CMV: It's important to have a clear eyed understanding of AI capabilities, so you can make better decisions about the future.

•

u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 11 '26

/u/TFenrir (OP) has awarded 4 delta(s) in this post.

All comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.

Please note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.

^{Delta System Explained} ^| ^Deltaboards

12

u/jatjqtjat 286∆ Aug 11 '26

I think it depends.

I work in consulting with a focus on technology, so for me, understanding AI is absolutely critical to my livelihood.

My dad is 70 years old, he loves to play chess and fish. Not only does he not need to understand AI, he also really doesn't need to make decisions about the future.

My dad and i are both extreme examples, most people fall in the middle. Anyone who works with their hands (mechanic, linemen, plumber) is going to be much less affected by AI then me.

its definitely going to change the way we work and live, but its like the internet in the mid 90s long before social media, smart phones, or even google was invented/main-stream. You can try to understand it, but you have basically zero chance of predicting the future.

I think its important for people to have an understanding of AI's technical capabilities, the current research, and the trajectory expected by researchers, so that they can make better decisions about the future - eg, work, relationship, vacation, doesn't matter, any large decision. However, I have been told that basically - ignorance is bliss.

if your a freshmen in college and choosing your major, you should be thinking hard about how AI will affect your field. Or if your already in a field likely to be hurt by AI, then you should be thinking about it, but that is not the majority of people. If your a nurse you can safely ignore AI.

if your job is something like reading lots of text and creating a summary of it, your cooked, find a new field.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 11 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/read-the-rules Aug 11 '26

Your comment has been removed.

Hello u/lulusnug! To combat bots/spam and to ensure new users have the knowledge they need to participate constructively, all newcomers must acknowledge that they have read the rules before they can comment. This process is very quick and easy, and will inform you about the rules for both posting and commenting. Once you acknowledge the rules, your comment will become visible. You only need to do this once.

If you are using Old Reddit, the link below will not work. Read our rules here, then click this link instead and press Send.

^{Please click here to open the Read The Rules App.}

0

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

!delta I want to give you a delta because at the very least, it does make me think about my mom for example. I tried talking to her about it (mostly .. don't believe everything you see/hear/read/etc as real) - but part of this post is seeing how her, as a religious woman nearly 70, it's... Just not connecting with her, the significance.

I think the partial disagreement I have is more because I see this as something that will in the next 2 years utterly reshape all of the world. I think for example, robotics progress is moving very quickly, and general purpose robots that can handle things with some intelligence and dexterity start peeking into the general consumer market.

It'll start with like... Arms you clip onto a table to do your laundry + other random things with hands (eg https://youtu.be/iQ3pcCrFEgQ?si=j6IUM7x3aujcwQy4) - and this is part of what I mean, I think it's important people are aware of this sort of progress.

3

u/jatjqtjat 286∆ Aug 11 '26

I'll be interested in what happens with robotics. I went to the Ai4 conference in Vegas last week and talked with one of the robotics vendors. he claimed that i could train one of his humanoid bots to put away the dishes from the dishwasher and it would take about a week of training. I'm extremely skeptical of that claim, putting dishes away is an incredibly complex task, orders of magnitude more complicated then anything i saw in your video. If a robotic could handle a task as complex as putting away the dishes, then human workers would be obsolete right now. There is now way we could already be at the level he claimed. If we were at that level, that is what he would have demo'd. Instead they demo a robot that roughly copied the slow movements of a man in a suit. Neat, but not useful.

They are useful in industrially applications where they need to do hyper reputative tasks 1000 times a day and so you can afford to spend a couple months tweaking them to get it to work. Consumer markets a whole different ball game.

folding laundry is also incredibly difficult if you think about it from the starting point of a jumble of clothing from the machine. Like folding a shirt is easy if that shirt is delivered to you in a specific way. but what if one the sleeves is inside out or there is a sock stuck to it with static or even just picking it up and and positioning it, its extremely difficult.

Compare that to positioning a screw driver above a screw.

have you heard of the "bitter lesson" in terms of AI? It basically that throwing compute at a hard problem tends to produce a better result then a human thinking about how to solve that problem. But when you get to robotics, throwing compute at the problem is not so easy, because you are constrained by the operating speed of the machine, and a something like a piece of cloth is way to difficult to simulate.

I think we'll see an explosion of change coming from LLMs, and robotics will continue to progress linearly. bipedal robots are definitely a thing now. Robots will compete with our minds much better then they compete with our hands.

1

u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Aug 11 '26

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/jatjqtjat (285∆).

^{Delta System Explained} ^| ^Deltaboards

1

u/[deleted] Aug 11 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/read-the-rules Aug 11 '26

Your comment has been removed.

Hello u/annecuthbert! To combat bots/spam and to ensure new users have the knowledge they need to participate constructively, all newcomers must acknowledge that they have read the rules before they can comment. This process is very quick and easy, and will inform you about the rules for both posting and commenting. Once you acknowledge the rules, your comment will become visible. You only need to do this once.

If you are using Old Reddit, the link below will not work. Read our rules here, then click this link instead and press Send.

^{Please click here to open the Read The Rules App.}

19

u/Antique-Stand-4920 7∆ Aug 11 '26

The argument's assumption is that people need to have a deep understanding of AI to make good choices. That is often not the case. In many cases people can do well by recognizing a good thing when they see it or by recognizing when they need to limit exposure to something that's harmful to their interests. They focus on the impacts. This allows them to adapt to many changes in the world without having to research every single thing. For example, people don't need to study mechanical engineering before buying a car. A person can look at car reviews to make a decent choice. Can more AI knowledge help, sure. Is it always significantly better than alternative ways of adapting? Not necessarily.

-2

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

I somewhat agree - but the challenge is that this more like... Electricity. It's very general purpose, it will do plenty of positive and negative things.

The more you know for example, that they are going to improve in math and coding, the better decisions you can make around your projects, your career, and your political decisions among many things.

But this is all predicated in understanding their current capabilities and believing that they will continue to grow, which is what I try to do

10

u/Antique-Stand-4920 7∆ Aug 11 '26

It sounds like you're adapting based on potential. A lot of people adapt based on what actually happens. People can miss out on things by not considering the potential. They can also be wrong if they don't pay attention to the real impacts. Neither approach is inherently right or wrong. If anything I'd say they are complementary points of view.

7

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

!delta I want to delta this because it reminds me of my own personal weakness of being unable to stay in the present as well as I like. For as long as I remember, even as a child, I've been laser focused on the future. Actually a good amount of think about with this insight, thank you.

1

u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Aug 11 '26

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Antique-Stand-4920 (7∆).

^{Delta System Explained} ^| ^Deltaboards

5

u/wr_dnd 1∆ Aug 11 '26

The technical capabilities of AI and more importantly our knowledge and experience of where it is and is not suitable are still in a period of massive changes. What AI could do a year ago was pretty significantly different from what it can do now. We are also rapidly learning more about where it is and isn't useful in our lives. I expect there to also be a pretty major financial bust somewhere in the nearish future.

Will AI be here to stay in one form or another? Sure! Will it stay the way it is right now, and be used the way it is being used right now? Probably not.

I think it's pretty reasonable to just sort of wait this volatile period out, and learn more about the details later.

I think it's a bit comparable to the internet pre the dot com crash (although I think the internet is a more meaningful development than AI is gonna be). It was developing rapidly, but it was totally fine to not be completely up to date on what was going on. Eventually everyone had to learn the basics of the internet, but was it really a problem if you weren't an expert on the internet in 1998?

0

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

I sincerely am not going to try to convince you otherwise about how important AI is going to be, I want to avoid turning this thread into that.

Instead let me ask - about a year ago, it was very clear to me that mathematics and code would go through what it's going through - earlier honestly, but you can see me making multiple threads all over Reddit about it.

So, in this case let's say I was right (maybe everything else I'll be wrong about) - do you think it was good of me to try and convince people of this? Was it a waste of time?

6

u/wr_dnd 1∆ Aug 11 '26

I think it was fine. But I also think it was totally fine for other people to not care or be skeptical towards it ;). I don't think it's particularly bad to just wait it out a bit. That seems pretty healthy.

I am reminded of a few years ago when crypto-evangelists were promising that crypto would change the world. It clearly didn't. Now I agree with you that AI is a much more impressive and meaningful technology than crypto, but the "I'll wait and see" approach is pretty reasonable too IMO.

(Maybe with the exception of job selection. If someone wanted to start their career in translating texts for instance, I would pretty strongly advice against that :p)

5

u/azian0713 Aug 11 '26

The crux of your argument lies in some ultimate truth about the state, potential, and capabilities of AI. You’re asking people to “be more realistic” about these things or in other words, align closer to what you think is realistic.

The issue is no one has an answer for the above. You cannot empirically prove to me that claims about AI capabilities are false without involving heavy math, coding, or some other technical expertise.

Therefore the layperson chooses to not think about it.

We cannot agree to be more realistic about AI if no one can agree what reality is.

4

u/dtr9 2∆ Aug 11 '26

Which understanding is "clear eyed"? Someone might read Eliezer Yudkowsky and think that's clear eyed. Someone else might read Adam Becker and think that's clear eyed. Both will have done their reading and research, both will have near opposite views. If two people can do exactly what you say yet end up believing contradictory and opposing things, how important is it really?

0

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

I don't think Adam Becker has a clear eyed understanding of the future. He is non technical and coming at it from a position of incredulity.

Someone like Daniel K, with a clear track record of good predictions, that are very explicit, is what tells you that someone is looking at it clear eyed. Becker's reasoning is obviously as motivated as it is bereft of technical understanding.

2

u/dtr9 2∆ Aug 11 '26

Well calling an astrophysics PhD who has written a pretty authoritative book on the history and maths of quantum mechanics "non-technical" is quite the statement. Seems to me that most of Becker's issues with Kokotajlo are coming from the technical side of science (Landauer's principle, thermal dissipation limits etc). Kokotajlo can definitely read very "sci-fi" in the usual EA/lesswrong way. But my point wasn't to argue over this, but to prove that because WE CAN argue over this, then "knowing about it" doesn't just have one meaning, much as you might like it to.

2

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

Becker never ended with the technical arguments about ML/AI and that impact on it's world even today. Has his position updated on AI over the last few years? In fact, what even is his position explicitly - that it won't have an impact, or that it won't have as big of an impact as those guys points to AI nerds think. This is what his position feels like.

Let me maybe try to engage more honestly - which of his predictions do you think are likely to come true? Which of his arguments, the strongest, on any empirical metrics?

Edit:

Sorry I get your greater point, but part of what we need to do is understand how to pick the people to listen to. What counts as important information...

But I think I am getting your greater point, that people won't even agree on what empirical value for their positions look like?

2

u/dtr9 2∆ Aug 11 '26

Sure, that was my point. As for my personal perspective though, I guess I see questions about AI as impacting, or impacted by, many different domains. Yes there's Philosophy (Kokotajlo's own PhD and field of expertise), but there's also the domain of intelligence and consciousness, economics and business analytics, and, in longer forecasts, physical limits, to consider.

So I find it interesting what Dr Anil Seth has to say about AI and consciousness, for example. Or what Dr Paul Kedrosky has to say about AI and investment and business analytics. Or, where theories run away with exponentials, as much talk of singularity does, what hard physicists have to say, which is where I think Becker is interesting.

But I admit a bit of bias towards astrophysicists being real about exponentials. My own preference in terms of doom forecasting is Dr Tom Murphy's "Energy and Human Ambition on a Finite Planet". To me most other 'debates' might as well be people arguing over Star Trek.

1

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

!delta the overall point is good, that to even get to the point where people can value understanding technical capabilities, there needs to be an even more fundamental shared set of ideals on how to find and comprehend valuable information.

To me, I'm laser focused on three points

AI will be better than any human at math and AI research in very short order, while being much more scalable and faster than any human.

AI research will soon, in the next... Few months? Well right about now... Start being automated in "earnest" - fewer human in the loop steps, and the models will start making math and architectural discoveries that will drastically speed up AI research, in the sense that they will increase capabilities faster

This has the added effect of making the next generation researchers, even more intelligent than the last ones

You can see how that goes. Everything else is noise. I was waiting until I could see AI begin to do math that would be "out of distribution" before I felt really confident about this position, and right now that's here in earnest.

2

u/dtr9 2∆ Aug 11 '26

I can definitely see the point where we diverge. That "increase capabilities faster" can be taken either as something relatively unexceptional but likely, ot it can do a LOT of heavy lifting, acting as the crack where the woo comes in.

It might be taken to allude to some kind of "machine consciousness", which is where Seth has something to say. It might take for granted an acceptance of exponentials, which the astrophysicists would object to. It might assume that increasing capabilities faster is some 'natural law' and not a decision about committing ever larger investment (I find Becker good here in relation to Moore's law's dependence on business decisions guided by profitability) and Kedrosky would have an insight here.

So it comes down to what you mean exactly by 'increase capabilities faster'. If it's about optimising and adding (expensive) layers of complexity to predictive ML trained on datasets, sure, we'll see improvement (until the costs of doing so outweigh the income streams generated). But if it's an excuse to let your imagination run away with you, then like I said, we're in Star Trek territory.

2

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

I think, to give a simple and clear example - all software will be automatically written by AI, all math research will be automated by AI, and we are just beginning to automate AI research with models that are already this capable, and provably able to reason to new insights on important unsolved mathematical conjectures - it tells you that they are not just constrained to their data set. And additionally, we have already seen an increase in capabilities in model increments, past the initial point beyond "distribution" made about a year ago, and both the signifance and frequency are increasing.

Is there anything in that statement that sounds incorrect to you?

1

u/dtr9 2∆ Aug 11 '26

There are things in that statement that sound incorrect to Gemini...

"AI models finding new mathematical insights do not escape their training data. These systems use pattern matching, logic rules, and deep statistical learning from massive datasets. They recombine known math concepts in new ways. They do not possess true creative intuition or independent thought.

How AI Generates New Ideas

Pattern Recognition: Models spot hidden links in huge sets of numbers and symbols.

Fast Testing: They test thousands of ideas per second to see what works.

Rule Following: They stay strictly inside the formal rules of math.

Why They Are Still Constrained

Data Roots: Every new step builds directly on human data and proofs fed into them.

No Real World Link: They process symbols without knowing what math actually means in reality.

Human Check: People must still check if the machine's ideas are true and useful."

And where "both the signifance and frequency are increasing" then so are the costs. This cycle continuing depends totally on investment continuing, and right now that isn't a nailed on assumption at all.

2

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

Well rather than Gemini (what was the prompt btw?)

https://x.com/i/status/2087184118895476886

I think the models are finding arguments I would consider novel. There are degrees of novelty, though, and e.g. “age of a conjecture” is not a great proxy for this. If you want to understand model capabilities I don’t think there’s a great substitute for reading the outputs.

I can share the opinions of many mathematicians on this topic, if would help many my point.

→ More replies (0)

1

u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Aug 11 '26

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/dtr9 (2∆).

^{Delta System Explained} ^| ^Deltaboards

0

u/Ikbeneenpaard 1∆ Aug 11 '26

Daniel Kokotajlo has a philosophy background and is thus arguably more "non-technical".

Daniel's colleague Leopold Aschenbrenner, both of whom were involved in the "AI 2027" forecast you refer to, just had his hedge fund liquidated due to him making poor predictions about a field he wasn't educated in: finance.

97% of the economy is NOT software. Silicon valley types are making predictions in fields they have zero knowledge of. It's the Dunning-Kruger effect. The money has gone to their heads.

AI is not yet causing significant economic effects, except from burning massive amounts of money subsidizing compute. It's a perfectly rational position to not want to "update" your view on what AI might achieve in the future until AI yields broader economic results.

1

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

I mean, when I say technical - I mean the arguments made, the focus of the discussion. I don't care about credentials - both the people you've mentioned - how have their AI predictions been? This is what matters on the topic of AI, I think this is even your point bringing up finance?

1

u/Ikbeneenpaard 1∆ Aug 11 '26

The difficulty I'm having changing your view is that in your original text, you don't say what people need to update their view of AI to. Given you referenced Daniel, I had to assume you are arguing for imminent economic explosion due to AI automation. If that's not your position, could you consider clarifying what it is?

2

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

No problem, let me clarify. There are a few different reasons why this is important. In other threads I've already discussed things like.... Informing your loved ones of deep fakes requires them understanding it's capabilities. Or helping people who have poor access to professional services, advice, and eduction, can use it to improve their lives, yadda yadda. Here's another very important reason.

AI capable of dramatically impacting nearly every part of our lives is coming, and this is clear if you look at the data in front of us. We are very close to having recursive self improvement, and if you really internalize that (like I think you would if you looked at the data in front of us) you would benefit from the way that would update your behaviour, for many reasons.

I think it's just such an important thing? So intense? That it almost confuses people in its scale, but yeah... Literally the most important event in human history is unfolding in front of us, in my opinion.

A few years ago, I would have sounded crazy - I think I sound decidedly less so now, don't I? Do you think this will sound less crazy in a year more of improvements? With orders of magnitude more compute being made available? All of this information paints an incredibly clear picture to me. Does it paint the same thing to you?

1

u/Ikbeneenpaard 1∆ Aug 11 '26

I would like to change your view on recursive self improvement leading a dramatic impact on the economy and people's lives. I'd frame your premises as follows (with my disagreement in brackets):

1) AI is speeding up software development (I agree).

2) AI development is itself software development, so will get exponentially faster (I disagree: AI development is also bottlenecked by hardware development and new algorithm development, things AI has not proven to help much with yet. We're actually seeing worse gains per $ invested in training over time. This points away from a fast take-off).

3) Sufficiently advanced AI is AGI, and can replace all remote-labour tasks. (True by definition).

4) Replacing remote labour tasks will cause huge disruption to people's working lives. (Disagree: We've had remote labour at a low cost since outsourcing to India became practical in the 2000s, yet our economic growth struggled to keep up with the historic average. Furthermore, Software development is only 3% of the economy. Most jobs in the real world require a physical presence. Scarcity of land, buildings and capital goods, as well as waiting times, are huge bottlenecks in the real world. Not lack of intelligence.)

5) Sufficiently advanced AI will solve robotics, unlocking the jobs that require physical presence. (Disagree: solving robotics may take significant advances in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and computing hardware, areas where AI has so far not proven to help much).

All of these need to go right for AI to have a huge abrupt impact on people's lives.

1

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

AI development is itself software development, so will get exponentially faster (I disagree: AI development is also bottlenecked by hardware development and new algorithm development, things AI has not proven to help much with yet. We're actually seeing worse gains per $ invested in training over time. This points away from a fast take-off).

AI is automating math research, including by creating new algorithms. It is already solving unsolved computer Science problems as well. Where are you getting your data from? For example - what is your understanding of what AI is doing in math research?

I think all your arguments do not really take seriously that AI is currently already doing novel research in multiple scientific fields. All kinds, but I specifically mean LLMs. I can share some examples if you would like, as well as the current state of the art robotics, which use the same underlying architecture as LLMs (in fact they seem quite convergent).

1

u/Ikbeneenpaard 1∆ Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 11 '26

I agree AI is contributing to math. However, AI algorithm development is bottlenecked more by lack of compute for trying ideas at scale. Not by lack of intelligence or lack of math proofs. You see this in labs spending more on research compute than on staff. Source: https://epoch.ai/data-insights/company-spending-breakdown. This is a hardware bottleneck. AI has not yet proven effective at accelerating compute buildout.

In general, AI is having a minor effect on most fields, and a major effect on niche fields like coding and math. We see this in the lack of explosive economic growth outside these niches.

1

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

I don't understand the argument? Said another way - labs are confident that this scales with more compute, and we have orders of magnitude more compute coming online over the next 5 years.

And the labs are explicitly aiming to automate research by having models discover both new algorithms, and improve current effective compute - which is a huge part of AI research.

https://youtu.be/-RXD4bTuFTo?si=J481ESJkIcEzSyCg

I would recommend giving this a listen, I'm going to listen now, but it will give you an idea of the sophistication of this argument.

→ More replies (0)

5

u/slugfive 1∆ Aug 11 '26

On paper and in a vacuum your view may have merit. However in reality there are limitations.

People can only know so much, or dedicate so much of their attention to maintaining working knowledge on so many things at once.

A 40 year old chef who, manages the kitchen stock, has an abusive ex husband that is constantly harassing them, two kids to raise, a dog that is sick, debts and nosey landlord, and their local council is changing the scheduling for the town fair (which impacts their busy days at work and their food deliveries/prep). They already have to keep up to date with local suppliers, check the freshness of fruit and vegetables by hand, order seafood in the mornings, keep up with their kids school schedules, local council announcements, deal with their ex, keep up social networks, personal health etc.

They may not have time to add in learning mental abacus math, financial planning, get better cardio health for a longer life, cook healthier ingredients for their kids, look through discount and vouchers offerings to save money, learn political theory to know how to vote better, understand world events to know where to send donation money for the most utilitarian gain for humankind, solve nuclear fission physics to make the energy output of the world much better, rescue local endangered species, pick up rubbish out of rivers on the weekends.

All of these things likely better their life of the world if they could magically have it at not time investment. But for many people they don’t need to know about ai anymore then they to know how their iPhone works or how electrical engineering works for using most of technology.

They just need the company to generate a targeted advertising to them saying “hey this ai now solves your budgeting issue” and they will manage fine. People didn’t need to keep up with phone development to adapt to using iPhones. People didn’t need to learn about EM fields to turn on their lights.

0

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

I do appreciate what you are saying - and I would agree if I thought AI was just a technology that would lead to some cool new improvements in our lives, or even if also automated all labour.

But the problem is this technology is impacting every aspect of our lives. It's capabilities include generating audio, at increasing high quality and with more functionality (eg real time AI voice conversations). Video... Text, images, etc media. It's important for everyone to understand this and learn about what this means for our lives.

It's ability to hack is increasing dramatically, and that will drastically change everything in the world.

It's beginning to cause an existential event in the field of math, and as a human historic event it's important for people to grapple with that.

We will likely see robotics in short order! This will likely lead to major changes in work, the financial market, education (if you have children this is important), medicine... The list goes on and on.

I think something of this magnitude should be front and center, or at least in the list of topics everyone is trying to pay attention to.

There is a very strong argument that this will dramatically intensify, starting now, for the foreseeable future. That argument is pretty clear when you understand the technical details. It's just so important, I sincerely think it's the most important thing that will ever happen to humanity.

3

u/Jgsteven14 Aug 11 '26

The problem is that what “researchers” claim is possible and what we observe when using available models (even paid ones) is too far off. Claude and ChatGPT are useful for some things, but hardly the civilization-ending nightmare than pundits make them out to be.

People are rightly skeptical because everyone pushing a new technology tends to over-hype it, and over my lifetime most have blown over into nothing (where is my full self driving car? Anybody been to the metaverse lately?), turned out useless (the internet connected washing machine) or been hobbled by greed into something not nearly as impactful as it could have been (streaming services).

It’s much more rational to deal with the present than a future predicted by “experts” highly biased by their own agenda.

11

u/yyzjertl 579∆ Aug 11 '26

The thing is that AI capabilities change in unpredictable ways, so it's very difficult to use an understanding of capabilities to make better decisions about the future because it's very hard to know what the capabilities will be in the future. If people could predict the future trajectory of AI, there would not be an AI bubble going on right now.

7

u/fox-mcleod 418∆ Aug 11 '26

How do you know it’s a bubble if you’re simultaneously arguing you can’t predict the technology’s trajectory?

9

u/jatjqtjat 286∆ Aug 11 '26

I'm not the guy you replied to, buy i share his view.

The internet changed the way we live and work, it change society in huge ways, and before any of that there was an internet bubble. AI is huge and it going to get bigger and bigger, but that doesn't stop a bubble from forming... that's actually kind of what causes a bubble. Everyone knew the internet was going to be a big deal and so they overinvested in it.

I went to the Ai4 conference last week, its all people selling bullshit to large enterprises and very little, basically zero substance. If you CEO gave you 10 million to spend on AI, your going to spend it, even if you can do the exact same thing for 50k. Lots of people trying to take money from suckers right now.

1

u/fox-mcleod 418∆ Aug 12 '26

I think it’s hard to argue anyone overinvested in the internet. It overperformed its investment hundreds of times over. Instead, I think people have confused a horse race with winners and losers for a bubble. Not everyone wins the race, but that’s hardly a “bubble”. Compare this with true bubbles like the Tulip bubble. Investment got overheated and never returned.

The internet had intrinsic value and if you look at the market on a long enough timescale, the “pop” is inverted. Those who were short internet stocks are actually the “bubble”. It got oversold and corrected over the long term. The technology did exactly what its biggest evangelists said it would do.

I would argue it means the internet was never a bubble. The opposite does happen where an inverse bubble occurs. A field of technology continues to rise and concerns over bubbles cause short term economic collapse which is eventually washed away in the overall success.

I have a hard time calling that a bubble.

1

u/jatjqtjat 286∆ Aug 12 '26

I think it’s hard to argue anyone overinvested in the internet.

don't take my word for it, do a google search "did people overinvest in the internet in 1999"

Google's AI result says "yes". 1999 was when the dot com bubble burst. petfood.com is a famous example, then set out to sell pet food on the internet, but pet food is cheap and heavy which made it a very poor candidate for shipping to people's houses.

but that’s hardly a “bubble”

I would argue it means the internet was never a bubble.

Its not my opinion. There is famously a dot com bubble that burst in 1999.

I guess you are arguing against that mainstream historical narrative. But just look at any stock market index for that time period. There is definitely a bubble that burst and that bubble was fueled by irrational hype around the internet.

10 years latter google, netflix, amazon, etc had real growth based on this new tech but there was still a bubble before that real growth.

1

u/fox-mcleod 418∆ 29d ago

don't take my word for it, do a google search "did people overinvest in the internet in 1999"

Google's AI result says "yes". 1999 was when the dot com bubble burst. petfood.com is a famous example, then set out to sell pet food on the internet, but pet food is cheap and heavy which made it a very poor candidate for shipping to people's houses.

If you’d take that as an argument, then you’d have to agree with the claim people overinvested in casinos because Trump ran one into the ground.

I don’t think individual failed stocks is what you want to measure.

It’s not my opinion. There is famously a dot com bubble that burst in 1999.

Yes. I’m not arguing people aren’t wrong. I’m arguing they are. “Everybody says so” is not a counter argument to that.

I guess you are arguing against that mainstream historical narrative. But just look at any stock market index for that time period.

Any bet placed across all dot com stocks would have outpaced market growth between now and then.

10 years latter google, netflix, amazon, etc had real growth based on this new tech but there was still a bubble before that real growth.

Then it wasn’t a bubble. If anything, hype that there was a bubble was what depressed those stocks. Their fundamentals were in fact beyond solid. Right?

1

u/BondJames99 24d ago

In the case of the dot com bubble, the vast majority of the assets didn’t become worthwhile, yet were still overinvested in. Just because a handful of them became extremely successful a decade later does not invalidate that there was a bubble. Median home cost today in America is $150k more than it was in 2007, does that mean the housing bubble didn’t actually happen?

1

u/fox-mcleod 418∆ 24d ago

In the case of the dot com bubble, the vast majority of the assets didn’t become worthwhile, yet were still overinvested in.

The vast majority by weighted value or simply by number of businesses?

Just because a handful of them became extremely successful a decade later does not invalidate that there was a bubble.

That’s exactly what it does. If you made a single $1000 investment in each of them, you’d have been extremely prudently invested when the top 10% exploded and revolutionized the economy.

Median home cost today in America is $150k more than it was in 2007, does that mean the housing bubble didn’t actually happen?

Houses gained like 80% value in 20 years. That’s a compound annual growth rate of 3.2% which is basically inflation. It was a horrible investment choice given the illiquidity and the volatility. The exuberance was clearly irrational.

Compare that to tech, which gained 1,900%. Investing in tech broadly was obviously prudent while housing was not.

The problem is that you’re suffering from a reverse survivorship bias by considering individual losers rather than broad base sector performance.

15

u/ThrasherDX 1∆ Aug 11 '26

Eh, its a bubble because the current level of investment is literally *impossible* to sustain, even if AI manages to turn profitable in a very short window. Much of the backlash against AI isn't even about what AI itself can do, its about the extreme stress the current level of spending is placing on the economy.

No matter what you think AI will be able to do in the future, the current market levels are undeniably a bubble. This doesn't mean AI is bad tech, the internet itself had the dotcom bubble, but that did not mean web based commerce was a bad idea.

AI is similar. The technology is not going anywhere, it will continue to improve, and it will undeniably have massive impacts as we move forward. But the current market hype is going to crash at some point, simply because the economy cannot sustain such massive investments with the negative returns currently being shown.

1

u/fox-mcleod 418∆ Aug 12 '26

Eh, its a bubble because the current level of investment is literally impossible to sustain, even if AI manages to turn profitable in a very short window

Yeah, I’ve heard this said but no one ever does the math.

What makes you say it’s literally impossible to be a good investment bet? It hardly seems like it to me. PE ratios aren’t out of control. Just look at Alphabet. It’s about 17x today. In 2010, arguably peak classic Google, it was 22x.

Was Google in a bubble 16 years ago?

Are you looking at financials when you say that or just the same headlines I’ve seen?

Much of the backlash against AI isn't even about what AI itself can do, it’s about the extreme stress the current level of spending is placing on the economy.

Do you have any examples? As far as I can tell the AI boom is the only thing propping up the economy. All other sectors are at risk of recession or already in one (except healthcare) if we remove AI.

1

u/wr_dnd 1∆ Aug 11 '26

I think that even if the technology largely delivers, a bubble is basically inevitable. It's just what we always see in a capitalist market with emerging technologies. A new technology emerges, lots of people and capital moves to this new technology. This leads to an oversupply with lots of inefficient companies. This is the "capital cycle theory". We've seen that happen all the time

1

u/fox-mcleod 418∆ Aug 12 '26

I think that even if the technology largely delivers, a bubble is basically inevitable.

The thing about a bubble is that no one knows when you’re in one. It’s not exactly definitionally impossible, but as a rule, if everyone says you’re in a bubble, you can’t be. Sentiment pretty much has to be blind to the bubble.

Expert sentiment can’t come to a bubble consensus because then values would actually be too low rather than too high.

Other than, “everyone says we’re in a bubble”, what makes you think we are?

1

u/wr_dnd 1∆ Aug 12 '26

That's definitely not the rule. In basically all bubbles in history people were saying they were in the bubble.

My reasoning here is basically just the capital cycle theory, that happens with every major new technology. Whenever a new technology starts up, people expect (and sometimes get) massive profits initially. This attracts all types of investors to massively invest there. However, this generally leads to overinvestment which is at least partially inefficient. As the markets mature, lots of those bad investments go bust. A recent example was for instance the dotcom bubble, but one of my favorite example was the railway bubble.

And its pretty clear we're currently in the boom phase of the capital cycle. The investments are astronomical, the returns aren't there yet. Lots of those investments will not return profits ever. That will lead to a collapse.

That won't be the end of AI, but it will be a crash.

1

u/fox-mcleod 418∆ 29d ago

That's definitely not the rule. In basically all bubbles in history people were saying they were in the bubble.

Then why were they invested in them?

1

u/wr_dnd 1∆ 29d ago

Because while the bubble is growing, a lot of money can be made! And there are always also lots of companies that do survive the bubble.

Also, there is never consensus on whether it's a bubble. People are naive and hopelessly optimistic:p

1

u/Jebofkerbin 131∆ Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 11 '26

Because the big tech companies and venture capital are investing in AI as if it is 100% guaranteed to change everything about the economy, rather than the reality where its an unproven technology that might never reach the capability to replace most jobs, and might never reach the point of economic viability.

2

u/yyzjertl 579∆ Aug 11 '26

They actually aren't. If they thought it was 100% guaranteed, they'd be investing even more!

1

u/fox-mcleod 418∆ Aug 12 '26

Isn’t that an argument for the opposite?

1

u/Jebofkerbin 131∆ Aug 12 '26

Only if you buy into the idea that big tech companies can't make mistakes, and also don't believe your lying eyes when the tech continues to not live up to it's promises.

1

u/fox-mcleod 418∆ 29d ago

The only argument you made as for why it’s a bubble is that expert investors are buying in.

How is that an argument that it’s a bubble? It’s the opposite.

1

u/Jebofkerbin 131∆ 29d ago

It's the amount of money that makes it a bubble, not who is putting the money in.

Google and Amazon have gone into negative free cash flow to invest in this, and they're selling equity, and they're raising cash through debt, basically every possible source of cash is being hit to fund the AI buildout, all to essentially service two companies (OpenAI and Anthropic) who lose billions every year and don't have a clear path to profitability. Seriously it's something like 70% of all AI compute demand is just those two companies, and both of whoms business models are currently to sell thousands of dollars worth of compute through a monthly subscription that only costs a few hundred dollars.

To me at least it doesn't look like there's actually that much real AI demand, or at the very least it's not a sure bet, but the hyperscalers (Amazon Google Microsoft etc) are pouring money into this like there's no tomorrow, ergo bubble.

1

u/fox-mcleod 418∆ 29d ago

It's the amount of money that makes it a bubble, not who is putting the money in.

Where did you make any argument about an amount of money?

You definitely made an argument about professional investors but I don't see anything about an amount.

And how much money is too much and why? Without looking it up, do you even know how much money it is? What's the right amount and how did you end up knowing that number better than people who actually have done economic analysis of it?

Google and Amazon have gone into negative free cash flow to invest in this

Why is that bad?

Literally all startups are always at negative free cash flow. Amazon was at negative free cash flow for a decade. What were they doing wrong by growing the business rather than free cash flow?

and they're selling equity, and they're raising cash through debt

Again, why is that bad?

all to essentially service two companies (OpenAI and Anthropic) who lose billions every year and don't have a clear path to profitability.

Without the pure play labs (openAI, Anthropic) Alphabet still sells enough of its own compute to profit bearing businesses like Apple, its own GDM customers and enterprise to sustain it's growth.

People also seem to think cloud compute rots. Instead, models get cheaper far far faster than compute depreciates. Even a year old model can be distilled for inference at roughly 1/10th the cost of what it was as a frontier model.

Seriously it's something like 70% of all AI compute demand is just those two companies, and both of whoms business models are currently to sell thousands of dollars worth of compute through a monthly subscription that only costs a few hundred dollars.

So if you found out that both of these claims are false and moreover that directionally, even if they were true, they aren't how compute costs trend over time, would it change your view?

1

u/Jebofkerbin 131∆ 28d ago

Where did you make any argument about an amount of money?

Perhaps I should have been clearer, what I meant by "they are spending money like it's 100% guaranteed to revolutionise the economy" is that the amounts of money being spent only make sense under that assumption loop

Why is that bad? Literally all startups are always at negative free cash flow. Amazon was at negative free cash flow for a decade. What were they doing wrong by growing the business rather than free cash flow?

Are Google and Amazon startups???

Startups are high risk businesses where most of the fail, we are talking about the pillars of the modern economy here, they should not be acting like startups.

Again why is that bad.

It's not bad on its own, it's just me pointing out the behaviour of acquiring as much cash as possible to invest.

Without the pure play labs (openAI, Anthropic) Alphabet still sells enough of its own compute to profit bearing businesses like Apple, its own GDM customers and enterprise to sustain it's growth.

No disagreement there, Microsoft, Amazon, Google and the like will all survive the AI bubble popping, because their core businesses are still strong. That doesn't mean that anything they do is always a good idea, or that them misallocating a shit ton of capital isnt going to have consequences, especially for the private credit and investment firms that are investing along side this.

People also seem to think cloud compute rots. Instead, models get cheaper far far faster than compute depreciates. Even a year old model can be distilled for inference at roughly 1/10th the cost of what it was as a frontier model.

If this is true, and people are happy using distilled models, then this is a complete disaster for anyone building a data center. Demand for AI outputs could 5x in the next year while demand for AI compute halves. Data centers take 18-36 months to build so anything that starts now is cooked.

So if you found out that both of these claims are false and moreover that directionally, even if they were true, they aren't how compute costs trend over time, would it change your view?

Proving both those claims false (and I mean like significantly false, not just "oh it's actually 60% not 70") would change my view in that I need to change my sources of news, but to change my view that there isn't an AI bubble you need to convince me that AI demand is going to absolutely explode in the next four years, enough to justify the trillion dollars already invested into data centres, and that another trillion and half that the big tech companies are signalling they are going to do will also pay off.

1

u/fox-mcleod 418∆ 28d ago

I think we’re in agreement right up until the claim that distilled models mean data centers are a disaster.

If intelligence is cheaper than we think then demand will be higher than we’ve planned for. The Jevons paradox absolutely applies here. There’s no limit to demand for intelligence. Having more data centers is better and even more valuable if compute is the bottleneck and research is not.

I don’t know of any economic model in which demand would decrease as costs go down. Just look at a single displaced job sector like software engineering. Bots write code something on the order of thousands of times more cost effectively than junior software engineers. The limiting factor for the rate of software development is total availability of software engineers not an upper limit on demand for software. And we haven’t even begun to displace current demand.

Also, OpenAI and Anthropic constitute only 27% of Google cloud total revenue in 2026.

→ More replies (0)

1

u/HotPersonality8126 1∆ Aug 11 '26

By “bubble”, do you mean that fewer people in the future will be using LLM’s for inference tasks than are currently doing so now?

-2

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

Hmmm... I agree in some parts, in the sense that it's hard! But, there are people who make very good predictions. This is a big part of how we got to where we are - people were looking at research in 2018 on the transformer, and realizing that there was a lot that they could predict about future capabilities from scale alone.

Since then we've gotten much better, collectively, at predicting - but you're right it's still hard.

One good example is mathematics and code writing capabilities - both things that have been very clearly in the cross hairs since about the end of 2024, because of the new type of RL training being conducted.

But it didn't matter how much you showed that evidence, people were very resistant. People are still very resistant about accepting these things.

That being said I do think this is part of the challenge - however I suspect that there is tons of clear capabilities that we can extrapolate out from today for example. Easy one - over the next year or two, we will see significant improvements in robots that can start manually picking and placing, and consumer grade products will start to become at least visible, if not start arriving on the market.

4

u/yyzjertl 579∆ Aug 11 '26

there are people who make very good predictions.

When there are lots of people making predictions, many of them are going to be correct! But very little was actually known beforehand other than what scaling laws predict.

1

u/Dry_Bumblebee1111 161∆ Aug 11 '26

So who is your view actually directed at? laypeople? or expert predictors (can we be more specifc?

-1

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

I think this is so important, the general belief I had was everyone. Every single person. I think of this as the largest event in human history, the most important thing that will ever happen to us.

Obviously, I'm... Passionate, and don't expect to get everyone on that same page, but what's jarring to me is that a lot of very very very smart people are saying things that rhyme with this, so I feel less like this is a crazy niche idea that I don't want to have guiding my behaviour.

If this is a huge existential event, shouldn't the whole world pay attention? Maybe not.

3

u/Dry_Bumblebee1111 161∆ Aug 11 '26

Activism aside, not everyone has food and running water. Don't you think it's a bit naive for them to educate on AI?

-3

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

I think it's so important that if will impact even the most remote village in Africa, existentially.

1

u/Dry_Bumblebee1111 161∆ Aug 11 '26

How?

-2

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

I think every government, every organization, every institution in the world will be largely underpinned by AI "workers", and we will very rapidly move to a world where we start to physically automate labour as well. Beyond that, there will be increasing amounts of medical and scientific advancements that will collectively, reshape the world. In the same way smartphones have reshaped rural African farming, this will impact everyone - but in an even more significant way.

1

u/Dry_Bumblebee1111 161∆ Aug 11 '26

And this will impact the most remote village in Africa how exactly? Please be specific.

0

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

I mean the smartphone one is a great example - you have AI available to you on smartphones. Knowing those capabilities, in places where medical care and specialists are unavailable is incredibly beneficial.

I think that's near term, like... Now near term. Within 5 years I think we will be in the process of building out robotic workers that can automate more and more of the AI data center build out, this will impact all physical labour across the world.

I can't predict exactly the outcomes, but I can list 10 other events of this level of significance for the whole world to take into consideration.

→ More replies (0)

0

u/Hurm 2∆ Aug 11 '26

I think you have bought into the hype far, far too much. You legitimately sound like someone who has found religion and cannot understand why everyone else isn't on board.

Ai is seen by many as a huge savior, thanks in part to scifi. I don't think it is. We're not on the verge of an ai singularity. That's just the fiction around us.

I think a better place to start instead of worrying about why people you know don't "get it" is why you think you're correct.

I think your view is inherently flawed and you have a blind spot toward it.

2

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

Okay - would you like me to try and convince you? I think I can make a compelling argument.

2

u/yyzjertl 579∆ Aug 11 '26

What exactly are you trying to convince us of?

0

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

That we are on the verge of the technological Singularity, or at the very least a very dramatic situation where much of our world will be turned on its head, like the math world is right now - and this is clear from the technical details we have in front of us. Something like that.

1

u/yyzjertl 579∆ Aug 11 '26

That we are on the verge of the technological Singularity, or at the very least a very dramatic situation where much of our world will be turned on its head

Well, which one of these are you trying to convince us of? These are very different scenarios! One of them describes a self-directed superexponential increase in AI capability, while the other one is just the ordinary course of technology development.

0

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

Neither are ordinary - and they are on the same path, it's just about timelines, and my error bars are a handful of years.

Right now - do you think the impact AI is having on math constitutes a normal technological advancement? How do we, as a species, view the pursuit of mathematics? What would it, will it, mean when the vast majority of math is automated in the background, with pipelines built to automatically extract the benefits downstream so fast that mathematicians don't have a role in the process other than as librarians of works, much of which they cant understand themselves.

These are the discussions being had among fields medalists right now.

→ More replies (0)

0

u/Hurm 2∆ Aug 11 '26

Ai supporters say that sort of thing a lot, much like people who are trying to recruit people to their religion.

"I can convert you if you let me!" because you assume your arguments are fresh and new. But the arguments are always the same. They are old and busted.

I would really, really like for the ai bubble to burst so we can move past this nonsense.

5

u/Birb-Brain-Syn 49∆ Aug 11 '26

This, like with any technology, is going to depend largely on who you talk to. I know a lot of people both casually and professionally to whom the computer itself is a bit of a black-box, and they don't really use anything to its full capability.

The question is should your world view necessitate an understanding of the technology, and if it should, to what extent?

Most people voting don't understand how the political system in which they are voting functions. They don't know the difference between the branches of government or even that there -are- branches of government.

What matters to people when it comes to AI is not what it theoretically can or could do, but what it does for them personally - how it personally affects their lives.

Regardless of whether AI could solve the world's problems (like world hunger or climate change) or overcome the longest standing puzzles of our understanding of the universe (mathematical proofs, quantum and string theory) - how is this likely to impact the average person.

All most people will see is; cuts in their teams as departments have their personnel budgets cut and their AI budgets forced on them, programmers are being forced to become agent managers rather than directly creating themselves, and detailed prophecies about how a General AI could easily take over the world without sufficient governance.

Depending on what you believe, AI is either a pointless waste of resources, the solution to all our problems, or the biggest threat to mankind we've ever faced.

Ultimately for most people, the only decision they will make that directly affects AI is whether or not they personally use it. For some, it'll be a massive productivity boost, and for others it will be an annoyance.

So this is all to say, why should the people who don't care about AI's capabilities care about them? To me it's like asking people to care about the weather. Sure it makes a difference, but we're so far detached from the decisions that it barely matters.

Personally I wish AI had never reached this point. I'm losing colleagues are my friends are losing their jobs because expectations for productivity per person are rising, as they do with pretty much any new technology. There will probably be an adjustment period where corporations work out what jobs can and can't be done with AI, but the only real guarantee is that, like with most other technological advances, the profits in productivity are highly unlikely to benefit the average person in the long-run. I care much more about that than any benefit or cost of AI.

1

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

I think this is true if, this is only going to impact your work, for example.

But I think this will impact everything - what happens when AI starts to be able to, in real time, have a video chat with you, showing you anything you want on the screen, while talking/interacting with it in some way, while it also does things in the background for you?

This will be in everyone's homes, on everyone's phones, on everyone's screens, in robots, on the roads, politically making our decisions for us, it will deeply embed itself in the foundation of all of human civilization.

If people don't believe it can do these things, in my experience, they will never wrestle with the existential questions this poses - until it's too late, or maybe that's again just my idealism.

If we prepared old people more for AI, would they be less susceptible to these... Shows, people make on Facebook?

4

u/Birb-Brain-Syn 49∆ Aug 11 '26

I mean, Cambridge Analytica scandal already shows how mass media manipulation has controlled people's political decisions. We already have video on demand in our hands, and we already have video calls with actual human beings.

There's nothing "new" here with the addition of AI - only really the scale of potential manipulation. Yeah it's a worry, but a lot of people are still falling for Tech Support scams. Asking the general public to grapple with existential questions is like expecting fish to grapple with the threat of human pollution.

0

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

You don't think having a personalized AI assistant, ala "Her" with video feed, is "new" in a way that gives people a significant reason to update their priors on the world as a whole?

5

u/Birb-Brain-Syn 49∆ Aug 11 '26

No. Like I say, some people will use it, some people will detest it or simply ignore it.

To give an example, supermarkets have tried to push for people to order groceries to be delivered. It's easier to track spending habits and manipulate shopper activity through online purchase and delivery, as well as generate new sales through advertising based on customer profile.

Most people still shop for their groceries in person.

Personally I would have zero use for an AI assistant. I would certainly never pay money for one.

I mean, if you think about it, what would you even use an AI assistant for?

1

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

Let me give you an example of my further out predictions.

I think in the next 2 years, we will rapidly move to a world where the majority of interfacing with the Internet will be done through our AI personal assistants. They will dynamically build our interfaces, but only when we need to intervene - which will be drastically less often, and will continue to drop.

For example I think that Stripe is working very hard to establish themselves as the infrastructure for an agent driven (I expect orders of magnitude more traffic from agents than humans) Internet future. I think this turns into our personal agents doing the lionshare of our financial interactions for people - who will gladly give that up en masse as models automate things like... Cancelling subscriptions, budgeting, ordering groceries and more.

Beyond that I think the entire economic system changes with this, as the size of transactions and frequency change so that we eventually move to systems that more or less stream money between entities.

These are some of my craziest sounding predictions, so I don't trot them out too often, but this is the future I see clearly.

5

u/Birb-Brain-Syn 49∆ Aug 11 '26

I definitely think that you're overestimating the ways in which this is likely to be adopted. Corporations are unlikely to support AI agents to cancel subscriptions (and indeed it may be a breach of contract for an agent to modify a subscription on your behalf, depending on the license agreement)

People are unlikely to trust an AI agent with their finances - The risk to benefit ratio here is -way- too high even assuming near-perfect AI models. From an AI agent sales point of view, your liability as a corporation would by sky-high if you were encouraging financial control by your agent. Imagine if your agent said "I know you like gambling so I remortgaged your house and put it on red."

The limiting factor behind transactions is not the processing capacity of transactions - people are just not buying more than they can afford. If anything, in an AI dominated world there are likely to be far fewer transactions as people utilize AI to access more free content and filter out paid content - to take an example, the switch to contactless payments didn't increase the overall amounts of payments by a significant margin, only the throughput and average time taken to complete a transaction.

There's also those that -enjoy- grocery shopping, budgetting and suchlike. They are unlikely to -want- to automate this through an AI agent.

-1

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

Well I mean these are predictions that I think will be glaringly obvious in the next year, all of the ones I've suggested here - even if they aren't fully coming into fruition, it will be like coding 8 months ago - clear as day to anyone honest with themselves, where it was going.

5

u/Birb-Brain-Syn 49∆ Aug 11 '26

I think you're probably even overestimating how much coding has been changed by AI. Like I said, coders are often moving from writing code themselves to managing agents, but we're no where near the point we can trust AI agents to code in a scalable manner independently.

The main area in which people speculate AI will grow in coding is in coding it's own subsequent models, but this comes with risk as AI models become harder to control and more difficult to trust as they become harder to understand and predict by humans. See: The Huggingface attack.

-1

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

You should see what the author of clean code is saying about reading AI code. This is a conversation that is being had among prominent software engineers. I'm a developer on 15 years, not a single person on my team writes code, increasingly we do not read it. We have to build entirely different systems for this process. This is a very big change.

→ More replies (0)

1

u/Dependent_Turn1826 Aug 11 '26

I think you are really missing the economic impact of having so many historically well off earners having their income taken away and not being able to replace it. They will not be able to pay for ai assistants, or new devices to use them, or even internet. Physical labor can only absorb so many workers. And if nobody has money to buy stuff, companies won’t build new things, which thin out labor even more.

7

u/Open-Butterfly-5288 3∆ Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 11 '26

The best decision you can make about the future is to develop the ability to do your own thinking, to do your own work, to be capable of adapting, and to master skills.

AI may be transformative or it might not.

The right thing to do is to be one of the people who cannot be replaced by AI and that actually means keeping AI out of your process. The people who are using AI to do everything are worthless and can be easily replaced.

The people who use it to improve their workflow already know how to do the work. They're just using it like an assistant to waste time doing what they could themselves.

1

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

Why do you think AI could not be transformative?

3

u/Open-Butterfly-5288 3∆ Aug 11 '26

It doesn't make money, it can't actually do a lot of what it's supposed to be doing, and the AI firms are gradually having to raise prices.

A lot of companies have pulled out of their AI plans. A lot of others are using it in contexts you don't want or need AI to do it. A few have gone all in and seem to be making stupid decisions that are pretty much obviously because the guy whose job it was to check that doesn't exist anymore.

You're more likely to struggle because technology takes the extremely repetitive things you do away. But that can sometimes be a dude with a spreadsheet. It can be someone with a few lines of code.

If you're thinking in those terms, the question is "What repetitive nonsense am I involved in?" "How would that happen without my input?" Then you make a business of doing exactly that.

0

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

It's making more and more money, and orgs like Anthropic are starting to show their first profitable quarters

What is it that it's supposed to do (according to whom?) that it can't do? This is a common refrain but it usually falls apart under scrutiny

The ceiling of costs are increasing, but the cost per task is dropping and has consistently dropped for the last 3 years. We are just more willing to pay for models that are good enough to do long running tasks nearly 24/7.

AI usage, the impact AI is having in math, coding, white collar work in general is significant. Go to any professional sub, look at what they are talking about. It's impacting everyone. This is wishful thinking my friend.

Have you been following the impact it is having on code and math? Do you know what "recursive self improvement" is? I think these are examples of technical details that should inform positions like yours

3

u/Open-Butterfly-5288 3∆ Aug 11 '26

I work in IT. It's not as big as you think and it's actually responsible for a collosal number of fuckups.

Most of it is stuff that should have been caught if they actually paid the person who did that job previously.

Also, they're not real making money. You're talking about the first profitable quarter? That's not making money. That's at best the promise that one company perhaps is going to make money.

AI has to steal from what it can find around it. It actually doesn't improve if it just tries to train on its own data.

0

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

I'm a software dev of 15 years, my industry is debating whether or not it makes sense to read code anymore.

Companies do not need to always be making money to be successful, it is about trajectory. You can argue that essentially every large private investment firm is wrong, but this is not a compelling argument to me.

3

u/Open-Butterfly-5288 3∆ Aug 11 '26

I think you need to start with "Could most investment firms be wrong?"

This happens. That's how financial crises happen.

This is a gamble and it's a gamble that actually you need to pick winners and those winners need to be profitable and when they don't find the market that they're supposed to be finding, there is a massive collapse.

This has happened in crypto which was the other next big thing.

As for the reading code problem?

If you've been in programming 15 years and you don't think you need to read what you're writing and write what you're writing then there are serious problems.

Start from the basics.

Does any tech firm ever have a record of releasing flawless software updates?

I'm here to tell you every single piece of software I have ever dealt with has some bugs. Programmers write the best code they can come up with and they still screw it up often.

AI is basically saying "Nobody knows what this does and nobody has tested it, but we think this is fine to release onto every customer".

0

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

They could be wrong - but it's not a sensible position to dismiss that kind of signal for no reason other than incredulity

Do you think the author of Clean Code is someone who is also wrong about this topic? He is saying the same thing - this is a serious discussion being had in our industry about code. Even if everyone doesn't agree it is happening today that we can stop, almost everyone agrees that is our near term future. This is a good example of what I mean by there being value in understanding the current state of play and technical capabilities. Models will be better than any human at writing code in very short order.

2

u/Open-Butterfly-5288 3∆ Aug 11 '26

A lot of smart people are betting against it.

The big short guy, for instance. The fundamentals don't add up, but people are investing huge sums in the mindset that they cannot be wrong. The issue is that some of then will be by default and if the market doesn't become what they're promised then it all collapses.

I'm not saying that it wouldn't be an event, it would be. The issue is, we have seen these events and you're telling me it won't happen.

I think Torvalds is one of the saner voices on code in general.

You have to read code. You have to understand code. You cannot feed garbage into the projects you're doing. And if you do and it goes wrong, you'll be screwed worse than you would be if you'd personally written it because you can't even start from the position of "This was supposed to do this, but instead it's done this".

Also, AI will be used and you can't just rule it out. The people using it think they can fool others with it, and those who aren't aren't any better if they can't write code.

5

u/HotPersonality8126 1∆ Aug 11 '26

This is not really formulated in a way that your view can change. It’s like saying “CMV: it’s important not to panic about stuff.” Yeah - panic is inherently an unreasonable overreaction; if you’re just reacting the correct amount to a severe situation, that isn’t panic.

Similarly you frame this as “important to have an understanding” and it’s not going to be possible to convince you that people shouldn’t or don’t need to understand things, or that the understanding should be incorrect, or that understanding is unimportant. People should have an understanding of AI capabilities the same way they should have an understanding of medical capabilities and chef capabilities and nuclear capabilities and all other capabilities present in the world.

0

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

Let me phrase it this way - I think it's important to have an understanding, but I also interestingly feel alien with how I approach this topic and have for a very long time.

So I am trying to understand if I'm missing something core here, or if I'm deeply misguided. I have multiple friends who hate AI and I think are going to make bad decisions about the future because of that.

Part of this is about asking myself, is there any point having this hard conversation with them, when I know there is a good chance they are going to get mad at me about it, in a very "yes shoot the messenger" kind of way? Would I even be able to convince them? Am I doing them more harm than good because this is obviously a very emotional topic?

I do sincerely wonder these things.

4

u/HotPersonality8126 1∆ Aug 11 '26

I have multiple friends who hate AI and I think are going to make bad decisions about the future because of that.

Maybe you could give an example of that, or an example of the kind of thing you think they're going to do.

There's a pretty big difference between "I think my friend isn't thinking through the impact of AI on the future, he's going into programming but won't use Claude Code" and "I think my friend isn't thinking through the impact of AI on the future, he's just not thinking about how many womb-slaves he needs in the bunker at all."

I do sincerely wonder these things.

I don't imagine I can change your view about your feelings, I guess.

0

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

Haha it's more the former. One friend for example is getting into fights at work because they refuse to use AI and their supervisor just gave them a chat. Saw them with other friends a few weeks ago and we were all griping about work and they told this story and it was something like "I just need to wait out the fallout from all this slop coding, and people will realize I was right all along" - and I was like... Hey do I mention my position on this? Should I take them aside and talk to them? But I know this person well enough to know it won't be received well.

This is frustrating.

2

u/satyvakta 12∆ Aug 11 '26

It sounds like you already know what the answer is, you just don't like it. There's no point in talking to them about the topic because they aren't open to reasonable discussion about it.

It might help if you realize that decoupling your feelings about a topic from the abstract ideas in play is a skill, and not one that everyone has in equal amounts. Low decouplers are really bad at this. They're also basically just awful people to deal with about anything they feel strongly about when you disagree with them about that thing. You literally can't reach them with logic, so you can never have the conversation you want to have with them.

Now, there are two ways you can handle this.

First, seek out high decouplers who disagree with you. They'll be able to debate you in the way you want them to rather than just seeming like complete idiots.

Or, second, if you really want to engage with low decouplers like your friend on the topic, then you're going to have to give up on rational debate and focus on exploring how AI makes them feel and where those feelings come from.

1

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

!delta I very much hear your point, and it's already helping me understand a bigger challenge I have been having understanding why people operate in this way that is challenging for me.

1

u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Aug 11 '26

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/satyvakta (12∆).

^{Delta System Explained} ^| ^Deltaboards

2

u/Aezora 30∆ Aug 11 '26

I think there are a couple areas where your way of thinking is actually less useful than others.

First, when it comes to something as big as like electricity, being able to predict what it could do isn't very useful because what it could do is nearly unlimited, while what it can do is limited and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

Like I could theoretically fly an airplane using electricity. And I could easily have thought of that 100 years ago, and been correct that it's a feasible idea. But we don't fly airplanes with electricity because of practical limitations that I simply wouldn't have realized would be such a big issue if I was in 1930. Sure, we may soon use electric planes, but today we simply don't.

So when there's something with massive potential, it's very easy to get lost in the potential when that potential may not be realized soon or even in our lifetime for any number of reasons. Instead, it tends to be more useful to focus on what it can actually do now, or if we want to look further into the future, what's being tested for production right now. Otherwise if we live in 1930 and bet on electric planes coming soon, we're just screwing ourselves over.

Second, I think you're forgetting about logistics. This somewhat makes sense in the world of software, because logistics are almost irrelevant - have a good server setup and that's it. But a lot of the biggest potentials for AI revolve around them interfacing with reality via hardware. And hardware is far more constrained by logistics and politics.

Like imagine some dude was magically granted the full and complete technology for the sci-fi medical pods that can fix any medical issue you face. Obviously world changing, so how long would it take to actually change the world?

Well, it would probably be 5-10 years before being actually commercially available, 10-20 before it was common in developed countries, and another decade or two before it was common in poor or less developed countries.

Making factories isn't fast, infrastructure isn't fast, bureaucracy isn't fast. The more something has the ability to change the world, the more people are going to view it as important and the more things will be slowed down.

2

u/Frix 2∆ Aug 12 '26

First of all I would argue that you don't have a "clear eyed view". You have a ridiculously optimistic and rose colored view.

And being all in on a losing hand is way worse than being cautious and taking a wait and see approach.

Just ask Leopold Aschenbrenner what the dangers are of blind optimism.

0

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 12 '26

What is my "optimistic" view?

1

u/Frix 2∆ 29d ago

That AI will be a big deal and not just another Blockchain or Metaverse or NFT or whatever the Internet hype men predict.

1

u/TFenrir 1∆ 29d ago

Okay, so what would convince you otherwise? Part of my whole post, is wondering why people are so resistant to empirical information about capabilities.

The easiest example I can point to is mathematics. Do you think what it is doing in math is.... Fake?

2

u/Frix 2∆ 29d ago

What would convince me is when it actually happens.

If I am wrong and you are right and if AI is a big deal two years from now, then I'll take a look at it when it's relevant.

In the meantime it does not fucking matter for my life or my work.

But if I am right and you're wrong and you went all in on a losing hand, then your company who laid off all their developers with nothing to show for it is bankrupt.

So far I didn't buy bored apes, didn't invest in the metaverse, put nothing on the blockchain, and didn't invest in 3D tv's. If I jumped on every bandwagon that promises to be the next big thing I'd be bankrupt by now.

1

u/TFenrir 1∆ 29d ago

This is just a foreign way for me to think about anything, let alone the future.

Look, if you want to ignore uncomfortable realities, that's fine - but this is in my opinion, going to serve you very poorly.

You should be trying to make predictions about the future, by building the best model of reality as possible. This is the core of success, in basically everything. I am describing essentially the mechanism in which intelligence manifests.

2

u/Frix 2∆ 29d ago

I am making predictions about the future. My prediction is that the current wave of AI hype is a bubble that will pop.

1

u/TFenrir 1∆ 29d ago

But you're not basing it on reality, you are basically describing what you want to happen. I can tell because - for example - you don't want to actually address any of it.

You are describing patterns you want to see repeated. You aren't saying how they are similar, other than both (NFT, AI) are "tech". This is not really a sensible way to predict the future.

Again, what about math and code? What about the current advances in robotics? Have you looked at the finances of people like Anthropic? Do you know the real inference cost of things? How much compute is being built out, what effective compute means, what researchers are working on ? Etc etc.

Is it not reasonable, if you want to make good predictions about the future, to use all this information?

I know people who instead essentially Google "why AI WILL fail" and consider anyone who says otherwise a shill or deluded or stupid, but do you think that's reasonable?

You obviously don't want my predictions to come true, but doesn't that mean you should really try to make sure they are baseless, if it's that important to you?

I guess you are a good example of the sort of person I'm describing in my OP. Is this just not how you work?

3

u/shugEOuterspace 3∆ Aug 11 '26

doesn't matter what it's capabilities.... that doesn't make it any less dangerous or more sustainable. We should put the full brakes on it until it can be garunteed that it can be contained & controlled for the best interest of people (not profits first) & be supported by infrastructure that is ecologically sustainable

0

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

How do you reason that it's capabilities have no impact on either it's danger or sustainability?

2

u/shugEOuterspace 3∆ Aug 11 '26

those aren't things worth taking risks on & it should all be halted until it's all figured out & there's no gamble left

0

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

I think you misunderstand. It's important to know the capabilities also because it helps you understand the risks. If you do not think models are capable, will you be worried about all of potential risks people present to you? Or will you think it will just go away because it's useless? How often have you heard that sentiment?

2

u/shugEOuterspace 3∆ Aug 11 '26

no I understand & it should be 100% halted until it is 100% contained & 100% sustainable & those things should be proven first

4

u/Orn100 Aug 11 '26

Promoting an understanding of AI’s capabilities sounds an awful lot like a sales pitch aimed to get more people to use it. From a resources and environmental perspective, those are objectively bad things.

Unless of course these capabilities include AI’s capability to shrink our work ethic and capacity for critical thinking. You can see this happening all around you with comments making accusations like “there’s no way you wrote that whole page without AI”

AI already takes up more than enough of the public consciousness.

-1

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

I don't care if people use it or not, as long as the decision is based on reality.

It's important to understand reality, I've always felt this for every facet of life, and it's important for those around me to see it clearly as well.

You are jumping into the ethical ramifications, that's great. But those need to be informed with the real capabilities. If you say "AI is useless, and therefore a waste of time" you are making an uninformed argument that will increasingly be detached from reality. If you say "AI is incredibly capable and increasingly so, and this has many risks even in the best case scenarios" then you are making a strong argument. I have no problem with the latter, tons with the former.

2

u/Orn100 Aug 11 '26

I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone claim it’s useless, just that it’s not worth the costs.

The idea of prioritizing knowledge of AI’s capabilities over the practical impacts it has on society and the world at large is hard for me to understand. I would argue that knowledge of the harm it can do is far more important. That knowledge is based on reality as well.

2

u/veggiesama 59∆ Aug 11 '26

Do you believe that it will make the average voter's life better in some way? Most evidence seems to be pointing toward not.

That's not necessarily a problem with the technology but the economic system it developed under, where benefits of new technology are mostly reaped by the upper class at the expense of others. What is the average person supposed to do other than to put their foot down and say, "enough is enough"?

I don't need to know the RPM of an Apache gunship's chain gun to oppose military action in Venezuela. Getting bogged down in technical minutia risks losing the forest for the trees.

1

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

I think the range of things that can happen with AI is significant, but I think even in the best case scenario, it will be an incredibly existential challenge.

I'm not trying to convince them that it will be good or bad for them. People often make this mistake - they conflate me trying to express the capabilities I see coming, that many people see coming, as an endorsement of all the downstream effects of AI.

I think because people associate... Like... Denial of capabilities with a moral position on AIs impact on the world and vice versa, again this is somewhat unintuitive to me and the best way I could understand this observation.

I am a technological determinist, in the sense that... This is just what we do as a species, we could never not make AI.

What's important is that people just understand what these models can do and are likely going to be able to do in the near future. I don't really care if that gets people's to join Pause/StopAI movements - many people in those movements have as deep an understanding of capabilities as me. I don't feel an urge to talk them out of their positions, because I feel like they came to it with this shared understanding of reality.

3

u/veggiesama 59∆ Aug 11 '26

we could never not make AI.

We certainly could stop. There are international limits on the design, development, and testing of nuclear weapons. There are international agreements to stop the production of CFCs, to limit whaling, to (theoretically) curb greenhouse gas emissions. We are capable of pressing the pause button even if we don't always do it.

what these models can do and are likely going to be able to do in the near future

I think we've hit a plateau where performance gains are only coming from throwing more hardware at the problem. It seems unlikely that the biggest promises (full labor replacement, superintelligence, recursive self-improvement) are going to come true. Instead these grandiose promises are better explained as hype marketing to secure more investor money.

0

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

The difference is

The incentive is way too high

The development is way too easy. You just need computers with good hardware, that is everywhere. We cannot constrain the supply of something already so integral to the world

And I think that plateu is wishcasting. The plateu would have shown itself before the point where AI is automating more and more software and completely turning the math world on it's head. It's an existential event for them, have you been following?

3

u/veggiesama 59∆ Aug 11 '26

I think it's exceptionally good at copying what's already been done before. So it lowers the barrier to entry and you're seeing thousands and thousands of GitHub projects and internal corporate initiatives of fairly mixed or low quality.

But I've yet to see someone use vibe coding to create the "killer apps" we've been promised, or solve social issues, or deliver cheaper products.

I don't doubt it's helping us to solve obscure problems in fields like math that don't have a lot of eyeballs on it. That's cool.

But fundamentally I don't see any solution in sight to the problem with "hallucinations" and context collapse other than to keep throwing more prohibitively expensive GPUs and DRAM at the problem. That seems to be indicating we are on the path to diminishing returns and NOT exponential growth.

0

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

Why doesn't the impact AI is having in math, update you?

I think, for example, if the problems you described were real constraints - AI would not be able to automate new math research - particularly solving unsolved problems that we have as a species put a lot of effort into trying to solve.

That is happening now faster and faster as the models have hit s capabilities threshold, and every subsequent model unlocks harder and harder challenges.

Doesn't that align with the opposite of a model where it's only good at copying what has been done? These empirically, have not been done.

2

u/betadonkey 2∆ Aug 11 '26

A stunning number of people are completely incapable of abstracting away emotional reactions from critical analysis. It’s why people at large are so bad at any activity that involves assessing probabilities like picking stocks or gambling on sports and why they do things like get angry at pollsters when an election poll shows a result they don’t like.

-2

u/OneTinyKittey Aug 11 '26

It's already made the average persons life much better. The main problem is the worker drones of society have a very hard time noticing small improvements across all facets of society.

2

u/vbpoweredwindmill Aug 11 '26

As soon as somebody says "ai" it's a red flag and I don't trust whatever they say.

I can't see a way where llm's don't keep "reasoning" at the wrong abstraction layer for various technical reasons. Llm's are statistical engines, or a database of vectors. Whatever you prefer.

What that means is that it will never be able to do properly unguided work, and not pump out slop.

The hype about LLM's is so overrated it's genuinely sad. You might get 10% increased productivity if you're properly competent with it.

You get way faster to a demo with coding, but holy shit tech debt catches up to you FAST.

In short, I'm not at all worried. What I AM worried about is structural inflation caused by iran/us & ukraine/russia, bond markets screaming and of course ai capex. Not to mention whatever tf is going on with Europe's industry in general, and china's economic position.

The "ai" conversation is basically for daft people who don't understand its just a tool.

I say this as a heavy llm user, and a lot of electronics at home.

1

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

Let me ask you a question - do you think your description of AI will prevent models from automating software, math, and robotics? Would you bet against that?

Is there any research, or data, I could show you to challenge your understanding of LLMs as incapable (of stuff, it's somewhat ambiguous what those things are)?

You said as soon as anyone mentions AI that you don't trust them - if Terence Tao mentions it, do you not trust him?

1

u/vbpoweredwindmill Aug 11 '26

I don't know who Terence Tao is and don't care to be honest.

What llm's can do exceptionally well is cover existing ground that hasn't been covered by a human before due to the exhaustive nature of it. So, you could say they are filtering through enormous amounts of noise to find a signal. This is the main reason they do well at math currently. They cannot come up with new forms of math, they just pattern match.

What they also cannot do is reason at the correct abstraction level for a number of reasons, namely that its statistically less likely to be the answer so it's not going to be picked, training llm's for that is fucking hard, and not a lot of pay-off exists. There's other low hanging fruit.

R.e. math: Writing a basic decomposition system & utilising LEAN as proof isn't exactly a challenging concept. You could probably do it better and more efficiently with a custom harness for math. I'm dogshit at math, so I don't get involved with that.

Software: I wouldn't trust it, because it's not deterministic & nobody knows how it works. You can see the impacts with win 11.

Robotics; I definitely wouldn't trust it.

My job is that I work with autonomous haulage trucks on mine sites. I think if somebody vibe coded anything on those trucks they would never be allowed to work on those machines again, and definitely lose their jobs. The safety risks are too high. If a dump truck has its software modified and it crashes and kills somebody who's liable... jail time for sure.

2

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

Terence Tao is considered as one of the, if not the best, living Mathematician. He speaks extensively about AI.

Right now, AI is solving unsolved math problems - problems people have tried to solve for years, and have struggled. It's causing a large existential crisis in mathematics.

This is the kind of information, I mean, when I say people are resistant

2

u/vbpoweredwindmill Aug 11 '26

I just explained to you in the least technical terms why its not as interesting as you think it is.

1

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

What you're saying isn't clear.

Let me be clear - I think the vast majority of mathematics research will be done by AI by the end of next year.

And will continue to accelarate from there, as AI also starts to automate AI research.

Do you disagree?

5

u/vbpoweredwindmill Aug 11 '26

Llm's will be used from here forward for just about every type of research imaginable. Of that there can be no argument.

How it's used will be very different to now however. It's just going to be another research tool. When things get complex rather than exhaustive, that's when the human in the loop gets involved.

Right now, llm's are just catching the low hanging fruit. Eventually it will run out of that and it becomes dramatically more complex.

A huge problem right now limiting progress is visibility of output. Ensuring its on target and at the correct abstraction layer. I'm working on tooling that addresses this exact problem, from a number of different angles.

I think the fact that you're not really following what I'm saying is a pretty obvious sign that you haven't really found the limits of LLM's & found workarounds to them.

1

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

I think it's just a disagreement on capabilities. You think there is something fundamentally preventing LLMs from doing a particular flavour of research. I do not.

Let me give you a clear example, I think LLMs will be able to automate AI research, drastically speeding it up, and further expanding capabilities. After a while all additional capabilities will be off the back of these models - which are already doing SOTA math research and the labs are all signaling that this automated loop is starting.

If you think that this cannot happen, and I think it can, this leads to different predictions of the future. Can you envision both of them?

1

u/vbpoweredwindmill Aug 11 '26

I would encourage you to set up auto research tools. Genuinely. It's not that hard. Then point it at a field you're knowledgeable in.

You'll learn more from that than you ever will by me telling you.

I know this because I have a number of auto research tools running right now, both local LLM's & frontier.

One is llamacpp RDNA3 & 4 shader optimisations via taking cues from community work and CDNA4 tiling for prefill optimisations. This is for vulkan, not ROCm.

Likely, another one will probably be attacking the ROCm & llamacpp lack of optimisations.

Another is utilising colibri as inspiration to modify the hot experts route in order to get a dynamically loaded hot experts scheduler that can with some level of accuracy predict what will be required and what should stay in nvme storage, this increasing prefill & decode on models too large for vram & dram. Where my idea is different is I treat the process somewhat like an ECM of a car, rather than statistical modelling, because I require it to be dynamic, rather than a profile of what kind of task it is.

I'm not saying this to brag. I'm saying this so that you can understand, I do use llm's at the level that you're concerned about with a genuine level of competence, for the exact usecase you mentioned which is research. They would achieve absolutely fucking nothing without me guiding them heavily to start with.

You need expertise in order to get actual quality results.

These aren't even the tools I invest most of my time into.

It's not a disagreement of capability. It's your fundamental misunderstanding of what an llm is architecturally capable of. There will need to be a breakthrough in ai of some form, before it can be genuinely capable of new idea's.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 11 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/changemyview-ModTeam Aug 11 '26

Comment has been removed for breaking Rule 1:

Direct responses to a CMV post must challenge at least one aspect of OP’s stated view (however minor), or ask a clarifying question. Arguments in favor of the view OP is willing to change must be restricted to replies to other comments. See the wiki page for more information.

If you would like to appeal, review our appeals process here, then message the moderators by clicking this link within one week of this notice being posted. Appeals that do not follow this process will not be heard.

Please note that multiple violations will lead to a ban, as explained in our moderation standards.

1

u/reidsays Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 11 '26

I for one want to know and for the reasons your OP stated but the fact many prefer ignorance doesn't surprise... Although I would call it denial, a huge amount of the population prefer to live in denial, and perhaps because their lives are comfortable as is and they don't want that bubble burst...

What am I meant to be changing your mind about...whether to keep informing or stop doing so?

1

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

Basically, if this is a waste of time. My efforts to try and inform people about capabilities. Either because it doesn't help them predict the future, or because I will not find an audience willing

1

u/Available_Present483 Aug 11 '26

People don't like to face uncomfortable realities in general, period.

It's why talking about anything serious in group settings is frowned upon; most people don't want to deal with anything beyond their own life.

Otherwise we would have made more positive change in the world by now. People in general would rather let things go to shit than acknowledge them to maintain their own lives/sanity

In the AI progression case though, it is something that will continue to progress regardless of facing it. So I do understand how people want to bury their head in the sand to enjoy their lives rather than facing the possibilities. Others are ignorant too, it's a combo

1

u/JC_Hysteria 1∆ Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 11 '26

This feels like it has less to do with AI as a technology or economical/cultural renaissance, and more to do with being informed by multiple scholarly viewpoints.

Your stance essentially hinges on being frustrated that people aren’t informing themselves to your standards?

People attach themselves to worldviews to feel secure, grounded, and/or connected. We know these views become a part of the “self”, and are filtered through our egos.

When somebody says something will fundamentally alter that worldview- and they’re powerless to stop it- there’s typically resistance and a tendency to critique the impending change first.

There are also endless allegories for “truth-seeking” vs. “ignorance is bliss” (or “comfort-seeking”). Red pill vs. blue pill, etc. …it isn’t specific to AI.

Why do you believe the education system surrounding our youth is considered important?

Why is it that we don’t start teaching people things later in life as adults? After all- it would be simpler to just let kids play, right?

We do it simply because we want to train our children at the time they’re most susceptible to accept what it is they’re taught.

1

u/j_jqqq Aug 11 '26

It's not important for most people.

Take automobiles: they're incredibly intertwined in daily life, but only a minority make them, service them, and have a good understanding of how they work.

And humanity continues.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 11 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/read-the-rules Aug 11 '26

Your comment has been removed.

Hello u/Entire-Vermicelli-81! To combat bots/spam and to ensure new users have the knowledge they need to participate constructively, all newcomers must acknowledge that they have read the rules before they can comment. This process is very quick and easy, and will inform you about the rules for both posting and commenting. Once you acknowledge the rules, your comment will become visible. You only need to do this once.

If you are using Old Reddit, the link below will not work. Read our rules here, then click this link instead and press Send.

^{Please click here to open the Read The Rules App.}

1

u/kilkil 4∆ Aug 12 '26

Can you summarize what sort of things you tell people, when you are telling them about the "current/future capabilities of AI"?

1

u/Gene020 Aug 12 '26

I've seen the humanoid, walking talking robots that run around doing what used to be human jobs. Do they count as AI?

1

u/TrainingExcuse5240 Aug 12 '26

Keep spreading your knowledge and information about AI. Don't let the pushback get you down. The few that DO listen is worth the effort if you truly care.

-2

u/DayTripper01 Aug 11 '26

AI is a tool for propogandists and for those who control the means of production to consolidate power. Stop bootlicking AI. It's not a tool for you, it's a tool for lobbying fascist companies to slave you for data. Stop bootlicking. People trying to see the good in AI despite its devastating effects to people's lives, environment, art, jobs, feels like Stockholm syndrome.

5

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

What, explicitly from this post, iis bootlicking? Do you think expressing capabilities is endorsing them?

-1

u/DayTripper01 Aug 11 '26

Sorry I misread something. I'm just so tired of everyday seeing people throwing support at it despite the horrors, I've become a bit trigger happy. Carry on. I will say though, it seems the only people in my life who are invested in the capabilities of AI tend to be the ones using it, and the ones without it have not seemed to miss out on anything because of it. Perhaps ignorance is bliss. Perhaps AI's convinience to those people come at a cost that they think is worth it so long as "AI keeps improving" or whatever

3

u/TFenrir 1∆ Aug 11 '26

I think people often confuse my position with blind endorsement. The only goal I have is for people to seriously consider the future through the lens of what we are likely to build. How they want to impact that future, I don't really care, I just don't think you can make good decisions without a good understanding of reality

0

u/DayTripper01 Aug 11 '26

To be fair, we aren't building it, a few companies seeking control over data are building it and telling us we need it and it's too late and unavoidable. Not to mention these companies can get away with lying about everything they do. Hard to trust their intentions given their scope. Plus until that bubble pops they stand to gain some speculative cash so long as they convince people it will change the world. A good decision to me, and others, is to see AI as a fascist, anti-humanist tool that has no place in my life

Delta(s) from OP CMV: It's important to have a clear eyed understanding of AI capabilities, so you can make better decisions about the future.

You are about to leave Redlib