This is what I see, outside the HN bubble. If you work retail or weld pipes together or whatever, AI is of no use to you. On the contrary, if tech thought leaders are to be believed, you'll be out of a job soon, replaced by a lifeless robot. Fuck that.
You do realize that there a lot of people who sit at a desk and use a computer all day, right? Those are the ones whose jobs are vulnerable, not the ones who work with their hands or interact with the public.
we will come for them with real world AI, it takes time. dont worry. they are not safe in a decade, they are %100 safe for few more years. Learning from them at scale and updating is nothing impossible.
Well it’s mostly explained by the fact that most people lack imagination and can’t hold enough concepts about a particular experience to think about how to re-imagine it, to begin with.
Oh and sadly, llm’s are useless for the imaginative part too. Shucks eh.
I have a list of ideas a mile long that gets longer every day, and LLMs help me burn through that list significantly faster.
However, the older I get, the more distraught I get that most people I meet "IRL" are simply not sitting on a list of problems they simply lack time to solve. I have... a lot of emotions around this, but it seems to be the norm.
If someone doesn't see or experience problems and intuitively start working out how they would fix them if they only had time, the notion that they could pair program effectively ideas that they didn't previously have with an LLM is absurd.
> most people I meet "IRL" are simply not sitting on a list of problems they simply lack time to solve. I have... a lot of emotions around this, but it seems to be the norm
This sounds unnecessarily judgmental. Doing this is your hobby. Other people have different ways they want to spend their time. That doesn't make you superior, just different.
Yeah and frankly the innovation would occur irrespective of llm’s.
Would it be harder? Sure. And perhaps the difficulty adds an additional cost of passion being a necessary condition to embark on the innovation. Passion leads to really good stuff.
My personal fear is we get landfill sites of junk software produced. To some extent it should be costly to convert an idea to a concept - the cost being thinking carefully so what you put out there is somewhat legible.
As I’ve said in my other post, I’m very confident that imagination is the true bottle neck.
Writing lines of code? Nope. If one can imagine… trust me, writing lines of code is trivial.
Most people have no imagination. So sure they can produce more stuff with llm’s but it’ll just be mostly garbage.
Perhaps they can produce some peculiar workflow that works ‘for them’. Sure. But I think about the money invested into the LLM-based projects and I highly doubt we are going to see any returns that justify the spend. What we are going to see is a felling on the profession of software engineers, since the pipe dream of AGI isn’t coming and imagination is scarce.
It’s truly amazing. This is why I’m not surprised people are ‘blown away’ by llm’s. They were never truly intrinsically intelligent - they were expert regurgitators of knowledge on demand.
Steve already suffered from immense scar tissue of starting with the technology. And yet.. this wisdom blows over peoples minds. More fool them.
Im very confident the experts in every field are not all that impressed by LLMs, relative of course, to those who were 'meh' in the first place. Experts meaning those who actually understand the content, not simply regurgitate or repeat it on demand.
I'd even go as far as to say there are many out there who have a feeling of disdain of the experts and want to see LLMs flourish because of this.
"But those startups that are able to harness the productivity gains to deliver more complete and polished solutions that solve real problems for their users will be unstoppable."
They'd be unstoppable irrespective of LLMs. Why do you think Zuckerberg acquired Instagram? He literally tried copying it and failed. Instagram at the time was absolutely tiny in terms of pure labour, relative to Facebook.
Most people on hacker news are missing the point. Productivity gains for the sake of perceived productivity gains is not what creates economic value. Its not the equivalent of a factory all of a sudden becoming more productive in producing more of the same stuff. Not comparable at all.
"Here's an evil business idea: Use the LLMs to identify the users most likely to be "vocal influencers" and then prioritize resources for them, ensuring they get the best experience. You can engineer a bubble this way."
Its quite likely this is already happening buddy...
The 'random' degradation across all LLM-based services is obvious at this point.
Most People do not care about the technology and frankly they don’t want to know about it. They want great experiences. That’s it.
Technologists seem to have a reallyyyy hard time getting it.
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