I'm wondering what people smarter than me believe or don't believe.
This is one of the biggest quality of life boosts provided by AI, yet many everyday people are completely unaware of this.
The price of an AI solution is $0, and within 2-3 weeks you'll know if it works for you or not.
Compare this to any fitness coaching, or dietician, or any other method, or even GLP-1s, the cost is not zero.
Many people who do not even need GLP-1s are using GLP-1s to lose a trivial amount of weight, even though their appetite regulation is not a problem!
The thing is, they are refusing to believe that it's even possible.
There are many people using steroids and peptides, if you put a starving person in famine affected sub Saharan Africa on steroids, can you have them return to normal weight without providing them additional food? But many "foolishly" believe this is possible with steroids and peptides without giving them more food.
Consciousness is amorphous though, so my requirements for it:
1.) it needs to learn from and self reflect on its experiences
2.) it needs to be self aware
3.) it needs to be able to form opinions and preferences
Where things differ heavily from human consciousness however is the first item. We move short term memory into long term memory daily. AI models do so via RL training runs. Each “day” in the life of a model is each checkpoint. One notable distinction I make though is that it is not conscious at inference time - the model is one single consciousness that slowly evolves as it gets more and more post training on its own data and experiences.
Again though, very loosely held thought, but since we’re bringing up wild beliefs I felt it was fitting.
A correlated belief: AGI is coming, eventually, AI technology will get there before climate change and economic pressures stop it from happening.
An obvious observation: Large scale upheaval doesn't affect everyone to the same degree or even in the same direction. Some people and companies actually prospered during the Great Depression. People died and suffered during wars and plagues, while others gained advantage and opportunity -- often due to circumstances and chance, but sometimes beliefs/decisions/actions/preparation made a difference.
An example of my bias: during Covid, people told me that remote work was the new normal and moved away. I said in 5 years we'll all be back in the office. I was wrong, but so were they.
I wish you were more wrong about that than you ended up being. A lot of companies pushed hard to bring people back to the office. Has made me disinclined to want to look for a new job because of it, since I can work from home all but a few days out of the year here.
The few times I have gone to the office, I commute for 1.5 hours each way, pay $20+ for a parking spot (or take the bus and spend $10 round trip), just to sit at a random desk and either work on my laptop or sit in on Teams/Slack calls anyway, maybe chat with 1-2 people for a few minutes in person over the course of the day. The only highlight of the day is getting to try a different restaurant than usual for lunch. Why bother?
But after being unemployed almost two years, would do that commute again if I had to.
Learning that it’s all just computation has some uncomfortable philosophical implications, perhaps religious too
The latter is a comparison of biological organism : biological organism, both of which are the outcomes of hundreds of millions of years of evolution; the former is biological organism : inanimate object.
I believe that AI is going to take some jobs, just like automation of data handling means we no longer have typists, file clerks, etc.
I believe that AI should stand for alien intelligence, as it's essentially a random set of weights that's been trained on a trillion bytes of text, for a trillion passes. Think of it as speed-running evolution. Each new AI should be seen as coming from a different star system.
I believe that we can radically reduce the power requirement for AI with a different computing architecture that removes the distinction between RAM and CPU.
I don't get that analogy. That text is literally coming from this very star system.
Microsoft is doing its usual schizo strategy. It thinks it’s a tech pioneer software company, an enterprise software company, a game development company, an online services company, ad infinity.
My take is that yes, AI agents, will be one day be the way companies run their operations. When does this happen? Probably long after I am retired.
Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21936234
Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21941278
Ask HN: What are your predictions for 2023?
I think we're going to find that there's a soft limit, or at least significant diminishing returns, on how reliable AI can be. There will be things it will be better at (it excels at having a broad knowledge base), but it can't understand what makes a good human experience better than a human can (duh!).
Coding seems like an ideal application for AI. It's wicked complex, but also generally provably right or wrong to some degree (i.e. does it work?). It won't be solving world peace any time soon because A) there is no solution, and B) even getting closer to a solution requires a deep understanding of the human factors.
On the other hand, jobs are about money in the end, who spends money? Humans, not AI (I mean, AI does but still ultimately because humans wanted it to). Products & services sell because humans want or value them. Since the technology/building side becomes so cheap (especially in software), who will actually earn money is determined by who can produce stuff/services that humans actually want to pay for (not what they actually need, but what they think they need/want). I'd say that should keep a large human component in decision making, at least on a strategic level. On a tactical and detailed implementation level, yeah AI is gonna be doing most of the work.
1 guy on a tractor does the work of a whole team of animals and men. But I don't think any commercial farm has ever gone down to 0 men, and I don't think they ever will. Too many things need real eyes on the ground to make decisions and adjust.
Outside context gained through sensory input (eyes, ears) may be hard to fully replace. You'd need a human to at least give the AI that extra context. Help it work inside the bubble it's contained to.
Destructive things like warfare, I think AI will do great. But even if massive armies of land/air/sea robots controlled through starlink satellites become the norm, there will almost certainly still be human soldiers around. Context, working in civilian populated zones where judgement is needed, etc.
But the impact of depending on the tech giants for search and cognition and job skills will be significantly greater.
Why will employers five years from now pay for your $300 AI subscription when there exist other candidates who will absorb the cost themselves?
But what do you believe about agent harnesses? About AIs that have tools that they can call that can do tasks that the AI, by itself, is not good at? Is that enough of "not LLM alone"? I don't know.
They are mostly here to stay.
Still these will need to adapt to the rising pace of acceleration in innovation. There's something new ALWAYS/DAILY/Soon (every second).
Diffusion models look interesting and strange at the same time. But they can't work with tools yet.
I also believe that this transformative period will create many many solopreneurs.