Where does next-token prediction leave us?
pop.rdi.sh
pop.rdi.sh
I am genuinely sad and feel I’m losing something and if I do everything like I used to do, I am pressured that I waste time.
Ignoring how disrespectful that behaviour is, I can't understand what value he thinks he brings in. Were you hired to be an interface between me and Claude? Because I don't need you. You are just accepting that you are redundant by doing that.
Did you feel similar when Wikipedia was created or Google or when you first got access to the internet?
All of these tools have made digging into subjects and learning easier. I find the same with AI. I love it when a random thought pops into my head and I can explore it with an AI such as Gemini. Then ask it for the sources it used so that I can read further.
AI is just a tool, much like StackOverflow. It doesn't prevent creativity, it just makes it easier and more accessible.
You are forgetting that AI can also use tools.
And those AIs can be used as tools as well by other AIs.
The moment you start working on something, someone else is already automating the exact thing you are doing now.
Good. If a machine can do my job then I can work on something more interesting. Perhaps a more interesting problem to fix is having the people working on something getting told about the automation.
Oh my god, you don't get it.
The more interesting thing? Someone else is already automating doing that exact interesting thing you are doing now.
All the way down.
I have enough money that I could just throw my socks with holes to throw trash and buy new ones inconsequentialy, but mending them by hand gives me something, it is kind of therapeutic and a sense of accomplishment.
Im sure there are machines that could do it in a second, or a patch I could stick on it as well.
Point being that we can still find satisfaction in doing things by hand that technology can do fast/easily. We just stop doing it by hand for profit.
Patches I tried didn't last and I haven't found a machine that works. And it feels bad to buy a new pair of socks only b/c of a hole in the heel.
Much of modern life is automating away the boring useless bits.
AI, on the other hand, changes the conversation on what’s boring or useless.
>AI, on the other hand, changes the conversation on what’s boring or useless.
A compression algorithm finds and removes redundancy. Simple automation is like simple compression algorithms (RLE like). AI (which even internally - at least the encoding to the representation parts - looks like compression) just like a much more sophisticated compression algorithm which finds and removes redundancy where we thought the creativity and originality were.
It does look like our civilization has accumulated a lot of cruft masquerading as creative/original/intellectual activities ("Bullshit jobs" comes to mind, also all that talk about stagnation in science, and all those huge collective collaborations - where collective there is a stagnation - and now with AI individual scientists will again be able to wield all the bleeding edge across the wide fields while digging deep in desired target research direction), and the AI is the vacuum cleaner for that cruft.
And if your CEO is right, then surely their business is doomed? If they don't understand, or can't maintain their own product, what's to stop their customers from just "making it" themselves?
How is anyone happy with this trajectory?!
Code quality does matter it’s just marketing people being shortsighted because their job is to react to the market. LLM gives a sense of « it’s kind of easy to build stuff, why bother loosing time with quality when I’m there at 80% in 20% of the time ? ».
There is compounding effects where given any big enough system this won’t scale, even Google did talks this week on this topic. So I guess you’re right, time will prove who’s right or wrong and what bet was the best with which consequence
I don't know. Does it?
Also: Maintainability is a property for which the associated costs don't show up right away.
What ideal?
> The prevailing view is that « AI makes us stupid », so it’s actually a good thing if only the wealthy were still capable of using it.
You mean it would be a good thing?
> I doubt that [..] we will ever fail to overcome entropy
What does this mean?
> What is given without effort does not transform.
Children who have loving parents absolutely are affected by that, even if the love is given unconditionally and was there even before they had a sense of self. We are also very much transformed by living on a planet with sunlight and all that entails, and we never had to turn the sun on for that.
It's true that muscles you don't use atrophy, and that includes the brain and "the heart", but it's also true that the best things in life are free.
What is ideal for one person may not for another, therefore I cannot define this ideal without making a mistake. But if I had to try, I would say: answers for the scientist, paradise for the believer. As for the impoverished ideal, some of the fundamental goals that serve as a pretext for these technologies have not even been achieved and yet we are already, gradually and methodically, being stripped of using them.
> You mean it would be a good thing?
It would be a good thing, yes. Not the most desirable option, to be sure. But proportionally less harmful to all those who would then be forced to do without it and adapt without necessarily conforming. I admit it's a divisive issue and that it's unlikely to happen that way. But we won't be able to reason with those who see only progress or magic in it, nor will we be able to close this Pandora's box. Whether rightly or wrongly.
> What does this mean?
This means that, as far as we know, it is impossible to prevent the universe from deteriorating, aging, or descending into chaos, because decay and disorganization are fundamental laws. Perfection is not of this world, and thankfully so, for beings as imperfect as we are would quickly corrupt it.
> the best things in life are free.
That’s an interesting thought experiment, indeed. There are indeed things that are given to us, and for which we can be grateful. Antoine Lavoisier said, “Nothing is lost, nothing is created; everything is transformed.” That’s kind of the problem with quotes, they sound nice but don’t always take the complexity of the world into account.
It was a pleasure exchanging with you.
Ah I see, I thought you had a specific ideal in mind, but you rather mean having any ideal at all, right? I agree, I'm dismayed how many view any idealism as "immature" or "unrealistic". It's very tragic IMO because we're not so passive because the world would be so hard to make better, the world is so hard to make better because we're so passive, and think so small.
> with those who see only progress or magic in it, nor will we be able to close this Pandora's box. Whether rightly or wrongly.
Hey, didn't you just deplore lack of idealism? Of course we can't reason with them, not with that attitude! But knowing that other humans just want the best for themselves and those they love, surely they shall see the good sense of our arguments, if only we bring them forth with the right cheerful spirit! I'm only half-joking, and of course you also have a point.
If "AI" does real work and gets better and better, they'll price us out, stomp us underfoot like ants. A giant blob of consumers saying "go away, batin!" until it bursts and dries out, leaving nothing but some Moloch monolith. The upside of that would be that we don't have to worry about arguments, or beat ourselves up for not having tried hard enough. We'd be like other early humans species that curiously are no longer around.
BUT if we're right, and it's really just putting everything people made into a blender, to produce a brief powder flash and then confusion and regret, we'd do well to hold on to our ideals, whatever they may be, and to caring and thinking things through as best as we can; in short, to being human. There's a new drug, a lot of people got addicted or kinda lost their minds, but a lot of them will come around, too, and should know they're always welcome back.
> This means that, as far as we know, it is impossible to prevent the universe from deteriorating, aging, or descending into chaos
Okay, so you meant we will never overcome entropy, not, as you originally wrote, that we will never fail to overcome it. You can see how that would be confusing.
> decay and disorganization are fundamental laws. Perfection is not of this world, and thankfully so, for beings as imperfect as we are would quickly corrupt it.
Not that I would call us or anything perfect (gotta keep it around as an ideal :), but that's what life does, struggle against entropy, introduce and proliferate some order, for a little while. The idea that with just enough power and/or knowledge we can somehow make a leap into a different category (one that lasts) is probably just wishful thinking, if there's even any thought involved, so the best we can do is try to be excellent, and excellent to each other.
(At least, that'd be my ideal, someone else might say we must fight as brutally as we can so at the end of time, some super stronk warrior gets to turn out the light, but it's so easy to show such things up as stupid so that's what we should keep doing)
I find it interesting how this is almost the “democratization” you mentioned that AI provides. While AI “democratizes” certain technical ability, in some ways the democratization of things can actually be bad, in that this “democratization” pushes us towards a system in which people are completely fungible, and so lose their individual bargaining capability. By democratizing this ability to the non-technical middle manager, the junior software engineer ends up losing their unique contribution and hence vote.
I read a while ago about boycotting AI if you can, and I would love to, but this issue makes me wonder if that could even be effective. If the goal is to remove every unique contribution you provide, what can you take away with a boycott?
It's not too difficult to install a wall socket, but many things can go wrong, so people would normally call an electrician. In some jurisdictions you are not allowed to install it without a license, or probably you can install it only for yourself but not for anyone else if you don't have a license, and you need to call an inspector and check your work when you're done. Some other jurisdictions truly don't care, you can do whatever, and all the possible damage is on you.
Electricians are somewhat fungible, because you often don't care who will do the job for you, but the profession exists and they can pay their bills.
I wonder how far we are until, at least in some jurisdictions, a person won't be legally allowed to update the website that stores customers' data or processes payments without being a licensed software developer, and how rules, should they be adopted, will change our profession.
Hasn't this been the case since the power loom put hand weavers out of a job?
Suppose it became possible to buy a Ferrari (not that new hideous one) for $5k. That would be democratizing Ferrari ownership: far more people could do it. I’m sure there would be investment bankers who would complain it devalues their hard work (I am not a fan of those people, but it is notoriously long hours). Does that make a $5k Ferrari less of a democratization?
But I agree, and even celebrate, that a hypothetical future with abundance will be bad for speculators and the luxury-obsessed, and great for people who enjoy the first-order benefits of products.
Then they’ll raise the price.
Of course, I don't think this is happening any time soon because I don't believe the hype machine. But if you do believe the hype machine, you should be honest about what you're facing.
Also, for what it's worth as a person that's written (and will continue to write) games and tools etc., there were already plenty of forces democratizing that (free engines, asset stores with reusable code and art, etc.) The difference was that there was still skill involved, and at the end of the day you were paying another human being for their effort if you bought or used pre-existing components. There's no skill in AI, not really.
Also, I'm really not that interested in playing a game created by AI, and judging from the reaction gamers and game developers have had to this technology, I don't think many people are. So, yay, you can make a game that has a tiny audience with zero satisfaction from having done something hard and learned something? Also it's likely going to be extremely derivative, because the AI can only really work with what it's been trained on.
Also your example with Ferrari is completely flawed, and I dont give a fuck about what investment bankers think or do. What are you even talking about here?
Please explain the first part more than you hand waved away to make a completely unrelated metaphorical case. What is the ability to create software if not software engineering? How are both different?
You might as well ask what the ability is to create arbitrary images to any specification, if not painting? But AI image gen is not painting.
It’s painful and confusing to those who’ve mistaken the tool for the product. Why, you ordered that pizza for delivery, that’s not cooking! No, but it is eating.
Same thing with software. Some people just want the outcome, not the process, and it’s pointless to whinge about how it’s somehow less legitimate.
Coding was always power that you can have if you just read the freely available info but having access to a computer and internet is not free - if we can change this it would make democratized.
AI doesn't make that learning and understanding easy but just allows people to skip it.
That doesn't mean democratization at all.
Yeah it's always so weird when people anthropomorphize the harsh physical reality of learning a skill that is accessible to everyone as some sort of secret boys club, where the existing club members do not let you in, when the only difference between the members and outsiders is whether they've paid the entry fee or not.
Thinking that "individual bargaining capability" capability is an especially useful thing for society as a whole is one of the things that has got us into the current Hobbesian mess
Works the other way too. Now a junior engineer can use AI to do much of what a middle manager had been doing in the past.
Frankly I think the middle manager ought to be WAY more worried than most.
And that's just one devastating outcome. There will be far more, and for some reason, no one is talking about them.
> ToiletOverflow.com
Applause!
But honestly I'm not sure this will be enough for people to spend on e.g. restaurants or activities or oh I don't know, children. I think this will imply a freezing or even stepping back on the Maslow pyramid, the majority of people consolidating in the middle.
What I'm mostly concerned about is not even economic, it's psychological. With nothing to do, people will not have purpose, and bored people are a gunpowder keg.
I'm not so sure about this one. The powerful in a society like the one you describe would surely know about that potential powderkeg and supply ample cheap entertainment to dull the edge. Then we'll have a society of mostly dull, idle, useless people with no purpose.
That's even more dystopian than your scenario, if you ask me.
I can spin this in a weirdly positive light though. With fertility rates going down, life becoming less and less meaningful and simultaneously a small and decreasing group of people becoming extremely productive.. maybe humanity will finally stop exploiting the planet and start a sort of transition.
AI enhanced increased lifespan forest elves watching over nature. Mm I'd prefer that over soma. We are the heralds of The Great Ones
See Brave new world.
Even with large advances in reasoning and actionability, it still makes insane mistakes and it's wildly prone to prompt attacks. That is a fundamental flaw in the technology.
Even an AGI will lack the millennia of self-preservation evolution that will cause it to do crazy shit. So much of what humans do is governed by a desire to be alive and to be liked.
So, I'm not particularly worried about these changes happening rapid fire. I'm more concerned about the ladder pulling effect and misinformation.
I feel better about it than I did a few months ago. Still seems like there’s something missing that is going to be hard to make happen. I forsee humans being necessary for a long while yet.
I think part of the negative societal response to AI is the uncertainty of it all. AI killing me, taking my job, augmenting me, curing me of old age, all seem like viable futures within my lifetime given the information I have. People want to know it's going to be okay and even the smartest experts can't credibly promise them that.
I know Altman has been going around selling visions of curing cancer and the like, but when he talks about standing up new DC or getting a new investment most of that is going towards LLMs, not cancer research.
The irony is if we ever taught machines how to have this, they'd probably not want to work for us anymore.
I think this ties in with the rise of racism over the last two decades. Historically, antisemitism has been instrumentalized by the elites in order to deflect animosity from the lower classes: "look, it's not us that are robbing you blind, it's the Jews!"
I see the same thing happening today in the Western world. The elites are squeezing more and more of our countries' wealth, turning governments them into hollow sources of rent, while at the same time backing corrupt politicians who tell us our misery is all because of (illegal) immigrants.
> the people that are cheering for it need to really consider what they're cheering for.
Indeed. To me if there's one reason to oppose the use of AI technology, it is political. Sadly, the SWE class (if it can be called that), being better off than the majority of humans on earth, seems to care very little for class issues and inequality in general, maybe out of self-interest. But as you said, the machine will be coming for them too, it's just a question of when, not if.
Hypothetically, I’m scared and sad that AI can replace me (it currently can’t, not literally, but a lot of my skill and expertise, built up over say 30 years, that used to be valuable and rare is now cheap to get from an AI).
Let’s try to see the upside. How ‘powerful’ would it make me if, at the cost of my own edge being dulled, can access everyone else’s edge?
I am still my own expert. Now with AI I have a minor expert in everything else as well. What is the best way to use that? don’t have an answer but it’s an aspect I haven’t seen discussed much and I think it is worth bringing up.
[1]: https://entropicthoughts.com/stop-using-junior-and-senior
Yes, the vast majority of people care about their jobs first rather than a theoretical future where mostly rich people colonize space. It's much easier to imagine yourself becoming poor than living in Mars.
I want that type of sadness back, please. Right now I'm relieved if anything to know I won't see 2126 and beyond, but that's not because I'm inherently pessimistic, I came to this world optimistic as can be.
This is normal I think. You grew up. Not wanting to live forever is totally sensible.
And "growing up" kind of can mean everything and nothing. I noticed that humans prey on humans, destroy and poison animal species and each other for nothing, for entertainment or to compensate for psychological issues. It is normal for a child to reject that, and a moral imperative for an adult to act on that, not to "get over it".
Come to think of it, kids aren't "naive" that they don't know these things. Adults are correctly ashamed of them, so they only discuss them with people who will accept shrugs, i.e. other adults. If we were honest to children about the world, the things in it we accept, they would freak the fuck out and probably be traumatized. We tell them to not kick a dog, but oh by the way, Abu Ghraib. If they say "shit" they get scolded, if a strange man scares them you should tell their parents and they'll be mad at that man, but if people murder thousands of little children, just evaporate them, that's just how it is, nothing can be done. Some people are insane and rule over us, starve us out, and that's why mommy and daddy have to work 5 jobs to have nothing compared to what the grandparents had, but here's that cartoon you like.
I'd say what is called "rational" and "grown up" is often just diminished and broken, barely surviving via constant distraction from one's own state.
1. Software devs are obviously going to have a better idea how to apply AI to software development compared to other fields. So of course the coding tools are going to be the first things made.
2. Formal verification makes the problem easier by allowing for iterative feedback (compilers, proofs, etc.)
The second argument is, I think, somewhat valid, but ignores that a lot of other professions also have similar verification systems even if they're a bit less rigorous. The first argument just explains why things are the way they are now, it's not indicative of the future. I don't want to fall into the trap of thinking that other jobs than mine require less cognitive horsepower or whatever, but I don't see what's particularly special about other jobs if it can do hard STEM stuff.
Recently I had to go through some building regulations and Claude's advices were catastrophic.
The thing that is truly mysterious to the managerial and ruling classes though... when everyone is unemployed, who will be able to afford to buy your junk? Whatever industry you're in, whatever it is you're selling, the people buying that have the money to buy it because they still have jobs. If you're cutting jobs at your company, that helps the bottom line, but every other company is doing the same thing. And they're laying off your customers.
Admitting you were just lucky, rather than exceptionally hardworking or talented, is something very few people are willing to do. In all my years, I've met almost no one who genuinely attributes what they have to luck rather than their own effort.
> Shit, even the cynical people that think their wealth is going to protect them are probably ignoring that if unemployment hits 50+%, society is just going to stay stable and they're going to be safe?
Most people can't see two steps ahead. Most people believe the mainstream narrative and think they are outsmarting everyone else in the process. See how Trump tweets still work despite proving time and again that he's full of s**. These people will keep doing what they were doing until they are completely emptied out.
Most propaganda seems to be centered on increasing division along gender / race / sexuality boundaries, so that infighting keeps people from looking up for too long.
But I might just be overly radicalised.
You could also say what it is you think you already know that others are about to find out, and what it has to do with class war.
In the data I've seen, the US and European countries have a more negative view of AI than China and developing countries. Doesn't that fly in the face of the premise here that only people that have economic security support AI?
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/survey-how-21-countries-vie...
https://www.ipsos.com/en/conflicting-global-perceptions-arou...
I think this is a big reason why the Chinese have a more positive view of AI than the West: their leaders have a clear plan to mitigate the negative externalities of introducing AI, and ours don't.
I, personally, think that this is somewhat like hoping that mining coal will lead to a great leap forward in development because mining coal led in the past to a great leap forward in development.
AI turns this line into a circle by making knowledge a resource problem. Less developed economies with a lot of natural resources and manufacturing like China's are less at risk than heavily knowledge-based economies like Europe's.
I think that's more a sign of the relative state of these economies and the rate of progress. In developing economies, people see progress as something that will improve their lives. In developed economies, they see it as something that will disrupt their current status quo and must be stopped.
China historically has had a poor social safety net, but made up for it with a more dynamic labor market (well, we could say the same about the USA vs Europe).
I saw a tiktok a few days ago about the proliferation of autonomous food delivery taking away jobs from delivery bike riders (the ones pretty ubiquitous in China today), and this kind of job was sort of considered a safety net if you lost your normal job (in that you can can always deliver food). It was Chinese authored and I doubt anyone who has never been to China would have understood it anyways.
I think this might be a bigger reason as China’s economy for the youth isn’t looking the brightest right now.
So because so much of maintaining the forms of power and order within the wealthy class has been reliant on information, and again the legal example can be used here because if you hire a lawyer, you're largely paying for information and access. Now the powers that be to compete with open information have to make the access side of the equation much more important to maintain the status quo with such a disruptive technology. And that is another layer of the need for being able to say, degrade a Chinese model if a U.S. citizen the Govt doesn't like is trying to bypass the restrictions implemented on them using models made in the U.S.
In other words, KYC is about restoring the historical aspect of needing money to have information. And there is a class warfare aspect to looking at it that way.
> https://www.visualcapitalist.com/survey-how-21-countries-vie...
A graph of corruption levels would also almost mirror the values in the first link. The more corrupt a country is, the more the public loves AI. AI enthusiasm is almost directly correlated to a general erosion of truth.
In the same way, those with a high value of correctness and stability, like people who work w Haskell, Agda, or Type Theory are not as enthusiastic about AI as people who copy and paste boilerplate and snippets for quick, practical react apps.
I think that there is a misconception about what money is. It is a vector of value, and value comes from the work of the people. If less people can work, this will lead to deflation, something that capitalists would avoid. But remember that AI is hardware and energy, and that requires more workers. Your token price pays for electricity and hardware GPUs -- only marginally for AI science. Sure, developers have to be more like architects than code monkeys, but I am not sure if it is a bad thing.
Also, I have this contrarian view that the LLM tech will now plateau. They are not a path to AGI. Look at how they work, and you'll understand that they are unable to innovate. Models are like a compressed version of Internet knowledge, and that's what they are spitting out. That's already pretty good. But I don't think that we'll see another leapfrog innovation on LLMs anytime soon. After all, OpenAI happened by accident.
In the future, we will all have today's frontier AI on our laptop to automate our lives. There are still many things to invent out there, and I see LLMs more like an enabler than a competitor.
It has really left a bad taste (to say it politely) seeing people I consider colleagues, friends, leaders support something like this. These people would spend hours/days/weeks designing systems reasoning through tradeoffs and yet for something like this they can't spend even two seconds thinking through what it all leads to.
The usual justification is "someone using AI will replace you". I wonder if they can actually think through that for more than a few iterations. You can visualize for-loops and recursion in your head but you can't visualize what a few iterations of "someone using AI will replace you" _actually_ means?
My usual go to line is: "I will see you in the breadlines of the future comrade. At least one of us will have their head held up a little bit higher."
Or it will turn out we no longer need middle managers because of AI.
Side note: I am pretty sure most companies could fire 50% of middle management and see a dramatic productivity improvement. With or without AI.
"Implications Of Predicting The Next Token"
https://minihf.com/posts/2026-05-07-implications-of-predicti...
In what way is this different to electricity?
> Electricity has almost always been a public service.
I have no clue where that would be true, if anywhere. Not where I live. I am paying a private company, and the electricity that they are selling me is generated by other private companies.
LLMs can both help you advance your knowledge and do your homework (preventing you from learning).
I think about a related question pretty often: What proportion of people working at these companies are "true believers", that their work will be a net benefit for humanity? And for those people (if they are at all numerous), how do they plan to fight back against the obvious harms that are already occurring?
I just can't imagine working at one of these companies without hating myself. But I suppose with what they're being paid, they can afford a very good therapist...
If one works for a gun manufacturer, should they feel personally guilty when crimes are committed? What about when police arrest a criminal without injury? Perhaps the balance is determined whether the viewpoint is from one of killing or one of deterrence.
If a doctor provides medical care that extends a to-be murder’s lifespan, is that a good thing? Sure, hopefully most patients aren’t and the provided care is a “net positive”, but does that make it okay?
Sure, one can say, I’ll do paper sales at Dunder Miflin and not have to worry about these problems. Few have been murdered by paper cut. However if they aren’t the #1 paper supplier for almost every “evil” entity one can imagine, it’s ONLY because they failed to do so. It’s easy to pretend to be virtuous after failing otherwise.
That said, I’m not sure if I have ever met any true believers. The executives that claim to be clearly aren’t. The intellectually curious are motivated by the problem, not the product.
I don't think this analogy holds. You could use a gun to commit a crime, but you could also use a gun to defend yourself. On the other hand, if your CEO is talking about getting rid of all labor, well, you're kind of complicit in the crime if you keep working there. There's no ambiguity as to "what will this be used for", like there is with a gun.
I would be very conflicted, because the inherent purpose of a gun is its ability to harm people, regardless of whether any given concrete case constitutes a crime or not.
Here's the RIGHT mental model of the people the author is talking about.
1. If AI is good enough that it can boost productivity by 20% then it is good for society in general because the gains will be redistributed (as it has always been). So even if it is ME who is getting laid off, I will still say it is still good for society because that's how progress happens - by breaking eggs to make omelettes
2. If AI is so good that it can replace full professions altogether like Mathematics, it is a profound joyful moment for humanity. What better thing can happen to the curious ones amongst us to get an oracle that can answer every question? Why does the author seem to scoff at this?
3. If AI is so good that it is a complete superset of humans itself, it is much much more profound moment when civilisation will be changed in ways that English doesn't even have the vocabulary to describe. It can't be stopped nor is it clear that it should.
The author is in curious and has a bad mental model of the people they are describing. They say it is a "class" issue and bring old outdated Marxist terminology to prop up their weak argument.
How exactly? Is this a version of trickle down economics I am unfamiliar with?
> What better thing can happen to the curious ones amongst us to get an oracle that can answer every question
How are the curious going to eat or have a roof over their heads? Or how are the curious going to pay for the tokens?
> civilisation will be changed in ways that English doesn't even have the vocabulary to describe
Maybe, we ought to think real hard and slow about it?
This redistribution has never been as automatic and inevitable as you seem to assume.
> What better thing can happen to the curious ones amongst us to get an oracle that can answer every question?
Getting paid to answer said questions would be nice. The alternative is you'll have to work 14-hour shifts in a warehouse to be able to pay for ChatGPT 10.0 subscription with ads, but sure, it can answer your math problems and satiate your mathematical curiosity.
Breaking eggs to make omelette sounds good unless you're the egg. There's an excellent quote from Thomas Friedman: "when you get laid off, the unemployment rate is not 3.4%, it's a 100%". It's great to fantasize about future utopian abundance, but most people live in the present and most will be presently ground to powder. All technologies have a barbelling effect. Redistribution of surplus does not happen by default. The tumult and disruption may last a decade or more. And the fruits, if we make it to the other side, will not be for this generation to enjoy. The textile workers did not cheer for the loom, because they were not the ones that enjoyed the joy of cheap Uniqlo or H&M t-shirts.
On point 2: Many people derive meaning and identity from their work. Acquiring expertise, feeling useful, contributing to society, honing your craft are all things that leads to a good life. It could be that after AI we will all write poetry in the morning, go fishing in the afternoon, and paint in the evenings, but I don't think most people are like this, it's certainly not the way I am wired.
On point 3: "utopian AI is so good that words can't describe it so it can't and shouldn't be stopped". I do not think utopian abundance is guaranteed just by copy-pasting data centers across the globe. There is a non-negligible chance that things go really badly.
Lastly, I think the usage of the word "class" shouldn't automatically be linked to "Marxist ideology". This is cheap rhetoric: "class" --> associated with Marx --> communist loonies of the 20th century --> therefore disregard all argument presented.
No those are just marketing slogans. The founding tenet of AI is to best match next token according to a reward model.
Yes there are people making stupid claims on all sides. Attributing phrasing like solved or cooked is as if it is some sort of fanatic specific jargon simply ignores the terminology of different groups of people. I don't use cooked myself, but I am not so ignorant of the younger generation that is see it is just another in the long line of terms like sick, bogus, hip, radical, macaroni, etc.
The author plays the trick of flipping the situation from stochastic parrots or next token prediction. Those are "taken as pejorative" whereas cooked and solved "to signal"
The flip is done to place the fault on the other party. You could equally uncharitably say that invoking next token prediction or stochastic parrots is signalling, whereas AI skeptics take terms like cooked as pejorative.
Specifically on the topic of next token prediction, we are already past that phase. Even then I don't think that a model trained by prediction has the limitations that people think it does. As a thought terminating cliche it is simply obsolete when models are trained on reinforcement techniques where there is no template next word to predict. Diffusion models don't even have an autoregressive nature.
I am not terribly fond of the claims made by people at the extremes of any particular to issue. We can perhaps try debating the facts of the matter rather than assuming the internal thoughts of people who might disagree with you.
I generally do not attribute malice to people who describe models as next word predictors. Most are simply uninformed and if you query what their understanding is of a model then you see that what they are imagining is a Markov chain. Investigating if their imagined model could correctly use "an" before "alligator" but obviously not choosing an animal beginning with a vowel just because it had just said "an" often leads them to think that there's more going on than just the next word.
We really aren't past that phase at all. Reasoning models are just next-token prediction trained in a way where it thinks out loud, essentially. (Source: books on how LLMs actually work, and asking ChatGPT directly!) Harnesses and tool use help a little bit, but it doesn't change fundamentally what an LLM is.
Some reasoning is trained by reinforecement you could just finetune reasoning, people have had better results than you would expect by brute forcing inserting tokens to periodically say "wait, let me think."
Reinforcement trains things to produce better results, not move towards a specific correct result. There is no future answer to predict.
"Inevitable"
I don't know why the author is so surprised people want freedom from others. We're the original bullshit machines, and with every useful invention, an additional chunk of utter snakeoil is snuffed out. We're not particularly reliable either. In an old post I can't find for example, I remarked how people can apparently do figure out how to document and coach properly, as long as the target is an LLM, not a human. Suddenly the limits and importance of attention, contextualization, clarity, working memory size, etc. are not so elusive and debatable after all.
I'm sure I need not to remind the author of the "certainty of steel" quote, as ironic as that'd be for an indeed inherently stochastic system. A parrot though, I'm not so sure. "Not sure" why the author feels compelled to conditionally deny it is absolutely meant to be pejorative either.
One does not need to be blind to the mentioned prospective pitfalls either: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48196923
> Science and technology, I feel, has always had a certain apathy towards the plight [of] the people at the bottom rungs.
Does that apply to medical advances too? e.g. antibiotics, vaccines, etc. too? We are living longer today thanks to advances in science and technology. Not just the people at the top; but also the peopl at the bottom rungs. Most scientific research does not take into account who the beneficiaries of that research would be.
I would consider that apathy.
But generally we’re talking about the life experience of the 330m people who are not outliers in our society.
Now, if we’re shifting to why advances are often generally available, sure, there are lots of plausible theories that may or may be true, in whole or part, and which we’ll never prove one way or the other. Believe what makes you happy, or angry, or whatever mood you prefer.
But it's not me who is shifting, right? The claim was:
> Science and technology, I feel, has always had a certain apathy towards the plight [of] the people at the bottom rungs.
not
> The claim was that average people don’t benefit from medical advances
My point is to reject the claim that the high availability of vaccines is a counter-example. It's a political decision, not a science/technology related one.
If you’re going to say that fact X is not a counter/example because [subjective, speculative reasons] then I’m confident you’ll never find a fact that contradicts your beliefs. There will always be some “oh, well the bridge collapsed, but it wasn’t bad engineering it was political reasons, so it doesn’t count as a collapse.”
To restate, COVID vaccine can't be used as an example of "science/technology's sympathy towards the bottom rungs". They were only accessible because governments purchased those vaccines from science/technology companies and gave away for free. Companies developed it to make profit.
If the governments didn't purchase billions of doses at a subsidised price, most people wouldn't be able to afford it [1]. I don't see how this conclusion is subjective, speculative, or unfalsifiable?
[1] https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/covid-19-vaccines-what-i...
This may be the promise of the American dream, but it's not the promise of "capitalism". Capitalism promises nothing to the individual. Capitalism means putting machines to work, and using as few people as possible, paying them as little as possible, to operate them. In that sense, AI is capitalists' wet dream: all machines and no people.
The comments on this page so far seem to agree that it all will happen like this. I have doubts. What I see mostly is slop. Slop can replace bullshit jobs, but the point of bullshit jobs is not to produce bullshit, it is to employ people. There is no point in having bullshit jobs done by machines. For the non-bullshit jobs (of which, yes, there may be fewer than we think), slop won't cut it.