription models, offering a variety of products under one roof: articles, podcasts, newsletters, games, recipes, product reviews, etc.
biophysboy 1y ago
Its an article reformulated from a daily newsletter. Newsletters take the form of a quick, casual follow up to current events (e.g. an Amodei interview). Its not intended to be exhaustive analysis. Besides the labor economist bit, it also makes the correct point that tech people regularly exaggerate and lie. A great example of this is biotech, a field I work in.
leeroihe 1y ago
The best heuristic is what people are realizing happened with uncheck "skilled" immigration in places like canada (and soon the U.S.). Everyone was sold that we "need these workers" because nobody was willing to work and that they added to GDP. When in reality, there's now significant evidence that all these new arrivals did was put a net drain on welfare, devalue the labor of endemic citizens (regardless of race - in many cases affecting endemic minorities MORE) and in the end, just reduced cost while degrading companies who did this. We will wake up in 5 yrs to find we replaced people for a dependence on a handful of companies that serve llms and make inference chips. Its beyond dystopian.
- matteotom 1y ago
  Can you provide more details about said "significant evidence"? This seems to be a pretty popular belief, despite being contrary to generally accepted economics, and I've yet to see good evidence for it.
mjburgess 1y ago
You can pick and choose problems from history where folk belief was wrong: WW1 vs. Y2K. This isn't very informative. Indeed, engaging in this argument-by-analoguy betrays a lack of actual analysis, credible evidence and justification for a position. Arguing "by analogy" in this way, which picks and chooses an analogy, just restates your position -- it doesnt give anyone reasons to believe it.
timr 1y ago
> I think of skeptics who dismissed the exponential growth of covid19 cases due to their initial low numbers. Uh, not to be petty, but the growth was not exponential — neither in retrospect, nor given what was knowable at any point in time. About the most aggressive, correct thing you could’ve said at the time was “sigmoid growth”, but even that was basically wrong. If that’s your example, it’s inadvertently an argument for the other side of the debate: people say lots of silly, unfounded things at Peak Hype that sound superficially correct and/or “smart”, but fail to survive a round of critical reasoning. I have no doubt we’ll look back on this period of time and find something similar.
Terr_ 1y ago
> I think of skeptics who dismissed the exponential growth of covid19 cases due to their initial low numbers. Compare: "Whenever I think of skeptics dismissing completely novel and unprecedented outcomes occurring by mechanisms we can't clearly identify or prove (will) exist... I think of skeptics who dismissed an outcome that had literally hundreds of well-studied historical precedents using proven processes." You're right that humans don't have a good intuition for non-linear growth, but that common thread doesn't heal over those other differences.
- actuallyalys 1y ago
  Yeah, for this analogy to work, we’d have to see AI causing a small but consistently doubling amount of lost jobs.
  - mitthrowaway2 1y ago
    If that were happening right now, how would we know? COVID-19 cases were tracked imperfectly but pretty well; is there any equivalent for AI-related job losses?
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - actuallyalys 1y ago
      Right, my point is that we don't have the data to make a similar exponential argument. We can't rule out the possibility that we're currently in the early stages of exponential growth based on direct measurement. If it is exponential, once it doubles enough times, it will show up in overall economic data. We can also look at the tools, which have improved relatively quickly but don't appear to be improving exponentially. GPT-4 and GPT-4o came out about a year after their predecessors. Is GPT-4o a bigger leap that GPT-4 was? Are GPT-4.5 or 4.1 a bigger leap than GPT-4 was? I honestly don't know, but the general reception suggests otherwise. The biggest leaps recently seem to be making models that perform roughly as well as past ones but are much smaller. That has advantages from the standpoint of democratization and energy consumption, but those kinds of improvements seems to favor a situation where AI augments workers rather than replaces them.
monkeyelite 1y ago
> I think of skeptics who dismissed the exponential growth of covid19 cases due to their initial low numbers. But that didn’t happen. All of the people like pg who drew these accelerating graphs were wrong. In fact, I think just about every commenter on COVID was wrong about what would happen in the early months regardless of political angle.
- tim333 1y ago
  I remember scientists, especially epidemiologists being quite accurate. I guess the key is to not even have a political angle but instead some knowledge of what you are talking about.
  - monkeyelite 1y ago
    I don’t remember that. How do you explain the total collapse of public trust in science and medical institutions? Try revisiting their content from spring of 2020 (flatten the curve, wild death predictions, etc). > I guess the key is to not even have a political angle It’s a fantasy to imagine technical knowledge allows you to transcend the political and 2020 only reinforced that.
qgin 1y ago
This is the exact thing I’ve expressed as well. This moment feels exactly to me like that moment when we were going to “shut down for two weeks” and the majority of people seemed to think that would be the end of it. It was clear where the trend was going, but exponentials always seem ridiculous on an intuitive level.
deadbabe 1y ago
It goes both ways. Once the exponential growth of COVID started, I heard wildly outrageous predictions of what was going to happen next, none of which ever really came to fruition.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

bckr 1y ago

That’s not what major news outlets are for. I’m not sure exactly what they’re for.

SoftTalker 1y ago

Analysis == Opinion when it comes to mainstream news reporting. It's one guy's thinking on something.

TheOtherHobbes 1y ago

I'm not seeing how comparing AI to a virus that killed millions and left tens of millions crippled is an effective way to support your argument.

drewcon 1y ago
Humans are not familiar with exponential change so they have almost no ability to manage through exponential change. Its an apt comparison. The criticisms in the cnn article are already out date in many instances.
- const_cast 1y ago
  Viruses spread and propagate themselves, often changing along the way. AI doesn't, and probably shouldn't. I think we've made a few movies on why that's a bad idea.
- geraneum 1y ago
  > Humans are not familiar with exponential change Humans are. We have tools to measure exponential growth empirically. It was done for COVID (i.e. epidemiologists do that usually) and is done for economy and other aspects of our life. If there's to be exponential growth, we should be able to put it in numbers. "True me bro" is not a good measure. Edit: typo
  - margalabargala 1y ago
    There's individual persons modelling exponential change just fine, and then there's what happens when you apply to the populace at large. "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it."
    - geraneum 1y ago
      > when you apply to the populace at large What does this mean? What do you apply to populace at large? Do you mean a populace doesn’t model the exponential change right?
      - margalabargala 1y ago
        Yep that's what I meant! Context clues did you well here.
        geraneum 1y ago
        “A populace modeling exponential change”. Yeah, that’s just word salad.
        1y ago
dingnuts 1y ago
especially when the world population is billions and at the beginning we were worried about double digit IFR. Yeah. Imagine if COVID had actually killed 10% of the world population. Killing millions sucks, but mosquitos regularly do that too, and so does tuberculosis, and we don't shut down everything. Could've been close to a billion. Or more. Could've been so much worse.
IshKebab 1y ago
I think you missed the point. AI is dismissed by idiots because they are looking at its state now, not what it will be in future. The same was true in the pandemic.

aaronbaugher 1y ago

> Is this really the level of analysis CNN has to offer on this topic? Not just this topic.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

bgwalter 1y ago

Why not use the promised exponential growth of home ownership that led to the catastrophic real estate bubble that burst in 2008 as an example? We are still dealing with the aftereffects, which led to the elimination of any working class representation in politics and suppression of real protests like Occupy Wall Street. When this bubble bursts, the IT industry will collapse for some years like in 2000.

michaeldoron 1y ago
The growth of home ownership was an indicator of real estate investment, not of real world capabilities - once the value of real estate dropped and the bubble burst, those investments were worth less than before, causing the crisis. In contrast, the growth in this scenario is the capabilities of foundation models (and to a lesser extent, the technologies that stem out of these capabilities). This is not a promise or an investment, it's not an indication of speculative trust in this technology, it is a non-decreasing function indicating a real increase in performance.

PeterStuer 1y ago

"Is this really the level of analysis CNN has to offer on this topic?" It's not CNN exlusive. Newsmedia that did not evolve towards clicks, riling up people, hatewatching and paid propaganda to the highest bidder went extinct a decade ago. This is what did evolve.

biophysboy 1y ago
This is outdated. Most of journalism has shifted to subscription models, offering a variety of products under one roof: articles, podcasts, newsletters, games, recipes, product reviews, etc.

biophysboy 1y ago

Its an article reformulated from a daily newsletter. Newsletters take the form of a quick, casual follow up to current events (e.g. an Amodei interview). Its not intended to be exhaustive analysis. Besides the labor economist bit, it also makes the correct point that tech people regularly exaggerate and lie. A great example of this is biotech, a field I work in.

leeroihe 1y ago

The best heuristic is what people are realizing happened with uncheck "skilled" immigration in places like canada (and soon the U.S.). Everyone was sold that we "need these workers" because nobody was willing to work and that they added to GDP. When in reality, there's now significant evidence that all these new arrivals did was put a net drain on welfare, devalue the labor of endemic citizens (regardless of race - in many cases affecting endemic minorities MORE) and in the end, just reduced cost while degrading companies who did this. We will wake up in 5 yrs to find we replaced people for a dependence on a handful of companies that serve llms and make inference chips. Its beyond dystopian.

matteotom 1y ago
Can you provide more details about said "significant evidence"? This seems to be a pretty popular belief, despite being contrary to generally accepted economics, and I've yet to see good evidence for it.

mjburgess 1y ago

You can pick and choose problems from history where folk belief was wrong: WW1 vs. Y2K. This isn't very informative. Indeed, engaging in this argument-by-analoguy betrays a lack of actual analysis, credible evidence and justification for a position. Arguing "by analogy" in this way, which picks and chooses an analogy, just restates your position -- it doesnt give anyone reasons to believe it.

timr 1y ago

> I think of skeptics who dismissed the exponential growth of covid19 cases due to their initial low numbers. Uh, not to be petty, but the growth was not exponential — neither in retrospect, nor given what was knowable at any point in time. About the most aggressive, correct thing you could’ve said at the time was “sigmoid growth”, but even that was basically wrong. If that’s your example, it’s inadvertently an argument for the other side of the debate: people say lots of silly, unfounded things at Peak Hype that sound superficially correct and/or “smart”, but fail to survive a round of critical reasoning. I have no doubt we’ll look back on this period of time and find something similar.

Terr_ 1y ago

> I think of skeptics who dismissed the exponential growth of covid19 cases due to their initial low numbers. Compare: "Whenever I think of skeptics dismissing completely novel and unprecedented outcomes occurring by mechanisms we can't clearly identify or prove (will) exist... I think of skeptics who dismissed an outcome that had literally hundreds of well-studied historical precedents using proven processes." You're right that humans don't have a good intuition for non-linear growth, but that common thread doesn't heal over those other differences.

actuallyalys 1y ago
Yeah, for this analogy to work, we’d have to see AI causing a small but consistently doubling amount of lost jobs.
- mitthrowaway2 1y ago
  If that were happening right now, how would we know? COVID-19 cases were tracked imperfectly but pretty well; is there any equivalent for AI-related job losses?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - actuallyalys 1y ago
    Right, my point is that we don't have the data to make a similar exponential argument. We can't rule out the possibility that we're currently in the early stages of exponential growth based on direct measurement. If it is exponential, once it doubles enough times, it will show up in overall economic data. We can also look at the tools, which have improved relatively quickly but don't appear to be improving exponentially. GPT-4 and GPT-4o came out about a year after their predecessors. Is GPT-4o a bigger leap that GPT-4 was? Are GPT-4.5 or 4.1 a bigger leap than GPT-4 was? I honestly don't know, but the general reception suggests otherwise. The biggest leaps recently seem to be making models that perform roughly as well as past ones but are much smaller. That has advantages from the standpoint of democratization and energy consumption, but those kinds of improvements seems to favor a situation where AI augments workers rather than replaces them.

monkeyelite 1y ago

> I think of skeptics who dismissed the exponential growth of covid19 cases due to their initial low numbers. But that didn’t happen. All of the people like pg who drew these accelerating graphs were wrong. In fact, I think just about every commenter on COVID was wrong about what would happen in the early months regardless of political angle.

tim333 1y ago
I remember scientists, especially epidemiologists being quite accurate. I guess the key is to not even have a political angle but instead some knowledge of what you are talking about.
- monkeyelite 1y ago
  I don’t remember that. How do you explain the total collapse of public trust in science and medical institutions? Try revisiting their content from spring of 2020 (flatten the curve, wild death predictions, etc). > I guess the key is to not even have a political angle It’s a fantasy to imagine technical knowledge allows you to transcend the political and 2020 only reinforced that.

qgin 1y ago

This is the exact thing I’ve expressed as well. This moment feels exactly to me like that moment when we were going to “shut down for two weeks” and the majority of people seemed to think that would be the end of it. It was clear where the trend was going, but exponentials always seem ridiculous on an intuitive level.

deadbabe 1y ago

It goes both ways. Once the exponential growth of COVID started, I heard wildly outrageous predictions of what was going to happen next, none of which ever really came to fruition.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]