I've been reflecting on Generative AI in the context of broader sociological and cultural theories. This article is reminding me of these things and I'm curious what other think.
#1: George Soros' concept of reflexivity, where human biases begin informing, distorting, and supporting asset prices not because of their underlying fundamentals, but because of the human biases that have contributed to their prior appreciation. As per the essay being cited, if you are a CEO committing to AI as a strategy, you will also commit resources to double down on the technology. Your own identity becomes tied to it, whether you realize it or not, and you'll keep pushing for it and maybe even ignore facts that challenge the success of your investment.
#2: Marshall McLuhan (of "The Medium is the Message" fame) argues that we need to understand communication and entertainment technologies in terms of the structure they impose on us. While social media is seen as a societal ill by many, its original idea of connecting people is fundamentally, well, social... GenAI is very much a non-social (i.e., you experience it on your own) convenience technology. It gives you answers, it writes code, and it implies an authoritative perspective that is always available to you, as an imperfect human. What will this mean for our own identities as human beings?
I am very much a supporter of foundation models, LLMs, AI, etc. but can't help and think about some of the ideas above. Curious what others think.
I’m curious what makes you a supporter, as you say? Supporting the companies that make them or the developers themselves pushing the technology forward or the impacts of the proliferation of the LLMs’ usage or something else?
Transformative implies neither good nor bad. You started this thought in your original comment re social media and how that's now possibly perceived as a net negative, despite the original aims of its inventors.
Is there something someone could hypothetically tell you about how AI/LLMs as a technology might come to be understood as a net negative that would sway your support?
For full disclosure, I sit on the other side of this fence, with a constant concern of the issues that we will see arise. As an exercise, I try to imagine how these issues will be outweighed by the positives, though it's a challenge tbh.
I did click through and saw it was one person’s commentary on the same tipis we discussed here a week ago. It is probably nicer if all the commentary on a story live together.
Ironically your comment here also breaks HN guidelines. Specifically the one where you aren’t supposed to accuse other people of not reading the articles.
> It’s a religious fervor and heretics are excommunicated. But the dissenters, who feel they must remain silent, are largely correct.
Good god, this again. Another group oppressed -- those who stay silent because they don't like being criticized for their stand against the elite!
They can stand alongside their political refugees, the white man, the poor downtrodden billionaire, vaccine conspiracy theorists, and those that will not be masked!
Yes, there are plenty of insufferable AI advocates, and there are companies that didn't want to sit on the sidelines of a technological revolution. Did people overcorrect?
Yes. Are some going to avoid generative technologies out of some bold principal to their own detriment? I imagine some.
The only thing that will be consistent is the level to which they will whine about how they were right.
Wait is it people that post about not liking chat bots that are like vaccine conspiracy theorists, or is it the people that dislike chat bots but don’t post about it that are like vaccine conspiracy theorists?
Feel like AI prep vanished cold blood ambushed into a 5-point kidney, thistle tea'd then MfD 5-point eviscerated my career, when all I was doing was gathering peaceblooms in silvermoon when I should've trinketed the kidney death coil into a fear. It is what it is
Is 100x even controversial anymore? Anyone can do it by just throwing the whole backlog at AI and let it go crazy. What's the bottleneck? You don't need to babysit LLMs anymore. The problem is that you can only keep up with so much, but it's obvious that a lot of people and companies don't care about that.
Yeah 100x is definitely still controversial. 100x means you should be able to whip up a new OS in a week.
Looking at something like Anthropic's attempt to write a C compiler in rust. That definitely wasn’t 100x. It took 2 weeks to build something that wasn’t a viable c compiler. And that was best possible scenario. A very comprehensive spec, an existing implementation to act as an oracle, and existing compilers in the training data.
Not sure how you reached that conclusion and most people do not make OSes. A normal backlog at a standard company is not comparable.
Your edit is even more peculiar. Writing a C compiler in Rust? Come on. I'm obviously talking about normal grunt work. And what are you even using as a benchmark? It's not 100x compared to what?
You’re the one that said it’s a 100x productivity increase, so I assume you meant compared to a software developer writing without AI. What else are you using as a benchmark?
So it can’t 100x writing an OS even though it has tons of OS code in the training set. It can’t 100x a compiler. Based on personal experience (and number of games released on Steam compared to last year) it can’t 100x game development.
At my very large tech company it can’t 100x development of any of our customer facing products (and we still have a huge backlog). Judging by the fact that the vast majority of us still have jobs and big companies are still paying for Jira, Slack, and Teams, it doesn’t seem like it can 100x anything useful.
I've been reflecting on Generative AI in the context of broader sociological and cultural theories. This article is reminding me of these things and I'm curious what other think.
#1: George Soros' concept of reflexivity, where human biases begin informing, distorting, and supporting asset prices not because of their underlying fundamentals, but because of the human biases that have contributed to their prior appreciation. As per the essay being cited, if you are a CEO committing to AI as a strategy, you will also commit resources to double down on the technology. Your own identity becomes tied to it, whether you realize it or not, and you'll keep pushing for it and maybe even ignore facts that challenge the success of your investment.
#2: Marshall McLuhan (of "The Medium is the Message" fame) argues that we need to understand communication and entertainment technologies in terms of the structure they impose on us. While social media is seen as a societal ill by many, its original idea of connecting people is fundamentally, well, social... GenAI is very much a non-social (i.e., you experience it on your own) convenience technology. It gives you answers, it writes code, and it implies an authoritative perspective that is always available to you, as an imperfect human. What will this mean for our own identities as human beings?
I am very much a supporter of foundation models, LLMs, AI, etc. but can't help and think about some of the ideas above. Curious what others think.
I’m curious what makes you a supporter, as you say? Supporting the companies that make them or the developers themselves pushing the technology forward or the impacts of the proliferation of the LLMs’ usage or something else?
I’m a supporter of the technology and believe it is transformative.
Transformative implies neither good nor bad. You started this thought in your original comment re social media and how that's now possibly perceived as a net negative, despite the original aims of its inventors.
Is there something someone could hypothetically tell you about how AI/LLMs as a technology might come to be understood as a net negative that would sway your support?
For full disclosure, I sit on the other side of this fence, with a constant concern of the issues that we will see arise. As an exercise, I try to imagine how these issues will be outweighed by the positives, though it's a challenge tbh.
Dupe. Prior discussion 7 days ago and 77pts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48956153
No.
Your link is the original post by Nikhil.
This page is Gruber's commentary on Nikhil's original post.
We make sure to click the link and read the article before posting here. Please follow that rule in future.
I did click through and saw it was one person’s commentary on the same tipis we discussed here a week ago. It is probably nicer if all the commentary on a story live together.
Ironically your comment here also breaks HN guidelines. Specifically the one where you aren’t supposed to accuse other people of not reading the articles.
I don't think this specific post is a dupe.
https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-glo...
https://hermit-tech.com/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global...
[dead]
> It’s a religious fervor and heretics are excommunicated. But the dissenters, who feel they must remain silent, are largely correct.
Good god, this again. Another group oppressed -- those who stay silent because they don't like being criticized for their stand against the elite!
They can stand alongside their political refugees, the white man, the poor downtrodden billionaire, vaccine conspiracy theorists, and those that will not be masked!
Yes, there are plenty of insufferable AI advocates, and there are companies that didn't want to sit on the sidelines of a technological revolution. Did people overcorrect?
Yes. Are some going to avoid generative technologies out of some bold principal to their own detriment? I imagine some.
The only thing that will be consistent is the level to which they will whine about how they were right.
Wait is it people that post about not liking chat bots that are like vaccine conspiracy theorists, or is it the people that dislike chat bots but don’t post about it that are like vaccine conspiracy theorists?
Feel like AI prep vanished cold blood ambushed into a 5-point kidney, thistle tea'd then MfD 5-point eviscerated my career, when all I was doing was gathering peaceblooms in silvermoon when I should've trinketed the kidney death coil into a fear. It is what it is
Is 100x even controversial anymore? Anyone can do it by just throwing the whole backlog at AI and let it go crazy. What's the bottleneck? You don't need to babysit LLMs anymore. The problem is that you can only keep up with so much, but it's obvious that a lot of people and companies don't care about that.
Yeah 100x is definitely still controversial. 100x means you should be able to whip up a new OS in a week.
Looking at something like Anthropic's attempt to write a C compiler in rust. That definitely wasn’t 100x. It took 2 weeks to build something that wasn’t a viable c compiler. And that was best possible scenario. A very comprehensive spec, an existing implementation to act as an oracle, and existing compilers in the training data.
Not sure how you reached that conclusion and most people do not make OSes. A normal backlog at a standard company is not comparable.
Your edit is even more peculiar. Writing a C compiler in Rust? Come on. I'm obviously talking about normal grunt work. And what are you even using as a benchmark? It's not 100x compared to what?
You’re the one that said it’s a 100x productivity increase, so I assume you meant compared to a software developer writing without AI. What else are you using as a benchmark?
So it can’t 100x writing an OS even though it has tons of OS code in the training set. It can’t 100x a compiler. Based on personal experience (and number of games released on Steam compared to last year) it can’t 100x game development.
At my very large tech company it can’t 100x development of any of our customer facing products (and we still have a huge backlog). Judging by the fact that the vast majority of us still have jobs and big companies are still paying for Jira, Slack, and Teams, it doesn’t seem like it can 100x anything useful.
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> Is 100x even controversial anymore?
Are you making 100x more profit or at least revenue? 50x more? 20x more?
Show me the company making even 10x more and I might be amenable to the argument that it isn’t controversial.
There's obviously no such correlation.