Ignore the “AI Guy” | Hacker News Reader

Ignore the “AI Guy”

6 pointsbayeslaw8 comments

Remember how self-driving cars were "imminent" (even in 2018) to the point that some companies (starts with a T, doesn't end with witter) were effectively selling it for a pretty steep premium to users? However there were ppl even back then saying it won't happen overnight and it will be really really hard.. if my memory serves me well they were mostly ignored or actively ridiculed.

Well, true self-driving is still isn't here as it turned out to be waaaaay harder than ppl (i.e. the optimistic experts working on it) ever thought. That is not to say progress in this space isn't amazing and ongoing. And it's not to say true self driving will never arrive.

Nonetheless.. Do you see any resemblance with today's generative AI craze? People pivoting their careers to become professional doom sayers envisioning mass unemployment and civilisational collapse (even extinction)? Ppl becoming AI experts and "AI guys" to tell us about this brave new world we are all about to face where Everything will be different. And they really mean Everything!!! With a capital E! Are you scared already?

While some genuine experts in this field think that LLMs are THE thing that will take us to AGI plenty of them think they are just stochastic parrots. Ppl in the latter camp don't make it to mainstream news and don't shout as loud as the doomsayers but they are there (as they were 5 or so years ago with self driving) and they might be right again..

Generally speaking, if you see a product or marketing person (or basically anyone without a PhD in ML) change roles to become an "AI guru" tweeting and posting every single day about the latest GPT tools and how you'll be replaced by a bot in a year, then maybe just ignore them..

Who knows.. Maybe displacing billions of workers will end up being pretty hard and it will take some time..

>> Maybe displacing billions of workers will end up being pretty hard and it will take some time..

It's an interesting question. Do you know the concept of "Disguised Unemployment" in economics? There are too many institutions laden with too much bureaucracy and inefficiency on this planet which are ever on the target of "downsizing consultants". There are many developing countries where notaries still use type-writers to this day, banks have so many staff like cashiers who count currencies, clerks who make copy-pastes in excel sheets, etc. All these are jobs that could have been automated already but maybe it didn't happen earlier because the going was easy, there was no recession.

As a business owner or shareholder wealth creator, your sole interest is profit making or increase in bottom lines, you'll never care about a bunch of employees getting laid off (as it's happening right now). The main cause of this is the underlying recession, AI is just being made to take the blame for it. All those "AI guys" you talk about who keep singing the songs of GPT/LLMs are perhaps just corporate sock puppets who are made to do that as a justification for these layoffs?

What layoffs? The labour market is still the tightest it's ever been almost everywhere.. don't get hn myopia from a few react developers being fired and whining here..

There are entire websites like layoffs.fyi[1] and layoffstracker.com[2] that tell you which tech company laid off how many. I don't know about other industries but at least IT and a few others are undergoing a bloodbath right now as far as employment is concerned. BYJUS laid off over a thousand recently and they're an Ed-tech company.

[1]: https://layoffs.fyi/ [2]: https://layoffstracker.com/

Those layoffs are the totally necessary consequences of the idiotic COVID overhiring these tech firms did and if you zoom out the problem is still the opposite: too many jobs are chasing too few job seekers.

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/are-labour-m...

The difference between self-driving cars and generative AI is that self-driving cars need to be 100% accurate in their problem-solving functions, or people die. Generative AI does not, and the current uses of generative AI are already able to solve their respective problems.

That's a nice false dichotomy right there...

You're the one who asked "Do you see any resemblance [to self-driving cars] with today's generative AI craze?"

> the current uses of generative AI are already able to solve their respective problems

"solve" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here…

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