The number of bug fixes to important programs has skyrocketed. Look at what Google are saying about how many Chrome security bugs they've been fixing lately. Other big software firms have been doing the same thing - AI has been finding and fixing a ton of bugs. I know of one big program where thousands and thousands of security bugs are being found and fixed.

It may not feel like this to you because a lot of the dollars right now are going into security bugs which you can't perceive. But it's definitely happening.

At the company I own I've got AI employees autonomously triaging backlogs and fixing long tail bugs. The software is definitely getting better, although by definition long tail bugs aren't ones you are likely to encounter. The subjective "feel" of how robust the software is won't change quickly.

New tech is always applied in apparently boring ways because we are imagination constrained and people harvest the low hanging fruits first. Remember claims there was worldwide demand for only about four computers? When Gates said he wanted a computer on every desk and in every home people laughed at him. What would people do with all those computers, they asked. But he was right about where the world was heading.

There are several hundred thousand mathematicians producing hundreds of thousands of new results in math each year. Why can't most people name any human contributions to mathematics from the past decade? What is the finished result that affects everyday life? Do you consider all those human mathematicians to be useless?

Most of the biggest breakthroughs in mathematics, breakthroughs that win Fields Medals like sphere packing in dimensions 8 and 24, have no applications in everyday life. Probably the only new mathematics results that people notice affecting their daily lives are the ones that enabled AI.

Nevermind mathematicians. What about the millions of programmers? Are they all hype too because people pre-2023 were griping on hn that software is buggier than ever and people are still using the same operating systems as always? Why couldn't the 30 million human programmers make something better in the past decade?

You set your bar so high that all the world's human experts in math and programming combined would fail to meet it.

The top LLMs in 2024 were Sonnet 3.5 and GPT 4o. You couldn't have expected those much weaker models to be making breakthroughs in math. The models that are making breakthroughs haven't been around very long.

We're not going to suddenly have new robots or operating systems. Those things take time. Just because there's massive change afoot, doesn't mean it's widely adopted or applied at lower-level products. ChatGPT is a product, and software, and a breakthrough. You can have a freeform conversation with your computer about anything, in human language, and ask it to do or make stuff and it will at least try, sometimes with surprising results. That wasn't possible until recently. The robots and products are coming, rest assured.

Amazon’s chatbot processed a price adjustment the other day without forcing me to call or chat with a human agent.

Constructed human life is just more complicated than the AI capitalists would want you to believe. For example, even if an AI model can design a circuit-board, does that mean it's inherently useful? You need to source the wafers, cut them, package them, advertise them, etc. Given LLMs by their nature are confined to language and language-adjacent tasks, that is a very small percentage of the overall reasoning needed to make changes in the real world. In reality, LLMs are the intended way to extract maximal surplus-value from white-collar workers. We may see an increase in innovation as a result of that, but not because AI necessarily did it, in the same way that the power loom didn't create computers because its textiles clothed the computer scientists.

I talked to an LLM at burger king the other day until it couldn't figure out that I wanted to change the drink on my previous order.