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I think the fixation on flakiness and hallucinations are exactly why tech people tend to underestimate how disruptive these LLMs really are.

LLM tutors don't replace teachers entirely, but just being able to express your confusion and getting a good answer nearly instantly is invaluable.

LLM customer support agents can't handle all queries, but they can handle the basic ones and categorize the remaining questions for people to look at. Also, LLM autocomplete is a 10x productivity boost for the support workers that remain. And language barriers are a thing of the past.

LLMs can digest years worth of meeting notes, Excel sheets, and Powerpoint decks. Bigcorps struggle so much with this stuff and LLMs will be a complete gamechanger.

Fully automated translation and subtitling of all video/audio material will increase the reach of multimedia 20x. Regional content becomes global content.

Creative industries (books, movies, comics, music) will also become much more competitive and winner-takes-all.

This AI boom is the real deal and there is no going back.

That is a great summary.

Career-wise, I think there is still good money for engineers in the AI area, building these AI things that most of us know are not going to work. What do you think?

I feel like a hostage in AI. Don’t particularly like it, but wouldn’t find a salary like that in any adjacent area in software engineering.

> We need AI systems that are clear on what they know and what they don't know, and don't "hallucinate" or get lost, before they can be trusted to do things on their own. And ways to keep the AI slaves subservient (the "alignment" problem.) Those are easier problems than ones already solved, but they are not solved yet.

Out of curiosity, why do you think the "alignment" problem is easier to solve than problems already solved?

> There's a market for that, but it's mostly in ads and "assistants" that have to be checked by humans.

This is a huge market.

Sure, maybe AI isn't going to replace 95% of white collar workers overnight. But it doesn't have to.

In order to still be extremely disruptive, all it has to do is make these workers twice as productive. Work that is "checked by a human", can still be a massive speedup, combined with a human.

Man it really HAS been 20 years since the DARPA challenge. I am OLD

Similarly realized Stargate Atlantis came out 20 years ago earlier today. Was thinking about a rewatch and noticed the year.

The US military is sometimes discussed as a large and generally competent organization which achieves goals making use of people who may not be top of the class, and many layers of other people checking that everything got done, and verifying that everything got checked. I have wondered if all we're missing for reliable AI is a suitable management layer, also composed of AI.

Generally competent is not how ive ever heard the US military described.

I think we're talking about different scales. At the small scale the military screws up all the time. At the big scale the military fields more bases, ship tonnage, airplanes, etc than any other organization in the world. It's exactly this ability to derive successful operation from unreliable parts that I'm pointing toward.