This technology is going to drive some incredible discoveries in all of STEM. The robber barons and monopolists tend to come out of the woodwork when incredible technologies emerge. It just sucks that we still haven't evolved them out of society.
No it won't. Natural language manipulation is never a bottleneck in STEM.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2527564-mathematicians-...
The thing is they don’t control them anymore, governments do by and large now, so a lot of the issues that came with their ownership and special privileges no longer exist. There is no way that is how this is going to go down with Google et al
At least until the maniacally evil train ownership debacle was better organized to prevent such harm in their core application.
We need to be very careful here, or we're going to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
We could do without them.
The lack of compassion that people display here is shocking to me.
"Don't automate science, because there are junior scientists could be denied the thrill of specific discoveries."
Cancer patients are not accessories to anyone's self-actualization.
"We could do without them." is not a great take when it comes to people dying prematurely.
In fact, I would bet that this particular technology will lead to climate change solutions eventually. If nothing else, it will drive an energy revolution in either nuclear or solar power. Probably too late to solve the AMOC collapse, but mitigation is still in play through science.
Good lord!
I hope somebody is documenting all these bombastic LLM-related public statements. They're going to be a neverending source of cringe and laughs for the next 50 years.
(I've heard one C-level dude say with a straight face that LLMs were a "more significant invention than writing".)
I'm a DevOps engineer, not a C suite guy, but I tend to agree with you in general. I think there is a lot of smoke being blown into the hive around this technology but having used it extensively, and having witnessed its progression first hand in engineering, these tools are insanely useful and have made giant leaps forward in just ~4 years.
Don't know if you're a believer in Moore's Law or not, but I don't think your tune is going to take anywhere near 50 years to change. I'd be surprised if it took 5 years.
>I hope somebody is documenting all these bombastic LLM-related public statements.
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This has been in use for awhile.
https://academic.oup.com/bib/article/26/3/bbaf263/8158336
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12970898/
How it gets used: https://mlconference.ai/blog/ai-in-vaccine-development/
This might change in the future if the planned insanely huge data centres get built and used. But today the situation is clear - AI isn't any more ecologically damaging than other popular data centred activities like streaming music and video, and general social media.
It feels like a very large segment, on both sides of this argument, is completely incapable of forming nuanced opinions on this stuff.
Two thoughts:
A. That's only true (to any extent) if you hold the extremely myopic view that 'AI == Generative AI'. For my part I'd posit that "AI" at large is not "intrinsically born out of theft". Not unless you think that linear regression, or a genetic algorithm, etc., inherently involve theft somehow.
B. It's an open question whether or not copyright infringement should be considered "theft" at all. It's curious though, that historically hacker oriented communities tended to lean towards "No" being the answer to that. But the scale at which GenAI affects things may be the reason that sentiment seems to be shifting a bit?
When Tesla FSD was in the zeitgeist, theft never entered the discussion, because it was clear that form of AI was not predicated upon theft.
I also hate it because:
1) Fundamentally, it's about reducing the power of labor (which are what the vast majority of people are) and I know I'm a laborer. This is why the CEOs and wealthy are excited about it.
2) It's about automating the engaging and creative knowledge work, and leaving the humans with manual labor and drudgery.
3) As a human, I don't just hate that C-Suites think they can replace my and my colleagues' creative output with LLMs, I dread the world where LLM-first creative content is ubiquitous because it will be a world of increasingly less substance/nutrition/taste/texture/other human metaphors.
It's definitely hypocritical at the "industry ethics" level, but again we don't have an ethics board and all we have are personal and public opinions. (Arguably this is one of the current problems with AI is that there is no ethics board for software so instead we must debate this in the court of public opinion, such as HN comments.)
Personally, I find AI technology itself super interesting. Plenty of great use cases. However, The current crop of lying thieving assholes running the show make it repulsive.
It's obvious they're just using AI as cloud-cover to act like assholes in the typical ways in which they would normally act like assholes.
AI is in its infancy, it's just learning to crawl. There will be more breakthroughs which will have more serious consequences. Today engineers are safe, holding the AI's hand as it crawls around, bumping into furniture. What happens when it learns to walk, run, and win marathons?
But do you think that once that has leveled out a bit, the bandwidth/market bottleneck you referenced will be identified as the new bottleneck[0]? Like, new businesses will launch, or existing companies will identify new growth areas that they did not have the capacity to move into.
I don't know how to respond to your second paragraph. Looking in that direction is a bit too overwhelming.
[0] I think this was always the problem, not developer productivity
If the extra one or two employees are 2x or 3x as productive as they used to be, why would they not be employed? There will be plenty of market to grow into since the gains in productivity are shared throughout the economy.
Besides, Anthropic did allegedly buy the ebooks they trained on so it's not like they even did that. It goes both ways though, they should get comfortable with their models getting distilled and opened up for everyone to run however they want. LLMs trained on people's data belong to the people.
AGI is a savior figure for the capitalist class. A tech version of the Second Coming, delivering them from the pesky demands of workers, like a living wage or (gasp!) sick leave.
That's why they're all so obsessed with it, it has religious-ideological component to them. When you hear them talk about AGI, there's always this weird eschatological vibe with it.
Unfortunately, they're blinded by their beliefs and can't think things through even one step further. Even if their cyberjesus comes down to them through the machine and replaces all workers, who's gonna buy all their stuff then?
All they're doing in their capitalist zealotry is ringing in the end of capitalism.
Yes, our new generation of overlords seem to be socially and emotionally stunted and exhibit an alarming naivete about the world. This worries me almost as much as the tech itself. It is impossible to predict the future but in the past when a ruling class completely disregarded the effects of their greed and excess on the wellbeing of society, at some point the bill came due and the consequences for them (and society) were dire.
Not just with the overlords, but also with our fellow nerds. We're all so busy trying to see if we can build something that we don't stop and think if we should build something, what consequences that might have or what history has taught us.
Theres a reason those fields of study are important.
The top 10% earners in the US account for half of all consumer spending. The capitalist class may be counting on that imbalance to only strengthen.