Comment by cchance | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cchance | Hacker News Reader

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The issue people seem to stick to is "AI will never be as good as humans at X" ... even if that was true, or it was going to take 50 years or whatever to do ... what everyone seems to miss.. companies are more than willing to have a AI that does X shittier but without a salary, than to hire a guy that does it amazing and pay him a salary. The math was never is AI better than a Human, its is AI cheaper than a human for a passable product. This can be seen by companies deploying AI to do shit and firing people with some of the shittiest models lol, people were losing jobs already when fuckin GPT 3.5 was out lol.

The other thing is and AI lovers say it and they aren't wrong, the AI we have today is the worst it will ever be again, the big issue with Klarna and the others is they jumped the gun they went from 0 to replace everyone.

The company that deleted a DB was an AI issue, but it was also a company issue... no backups? Really? No sandbox for the AI? Really?

People give companies way too much credit for making smart decisions.

Edit: I imagine a lot of coding jobs will drop and come back and eventually be a lot fewer in 2-3 more versions of claude. I imagine we'll see jobs like Tier 1 call center jobs, and answering services, and stuff like drive through attendants at restaunts go away pretty rapidly in the next 3-4 years

> companies are more than willing to have a AI that does X shittier but without a salary, than to hire a guy that does it amazing and pay him a salary.

To understand this better, people should look at their own purchasing behavior. High quality goods are always replaced by "good enough" items that are significantly cheaper. Amazon, Temu, Shien etc are all great examples of those marketplaces.

Also, programers are aware of "The Rise of Worse is Better" paper for 30+ years - the inferior but simpler solution wins, and over time the issues are fixed by lots of people putting lots of work into it.

It is like outsourcing, but even better, for business.

Similar quality, which most business have already proven they don't actually care, as long as it is cheaper than in-house.

With AI the numbers look great on the spreadsheet, now there aren't neither in-house humans, nor contractors/consultancies to worry about, only little digital gremlins like in any automated factory line.

Will AI always be better? I thought it gets worse the more it eats its own output. And more and more of the public web is being produced every day. Supposedly AI companies are paying experts more often and cheap labelers less often.

Google Search was once good. Now it struggles to keep up with SEO and now AI slop.

> Will AI always be better? I thought it gets worse the more it eats its own output.

This isn't a real issue, there's just a large cohort of people who want to think it'll go away on its own. They like saying things like this because it's a very convenient belief for them.

Likewise there's a large cohort of people who pretend diminishing returns don't exist since their investments depend on that not being the case.

Also the lack of factoring in the current cultural backlash.

Lots of free data was available because nobody cared or knew it was being used as training data a few years ago.

But now? Why publish a side project on GitHub if the current marketing for AI is effectively “we will use this to eliminate your job”?

I’ve noticed an increased interest in keeping side projects private in my circles.

> This isn't a real issue

You've just tried to sweep away a massive concern without justifying it

The entire advance in reasoning models comes from training on other AI output. So does Claude's "constitutional AI". The concern is entirely made up.

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