Give Smart People the Tools to Do Smart Things

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• Hacker News
• > Anthropic claims AI will replace industry X in Y months

  False, Anthropic didn’t claim what was linked in the article.

  > OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speculates that enough AI compute could help figure out how to cure cancer

  Idk likely true? What’s so wrong here.

  > Elon Musk says there will be no need for compilers as AI will write the binary directly

  What seems so off about this? AI can write binary and probably better in a few years. Higher level languages would still be efficient probably.

  > Anthropic claims that Mythos is super dangerous, the people can’t possibly handle such a powerful cyberweapo

  Well it was?

  by simianwords
• > > Elon Musk says there will be no need for compilers as AI will write the binary directly

  Wouldn’t that make the AI the compiler?

  by bigmattystyles
• > AI can write binary and probably better in a few years.

  Assuming you mean an LLM, you'd have to train this LLM entirely on a parameter space of binary tokens. Or are you saying the LLM generating natural language tokens is going to be printing machine language in 3-5 years, because that claim kinda betrays a misunderstanding of LLM functions.

  by IndeanCondor
• ... And watch stupid people do stupid things even faster
  by heikkilevanto
• When I think about the typical team composition needed to build a typical app in a lot of companies, well, actually what do I think about? I think, okay, that’s how many people we need to build a typical app - some number. That’s what we should all think … like, what is that “number” of people we need?

  So, today, if I think really really really, and I mean, really fucking hard about that “number”, I really really really come up with a number close to 1 (we need one person to type in the instruction at least, maybe two? Maybe three? Definitely not a team … no not that at all).

  That means, for everything that we build today, before we even build it, we’ve already mentally replaced people. People be replaced yo, in your mind, in your company, in your reality. That’s it.

  It’s a replacement, not a tool. And if you reaaallly think a bit more, you’ll see that it is truly the stupidest possible thing if in your scoping of what needs to be built, you didn’t scope out people. You’d have to be crazy not to scope out people.

  Trust me, I never thought we’d get to this point either. I thought it was going to be an “assistant” too.

  —-

  The layoff numbers still look “normal “ to us. 75k here, 20k there, all numbers we’ve heard before. It hasn’t even really happened yet, the true numbers should be in millions. I didn’t believe the number “trillion dollar company” until, BAM, here’s a trillion dollar company.

  Best we can do is kinda get used to the numbers, like the number 0 on one end (how many people you need), and some number N (in millions) that we won’t need anymore. We’ll just slowly get used to these new numbers.

  This shit ain’t no tool.

  by general_reveal
• I think if you use AI to automate talking to customers, you're going to stop having customers. If you use AI to do your engineering and deployments, it's up to you to fix it when it goes wrong. If you use it for accounting, you BETTER look at the results if you don't want to be audited. If the AI handles legal, same thing. Basically, if it replaces N people, then you, the one person, need to be accountable for being able to handle N people's roles, because the AI can't take accountability.
  by overgard
• > Compilers did not replace programmers. Spreadsheets did not replace accountants. CAD systems did not replace engineers.

  In the long run, this is as misleading as saying: Humans did not replace animals.

  by 4m1rk
• >>> CAD systems did not replace engineers.

  It did replace draftsmen and designers, and changed the work that the engineers do. It's now more efficient to let engineers be their own draftsmen and designers. And design work has changed -- a lot less "hard" quantitative engineering, and a lot more "bureaucracy in three dimensions" as things have gotten more complex.

  by analog31
• Normies just don’t understand what all is involved in running and evolving a production system. They think all programmers do is write code. Of course they believe that AI could replace programmers.

  My in laws smugly asked me what I would be doing for work since AI would take away all the programming jobs and I said its not gonna happen and they laughed in derision.

  by pm90
• The less people know the simpler they think things are.

  You should make $ bets with them on whether you will still have a job 2 years from now. An easy way to make money and teach them a lesson :)

  by deterministic
• > they laughed in derision

  It's crazy how defensive (offensive) people can get when you're into programming/math/whatever. Almost like "I don't understand your world, I don't want to, and I hate it and hope you fail".

  https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/what-its-like

  by Rendello
• I would be glad they don't understand what's next. For now, it helps devs keep a low profile as their work transitions into more bureaucracy. You're lucky they do not yet consider you one of the "bad guys" like lawyers, doctors, teachers, etc. (who didn't get replaced by the photocopier, google, or video tape)

  Some people who "used to love programming" have jumped ship for precisely this reason. Ordinary software (not R&D) is getting serious. A broken or disagreeable app is no longer a mere inconvenience. There is growing alignment between business and politics and the older generation is retiring out.

  by sublinear
• I just don't understand why people are incapable of extrapolating. AI can't do this blah blah, my brother in spaghetti monster, have you seen the curve? ChatGPT launched in November, 2022. Opus in December last year. Do you see where this is going?

  AI may be a tool and add 50 IQ points to a 100 IQ person today but what happens when its adding 10000 IQ points. The 100 base doesn't quite matter as much does it? What does that world look like?

  No, it's not just next word prediction. No you can't just wave your hand that it's probabilistic, so insert bad analogy to compiler or calculator and go about your day. And no, you can't just look at its limitations today, make a conclusion, and go back under your rock.

  by bilater
• It literally is just next word prediction. If you don't understand that, everything else you're thinking and saying is based on an incorrect foundation.

  Take a step back and really take a look at what's going on. You are not thinking clearly.

  by _se
• That’s not how iq works.
  by naveen99
• The internet doesn't have 10000 IQ points though. So where will it get the knowledge to be that smart?
  by mythrwy
• My nephew grew 7 cm in one year and 10 cm in another, so by 2040 he will be 4 meters tall!
  by hootz
• Is there demand for 10000 iq intellegence to fund its construction if we already have +100 iq AI? You are assuming there will be demand that scales as fast as technology can to fund its continued fast pace development.
  by AngryData
• Extrapolate the flight time from NYC to London in 1976 ... have you seen the J-curve?

  Or extrapolate the curve for self driving cars once they were only "two years away".

  Catch is, tech progress is not one curve. It's overlapping S curves, stair steps of progress and stagnation, with the next iteration starting off worse than the current one, until crossing it as the current one tops out.

  by Terretta
• The problem with your post is you’re depending on an assumption that all types of intelligence are useful in every situation.

  Being embodied will always be a huge advantage over a “country full of geniuses in a datacenter”.

  by cadamsdotcom
• Extrapolation leaves you in a world with no agency. Okay, so the models become superintelligent, you're kind of fucked at that point and there's no value you as a human can add so that reality isn't really productive to think about.

  The only thing we can do is look at the current state of things, and we still have the same problems we've always had with these models, they need proper direction and input.

  by lillutoo
• “ChatGPT launched in November, 2022. Opus in December last year.”

  You seem to be implying that there was nothing before. Obviously not true.

  “AI may be a tool and add 50 IQ points to a 100 IQ person today but what happens when its adding 10000 IQ points.”

  What is even IQ? What if it adds 50 now, 25 next month, 12.5 the month after, etc. You should check out Zeno.

  by ustad
• I encourage you to do research on extrapolation as a general concept. Not a deep dive, but to explore its general utility and limitations as a tool. I also encourage you to explore what metrics you use when evaluating the utility and impacts of LLMs.
  by the__alchemist
• I’m not convinced model productivity will scale forever.

  Presumably there are a lot of use cases that are essentially “solved” where more powerful models won’t matter.

  by cj
• but you’re just on the other end doing the same thing.

  one end is luddites nothing to see here, and the other end is omg humanity is cooked because programming is solved! and consciousness is coding so -> gg

  yes there’s a wide surface of emergent behavior we haven’t fully explored, but why do you get the pass to draw a straight line to a conclusion? the naysayers are doing the same thing.

  by apsurd
• > I just don't understand why people are incapable of extrapolating.

  I guess it's a matter of education. People with a mathematics or computer science background know that unless the dynamics of a process are known to be linear, extrapolation is usually wrong. Since we don't know that the dynamics here are linear and have every reason to believe they aren't, extrpolation is unlikely to teach us anything valuable.

  by pron
• > ChatGPT launched in November, 2022. Opus in December last year. Do you see where this is going?

  Maybe this is tongue-in-cheek, but in case it's not.

  No, nobody does. Consider that a person in their lifetime could have seen the Wright Brothers first flight in 1903, then the first jet engine in 1939, then commercial jet travel in the 1950s. That is an amazing 50 years for air travel. If you were living in 1950 and were to extrapolate where air travel would be by 2026, you would think we would be taking routine trips to Mars. Instead what we got was TSA, cramped seats, and better safety. But "progress" leveled off dramatically. Commercial air flight has looked pretty much the same for my entire life.

  We have no idea how far transformers and LLMs will take us. It certainly isn't obvious where this is going.

  by encomiast
• The problem is not AI. It's an excellent technology. The problem is there's an underlying power grab (e.g. layoffs). When humans do that to each other they inherently dehumanize/invalidate/insult each other. Implement strong labor protections or basic income and a lot of this dog-eat-dog toxicity goes away.
  by Herring
• Automating a job is toxic now ?
  by ttoinou
• AI is completely irrelevant to the power that software wields.

  Implementing labor protections and basic income is not seeing the forest for the trees. What we need is a more educated public that can contribute their ideas. All AI can do is lower the barrier to entry, but it does not replace the need for education.

  by sublinear