Maybe I just lack imagination, but I don't really know how jobs are supposed to solidify around the role of giving prompts to agents and then looking at the results. I mean, engineers will be in the breadline because their role was simply to prompt the agents.. only to be superseded by managers or executives who no longer manage engineers but themselves prompt the agents? And, for this previously considered obsolete function which they do presumably by copy/pasting requirements from their email inbox, they will be paid by someone who doesn't know that they could just be talking to their own agents?
Sorry if I misunderstand the point, just trying to understand.
I don't know if he's right, but Peter Zeihan thinks the breakdown in globalization will negatively affect the ability to continue to improve the chips that AI depends on[0]. Too many steps in the supply chain, too widespread, too vulnerable to deglobalization.
An invasion of Taiwan would definitely slow progress but it wouldn’t stop it.
We already have sufficient hardware that algorithmic (software) improvements alone should get us to GPT 7 / Greek Reference 6 even if not a single new chip is delivered to an AI data center ever again, starting today.
Maybe, maybe not. It's not unreasonable that these systems cap out at some point, or perhaps fizzle away entirely.
The businesses that create these systems are not profitable and run at a massive historical and go-forward loss.
New data centers required to operate these systems are facing increasing pushback at local levels. New construction is not guaranteed. Energy and power grid constraints exist as well.
Government regulation is way behind. What happens when (if) mass layoffs due to AI occur? How does the population react? Theoretically AI can be regulated out of significant progress, or outright existence for many purposes. At the end of the day, US and other prominent governments make the calls, not corporations.
These inventions all stopped disrupting the world and just became a part of it. The question is whether LLMs are going to just take their quiet place, or profoundly change (or eliminate) humanity in a self-feeding frenzy towards singularity.
Lots of goddamn awesome computers fizzled out. The Amiga being a prime example. Besides you can't just wave your arms in the most vague terms and then deny that survivor bias was ever a thing.
So your argument is that AI is more lika Amiga than computers? I'd say that Amiga wouldn't fizzle out if it wasn't superceded by pc. It very well may be that transformer architecture is going to be superceded by something like jepa or other world models but it doesn't change much.
Survivor bias is always a thing but it's not everything. All surviving things are not equal and neither are all gone things. If there are such things. Some cls technology never dies. There are new games written for 8-bit Atari today.
There are two things SOTA LLMs fundamentally cannot do. They cannot take financial or legal responsibility for mistakes, and they cannot learn new things without forgetting things (except to a limited degree by adding it to their context). This is clear to anyone who has used even the smartest models for tasks requiring domain knowledge outside of math and coding, for which it's not possible to generate an infinite amount of synthetic training data: they still make stupid mistakes, and have limited ability to learn from those mistakes.
Humans also have a limit on the amount of domain knowledge they can acquire, albeit a much larger one. Executives hence cannot just replace all knowledge workers with LLMs, because executives have neither the domain knowledge to prompt and check the LLMs' work nor the bandwidth to keep on top of such a large volume of ongoing work.
In the US, Business' are treated like people with free speech rights. If it would be cheaper for them in the long run to use ai and robots instead of humans, they will figure out a way to make it so.
>There are two things SOTA LLMs fundamentally cannot do.
I would say there’s a third thing. They seem to be very bad at being creative. Maybe they will eventually fix that, but if you ask it to come up with a list of business names or business ideas, for example, what you’ll get is the most generic, boring answer you could think of. They seem to be terrible at extrapolating outside of their training data. To me, this is the most significant difference.
For the moment that may be true. They are getting better and better at acquiring, retaining, and processing domain knowledge. I wonder what this will look like in a few more years.
The responsibility side is a different matter of course.
> they cannot learn new things without forgetting things
Where did you get that idea from? Basically last few years was them constantly learning new things while improving their capability on the things they already knew.
If it's samey regardless of language, isn't that in contradiction to your original theory? " .. the most important feature for agent performance is the popularity of the language .. "
No, not really. It's a similar flavor of output, but there's less iterations to get a correct result. The training is mostly about reducing error rates on generation.
POGOs are criminalized and often operated by illegal immigrant Chinese people, it's not really representative. At least that's my understanding having lived in Manila for a few years.
Exactly, that opinion comes straight from parroting international news that have no grasp about what's happening locally there. Most BPO workers are overworked (not all, depend the company, there are thousands of them) but they aren't treated badly.
I'm not in favor of these social media bans, but I would think the benefit here is that without the ban your child will be in the "real world" while everybody else's is on social media. This would make the "real world" socialization benefits more difficult.
I want my child to go out, but first I need to force every other child to go out. Maybe that's why children are not out? Because parents wait for all the other children to go out?
I mean, we view social networks as having network effects that keep people there. The same force that stops people from switching from Facebook and TikTok prevents people from abandoning social media altogether. Waiting for all the adults to be responsible and forward thinking seems a little far fetched.
So instead you are going to use the force of the state to tell them what they should do instead and then threaten them with violence/fines/jail time if they don't want to?
Aren't they related in the sense that they're not tech/SaaS/software related? "I'm looking into being an elevator mechanic; I need the money because my wife is pregnant." and then "I'm writing poetry by hand." Like, their life is going in a non-tech direction?
Who do you imagine the winners and losers will be? To the extent AI is useful and disruptive, it's best utilized by people with capital. Which is to say, the winners are few and the losers are everybody else. In this case, the losers aren't just more vocal, they're louder and more visible because they're much more numerous.
Sorry if I misunderstand the point, just trying to understand.
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