11 ms·

A lot of the magic of LLMs, I think, has been tarnished by these CEOs and other FAANG companies. It might have been a far more interesting world if they didn't

A lot of the magic of LLMs, I think, has been tarnished by these CEOs and other FAANG companies. It might have been a far more interesting world if they didn't bring "AI" or "AGI" into the conversation in such a politicized way.

keiferski 5mo ago
It’s the inevitable result of valuations based on hype and future potential, not business fundamentals. It incentivizes companies to be as hyperbolic as possible with their pitches and marketing. Cryptocurrency is an interesting technology with some niche use cases, but it was pitched as replacing the entire money system. LLMs are extremely useful for certain types of work, but are pitched as AGI ending all work. Etc.
sigmoid10 5mo ago
Unfortunately, this is the only way to get enough venture capital to support the compute needs for this kind of technology. Who is going to spend hundreds on billions on a vague idea without regular claims that this will upend the existing economy in six to twelve months and whoever owns it will become unfathomably rich? And despite all the actual developments we have seen going against that idea, investors keep falling for it. This will continue until it crashes, one way or another. The question is how long it can build up and how deep the fall will be. LLMs will certainly change the economy in the end, but so did mortgage backed securities.
- pydry 5mo ago
  It's a sad indictment of our society that there is always a shortage of money for medical care, infrastructure, housing, food stamps and space exploration but always a surplus of cash for war and tools that purport to replace the workforce.
  - block_dagger 5mo ago
    War accelerated evolution, it’s why it exists.
    - jacquesm 5mo ago
      You have cause and effect mixed up.
    - bregma 5mo ago
      So did compassion, probably in a greater amount. And yet the greater amount of resources goes into war at the expense of compassion. Humanity has taken control of its own evolution and no longer relyies on natural selection to be the driving force for change. Using evolution as an excuse to make bad and immoral choices is a poor argument and should be left back in the stone age.
      - pheaded_while9 5mo ago
        Yes, the social darwinist approach inevitably lead to eugenical thinking and the human meat grinder that follows. We, as being with the capacity to understand harmful v. non-harmful behaviour, have a consequence to harmful behaviour, collectively: human suffering and the suppression of freedom.
      - djeastm 5mo ago
        >Humanity has taken control of its own evolution Has it taken full control of it or just partial control?
  - gmerc 5mo ago
    The opportunity cost to society of performative model training is stunning - 400M for a grok training run to dominate the charts for 2 weeks
  - roenxi 5mo ago
    > It's a sad indictment of our society that there is always a shortage of money for medical care... It has nothing to do with society; there is infinite demand for medical care. The upper limit is whatever it takes to live until the universe's heat death in good health. That takes a lot of resources. However much society spends on medical care, there is always more that could be spent. The modern era has the best, most affordable medical care in history and people are showing no signs of being satisfied at all. While war spending generally just causes pain for no gain it doesn't change the fact that there will never be enough available to satisfy people's demand for medical care. Every single time people get what they want they just come up with a new aspirational minimum standard.
  - philwelch 5mo ago
    There isn’t really a shortage of money for those things, just rampant levels of fraud, corruption, and incompetence in the government to make those things artificially expensive. California spends so much money on high speed rail and gets 0 feet of track because they’re not paying for track; the whole thing is a scam where the politicians give taxpayer money to their political supporters in exchange for political support. Defense isn’t immune to this either; Boeing, which builds a shitty heavy lift rocket out of Space Shuttle spare parts and delivers it late and over budget, pulls the exact same bullshit with their defense contracts, and there’s always some shitty Senator siding with them against the American people whenever anyone gets upset.
  - vixen99 5mo ago
    The current British government should be a shining beacon for you! Its welfare bill actually outstrips national income by far. Britain's pathetic defense capabilities cannot even see off Russian warships that intimidate by deliberately hanging around British waters assessing our vital undersea cabling. The UK government has now asked France if it can help deter these ships. Tangentially - I should add that even with their massive expenditure on the National Health System (NHS) it's not enough and too many people feel that they have to go abroad to get life-saving operations and procedures. If they can afford it of course. But sure, that is another matter. As far as I can tell, there seems to be pretty much an apolitical consensus on both areas.
    - twsahjklf 5mo ago
      Curous how france manages to have enough resources to protect its own waters, help the UK protect theirs, AND have free universal healthcare...
  - chongli 5mo ago
    There will always be a shortage of money for medical care. The dirty secret of social medicine is that a small percentage of the population are essentially unhappy utility monsters [1] who gain little or no benefit no matter how many resources are poured into treating them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_monster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_monster
bluegatty 5mo ago
It'd be nice if they didn't use the term at all because I don't think they're useful relevant or real. If we thought of all of this as 'stochastic data systems' then our heads would be in the right place as we thought about it just as 'powerful software' that can be used for good or bad purposes, and the negative externalizes will be derived from our use of it, not some inherent property.
- dr_dshiv 5mo ago
  On the other hand, "magical new systems that provide almost unlimited capacity for intelligent work" is probably a more functional mental model. Genie can give you 1000 wishes till you reach your session limit.
  - mindok 5mo ago
    Not quite 1000 on Codex as of last day or two!
- jacquesm 5mo ago
  It would have been better if they didn't bootstrap it off the outright theft of a very large amount of IP only to lock it behind a paywall.
  - nekusar 5mo ago
    "Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them." - Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, Dune
djtango 5mo ago
Magic or no, ultimately "AI" leads to labour displacement and it's just a continuation of the much broader trend of automation driven by computers. Labour displacement leads to an erosion of standards of living and in a world that ties purpose to work is an existential threat on a very practical level. It was always going to be met with violence once it became more than a curiosity for tinkerers.
- georgemcbay 5mo ago
  > in a world that ties purpose to work is an existential threat on a very practical level. I don't disagree that we tie purpose to work and severing that tie will have negative societal consequences, but it is far more impactful that we tie the ability to continue to exist to work (for anyone not lucky enough to already be wealthy). If I suddenly became unemployable tomorrow I'm positive I could find alternate purpose in my life to fill that gap, I already volunteer for various causes and could happily do more of the same to fill in the gaps left by lack of work. What I couldn't do is feed myself, keep myself housed, and get medical care (especially in the US, where this is very directly tied to work). The really big fuckup we are committing as a society in the US (may or may not apply to each person's country individually) isn't just this looming threat of massive labor displacement due to AI, it is that instead of planning for any sort of soft landing we are continually slashing what few social safety nets already exist. We are creating the conditions for desperation that likely will result in increasing violence as outlined in the linked post.
  - Throaway199999 5mo ago
    ^^^^
  - ryandrake 5mo ago
    > The really big fuckup we are committing as a society in the US (may or may not apply to each person's country individually) isn't just this looming threat of massive labor displacement due to AI, it is that instead of planning for any sort of soft landing we are continually slashing what few social safety nets already exist. Think of the alternative, though: If we planned for a soft landing and implemented safety nets and started transitioning ourselves to a society where people didn't have to work to survive, then a few trillion dollar companies would make slightly less profit every year. We simply cannot allow that. Won't someone think of those trillion dollar companies for a minute?
hackrmn 5mo ago
I don't want to stir up the hornet's nest here, but in my humble opinion the entire problem rests on the unabated and unchecked modern and "late-stage" capitalism model, championed by the U.S. and since exported to and sprung good root everywhere else, even in Europe where it as of yet has a few more checks and balances (which unsurprisingly draws a lot of ire from its acolytes and priests across the Atlantic). Soviet Union lost due to an inferior societal model, but this too is too much along what once was a relatively sustainable path. The American dream is now a parody of itself, as it takes more to end up with the rest of them, I could go on about the irony of wanting to escape the pit but not wanting to acknowledge the pit is the 99% of the U.S. -- Not Altmans, Bezos'es, Musks or Trumps or their hordes of peripheral elites. Point being, the model doesn't work _today_ with its cancerous appetite and correspondingly absurd neglect of the human, _any_ human. We can't have humanism and the kind of AI we're about to "enjoy". The acceleration of wealth disparity may prove to be nearly geometrical, as the common man is further stripped of any capacity to inflict change on the "system". I hope I am wrong, but for all their crimes, anarchy and in a twist of irony -- inhumane treatment of opponent -- the October revolutionaries in Russia, yes bolsheviks, were merely a natural response to a similar atmosphere in Russia at the turn of the previous century. It's just that they didn't have mass surveillance used against them in the same capacity our gadgets allow the "governments" today, nor were they aided by AI which is _also_ something that can be used against an entire slice of populace (a perfect application of general principles put in action). So although the situation may become similar, we're increasingly in no position to change it. The difference may be counted in _generations_, as in it will take multiple generations to dismantle the power structures we allow be put in place now, with Altmans etc. These people may not be evil, but history proves they only have to be short-sighted enough for evil to take root and thrive. Sorry for the wall of text, but I do agree with the point of the blog post in a way -- demanding people become civilised and refrain from throwing eggs (or Molotovs) on celebrities that are about to swing _entire governments_, is not seeing the forest for the trees. There's also no precedent in a way -- our historical cataclysms we have created ourselves, have been on a smaller scale, so we're spiraling outwards and not all of the tools we think we have, are going to have the effect required in order to enact the change we want. In the worst case, of course.
- fastforwardius 5mo ago
redsocksfan45 5mo ago
[dead]
threethirtytwo 5mo ago
No it’s tarnished by becoming too popular. Just like how people hated nickelback, if you remember.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
Thanemate 5mo ago
The power of the tool itself will be overshadowed by the motivations of its real owner. I can be both impressed by its ability to empower me, and be scared of the fact that the tools will change hands sooner or later and be deployed at scale to serve a goal I cannot, at minimum, support. When most engineers and Marvel fans watched Tony Stark in Avengers collaborating with Jarvis they thought of Jarvis like "an AI with Google's knowledge where I can interact with him". It's true that we're close to that level interaction. However, the ultimate goal is to get as much as possible automated on Jarvis, to the point where Tony Stark is not needed or Tony Stark can be replaced by anyone with a mouth. In this example, Jarvis isn't the goal but a checkpoint. The goal is a genie, providing software and research to anyone who is loaded with money, and knows how to rub the metaphorical lamp the right way.
- bluefirebrand 5mo ago
  > the tools will change hands sooner or later and be deployed at scale to serve a goal I cannot, at minimum, support Personally, the tools don't need to change hands at all. They are already in the hands of people who are deploying them at a scale to serve goals I cannot and do not support The people running AI companies right now are some of the most evil motherfuckers on the planet
- ryandrake 5mo ago
  > The power of the tool itself will be overshadowed by the motivations of its real owner. Not only that, but by how blatantly and openly these owners are discussing the tool's power. They are publicly crooning about their product's ability to replace workers. It's the first line of their sales pitch. And also, their customers (business CEOs) are publicly crooning about how awesome it is that they can reduce their headcount! Both the AI producers and their customers are absolutely bragging about worker displacement, and not a single guillotine has been constructed in the streets yet.
tsukurimashou 5mo ago
stealing and reusing the work of thousands of people as your own is magic now?
- joquarky 5mo ago
  Do they not know how to make backups?
  - tsukurimashou 5mo ago
    making a copy is not stealing, but presenting / selling someone else's work as your own is. especially when it's done on that scale by big corps and in an automated way
bethekidyouwant 5mo ago
Were you around for the first release of GPT? It was not the CEOs that were kvetching about being paperclipped by AGI

keiferski 5mo ago

It’s the inevitable result of valuations based on hype and future potential, not business fundamentals. It incentivizes companies to be as hyperbolic as possible with their pitches and marketing. Cryptocurrency is an interesting technology with some niche use cases, but it was pitched as replacing the entire money system. LLMs are extremely useful for certain types of work, but are pitched as AGI ending all work. Etc.

sigmoid10 5mo ago

Unfortunately, this is the only way to get enough venture capital to support the compute needs for this kind of technology. Who is going to spend hundreds on billions on a vague idea without regular claims that this will upend the existing economy in six to twelve months and whoever owns it will become unfathomably rich? And despite all the actual developments we have seen going against that idea, investors keep falling for it. This will continue until it crashes, one way or another. The question is how long it can build up and how deep the fall will be. LLMs will certainly change the economy in the end, but so did mortgage backed securities.

pydry 5mo ago
It's a sad indictment of our society that there is always a shortage of money for medical care, infrastructure, housing, food stamps and space exploration but always a surplus of cash for war and tools that purport to replace the workforce.
- block_dagger 5mo ago
  War accelerated evolution, it’s why it exists.
  - jacquesm 5mo ago
    You have cause and effect mixed up.
  - bregma 5mo ago
    So did compassion, probably in a greater amount. And yet the greater amount of resources goes into war at the expense of compassion. Humanity has taken control of its own evolution and no longer relyies on natural selection to be the driving force for change. Using evolution as an excuse to make bad and immoral choices is a poor argument and should be left back in the stone age.
    - pheaded_while9 5mo ago
      Yes, the social darwinist approach inevitably lead to eugenical thinking and the human meat grinder that follows. We, as being with the capacity to understand harmful v. non-harmful behaviour, have a consequence to harmful behaviour, collectively: human suffering and the suppression of freedom.
    - djeastm 5mo ago
      >Humanity has taken control of its own evolution Has it taken full control of it or just partial control?
- gmerc 5mo ago
  The opportunity cost to society of performative model training is stunning - 400M for a grok training run to dominate the charts for 2 weeks
- roenxi 5mo ago
  > It's a sad indictment of our society that there is always a shortage of money for medical care... It has nothing to do with society; there is infinite demand for medical care. The upper limit is whatever it takes to live until the universe's heat death in good health. That takes a lot of resources. However much society spends on medical care, there is always more that could be spent. The modern era has the best, most affordable medical care in history and people are showing no signs of being satisfied at all. While war spending generally just causes pain for no gain it doesn't change the fact that there will never be enough available to satisfy people's demand for medical care. Every single time people get what they want they just come up with a new aspirational minimum standard.
- philwelch 5mo ago
  There isn’t really a shortage of money for those things, just rampant levels of fraud, corruption, and incompetence in the government to make those things artificially expensive. California spends so much money on high speed rail and gets 0 feet of track because they’re not paying for track; the whole thing is a scam where the politicians give taxpayer money to their political supporters in exchange for political support. Defense isn’t immune to this either; Boeing, which builds a shitty heavy lift rocket out of Space Shuttle spare parts and delivers it late and over budget, pulls the exact same bullshit with their defense contracts, and there’s always some shitty Senator siding with them against the American people whenever anyone gets upset.
- vixen99 5mo ago
  The current British government should be a shining beacon for you! Its welfare bill actually outstrips national income by far. Britain's pathetic defense capabilities cannot even see off Russian warships that intimidate by deliberately hanging around British waters assessing our vital undersea cabling. The UK government has now asked France if it can help deter these ships. Tangentially - I should add that even with their massive expenditure on the National Health System (NHS) it's not enough and too many people feel that they have to go abroad to get life-saving operations and procedures. If they can afford it of course. But sure, that is another matter. As far as I can tell, there seems to be pretty much an apolitical consensus on both areas.
  - twsahjklf 5mo ago
    Curous how france manages to have enough resources to protect its own waters, help the UK protect theirs, AND have free universal healthcare...
- chongli 5mo ago
  There will always be a shortage of money for medical care. The dirty secret of social medicine is that a small percentage of the population are essentially unhappy utility monsters [1] who gain little or no benefit no matter how many resources are poured into treating them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_monster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_monster

bluegatty 5mo ago

It'd be nice if they didn't use the term at all because I don't think they're useful relevant or real. If we thought of all of this as 'stochastic data systems' then our heads would be in the right place as we thought about it just as 'powerful software' that can be used for good or bad purposes, and the negative externalizes will be derived from our use of it, not some inherent property.

dr_dshiv 5mo ago
On the other hand, "magical new systems that provide almost unlimited capacity for intelligent work" is probably a more functional mental model. Genie can give you 1000 wishes till you reach your session limit.
- mindok 5mo ago
  Not quite 1000 on Codex as of last day or two!
jacquesm 5mo ago
It would have been better if they didn't bootstrap it off the outright theft of a very large amount of IP only to lock it behind a paywall.
- nekusar 5mo ago
  "Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them." - Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, Dune

djtango 5mo ago

Magic or no, ultimately "AI" leads to labour displacement and it's just a continuation of the much broader trend of automation driven by computers. Labour displacement leads to an erosion of standards of living and in a world that ties purpose to work is an existential threat on a very practical level. It was always going to be met with violence once it became more than a curiosity for tinkerers.

georgemcbay 5mo ago
> in a world that ties purpose to work is an existential threat on a very practical level. I don't disagree that we tie purpose to work and severing that tie will have negative societal consequences, but it is far more impactful that we tie the ability to continue to exist to work (for anyone not lucky enough to already be wealthy). If I suddenly became unemployable tomorrow I'm positive I could find alternate purpose in my life to fill that gap, I already volunteer for various causes and could happily do more of the same to fill in the gaps left by lack of work. What I couldn't do is feed myself, keep myself housed, and get medical care (especially in the US, where this is very directly tied to work). The really big fuckup we are committing as a society in the US (may or may not apply to each person's country individually) isn't just this looming threat of massive labor displacement due to AI, it is that instead of planning for any sort of soft landing we are continually slashing what few social safety nets already exist. We are creating the conditions for desperation that likely will result in increasing violence as outlined in the linked post.
- Throaway199999 5mo ago
  ^^^^
- ryandrake 5mo ago
  > The really big fuckup we are committing as a society in the US (may or may not apply to each person's country individually) isn't just this looming threat of massive labor displacement due to AI, it is that instead of planning for any sort of soft landing we are continually slashing what few social safety nets already exist. Think of the alternative, though: If we planned for a soft landing and implemented safety nets and started transitioning ourselves to a society where people didn't have to work to survive, then a few trillion dollar companies would make slightly less profit every year. We simply cannot allow that. Won't someone think of those trillion dollar companies for a minute?

hackrmn 5mo ago

I don't want to stir up the hornet's nest here, but in my humble opinion the entire problem rests on the unabated and unchecked modern and "late-stage" capitalism model, championed by the U.S. and since exported to and sprung good root everywhere else, even in Europe where it as of yet has a few more checks and balances (which unsurprisingly draws a lot of ire from its acolytes and priests across the Atlantic). Soviet Union lost due to an inferior societal model, but this too is too much along what once was a relatively sustainable path. The American dream is now a parody of itself, as it takes more to end up with the rest of them, I could go on about the irony of wanting to escape the pit but not wanting to acknowledge the pit is the 99% of the U.S. -- Not Altmans, Bezos'es, Musks or Trumps or their hordes of peripheral elites. Point being, the model doesn't work _today_ with its cancerous appetite and correspondingly absurd neglect of the human, _any_ human. We can't have humanism and the kind of AI we're about to "enjoy". The acceleration of wealth disparity may prove to be nearly geometrical, as the common man is further stripped of any capacity to inflict change on the "system". I hope I am wrong, but for all their crimes, anarchy and in a twist of irony -- inhumane treatment of opponent -- the October revolutionaries in Russia, yes bolsheviks, were merely a natural response to a similar atmosphere in Russia at the turn of the previous century. It's just that they didn't have mass surveillance used against them in the same capacity our gadgets allow the "governments" today, nor were they aided by AI which is _also_ something that can be used against an entire slice of populace (a perfect application of general principles put in action). So although the situation may become similar, we're increasingly in no position to change it. The difference may be counted in _generations_, as in it will take multiple generations to dismantle the power structures we allow be put in place now, with Altmans etc. These people may not be evil, but history proves they only have to be short-sighted enough for evil to take root and thrive. Sorry for the wall of text, but I do agree with the point of the blog post in a way -- demanding people become civilised and refrain from throwing eggs (or Molotovs) on celebrities that are about to swing _entire governments_, is not seeing the forest for the trees. There's also no precedent in a way -- our historical cataclysms we have created ourselves, have been on a smaller scale, so we're spiraling outwards and not all of the tools we think we have, are going to have the effect required in order to enact the change we want. In the worst case, of course.

fastforwardius 5mo ago

redsocksfan45 5mo ago

[dead]

threethirtytwo 5mo ago

No it’s tarnished by becoming too popular. Just like how people hated nickelback, if you remember.

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]

Thanemate 5mo ago

The power of the tool itself will be overshadowed by the motivations of its real owner. I can be both impressed by its ability to empower me, and be scared of the fact that the tools will change hands sooner or later and be deployed at scale to serve a goal I cannot, at minimum, support. When most engineers and Marvel fans watched Tony Stark in Avengers collaborating with Jarvis they thought of Jarvis like "an AI with Google's knowledge where I can interact with him". It's true that we're close to that level interaction. However, the ultimate goal is to get as much as possible automated on Jarvis, to the point where Tony Stark is not needed or Tony Stark can be replaced by anyone with a mouth. In this example, Jarvis isn't the goal but a checkpoint. The goal is a genie, providing software and research to anyone who is loaded with money, and knows how to rub the metaphorical lamp the right way.

bluefirebrand 5mo ago
> the tools will change hands sooner or later and be deployed at scale to serve a goal I cannot, at minimum, support Personally, the tools don't need to change hands at all. They are already in the hands of people who are deploying them at a scale to serve goals I cannot and do not support The people running AI companies right now are some of the most evil motherfuckers on the planet
ryandrake 5mo ago
> The power of the tool itself will be overshadowed by the motivations of its real owner. Not only that, but by how blatantly and openly these owners are discussing the tool's power. They are publicly crooning about their product's ability to replace workers. It's the first line of their sales pitch. And also, their customers (business CEOs) are publicly crooning about how awesome it is that they can reduce their headcount! Both the AI producers and their customers are absolutely bragging about worker displacement, and not a single guillotine has been constructed in the streets yet.

tsukurimashou 5mo ago

stealing and reusing the work of thousands of people as your own is magic now?

joquarky 5mo ago
Do they not know how to make backups?
- tsukurimashou 5mo ago
  making a copy is not stealing, but presenting / selling someone else's work as your own is. especially when it's done on that scale by big corps and in an automated way

bethekidyouwant 5mo ago

Were you around for the first release of GPT? It was not the CEOs that were kvetching about being paperclipped by AGI