Comment by lucideer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lucideer | Hacker News Reader

I think many people on both sides of the "AI is a bubble" debate seem to continuously carry the same misconception: that significance is somehow tied to merit.

On the "AI is just a bubble" side we have: AI is not as good as claimed therefore its impact is not as significant as advertised - ergo it is a passing fad & market caps are inflated.

On the "AI is legit" side we have the counter: AI is as at least nearly as good as claimed and/or has potential to be - ergo the hype is warranted & it's here to stay & market caps are warranted.

I'm in the third camp: impact is not related to merit, and AI is impactful in not-necessarily-positive ways that are societally transformative & will reach far outside any bubble & persist. Probably to a more significant degree even than predicted. And I think this extends far beyond the impact of purely economic knock-ons as seen with some latent impacts of blockchain speculation.

Given that third thesis I don't think the market caps are significantly inflated (beyond any other comparable market caps outside AI): investment is not merit based, it's impact based.

AI has seen so many hype cycles there is a term for it in the industry : AI winter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter?wprov=sfti1#

Spring is coming.

Question is if summer is coming or if another winter is looming after this spring.

Origin & usage of the term are fine, but structurally a lot of that Wikipedia article seems like original research.

Also, grouping the current "AI summer" in the "2005-" category seems questionable.

The way I see it, either AI takes off and capital becomes an even greater proportion of production than in the late 19th century, or my job stays relevant.

To hedge against the first possibility, I want to at least have some presence in the stock market. (A broad presence, not only "AI stocks"). If the current AI boom is a bubble, I will stay employed for another couple of decades, and don't need those savings yet.

If your job does not stay relevant then a large number of other jobs will not stay relevant either. This would impact consumption and therefore also negatively impact those stocks. Unless, of course, political steps are taken, in which case holding stock will not matter.

Consumers are not _really_ needed in an economy, and in particular mass consumers are not needed.

It's perfectly possible to imagine an economy where most of the productivity goes into catering to the needs of those who hold capital, such as personal consumption, security and investment into activities that increase the value of their capital.

As an example, consider North Korea. Very little goes to the consumption of the regular citizens as most go into the regime and their police and military forces.

With AI, it potentially becomes easier for an elite to do this, as the police force can be robotized, meaning a handful of people (or none at all) can monopolize violence without relying on the support of a large group of humans.

For instance, if democracy collapses, the tech industry could step in as "saviors" and institute some kind of oligarchic republic or empire where the government is under the control of a wealthy elite (or an individual).

Even without a full collapse of democracy, I imagine it may be difficult for a government to fully control industry if AI becomes sufficiently powerful.

It is quite plausible to me that the result will be that international corporations will be able to protect 50% or more of value generation from taxation, by relocating to favorable markets, lobbying, clever lawyers, etc, just like today.

In both of the scenarios above, we may be seeing a massive increase in the gap between those who own capital and those who do not as labor is no longer needed to generate this value.

While it IS conceivable that at least some countries are able to adopt full socialism based on an AI economy, I wouldn't take that for granted.

> or my job stays relevant

As an abstract, I would wager AI will take off AND your job will stay relevant.

As an individual, the relevance of your skillset within the professional sphere is more variable - some jobs change more frequently than others, & I do think AI will change the nature of some jobs.

The most discussed example is graphic design: if you're a graphic designer "pre-AI take off", there's a reasonable chance you're balancing a more lucrative corporate slog with a less lucrative creative outlet. I'm banking on AI becoming favoured for the slog, but never approaching anything competitive in the creative space. That will lead to job losses or jobs becoming even more vacuous than before, but as an abstract it won't eliminate the actual creative role.

> the third camp: impact is not related to merit, and AI is impactful

I suppose I'm in Camp Zero: If you want me to invest, tell me exactly what it does and what you think it can do.

If you have created a better probabalistic language generator, you may have created some business value. But calling it "A.I." and implying that it is "A.G.I." is the kind of deceit practised in a typical economic bubble.

AI is a superset of ML, and calling it AI is perfectly acceptable by academic and industry standards regardless of your personal feelings about it.

Following your logic, we could order the terms thus: A.G.I. > A.I. > M.L.

No marketing team has yet had the audacity to claim that A.G.I. == M.L. but I am alas not aware of any robust long-term protection against marketing audacity. ^_^

A.I. remains a theoretical hypothesis, and that is not an opinion regardless of the marketing tactics and money thrown at the question. As for probablistic text generation, generating dubious text at scale isn't intelligence.

It's good enough for chat-bots but will not do for any task requiring serious responsibility.

It may nonetheless prove to be a viable business... or short-term pump-and-dump. ^_^

my take is that even without significant improvements over the current level of LLMs you are going to see significant impact on jobs and society over the coming years. There's so much low hanging fruit just by improving the UI around the existing models, I've seen prototypes that can automate a huge amount of grunge work and common manual workflows that office workers do every day. They just need to be integrated at the web browser or OS level so they can be used across apps and have some ability to preview/rollback any changes via human sanity check in the cases the AI agent messes up. Microsoft and Apple can destroy most of these AI startups by streamlining the workflow, Microsoft is already rolling stuff out. Apple really needs to back one of the open source models to support their on-device privacy message and include it with their devices as an improved Siri

and all of this is assuming we don't see the AGI exponential model improvement a lot of the AI bros hype up. If we continue to see improvements on the level of GPT-2 to GPT-3 to GPT-4, then the economy as we know it changes forever. I've already seen research prototypes using LLMs to do automated reinforcement learning and optimization for robotics, so you could rapidly see automation there as well

It's true that LLMs can be used to automate things that couldn't be automated before. But even without LLMs there are untold millions of jobs that could be replaced with a simple shell script. Staggering inefficiency is everywhere. So maybe the GPTs won't be that much of a gamechanger?

unless the reason why these jobs weren't replaced with a simple shell script was that we didn't have enough people for whom such a shell script was "simple".

maybe LLMs will change that: maybe it will help write all those "simple" shell scripts?

I think there's probably a lot of truth to the meme that goes around saying that our jobs are safe because effective LLM use requires people to know what they want.

The reason the scripts are not in use is that they're costly to maintain due to sprawling edge cases. One LLM argument is that they are better able to handle these ambiguities without expensive developer support.

I for one look forward to the 737 Max on board flight critical LLM, it'll help with our emissions goals.

I think the exact opposite is true.

The more you play with these tools, the more you realize that they are not nearly as robust as they need to be to have a significant impact on society. We need much more reliability.

We will undoubtedly continue to see new generative AI tools rolling out, but I think the end result is going to be a lot less disruptive than many claimed when ChatGPT was initially released.

Of course if there is exponential improvement all bets are off, but we have had nearly a year of stagnation where GPT-4 hasn’t been beaten. This year we’ll see if this is an actual ceiling.

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