AI is not a normal technology

(12gramsofcarbon.com)

11 points | by theahura 2 hours ago ago

18 comments

  • demibabs 2 minutes ago

    What happens if there are no more humans in the loop, and instead of building on human work, models have to build on their own work? Would we get stuck in a local maxima?

    When AI labs talk about “long-horizon tasks”, they mean tasks on the order of a few days. But what about keeping coherence across decades, like humans can? Models are not trained or tested on the ability to do that, and it seems unlikely that capability would naturally exist.

  • daft_pink 5 minutes ago

    I think what you are missing is that it will dramatically lower the cost of living so that everyone’s standard of living increases. It’s not about jobs.

    • irishloop 3 minutes ago

      I don't think there's any particularly good evidence of this other than blind optimism.

  • needfish an hour ago

    I wish AI could do my chores. Laundry, folding clothes, dishes, cleaning... That would be nice.

    • charcircuit 5 minutes ago

      Washing machines, dish washers, power washers, etc exist.

    • arcanemachiner 25 minutes ago

      If it does that, you should hope it can also stand in bread lines for you too.

    • voidhorse 7 minutes ago

      Unfortunately that will never happen because the people who stand to benefit most from AI already have cost-efficient (see grossly underpaid) humans to do this for them.

      They need AI to replace the expensive not cost-effective humans.

    • georgemcbay 36 minutes ago

      > I wish AI could do my chores. Laundry, folding clothes, dishes, cleaning... That would be nice.

      Sorry, AI only does the fun stuff.

      Off to the silica sand mines with you and the rest of the meat bags to keep the AI well fed.

    • myko 23 minutes ago

      literally the only thing i want out of ai ^^^^

      that said, it is fun generating code with them

    • Founderarcstone 44 minutes ago

      one day soon, right?

    • Rover222 29 minutes ago

      this will of course happen in a few years...

      • dd8601fn 19 minutes ago

        Won’t matter. Most of us won’t have paychecks to buy it with.

        Kidding (…kinda).

  • streetcat1 an hour ago

    AI can do anything that it was trained on based on humans. As soon as humans are not involved, AI will have nothing to train on, and hence, the rate of improvement will approch zero, and the AI will collapse.

    • bpodgursky 4 minutes ago

      Human knowledge races up to the frontier through formal education and then nudges past the frontier a little bit at a time and AI will train on AI outputs that do the same. But, it will do it 1000x faster than humans because that's just how they work.

      • charcircuit a minute ago

        >1000x faster than humans

        Some of the process of expanding the frontier is not parallelizable and is built on top of previous discoveries. And pushing the frontier requires doing things in the real world, or running experiments that take significant real world time that can hurt your 1000x faster claim.

    • Rover222 30 minutes ago

      what a dumb thing to keep repeating at this point

    • jazzpush2 22 minutes ago

      Just ignoring all the recently solved math problems human, huh?

      • tacomonstrous 18 minutes ago

        If you understood how they were solved, you'd see that you're only bolstering the point you were responding to.