RigelKentaurus

I think we're on the cusp of an intelligence explosion, but most jobs have no real purpose besides giving us sometime to do and a paycheck. Automating those jobs and making them 10x faster won't really help anyone. Read Bullshit Jobs by Graeber.

FWIW, why I'm rooting hard for AGI: -In the best case, AGI will lead to UBI, so unemployment for all becomes the default scenario. Sounds scary but unemployment is better than many soul-sucking occupations, e.g. cold-calling. -If AGI does result in a productivity boom due to automation, we're in for a deflationary spiral, so we don't need a huge amount of money for a decent standard of living.

It does lead to the question of how we'll find meaning in our lives, but I think we'll adapt in a few years.

Sorry, I'm not buying the fear. The post sounds similar to a 1920s-era farmer shouting "don't use tractors and farm machinery". Every technology has problems early on, and they take some time to get sorted out.

Not true. The company deploying or using the AI (not the frontier AI lab building it) needs to make sure that the AI works. Just like anything else. Not sure why this is complicated.

Not to say that I don't agree with you to an extent, but you should see AI-delivered healthcare numbers to human-delivered and make it a fair comparison.

From Google:

"Annual Deaths: Over 250,000 people die each year in the U.S. due to medical errors made by healthcare professionals, including doctors and nurses. Ranking: This figure positions medical errors as the third leading cause of death in the United States, following heart disease and cancer."

It is highly possible that in a few years, AI will be a lot safer in the majority of healthcare situations.

This article makes me super angry. Ours is an Indian-American family from the SF bay area. 3 years ago, my son graduated from one of the top high schools in the bay area with a 4.0+ GPA and 1600 SAT, getting all 5's in his 9 STEM AP classes, and was not accepted into a single UC for CS and Math. His HS counselor had asked us to lower our hopes, saying "to the UCs, he's just another very smart Asian or Indian kid. He's a statistic." That year, none of his (very high achieving) Asian friends with high GPAs and SATs got into UC Berkeley, UCLA, or UCSD. I recall that my rant got a crazy battle started here on HN.

Since then, he's done very well at a non-California school, but I will forever be pissed at the UC system. They passed on a brilliant student in the service of DEI.

BTW, I saw in the article the 2 sample math questions that stumped much of UCB's incoming class. What a freaking joke.

The only cure: throw out the entire board that decides admission policies; they are all incompetent. Ask professors to decide on admissions, not sociology and gender studies graduates. Heavily weigh the SAT and GPA instead of the essay. Hopefully this brings back some sanity to the process.

I'm saying that people can't discern between human- and AI-built apps, because the vast majority of human-built apps are not any better than AI-built ones.

Thought-provoking article, makes sense on some levels but it cuts too broadly.

For physical goods (clothes, purses,..) most buyers can discern high quality goods from bulk manufacturing with cheap materials. When it comes to digital goods, for movies, songs, books, etc. the buyer can discern a clear difference between AI- and human-generated, so the TEMU-fication argument is valid.

But for software engg, design, etc., I suspect that very few people can (or will be able to) discern the difference. There may be people who care about manual output, but then you have to come up with proof of manual work. Something like "prove to me that you have coded this application or designed this site without using AI". I don't see that happening.

I'm not sure I follow this argument.

>>But that is not the case for AI. In AI, profit margins are higher the further you get from the end user, see chart below.

This doesn't necessarily mean that the following is true:

>>This is important because it means the AI boom's profits are currently being funded by investors rather than earned from customers.

I think that AI is adding value to customers who are paying for it, but the value is going mainly to the frontier labs and hyperscalers since they, and not applications, are doing the main burden.

Hi, I am not a user of mechanical keyboards, but I did want to say nice work on the website. The fonts, the colors, the layout -- I loved it all! Good luck, hope you sell a lot of keyboards.

My (semi-educated) guess: it's about the quality, not quantity, of that revenue. If I opened their books, I expect to see lots of SMB customers with low deal sizes and non-trivial churn, non-sticky product usage, not many large enterprises signing up, and low NRR. Add a high customer acquisition cost in an undifferentiated space to complete the picture.

I didn't understand why a CRUD app (yes, with lots of integrations and bells and whistles) would need to raise more $1B+. I think most of that went into GTM, not into product development.

(Addition: Airtable had $900M in the bank at the time of acquisition so they spent "only" $400M, but still, my guess is that a lot of that went into GTM.)

>>I say all of this b/c at some point, most people don't care if the movie was hand painted cels, CGI done by humans or fully AI generated with human text prompting. If the feeling is strong, people will have a "bigger" reaction which in turn will make it more memorable.

I think in the near future, people will start filtering out movies that have a non-trivial share created by AI. (It remains to be seen what "non-trivial" means in this context.) I think a movie 100% generated by AI won't succeed. The story, the emotional impact, etc. all may be good, but people won't give it a chance.

Very useful, thank you for building it and sharing it.

Both sides should take a deep breath and stay away from predictions.

The most glaring gap in this "analysis" is that it's too early to tell. I don't understand how people can be certain in both extreme viewpoints.

Congratulations on shipping! Not sure what the process is for US-based public libraries to buy new books, but you should look into it. Where I live (Cupertino, California), the new books section gets read (a lot!)

Heartfelt and poignant. Thank you for sharing.

The handwringing tone of the article is off-putting.

Ed is confused between whether AI is useful, and whether the current level of funding and valuations are sustainable. The following statements can both be true:

1. AI is already quite useful and will continue to be so. This is true even if AGI doesn’t happen.

2. The funding and valuations of many AI companies are too far ahead of their skis, and will probably roll back. Some may fail entirely.

About the “where’s the productivity in AI?” question: I think it’s entirely possible that the primary benefit of AI will not be top-line growth but reduced costs (through reduced human labor). Companies will need to reduce prices to prevent losing market share to existing or new competitors, meaning that GDP may not increase, but costs will.

> That's an interesting observation. Though, there are many simple animals. How do you define consciousness here? Is it automatically conscious because it is an animal? What, then, is an animal defined by you?

Imagine consciousness as a 0-1 scale. Simple unicellular organisms will be closer to 0, while apes and humans closer to 1. I'm not suggesting that assigning this value rigorously is possible or that humans are at a 1. Perhaps the total consciousness in the universe (i.e. the sum of the consciousness of all organisms therein) is constantly increasing, like entropy.

We don't have a rigorous definition of consciousness, and there are so many questions. Is consciousness a thing that can exist independently on its own? Or is it a quality (like hardness or color) that can only be associated with something else? Is it an emergent property? Is it binary - are things either conscious or not? Or maybe there's no such thing as consciousness; it's just a word we came up with to describe the process of having thoughts and feelings?

My own intuition: it is an emergent, non-binary property that requires a physical substrate like a brain. If I am right, it means that animals have consciousness too (at varying degrees). If GPUs are the "brain", then AI is conscious, or will become so at some point.

I can't empathize with this mindset at all. I'm in the polar opposite camp. I don't want a list of search articles; just a direct answer to the information I was looking for. I see the problems pointed out by OP but they are being solved away.

Makes sense to me. When I use Google, I am interested in getting the information quickly and in the right length and format, and am not interested in navigating to particular page(s) and looking up that info myself. Perhaps this will impact Adwords revenue in the long run but Google will find a way out. If Google didn't have AI mode, I would've stopped using it completely.

It's not necessarily bad, but in tech, not actively growing is tantamount to shrinking. Organic customer churn and attrition means that you're just a few years away from irrelevance. If DBX wants to stay a stable tech company, it should figure out a way to go private.

They had a terrific product that worked well in ~2013, but they haven't innovated since then (TBH, not sure what "innovation" means in the file-sync space.) Although Y-o-Y revenue is mostly flat, I'm a little surprised that they still brought in $630M the last quarter, and that they still have 2,000 employees. Looking at what Dropbox does, I would have guesstimated they were a 250-person company.

All the best to their employees, but I think a big round of layoffs will be coming within the next couple of quarters.

On our last couple of Japan trips, we would walk into 7/11s for an inexpensive coffee, an egg or fruit sandwich, and also do some treasure-hunting for co-branded items with Muji/Uniqlo or others. It became a short and meaningful part of our routine. We loved the convenient locations and fantastic service at all their stores. Well done, Suzuki-san!

I'm tired of people who, when they don't like an article, comment that it was "obviously written by AI" instead of arguing its merits.

As for your points, global wealth is not a fixed pie, so it's not "impossible to have more than 470 trillionaires". Re:"1 person billion dollar company or 5-10 employee in the Fortune 500 is laughable" - it is difficult but not impossible. Currently, the company ranked at the bottom of the Fortune 500 (No. 500) is Vulcan Materials, with a revenue of ~$8 billion. I can imagine a company combining domain expertise with amazing AI/engineers to achieve superlative product-market fit and hit this revenue number.

The same is true in India. I live in the US, and when I visit relatives in India, they are nonplussed that I can afford a fancier car but choose to drive a Toyota. Clothes, watches, my phone brand - everything is under constant analysis and people feel free to comment on everything. I am used to it now but it gets tiring.

A poorly thought, as a result, a poorly-written article. Almost everyone wants to automate away the boring parts of their work and life. The author created a strawman, but that is not what AI is ("Not everything about our lives can be measured and automated and optimized, and it shouldn’t be.")

If every single image on their blog was generated by Images 2.0 (I've no reason to believe that's not the case), then wow, I'm seriously impressed. The fidelity to text, the photorealism, the ability to show the same character in a variety of situations (e.g. the manga art) -- it's all great!

Why can't it replace Figma? Seems like Figma is a thin UI layer on top of Claude Design.

I think the distribution of intelligence is extremely unfair in nature, leading to extremely unequal outcomes in society. I volunteer with an organization that gets ex-cons back on their feet and reintegrate into society by treating them for addiction, teaching basic finance skills, etc. I have found that for the majority of people in this program, their IQ is quite low compared with the average person, and it shows up in the form of extreme short-term thinking, not understanding interest rates, etc. It left me quite dejected, TBH. Not sure whether there is a solution.