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- Hacker News
- It will be interesting to see what kind of progress in biology and medicine they will preview during the fall. He does make a good point that most of the progress so far have not been material in the sense of providing real positive outcomes for ordinary people.
Or even for the HN crowd, when will we see e.g. "Mythos aided research discovers 10 new viable battery technologies"
by Depurator - None?by rimliu
- > He does make a good point that most of the progress so far have not been material in the sense of providing real positive outcomes for ordinary people.
Even worse, it has made a significant number of people's lives worse. Some major, like layoffs, some less major, like PC prices, some are just annoyed by AI slop.
And then Dario himself wouldn't stop yapping about white collar work being gone in X years...
- > Overall my view is that AI is structurally a technology that tends to concentrate power
> Open-weights do help some with this but are nowhere near a sufficient solution
Which is exactly why Anthropic contributes nothing to, and actively pushes for roadblocks and regulations for open weight models. Can't allow any hope to the masses.
Only people with $$$$$ are allowed to touch Fable. Which of course we have have aggressive guardrails for in case you even try to use it for something dangerous like AI model developement. Plus we are going to retain all data submitted to it just in case someone is trying to be sneaky.
by kingstnap - > Only people with $$$$$ are allowed to touch Fable.
This was primarily a clever way to try to shore up their revenue numbers. By preventing folks who don't have seven-to-twelve-figure bank account balances from using the tools that were most expensive to build, they might actually stand to make money from those tools... once they're forced to do accounting that includes the cost to make those tools.
As a bonus, R&D cost for serving the fixed-price-subscription rabble can be massively reduced by providing them with older tools that have had the goop around them tweaked just enough to make the tool's output have a different "flavor". That class of customer will never know that they're being conned.
by simoncion - > something dangerous like AI model developement
It's very dangerous to Anthropic's bottomline!
by quikoa - I really liked their brand position a year ago. But having Boris talk about "Claude's brain" on stage & their other founder pretending AI is sentient in front of the pope - they're coming off more as a religion than a tech company (and this is aside from the obvious model issues they're having).by ben8bit
- That s the thing with all US companies (chinese cos don't seem to go metaphysical)by seydor
- I am skeptical of David. But he is spot on with this comment:
“Yet Dario blames public negativity on a long-standing loss of trust in institutions rather than his own messaging.“
Dario’s arrogance and blind spots are really something to behold.
by jbs789 - I think he's on to something.
Nobody is worried about any AI company in the abstract the way people are worried about other companies in the abstract (e.g. an oil company might ruin the environment just simply as a byproduct of engaging in their core business).
Everybody worried about their government, their utility companies, their employer, their landlord, all the faceless BigCos they do business with, etc, etc. getting their grubby mitts on AI and then using it to screw them even more than they're already being screwed.
The whole system is set up to screw people right now and it does it as fast and as hard as it can. AI is see as bad to the extent that it lets the screwing happen at a higher tempo.
- Any argument about regulation in the US which doesn't mention that China and other countries aren't bound by that regulation should be heavily questioned. Exactly who are you stopping from doing what you don't like?!?
Law abiding US citizens won't be able to run them, but you didn't solve anything other than making sure US citizens pay Sam or Dario.
by xscott - Any arguments that US laws or regulations should apply to people in other countries should be heavily questioned.by blitzar
- As a US citizen I do not care about regulating China, they can figure out themselves. Just as they figured out how to imprison their corrupt CEOs, I'm confident they won't let corporations destroy their society like the US.
I rather let citizens of my country exercise our own authority and agency when deciding what is necessary for good societal outcomes (LLMs aren't necessary).
by shimman - One thing Dario said is important reflecting on (but from another angle): where's the big deliverable from AI? If AI makes us 10x more productive, the 3 years since its popularization were enough for a product that would have taken 30 years to build without AI, for instance.
I'm an AI advocate but that question makes me feel that AI is simply "very useful" rather than being a historical game changer for humanity.
by glimshe - > where's the big deliverable from AI ... AI is simply "very useful" rather than being a historical game changer for humanity.
The last 30 years of tech has been about big, the dot com boom, the next unicorn, the magnificent 7 or 11 or whatever.
The thing is that the missing solutions people want have never been the one sized fits all multi Tennant we need 6 rounds of seed funding kinds of problems.
The "app boom" should have been a clue that smaller, niche services are viable.
IF tech were like construction, then most of HN, most of SF Bay Area, most of "tech" seems to be concerned with building the tallest building, or a massive housing development. Your average office worker is more akin to a home owner, who has a busted outlet, a sticky door, a dripping faucet, they just work around it because the resources to fix it (programers) are going to build the next big thing.
Those workers now have tools to address those problems, themselves.
I have lawyers and writers (far removed from tech) talking to me about cron jobs and scripts they are running that solve real problems for them. AI has allowed them to accomplish this.
These things arent showing up on GitHub. They dont make quarterly reports at a publicly traded company. The mountain(s) of change are happening by stacking grains of sand, not one solid rock.
by zer00eyz - here's how I think of it.
Maximalists: 10x
Minimalists: were always close to 0x individuals, so opinion rejected 99% of the time
Realists: 30-50% productivity gains
by moomoo11 - Right now we are in the golden age where we do the same and take time off. Employers have not yet fully caught up with the workforce. I can't think of people that are not putting less hours this year for the same salaries.by ReptileMan
- I think it's more that it shifts the thought process from "If this is going to take 30 years then we won't bother, because the investment can be spent on things that pay off sooner" to "If we can do this in 3 years then we'll make that investment because that's a good bet."
The way it changes the game is by lowering the cost of making radical bets so we end up trying more moonshots.
by onion2k - First, it's not three years since. The real improvements in programming ability arrived in the last 6-8 months.
Second, the Internet didn't show up much in GDP and similar measures either!
But your point stands. Where are the amazing digital products/stuff? I get that it might take time to arrive as we scale up compute and learn new paradigms. But so much infra already exists (deployment pipeliens, everyone reachable on a smartphone) that we should be seeing something.
by blfr - Definitely something I've come around to as well, even though I am very pro-AI and think it's an amazing technology. But the bottlenecks just hit too hard. I notice every day where my usage of AI is so constrained, by myself and my imagination, by external factors like slow feedback loops (gathering requirements), by the AI still not being good enough for certain details (you need to heavily steer it, give feedback, even in long running agentic sessions).
So yes, many aspects of my job are now 10x as productive, but turns out that improves my overall throughput only very little.
by Sol- - Can only speak for my own project, but can give an example:
After an aquisition earlier this year I got the task of doing an SAP-Integration for the new company, last time I did this 5 years ago it was a 6 month task, but with the experience and skills ive gained since I estimated it would be a 3 month project (with or without AI, most work is just logistics, AI cant help much there).
In those 3 months I was able to not only integrate SAP but also deliver a completely modernised user-facing software for that integration. While I could have written that software myself in a vacuum it would have never been worth it financially, since it would have delayed the launch of the integration by 6+ months. Building the software post-launch of the integration would have easily taken 2.5 years at minimum.
But this is also basically a "spherical cow in a vacuum" scenario, where I was essentially acting as a solo dev, in full operational control of the project, with deep domain knowledge of the topic and an allready fully set up codebase that I knew perfectly while working down ideas I've had in my backlog for 5+ years.
- Anyone saying 10x as a serious claim is clearly using a round number and vibes; however, even if it were so, AI getting popular 3 years ago does not mean what you say.
The earliest used models in this category would easily 10x (what did I just say) the creation of one-off short scripts, but you're not writing a 30-year app out of just a bunch of short scripts.
The METR time horizons graph suggests we can now get 10x (ahem) speedup on solving most coding problems that take us a few hours and about half of problems that take 2 days. Amdahl's law bites: even infinity speedup on half your problems is only 2x overall.
If you let an LLM loose, with a huge budget, what's the biggest artefact it can make before it drowns under the weight of bad decisions? The C compiler and web browser headlines a while back? The maths papers we see now that solve problems which stumped the maths world for decades?
But this is the other side of the same coin: teamwork. One person getting a thing made in twelve months vs a team of a hundred, you can scale up fast with money when you have a proof of concept, and an LLM can make a lot of proofs of a lot of concepts even in free accounts.
by ben_w - I don’t think my people got my previous post but apparently a lot of diseases were on track to being cured regardless of the invention of LLM based AI. One thing that bothers me about this technology is it makes it easy to attribute all effort to it. This not only hurts the ego but also makes it difficult to reason about how effective it is compared to how effective the people using it are.
Secondly, if you look at what Dario has actually written, then the cure to the big conditions like cancer is in his view hopefully going to be a result of scientists working 10x faster and therefore making big Nobel prize paradigm shifting discoveries 10x faster. So Anthropic suggesting “we are going to cure cancer” doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. According to his original vision it looks like a bunch of groups now using AI independently producing breakthroughs which cure cancer.
by GPerson - Just want to say, this comment section on this website would have been unthinkable a few years ago. It’s wild: all the engineers have developed class consciousness. I wonder how that happened?
Anyway, it’s fun to watch, but remember to stay sane guys, be aware of the pendulum dynamics.
- > be aware of the pendulum dynamics.
What do you mean?
by nozzlegear - Some of us have always had a class consciousness, we just tend not to be boisterous about it.
Mine is based on two things:
1. The fact that i grew up in poverty and never want anyone else to suffer that fate.
2. I was raised in a religious tradition that can be accurately described as socialist.
by mekael - The early hacker culture in the 1970s inherited the political leanings of 1960s counterculture, so there’s nothing about being into tech that’s in opposition to class consciousness.by GPerson
- > I wonder how that happened?
My explanation is - the technology is amazing and engineers admired it, but CEOs kept talking about an exponential curve while engineers on the ground started to notice signs of Gartner hype cycle curve.
by maxnevermind - > I wonder how that happened
Layoff.
by raincole - Wild indeed.
It seems like a couple of years ago the HN and LW commentariat had a lot in common, but they’ve drifted so far in opposite directions that they look more like opposing political parties today.
by gibspaulding