7 ms·

Except Anthropic has delivered a truly world changing product…

by mountainriver 2mo ago

lostaccount 2mo ago
World changing in a good way?
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- msikora 2mo ago
  Yes, absolutely in a good way
  - ponco 2mo ago
    The benefits of modernity (electricity, cars, iPhone, Claude) are good, but they come bundled with potentially terminal ecological costs which is bad.
    - ETH_start 2mo ago
      There are certainly ecological costs, but in the long run, Earth's life will only survive if an advanced species like ours is able to transport it off the planet before the sun expands and boils away the ocean and atmosphere, in approximately 800 million years.
      - deleted 2mo ago
        [deleted]
      - fragmede 2mo ago
        Fortunately, the rockets for that will be helped along with the GPU capacity to run rocket simulations on. GPUs not being used to run LLMs can be used instead for physics simulations to help make those rockets work.
        ETH_start 2mo ago
        I'm looking at the second and third order effects of technologies. LLMs massively increase the surplus capacity of human civilization, and it is this surplus capacity enables resources (including human capital) to be expended on developing frontier technologies like rockets that can accelerate the development of space-faring capabilities.
    - doublepg23 2mo ago
      Have people (smarter than me) come up with a good equation - or at least heuristic - to determine what inventions are morally good? I suppose it'd be from a utilitarian perspective? Ex: My gut feeling is nitrogen fixing would rank "low" on "terminal ecological impact" against "positive benefits to humanity"; the Vinyl resurgence would be around the middle; private jets for the Epstein class would the highest etc.
      - ponco 2mo ago
        I was being a bit cheeky, but I’m not really arguing that individual inventions can be determined as good or bad. My point is it comes from the same underlying mode of production. "Claude is useful" and "the way we have organised society that led to its creation may be ecologically catastrophic” can both be true.
      - deleted 2mo ago
        [deleted]
    - CamperBob2 2mo ago
      Yup. Best unplug your computer.
      - ponco 2mo ago
        Darn, I tried this and the lithium battery kicked in.
    - deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
  - davkan 2mo ago
    That remains to be seen. I for one am doubtful that AI as a whole has meaningfully improved the lives of just about anyone besides the few who have gotten rich. Meanwhile many have already lost their jobs as a result, even if AI is just a convenient scapegoat.
  - tayo42 2mo ago
    You really think your life is better than 2 years ago because of AI chat bots? If AI went away tomorrow idk if my life would meaningfully change
    - ToValueFunfetti 2mo ago
      An AI chatbot diagnosed my rolled shoulders. I had assumed I had bad workout form. I would google "discomfort in upper back" or whatever and it would say "back pain after exercise means take a rest" and I would rest and it wouldn't get better until I lost interest in working out. It never occurred to me that this could be a medical problem, so I never asked a doctor (not that I had one to ask, as I was working retail at the time). Last time I started working out, I went to ChatGPT instead of google and it said "here's your problem, here's how to fix it" and it was right and I continue to work out and my quality of life has risen tremendously. YMMV
    - techpression 2mo ago
      I would see less fake news, fake profiles and fake content in general. I would be happier, even if I would miss some of it. It’s kind of sad how much we accept the idea of ”trust absolutely nothing” nowadays, even movie trailers for fictional movies are made to drive clicks for ads… obviously there has always been a large trust issue online, but with gen ai we entered a new era of it.
  - preisschild 2mo ago
    I disagree. People get dumber because they outsource thinking to fancy autocomplete and I haven't really yet seen work by LLMs that significantly improve the world.
- onion2k 2mo ago
  Your question implies a belief that things are 'good' or 'bad', but the reality of the world is a lot more nuanced than that. Pretty much everything that doesn't lead directly to human suffering can be seen as both good and bad.
patcon 2mo ago
So did Los Alamos? Edit: don't get me wrong, I'm a happy user. But I'd also be a happy consumer of refined sugar in the early 20th century. I'm still not sure if these tools won't destabilize society to the point of collapse. I don't think we understand the complexity of what's going on nearly enough, and am certainly not optimistic about AI being net good for us
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- mulmen 2mo ago
  This came up on the Lunch Money livestream yesterday. The entire episode is worth a listen but here's the relevant sections: Krugman: "I've been writing some about downsides of technological change and I realized afterwards that if I really wanted a really stellar example of a productive important innovation that had terrible effects on society would be the cotton gin." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJxQbfbpf7M&t=25m38s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJxQbfbpf7M&t=25m38s Richardson: "I always have a hard time articulating this, but the number of large plantations in which enslavers owned in air quotes, you know, more than 25 or more than 50 other human beings was a very very small proportion of the American South, less than 1%. The majority of people who again owned their black neighbors had one or two enslaved people on their farms. They weren't necessarily called plantations. And they would be working alongside those black Americans. And the cotton gin could have made small farms viable and could have ended human enslavement. And instead what they gave us was, you know, the the Trail of Tears in the 1830s that cleans indigenous Americans out of the southwestern land. You get an extraordinary land rush into the American South in the 1830s and the 1840s. And you get the establishment of these gigantic essentially factory farms. And that's a place where, you know, the majority of southerners, obviously the indigenous southerners and the black southerners, wanted no part of this system, but it actually didn't serve the white farmers either. It served a really small, less than 1% group of American enslavers in the American South. And you look at that and you think that wasn't the technologies fault. That was the fault of the people who um who set up the political system that enabled it to work that way." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJxQbfbpf7M&t=28m18s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJxQbfbpf7M&t=28m18s
hatefulheart 2mo ago
8 months ago I asked this question, I will ask again: Where are your browsers? Where are your compilers? Where are your databases? Where are your operating systems? Can you point me to literally anything useful that works and was created by this world changing technology? All I see is dead project after dead project.
- siwakotisaurav 2mo ago
  If you take them at their word, the people working on the current browsers, compilers and databases are all using it Google self reports 70% ai usage in code, bun was fully ai rewritten to be rust
  - hatefulheart 2mo ago
    Let’s not forget we are talking about a world changing technology here. So when you tell me “some people working on some projects are using it”, I’ll pretend you didn’t say “all” because that’s untrue, you haven’t asked all of them, and the company that got bought out by Anthropic did their “rewrite-in-rust” meme, do you think it’s unreasonable to incredulous?
    - siwakotisaurav 2mo ago
      Now the goalpost is “all” of code? I don’t think anything I say is likely to change your mind. You might need to get through this valley of depression by yourself in a few years and join the rest of devs using ai
      - hatefulheart 2mo ago
        Your reading comprehension is awful. You said “all” as in “all” developers on those projects. You haven’t spoken to all of them to make that claim. You’re just making stuff up. That’s what I was pointing out. If you are suggesting that we can call the Chromium project a work of LLMs because some developers may or may not be using LLMs on the project it let’s just stop the conversation right here. This is becoming a classic case of LLM brain rot. I hope you come back to your senses.
casey2 2mo ago
No, that would be OpenAI (or Google if you want to talk technicals). Anthropic's strategy was just let RL on coding and jack up the price. I can only assume their real strategy is to speedrun getting the whole industry turned into a utility.

Except Anthropic has delivered a truly world changing product…

lostaccount 2mo ago

World changing in a good way?

deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
msikora 2mo ago
Yes, absolutely in a good way
- ponco 2mo ago
  The benefits of modernity (electricity, cars, iPhone, Claude) are good, but they come bundled with potentially terminal ecological costs which is bad.
  - ETH_start 2mo ago
    There are certainly ecological costs, but in the long run, Earth's life will only survive if an advanced species like ours is able to transport it off the planet before the sun expands and boils away the ocean and atmosphere, in approximately 800 million years.
    - deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
    - fragmede 2mo ago
      Fortunately, the rockets for that will be helped along with the GPU capacity to run rocket simulations on. GPUs not being used to run LLMs can be used instead for physics simulations to help make those rockets work.
      - ETH_start 2mo ago
        I'm looking at the second and third order effects of technologies. LLMs massively increase the surplus capacity of human civilization, and it is this surplus capacity enables resources (including human capital) to be expended on developing frontier technologies like rockets that can accelerate the development of space-faring capabilities.
  - doublepg23 2mo ago
    Have people (smarter than me) come up with a good equation - or at least heuristic - to determine what inventions are morally good? I suppose it'd be from a utilitarian perspective? Ex: My gut feeling is nitrogen fixing would rank "low" on "terminal ecological impact" against "positive benefits to humanity"; the Vinyl resurgence would be around the middle; private jets for the Epstein class would the highest etc.
    - ponco 2mo ago
      I was being a bit cheeky, but I’m not really arguing that individual inventions can be determined as good or bad. My point is it comes from the same underlying mode of production. "Claude is useful" and "the way we have organised society that led to its creation may be ecologically catastrophic” can both be true.
    - deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
  - CamperBob2 2mo ago
    Yup. Best unplug your computer.
    - ponco 2mo ago
      Darn, I tried this and the lithium battery kicked in.
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
- davkan 2mo ago
  That remains to be seen. I for one am doubtful that AI as a whole has meaningfully improved the lives of just about anyone besides the few who have gotten rich. Meanwhile many have already lost their jobs as a result, even if AI is just a convenient scapegoat.
- tayo42 2mo ago
  You really think your life is better than 2 years ago because of AI chat bots? If AI went away tomorrow idk if my life would meaningfully change
  - ToValueFunfetti 2mo ago
    An AI chatbot diagnosed my rolled shoulders. I had assumed I had bad workout form. I would google "discomfort in upper back" or whatever and it would say "back pain after exercise means take a rest" and I would rest and it wouldn't get better until I lost interest in working out. It never occurred to me that this could be a medical problem, so I never asked a doctor (not that I had one to ask, as I was working retail at the time). Last time I started working out, I went to ChatGPT instead of google and it said "here's your problem, here's how to fix it" and it was right and I continue to work out and my quality of life has risen tremendously. YMMV
  - techpression 2mo ago
    I would see less fake news, fake profiles and fake content in general. I would be happier, even if I would miss some of it. It’s kind of sad how much we accept the idea of ”trust absolutely nothing” nowadays, even movie trailers for fictional movies are made to drive clicks for ads… obviously there has always been a large trust issue online, but with gen ai we entered a new era of it.
- preisschild 2mo ago
  I disagree. People get dumber because they outsource thinking to fancy autocomplete and I haven't really yet seen work by LLMs that significantly improve the world.
onion2k 2mo ago
Your question implies a belief that things are 'good' or 'bad', but the reality of the world is a lot more nuanced than that. Pretty much everything that doesn't lead directly to human suffering can be seen as both good and bad.

patcon 2mo ago

So did Los Alamos? Edit: don't get me wrong, I'm a happy user. But I'd also be a happy consumer of refined sugar in the early 20th century. I'm still not sure if these tools won't destabilize society to the point of collapse. I don't think we understand the complexity of what's going on nearly enough, and am certainly not optimistic about AI being net good for us

deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
mulmen 2mo ago
This came up on the Lunch Money livestream yesterday. The entire episode is worth a listen but here's the relevant sections: Krugman: "I've been writing some about downsides of technological change and I realized afterwards that if I really wanted a really stellar example of a productive important innovation that had terrible effects on society would be the cotton gin." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJxQbfbpf7M&t=25m38s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJxQbfbpf7M&t=25m38s Richardson: "I always have a hard time articulating this, but the number of large plantations in which enslavers owned in air quotes, you know, more than 25 or more than 50 other human beings was a very very small proportion of the American South, less than 1%. The majority of people who again owned their black neighbors had one or two enslaved people on their farms. They weren't necessarily called plantations. And they would be working alongside those black Americans. And the cotton gin could have made small farms viable and could have ended human enslavement. And instead what they gave us was, you know, the the Trail of Tears in the 1830s that cleans indigenous Americans out of the southwestern land. You get an extraordinary land rush into the American South in the 1830s and the 1840s. And you get the establishment of these gigantic essentially factory farms. And that's a place where, you know, the majority of southerners, obviously the indigenous southerners and the black southerners, wanted no part of this system, but it actually didn't serve the white farmers either. It served a really small, less than 1% group of American enslavers in the American South. And you look at that and you think that wasn't the technologies fault. That was the fault of the people who um who set up the political system that enabled it to work that way." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJxQbfbpf7M&t=28m18s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJxQbfbpf7M&t=28m18s

hatefulheart 2mo ago

8 months ago I asked this question, I will ask again: Where are your browsers? Where are your compilers? Where are your databases? Where are your operating systems? Can you point me to literally anything useful that works and was created by this world changing technology? All I see is dead project after dead project.

siwakotisaurav 2mo ago
If you take them at their word, the people working on the current browsers, compilers and databases are all using it Google self reports 70% ai usage in code, bun was fully ai rewritten to be rust
- hatefulheart 2mo ago
  Let’s not forget we are talking about a world changing technology here. So when you tell me “some people working on some projects are using it”, I’ll pretend you didn’t say “all” because that’s untrue, you haven’t asked all of them, and the company that got bought out by Anthropic did their “rewrite-in-rust” meme, do you think it’s unreasonable to incredulous?
  - siwakotisaurav 2mo ago
    Now the goalpost is “all” of code? I don’t think anything I say is likely to change your mind. You might need to get through this valley of depression by yourself in a few years and join the rest of devs using ai
    - hatefulheart 2mo ago
      Your reading comprehension is awful. You said “all” as in “all” developers on those projects. You haven’t spoken to all of them to make that claim. You’re just making stuff up. That’s what I was pointing out. If you are suggesting that we can call the Chromium project a work of LLMs because some developers may or may not be using LLMs on the project it let’s just stop the conversation right here. This is becoming a classic case of LLM brain rot. I hope you come back to your senses.

casey2 2mo ago

No, that would be OpenAI (or Google if you want to talk technicals). Anthropic's strategy was just let RL on coding and jack up the price. I can only assume their real strategy is to speedrun getting the whole industry turned into a utility.