Hacker News Reader

Comment by atleastoptimal | Hacker News Reader

> in part because of the huckster-like triangulations of scumbags like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei

I would happily read an AI-critical blogpost if it weren't clearly motivated by a strange, specific hatred of the prominent AI figureheads.

At this point I automatically dismiss writing like this, the motivated reasoning is palpable. Their distaste for the character and general vibes of the AI industry trap them in blatant denials of reality, like claiming that AI is a completely worthless technology or surely the bubble will pop any minute now.

I am all for well-researched criticisms of these companies and their claims, but please start at the facts and use them to derive your conclusions, rather than the other way around.

View on HN

The preceding clause is just as bad:

>> the belief that AI can — and will — displace white-collar jobs is a lie that’s been accepted by the masses

I see no argument whatsoever in the piece as to why this is the case, just an emphatic declaration.

Anyway. The belief that the author isn’t talking out of their ass is an insidious lie spread by dark forces. QED.

I think in the short term much of the concern for AI replacing jobs was overblown, largely due to two factors

1. Benchmark performance of LLM's and AI models did not fully represent skill in real-world domains

2. Most jobs span far more requirements than their specific job descriptions, many of which lie, even in simple jobs, in the realm of highly adaptive, context rich multi-modal information processing that most humans do still better than AI

However, there is nothing fundamental that prevents LLM's from scaling and improving, aided by better scaffolding, to the point of replacing many white-collar jobs, especially ones which have limited, specific requirements and output parameters. This is an enormous chunk of the white collar work force, and displacement is already happening in limited sections, and will surely continue as AI capabilities diffuse.

It seems however deeply entrenched in many people's identity to deny this fact, because to accept it requires accepting that many of the essential claims of AI CEO's are somewhat true to a degree, and that LLM's are a genuinely useful technology.

> see no argument whatsoever in the piece as to why this is the case

It hasn’t happened. We have AI rolling out and the jobs data aren’t showing this effect.

We're what, 2 years in? Or 6 months since the coding models became reasonably proficient. No one knows what AI will look like 6 months from now let alone 5 years so the present jobs data can't tell you anything other than that nothing catastrophic has happened yet.

> No one knows what AI will look like 6 months

No, but we know what it’s looked like over the past 6 months. We also have two years of Altman preening about imminent, massive job losses. Per his own timelines, those haven’t manifested.

Predicting indeterminate catastrophe isn’t a prediction, it’s a scam.

And its a quite insane thing to push, even if true - AI spend has outgrown wages (even in software) to such a degree, that basically if AI allowed companies to fire every human employee, they wouldn't be saving that much.

"Basically" is doing a lot of work there. What are the profit margins at FooCorp, and how much time and money is spent on messy human drama? If you could replace every human employee with AI, then you could fire the entire HR department and replace it with one AI "HR" that just spins up new AI employees like we do EC2 instances today. Since there are no more messy human resources to manage, anyway. Shutting down the entire department should boost profits by quite a bit!

Are you perhaps confounding inference purchased by clients with R&D and capex invested by frontier providers?

Agreed but the converse is also true. Predicting that everything will be sunshine and rainbows merely because the sky hasn't fallen yet doesn't pass the sniff test.

> we know what it’s looked like over the past 6 months.

Oddly I seem to interpret that in the opposite manner that you do. The output became noticeably more cohesive sometime around the new year although it certainly still has plenty of shortcomings.

> Predicting that everything will be sunshine and rainbows merely because the sky hasn't fallen yet doesn't pass the sniff test

I’m not predicting it will be fine. I’m saying we have enough evidence to cast the opposite prediction, made on specific timescales in the past, as BS.

I'm not following your logic here. Are you basing your predictions on the predictions of CEOs?

If I understand you correctly you are saying, CEOs predicted X and they were wrong. Now CEOs are predicting Y, and since they were wrong about X you predict they are also wrong about Y.

But Y's success seems independent of other people's ability to predict X?

most ai use and spend is still by humans. laying off humans would (ironically) reduce ai spend and use.

> No one knows what AI will look like 6 months

Which means that they were lying.

Or they were wrong. But best to assume malice given their incentives. (No, that certain saying is just stupid.)

> I see no argument whatsoever in the piece as to why this is the case, just an emphatic declaration.

We’ve heard Claude is good enough now that you no longer need SE and founders will just do their coding for a year already. It hasn’t happened. And guess who develops CC and other Anthropic/OpenAI products?

The false part is that the masses do not accept the lie, as most don't actually believe those companies.

People who talk about the masses are at the same time completely distanced from them but also completely tuned in to their mass psyche, or so they claim.

Maybe, not always, but doesn't make them incorrect.

Of course not. We have no proof that their hot takes are completely useless.

Most reasoning outside of philosophy departments is motivated and it is fine as long as it is either reflected on or the audience knows where they are coming from. This is just having skin in the game. You know, needing a job to survive, which is much more immediate than the motivation of society disruptors who either get to become fantastically rich or else move on to some other executive role.

I would also have wished for some substantiation for how this and that were a lie.

As it stands though it’s an argument against multi-level marketing. And it really doesn’t hold up that your everyman will be able to make money off of vibe coded apps. Maybe build their own very personal software gadget? Yeah, but there’s no money in that.

The Reasoned Case Against AI Disruptors does not need to be covered in such a piece.

> I would happily read an AI-critical blogpost if it weren't clearly motivated by a strange, specific hatred of the prominent AI figureheads.

It would annoy me more if those AI figureheads were not such hateful people.

What evidence do you have that Altman, Amodei, Hassabis, etca re hateful?

> I would happily read an AI-critical blogpost if it weren't clearly motivated by a strange, specific hatred of the prominent AI figureheads.

The thing is... many prominent figures, both individuals and companies, in the AI industry just lend themselves to being hateable.

Sam Altman personally completely fucked up the RAM market with his double dealing. Every single one of us felt the consequences of that and we will feel it for years to come. And it is why I will call for his arrest, speedy trial and imprisonment every time I have the misfortune of reading his name. I wish to see this person suffer from the bottom of my heart.

Elon Musk, well, there are so, so many valid reasons to hate him. Regarding AI itself, the mechahitler incident and the "undress her in a bikini" CSAM generator are the worst issues. Regarding him as a person, the "pedo diver" incident, the shady stuff surrounding virtually all of his children's mothers, the complete clusterfuck around his daughter, DOGE, the right-arm salute his fanbase keeps denying being a nazi salute, him stoking racial riots in the UK twice, his constant overpromising in all of his ventures (some of which would normally fall under "investor defrauding" claims if there were a functioning legal and regulatory world), the trashcontainer on wheels...

Google has no (notable) individual persons to raise the pitchforks against, but as a company, they severely degraded the quality of their "ordinary" search and have gone to steal clicks and thus money from creators by distilling their work into the AI results box at the top of every search.

Microsoft keeps shoveling AI down everyone's throats no matter if we want it.

Anthropic has literally ripped books apart to scan them for Claude. Google, back when they created the dataset for Google Books, at least didn't destroy the books. Destroying books at that scale is a sacrilege.

Every single AI company is guilty of using questionably sourced materials - either outright stolen or human input based on exploitation.

And on top of that, it's not just RAM that has gotten expensive. The entire rest of the economy - both individuals and companies of all sizes - are priced out of personal and even cloud compute, as the blown-up AI giants scoop up everything they can and the scraps and aged hardware that's available gets fought over by everyone else.

> blatant denials of reality, like claiming that AI is a completely worthless technology or surely the bubble will pop any minute now.

It is undeniable that the entire AI sphere is a bubble, artificially propped up by circular investments and wash trades, and that is now poised to raid pension funds.

> And it is why I will call for his arrest, speedy trial and imprisonment every time I have the misfortune of reading his name. I wish to see this person suffer from the bottom of my heart.

RAM prices were going to go up no matter what given the demand for AI. To so strongly want someone to suffer for fulfilling his fiduciary responsibility to the company he runs seems a bit disproportionate.

> It is undeniable that the entire AI sphere is a bubble, artificially propped up by circular investments and wash trades, and that is now poised to raid pension funds.

I honestly can't take your claims that AI is a huge artificial bubble seriously when you make it very clear how much you want it to be a bubble. The mark of a mature mind is being able to admit that people you personally dislike actually may be right about a few things.

That these people whom you hate so much are also cartoon villains who have taken the entire world economy for a ride is a very satisfying narrative because it implies a future point when all of their crimes will be revealed and they will be held accountable. It is however not a realistic thing to hope for. This is all because of one very real but hard to admit reality: AI is a very useful technology and is worth the billions of dollars that are being paid for it. To deny this reality at this point, when AI models have already proven unsolved Erdos problems and are driving such huge demand on both the consumer and enterprise side, is unreasonable, and consequentially smart people who would otherwise take your points seriously are going to see right through your claims as just being emotional self-soothing.

> RAM prices were going to go up no matter what given the demand for AI. To so strongly want someone to suffer for fulfilling his fiduciary responsibility to the company he runs seems a bit disproportionate.

Companies are a part of society. Destroying its foundations in the name of "fiduciary responsibility" is everything but that - it prioritizes short term profits over long term survivability.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com