5 ms·

I prefer that scenario to the one we had before where too many smart people were building out social networks and similar services trying to maximize ad impress

I prefer that scenario to the one we had before where too many smart people were building out social networks and similar services trying to maximize ad impressions. We are still dealing with the consequences…

jayd16 2mo ago
The consequences are different this time because why? Seems like an even bigger opportunity to inject ads, influence thought, and scrape user information.
- freedomben 2mo ago
  That will certainly come in time. We're already starting to see/hear the beginnings of it. My hope is that the market maintains competition because the moment one or two corps have monopoly/duopoly they will go full throttle toward that I'm afraid.
- kortilla 2mo ago
  The potential upside in positives is actually there. New cures, personalized really good medicine, breakthroughs in every scientific field, etc. The people are there because they are betting on AGI, not chatbots that make software engineering go faster.
  - sandeepkd 2mo ago
    any concrete evidences to support this theory from the past 12 months would be helpful here (where evidence > marketing fluff)
    - kortilla 2mo ago
      Talk to employees at anthropic and OpenAI. Listen to the talks from the higher-ups. Sam Altman even said something to the effect of “we don’t need a working business model because AGI will figure out how to make money”.
  - recursive 2mo ago
    The upsides for social media were there too.
  - wolvesechoes 2mo ago
    It is not enough to invent a new medicine. You also need to make it easily available. People investing in AI are not interested in giving new awesome medicine to people that couln't afford it.
- acedTrex 2mo ago
  I mean, I am no LLM lover but in the possible "success case" there are also many many other cool/good to humanity use cases. Whereas ads are almost exclusively negative.
- wubbawibba 2mo ago
  [dead]
mnky9800n 2mo ago
I think those people are the ones in charge now and will be directing their ai resources to make even better ads.
q8zd3 2mo ago
Same people, different context.
williamdclt 2mo ago
I'm not even sure that I do prefer the AI train to the social media / ad train. I certainly would if the direction was "we're throwing ourselves blindly in AI so to gradually free citizens from the need to work", but right now it's "we're throwing ourselves blindly in AI so that we can sacrifice workers for higher corporate profits".
- warshinder 2mo ago
  Not to mention how they will be used by terrorists and evil people to create biological weapons and other tools of mass slaughter. Or how it will be/is being used by criminals to target vulnerable people and businesses. Or how coupled with drone warfare the world becomes an unlivable hellhole in the next decade. But Marc Andreesan said only losers are against “tech accelerationiism” on twitter so here we are. Edit: all that and spellcheck still sucks too.
  - satvikpendem 2mo ago
    Sounds like you're reading into Amodei's propaganda as to why they should control AI. The information to make biological weapons for example is nothing new, it has been on the Internet for decades.
    - warshinder 2mo ago
      Should we control nuclear weapons? Is nuclear technology of the sort we’re fighting a war over right now a bigger technological advance than AI when it comes to war fighting capabilities? I suppose if you think ai is nothing big, it makes sense to not want to control it. Or, if you are all for widespread nuclear proliferation, then your position would make sense. ELSE: you’re totally illogical.
      - mrguyorama 2mo ago
        An LLM can't help you build a nuke. LLMs can't paper over hard engineering challenges like "You need to reinvent the centrifugal separator industry" and "rocket engineering is pretty difficult" and "you need really really good data to simulate things before you can actually build an implosion device" and less engineering challenges like "The CIA keeps murdering anyone who works on this" There's never been an information access problem with nuclear weapons. The information was so public that most physicist realized everyone was building bombs from the sudden lack of published papers on how you could build bombs. It's just silly how people seem to believe that if you just have a page worth of text saying something, you can suddenly do that thing. Even a magical superintelligent AI could not do these things. It's going to tell you the exact same thing that has been known for nearly a century now: "Hire 100 engineers and a couple physicists and 1000 very skilled machinists and laborers, and spend a billion dollars on plumbing, and then do that a second time if you need to deliver the device using a missile" Meanwhile a dirty bomb is trivial. These things don't happen because people who want to cause mass harm are generally poorly resourced.
Almondsetat 2mo ago
During the social media boom: Attention is all you need During the AI boom: Attention is all you need
aleph_minus_one 2mo ago
> too many smart people were building out social networks and similar services trying to maximize ad impressions. Honest question: where should these very smart people work then in your opinion? Nearly all suitable-looking, "smarter" ideas that come to my mind will bring less revenue/profit in expectation than, for example, letting them maximize ad impressions. I of course wish we lived in a "more intelligent" world where this is not the case. :-(
- codingdave 2mo ago
  > will bring less revenue/profit Call me crazy, but the smartest people I know have rejected maximizing their employer's revenue and profit as their goal. Or even their own company if they go that route. Find a niche, work it, enjoy it, and enjoy the rest of your life, too.
- hightrix 2mo ago
  > where should these very smart people work then in your opinion? Anywhere else. Ads are a net negative to society and provide no value. ANY activity outside of pushing ads is a better contribution to society as a whole.
  - sebastiennight 2mo ago
    So, let's reinvest those resources into surveillance and war?
    - wolvesechoes 2mo ago
      I mean, war, in all its cruelty and tragedy, at the same time it brings the worst from people is also able to bring out the best. Ad business, and business in general, doesn't. It only brings out the worst.
      - sebastiennight 2mo ago
        > I mean, war, in all its cruelty and tragedy, at the same time it brings the worst from people is also able to bring out the best. I can see it from here: out of tens of thousands of people, one man takes a stand to save a handful of children from all the pillage, rape and murder. In an alternate world, this man might have (gasp) tried to run a business instead. Sure, the children and city would still be alive instead of burning to ashes, but who cares? Look, there's not much positive to say for the ad-driven Internet, but to consider "pixels on screens that you disagree with" to be worse than actual mass killing is maybe a tad hyperbolic here.
BobbyJo 2mo ago
1000000% this. I remember lamenting all through the 2010s that all the high paying jobs were basically ad revenue supported. Now its AI. Maybe AI doesn't materialize the way we want, but I'll take that bet over business as usual before every time.
- hodgesrm 2mo ago
  > I remember lamenting all through the 2010s that all the high paying jobs were basically ad revenue supported. That's never been true for financial services, many of which offer very high-paying jobs for high-frequency trading, hedge fund management, market operations, etc. There are many other industries with high value IT jobs that are not ad-supported. (Edit: typo)
  - BobbyJo 2mo ago
    Those jobs are much more niche, and require much more specialized knowledge. Google alone probably has more software employees than all of the high paying trading firms combined. It's a possible career path, sure, but its like comparing taxi driver opportunities with stretch limo driver opportunities IMO. Totally different scales. AI is much more similar to classic cloud/infra with a lot more OSS than finance afaik, and probably already employs more devs than prop firms. (I'm not counting big bank jobs because those are definitely not high paying)
Ancalagon 2mo ago
You think AI won’t/isn’t being used to maximize ad impressions…?
jmilloy 2mo ago
I don't know, I feel like llms are the even worse replacement for social networks and maximized ad impressions. Now you don't even need a network or users to produce the addictive content and inject narrative that is so impactful on our brains and lives
- ToValueFunfetti 2mo ago
  I have more meaningful intellectual conversations with LLMs in a given day than in a month on social networks. And the LLMs never try to make me feel angry or stupid, they never ignore my arguments to go on their own soapbox, they almost never feed me misinformation (and never deliberately), and they've yet to tell me to my face that the purpose of their interactions with other people is not to convince or even communicate with those people but to perform for an audience (often one that doesn't feasibly exist). Some caveats here: my view of social media is biased by the fact that jerks tend to pull me out of the woodwork- I get ragebaited, although I think I avoid the literal bait- so many of my interactions are with jerks. Looking around, I expect I'm not alone, but this may not be the default experience. And the LLMs certainly aren't perfect. They can hallucinate, they're often sycophantic, they're bad at judgment in a number of ways, probably others I'm missing. Compared to actual people, they suck. Compared to social media as it exists today, they have orders of magnitude to fall before your comparison makes sense to me. And, at least for now, the LLMs are the ones getting better while the social networks are- AFAICT, universally- getting worse.
  - alpha_squared 2mo ago
    > I have more meaningful intellectual conversations with LLMs in a given day than in a month on social networks. This is kind of making the parent's argument for them about the dangers... > And the LLMs never try to make me feel angry or stupid, they never ignore my arguments to go on their own soapbox, they almost never feed me misinformation (and never deliberately), and they've yet to tell me to my face that the purpose of their interactions with other people is not to convince or even communicate with those people but to perform for an audience (often one that doesn't feasibly exist). You're basically asking to be coddled, affirmed, validated, and protected. The world has conflict. Not all conflict is bad. Yes, social media weaponizes that conflict for ads, but I think the opposite is more dangerous in creating completely distorted realities. What you're describing sounds worse than the worst nightmare I've ever had, a world in which I'd be constantly disconnected from everyone else and would be disillusioned into thinking I'm not. > Some caveats here: my view of social media is biased by the fact that jerks tend to pull me out of the woodwork- I get ragebaited, although I think I avoid the literal bait- so many of my interactions are with jerks. This is what therapy is for.
vkou 2mo ago
Social networks only destroyed discourse. This both destroys discourse, and centralizes the means of production into ~4 companies, with everyone else paying them an economic tax in order to be competitive.
- lotsofpulp 2mo ago
  Whatsapp provides tremendous utility. I remember paying far more “economic tax” before Whatsapp to communicate, with basically anyone in the world. Facebook Marketplace also provides me with quite a bit utility.
  - CamperBob2 2mo ago
    What "economic tax" was imposed by the Web, email, Usenet, and forums?
    - lotsofpulp 2mo ago
      None, but for actual communication by lay people, it cost a ton of money for audio and video calls by having to pay their phone service provider a lot, or calling cards, or whatever.
  - vkou 2mo ago
    Neither Whatsapp nor my landline is the kind of social network that I'm talking about.
lbrito 2mo ago
That's not what was happening though. Whatever happened between 2000 and 2022 cannot be compared to the llm monomania we see now.
- sandeepkd 2mo ago
  My guess is these AI companies are counting on the money to come from traditional SAAS style services only. This whole AI would be used to gather enough capital to rewrite most of the existing SAAS services under one umbrella, sort of super APP concept. The SAAS businesses doing the layoffs will soon realize that for this whole time they were just pouring their money into their own demise
ryan_n 2mo ago
I mean there are ads in certain chatGPT plans. There have already been multiple studies showing that regular use of genAI makes you less intelligent... Additionally, it's pretty clear that the owners of this tech (dario, altman, etc..) do not have the best interest of "the people" at heart and only care about accumulating as much power and wealth possible. Not that it's their responsibility to save humanity or something, but I'm not sure this future is much better...
vishnugupta 2mo ago
And crypto.
mrguyorama 2mo ago
"The smartest people" were not working on ads because building an advertising behemoth is not a smart thing to do. When there's nothing good being invested in, "the smartest people" are simply underutilized. They do things that they think are good instead. "The smartest people" have never sought maximum capital accumulation, and have not historically been driven by "highest wages" jobs. The computer industry formed out of WW2 because a bunch of smart people ran into each other and did what they thought was really cool and had realized was suddenly possible. Von Neuman literally met one of the other guys and discussed computers as a theory at a train station and that meeting was influential on the future industry. They did not try to make billions of dollars. They had fairly average jobs that paid average. Often working for the government itself. "The smartest people" did not work on targeting ads at people, and while some of them may have been involved with early transformer work, they certainly would be disillusioned with LLMs by now and would not be working at companies burning trillions on them.

jayd16 2mo ago

The consequences are different this time because why? Seems like an even bigger opportunity to inject ads, influence thought, and scrape user information.

freedomben 2mo ago
That will certainly come in time. We're already starting to see/hear the beginnings of it. My hope is that the market maintains competition because the moment one or two corps have monopoly/duopoly they will go full throttle toward that I'm afraid.
kortilla 2mo ago
The potential upside in positives is actually there. New cures, personalized really good medicine, breakthroughs in every scientific field, etc. The people are there because they are betting on AGI, not chatbots that make software engineering go faster.
- sandeepkd 2mo ago
  any concrete evidences to support this theory from the past 12 months would be helpful here (where evidence > marketing fluff)
  - kortilla 2mo ago
    Talk to employees at anthropic and OpenAI. Listen to the talks from the higher-ups. Sam Altman even said something to the effect of “we don’t need a working business model because AGI will figure out how to make money”.
- recursive 2mo ago
  The upsides for social media were there too.
- wolvesechoes 2mo ago
  It is not enough to invent a new medicine. You also need to make it easily available. People investing in AI are not interested in giving new awesome medicine to people that couln't afford it.
acedTrex 2mo ago
I mean, I am no LLM lover but in the possible "success case" there are also many many other cool/good to humanity use cases. Whereas ads are almost exclusively negative.
wubbawibba 2mo ago
[dead]

mnky9800n 2mo ago

I think those people are the ones in charge now and will be directing their ai resources to make even better ads.

q8zd3 2mo ago

Same people, different context.

williamdclt 2mo ago

I'm not even sure that I do prefer the AI train to the social media / ad train. I certainly would if the direction was "we're throwing ourselves blindly in AI so to gradually free citizens from the need to work", but right now it's "we're throwing ourselves blindly in AI so that we can sacrifice workers for higher corporate profits".

warshinder 2mo ago
Not to mention how they will be used by terrorists and evil people to create biological weapons and other tools of mass slaughter. Or how it will be/is being used by criminals to target vulnerable people and businesses. Or how coupled with drone warfare the world becomes an unlivable hellhole in the next decade. But Marc Andreesan said only losers are against “tech accelerationiism” on twitter so here we are. Edit: all that and spellcheck still sucks too.
- satvikpendem 2mo ago
  Sounds like you're reading into Amodei's propaganda as to why they should control AI. The information to make biological weapons for example is nothing new, it has been on the Internet for decades.
  - warshinder 2mo ago
    Should we control nuclear weapons? Is nuclear technology of the sort we’re fighting a war over right now a bigger technological advance than AI when it comes to war fighting capabilities? I suppose if you think ai is nothing big, it makes sense to not want to control it. Or, if you are all for widespread nuclear proliferation, then your position would make sense. ELSE: you’re totally illogical.
    - mrguyorama 2mo ago
      An LLM can't help you build a nuke. LLMs can't paper over hard engineering challenges like "You need to reinvent the centrifugal separator industry" and "rocket engineering is pretty difficult" and "you need really really good data to simulate things before you can actually build an implosion device" and less engineering challenges like "The CIA keeps murdering anyone who works on this" There's never been an information access problem with nuclear weapons. The information was so public that most physicist realized everyone was building bombs from the sudden lack of published papers on how you could build bombs. It's just silly how people seem to believe that if you just have a page worth of text saying something, you can suddenly do that thing. Even a magical superintelligent AI could not do these things. It's going to tell you the exact same thing that has been known for nearly a century now: "Hire 100 engineers and a couple physicists and 1000 very skilled machinists and laborers, and spend a billion dollars on plumbing, and then do that a second time if you need to deliver the device using a missile" Meanwhile a dirty bomb is trivial. These things don't happen because people who want to cause mass harm are generally poorly resourced.

Almondsetat 2mo ago

During the social media boom: Attention is all you need During the AI boom: Attention is all you need

aleph_minus_one 2mo ago

> too many smart people were building out social networks and similar services trying to maximize ad impressions. Honest question: where should these very smart people work then in your opinion? Nearly all suitable-looking, "smarter" ideas that come to my mind will bring less revenue/profit in expectation than, for example, letting them maximize ad impressions. I of course wish we lived in a "more intelligent" world where this is not the case. :-(

codingdave 2mo ago
> will bring less revenue/profit Call me crazy, but the smartest people I know have rejected maximizing their employer's revenue and profit as their goal. Or even their own company if they go that route. Find a niche, work it, enjoy it, and enjoy the rest of your life, too.
hightrix 2mo ago
> where should these very smart people work then in your opinion? Anywhere else. Ads are a net negative to society and provide no value. ANY activity outside of pushing ads is a better contribution to society as a whole.
- sebastiennight 2mo ago
  So, let's reinvest those resources into surveillance and war?
  - wolvesechoes 2mo ago
    I mean, war, in all its cruelty and tragedy, at the same time it brings the worst from people is also able to bring out the best. Ad business, and business in general, doesn't. It only brings out the worst.
    - sebastiennight 2mo ago
      > I mean, war, in all its cruelty and tragedy, at the same time it brings the worst from people is also able to bring out the best. I can see it from here: out of tens of thousands of people, one man takes a stand to save a handful of children from all the pillage, rape and murder. In an alternate world, this man might have (gasp) tried to run a business instead. Sure, the children and city would still be alive instead of burning to ashes, but who cares? Look, there's not much positive to say for the ad-driven Internet, but to consider "pixels on screens that you disagree with" to be worse than actual mass killing is maybe a tad hyperbolic here.

BobbyJo 2mo ago

1000000% this. I remember lamenting all through the 2010s that all the high paying jobs were basically ad revenue supported. Now its AI. Maybe AI doesn't materialize the way we want, but I'll take that bet over business as usual before every time.

hodgesrm 2mo ago
> I remember lamenting all through the 2010s that all the high paying jobs were basically ad revenue supported. That's never been true for financial services, many of which offer very high-paying jobs for high-frequency trading, hedge fund management, market operations, etc. There are many other industries with high value IT jobs that are not ad-supported. (Edit: typo)
- BobbyJo 2mo ago
  Those jobs are much more niche, and require much more specialized knowledge. Google alone probably has more software employees than all of the high paying trading firms combined. It's a possible career path, sure, but its like comparing taxi driver opportunities with stretch limo driver opportunities IMO. Totally different scales. AI is much more similar to classic cloud/infra with a lot more OSS than finance afaik, and probably already employs more devs than prop firms. (I'm not counting big bank jobs because those are definitely not high paying)

Ancalagon 2mo ago

You think AI won’t/isn’t being used to maximize ad impressions…?

jmilloy 2mo ago

I don't know, I feel like llms are the even worse replacement for social networks and maximized ad impressions. Now you don't even need a network or users to produce the addictive content and inject narrative that is so impactful on our brains and lives

ToValueFunfetti 2mo ago
I have more meaningful intellectual conversations with LLMs in a given day than in a month on social networks. And the LLMs never try to make me feel angry or stupid, they never ignore my arguments to go on their own soapbox, they almost never feed me misinformation (and never deliberately), and they've yet to tell me to my face that the purpose of their interactions with other people is not to convince or even communicate with those people but to perform for an audience (often one that doesn't feasibly exist). Some caveats here: my view of social media is biased by the fact that jerks tend to pull me out of the woodwork- I get ragebaited, although I think I avoid the literal bait- so many of my interactions are with jerks. Looking around, I expect I'm not alone, but this may not be the default experience. And the LLMs certainly aren't perfect. They can hallucinate, they're often sycophantic, they're bad at judgment in a number of ways, probably others I'm missing. Compared to actual people, they suck. Compared to social media as it exists today, they have orders of magnitude to fall before your comparison makes sense to me. And, at least for now, the LLMs are the ones getting better while the social networks are- AFAICT, universally- getting worse.
- alpha_squared 2mo ago
  > I have more meaningful intellectual conversations with LLMs in a given day than in a month on social networks. This is kind of making the parent's argument for them about the dangers... > And the LLMs never try to make me feel angry or stupid, they never ignore my arguments to go on their own soapbox, they almost never feed me misinformation (and never deliberately), and they've yet to tell me to my face that the purpose of their interactions with other people is not to convince or even communicate with those people but to perform for an audience (often one that doesn't feasibly exist). You're basically asking to be coddled, affirmed, validated, and protected. The world has conflict. Not all conflict is bad. Yes, social media weaponizes that conflict for ads, but I think the opposite is more dangerous in creating completely distorted realities. What you're describing sounds worse than the worst nightmare I've ever had, a world in which I'd be constantly disconnected from everyone else and would be disillusioned into thinking I'm not. > Some caveats here: my view of social media is biased by the fact that jerks tend to pull me out of the woodwork- I get ragebaited, although I think I avoid the literal bait- so many of my interactions are with jerks. This is what therapy is for.

vkou 2mo ago

Social networks only destroyed discourse. This both destroys discourse, and centralizes the means of production into ~4 companies, with everyone else paying them an economic tax in order to be competitive.

lotsofpulp 2mo ago
Whatsapp provides tremendous utility. I remember paying far more “economic tax” before Whatsapp to communicate, with basically anyone in the world. Facebook Marketplace also provides me with quite a bit utility.
- CamperBob2 2mo ago
  What "economic tax" was imposed by the Web, email, Usenet, and forums?
  - lotsofpulp 2mo ago
    None, but for actual communication by lay people, it cost a ton of money for audio and video calls by having to pay their phone service provider a lot, or calling cards, or whatever.
- vkou 2mo ago
  Neither Whatsapp nor my landline is the kind of social network that I'm talking about.

lbrito 2mo ago

That's not what was happening though. Whatever happened between 2000 and 2022 cannot be compared to the llm monomania we see now.

sandeepkd 2mo ago
My guess is these AI companies are counting on the money to come from traditional SAAS style services only. This whole AI would be used to gather enough capital to rewrite most of the existing SAAS services under one umbrella, sort of super APP concept. The SAAS businesses doing the layoffs will soon realize that for this whole time they were just pouring their money into their own demise

ryan_n 2mo ago

I mean there are ads in certain chatGPT plans. There have already been multiple studies showing that regular use of genAI makes you less intelligent... Additionally, it's pretty clear that the owners of this tech (dario, altman, etc..) do not have the best interest of "the people" at heart and only care about accumulating as much power and wealth possible. Not that it's their responsibility to save humanity or something, but I'm not sure this future is much better...

vishnugupta 2mo ago

And crypto.

mrguyorama 2mo ago

"The smartest people" were not working on ads because building an advertising behemoth is not a smart thing to do. When there's nothing good being invested in, "the smartest people" are simply underutilized. They do things that they think are good instead. "The smartest people" have never sought maximum capital accumulation, and have not historically been driven by "highest wages" jobs. The computer industry formed out of WW2 because a bunch of smart people ran into each other and did what they thought was really cool and had realized was suddenly possible. Von Neuman literally met one of the other guys and discussed computers as a theory at a train station and that meeting was influential on the future industry. They did not try to make billions of dollars. They had fairly average jobs that paid average. Often working for the government itself. "The smartest people" did not work on targeting ads at people, and while some of them may have been involved with early transformer work, they certainly would be disillusioned with LLMs by now and would not be working at companies burning trillions on them.