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Comment by ianbutler | Hacker News Reader

Tool use typically follows this curve. If you want to preserve a skill you have to actually preserve it. This isn't inherently bad by itself, tools enable us to do much more than we can without them and its a point of contention whether or not any skill is inherently important when a tool comes along that does it for us.

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One of the challenges here is that the skillset we are in danger of letting atrophy is essentially unbounded. It’s not a specialized tool like a calculator, where you have a well scoped domain of problems you are offloading. granted, in practice many people are using ai for specialized domains (like coding or producing visual designs). But whatever level of abstraction they are currently working at is not, in principle, something that they couldn’t also offload to ai.

The instinct of many people (myself included, a lot of the time) is "feed the AI the problems from the domains I'm least good at / familiar with" because those ones are the most frustrating and where I'm the most likely to spin my wheels. It's easy to imagine how this feeds into a cycle of "only put forth effort at things I'm already good at" and a consequent narrowing of professional / intellectual development.

The huge problem in this specific case is that to use this tool well you also need the underlying skill to be developed and preserved. It's very different from a power drill.

This is true of most tools, it's just that we generally consider the skills simple.

I'm very bad at using power drills.

Sure. But if you don't own the tool and it is held by a cabal of centralist (even political state-adjacent) parties, you're having a bad day when computer says no.

The tools aren't owned by a cabal of state-adjacent parties. Specific implementations are. But open-source models have saved the day here.

If they can keep up. Unfortunately, we learn from previous technology shifts that the masses will always favor ease of use (to the point of infinite scroll 5 second videos dopamine puddle, or echo chamber social networking in lieu of critical media consumption), which does not bode well for the market for alternative hardware: one which is already expensive.

I fear on-prem AI is likely to become as popular as on-prem servers without Cloudflare using self-hosted email are today: that is to say, people have heard of it but the skillset is almost popularly eviscerated, external policies make it progressively impractical, and anyone who does it is 'niche'. While basic guides will exist, obtaining top-level output will probably require many moons of concerted effort.

Basically: AI is SaaS for thinking.

> If they can keep up.

Consider another perspective: They don't have to keep up. Once a model is good enough for a task, the model can stay. A hammer is a hammer and a hammer from 100 years ago still has most of its utility.

Similar to the hammer, it's not unreasonable to think that some classes of work will simply be solved by some model generation and whatever happens at the frontier after that does not matter all that much for work that puny humans do.

Then, of course, there will be a time where all of this is moot: Absolutely no human will want a human to diagnose their medical issues. That is not a skill deterioration issue. We simply will concede that we are not able to do it as well as a more capable system can, and without much fanfare, increasingly delegate, as we have always done.

Carrying your analogy further, let's assume all human jobs fall under good enough open source models. All human problems (food, shelter, not clobbering each other over the head because of monkey genes) are solved through a combination of AI and robotics. Maybe we even remove governments, police, and live in a future post-capitalist ecotopia.

Even if this occurs, and I don't trust well-resourced humans to allow their existing apex-predator positions in present era capitalism to be overturned, the action - as far as either humanity or AI is concerned - will still be at the forefront of possibility: a front by definition invisible to old models. And someone has to pay for the hardware to be there. Do we (a) allow private-sector dominance, effectively depowering traditional nation states and empowering a private cabal beyond historically conceivable levels (b) nationalize thought (c) head in sand and pretend it will all go away?

Most of the world seems to be with strategy C right now, strategy A is the advancing default and has already achieved extra-terrestrial reach with a threat of extra-terrestrial persistence, and strategy B is potentially scarier than the other outcomes if it goes wrong but might be lovely, if you believe in nordic state funds, solarpunk futures and socialist utopia.

Interesting times. By the way, if anyone with AI capitalization reads this, I'm looking for investment to feed humans more efficiently and have a NASDAQ reverse merger under negotiation and effectively priced out with board buy in. Just need capital support. https://infinite-food.com/

On-prem versus cloud inference doesn't matter for concentration of power.

Concentration of power exists when the model makers are the same as (or control) the inference providers. Making a model is capital intensive, so there aren't many of them. Providing inference is not: I don't even need to own GPUs; I can rent them from those who do and then sell by the token. B300s cost less than $4 an hour currently.

Cloud can even be more effective at lowering concentration of power than on premise. Asking people to individually buy $20,000 of compute equipment plus power and cooling equipment to run a frontier model is not something they're going to do if they can just pay four-tenths of a cent per output token. If the only cloud inference providers are the big proprietary US titans, that means you're going to get far more power concentration than if open source inference providers are an alternative, because then I can just switch my API endpoint.

Eh, this is our species first contact with that type of technology. A good number of voices see how deleterious these things are, and it’s all still very new. Future humans will tell parables about the evil tech bros and their silly obsessions, and the unequal accumulation of capital. This will be seen as a dark and stupid time, but I think we’ll persevere - the tech bro set is much weaker than they imagine, and certainly than they project.

Agreed. History shows concentration in the hands of a few usually doesn't go well, not because the masses are powerful or smarter than the few but there is a limit you can manage power from the top. AI will be another step in the popularization of information and we'll get both Wikipedia and TikTok of AI in coming years.

We love our open source models. GLM 5.2 came out recently and the timeline for closing the gap to closed source shrank to something like 2 weeks by popular measurements.

Edit: Mis remembered the timeline I saw not 2 weeks, 3 months, but still I think my point stands.

Just to make sure I understand your argument. Are you saying that today's open source models are on par with frontier closed models of two weeks ago? By what criteria?

Sorry definitely mis-remembered on my part, its about 3 months

https://x.com/yaroslavvb/status/2067367657272422584 https://x.com/voratiq/status/2067667800643268928 https://arena.ai/leaderboard/agent

HN thread from 2 days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48567759

Commenters there were saying GLM 5.2 was roughly equivalent to Opus 4.8 in coding prowess, based on personal experience of the people commenting. Opus 4.8 came out on May 28 this year (so more like 3 weeks ago), GLM 5.2 came out 2 days ago.

I haven't tried this specific model, but you can understand that a lot of HN testimonials are bound to swing extremely pro open source. I certainly hope they are as good. But I have personally tried a lot of models that are supposedly as good as the frontier ones and have found them lacking.

After a while, you do start to start to skip a couple rounds of open source models until there's a notable release. That, and the resources needed to run them are increasingly bought up by the owners of frontier models

That's when you load up qwen3.7_67b_21a_heretic_ablated_ablitereted_uncensored_agi_sparse_attention_MTP_SuperHOT_q6_AGI_FINAL.gguf

The difference if this is okay is how reliable the tool is. If it is a calculator or compiler it is okay. The example in the article also sounds okay (machine learning image classification), though I am not sure.

LLM output is unreliable, so we still need to judge it. If I want to be able to judge code, I must have worked with it to a certain extent. So the unreliable tool does not help me much if I don't want to accept the unreliability.

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