That is one thing it could look like which is captured in my examples. We dont see any company like that. Remember that stock valuation is not, in the present day, correlated to any business metric. There are companies with huge valuations that have never netted $1 (like these AI companies, for example). So, even in your narrower example, there are no companies I have heard of that meet its criteria.
There would necessarily be a lag time between layoffs and unchanged productivity. And even then, if we’re being fair, that’s not conclusive evidence of AI being useful; it could just be that they had more employees than they needed.
My point is more that I’m not sure we’d see an obvious sign that AI was changing the market yet.
Elon Musk, the apparent thought leader of the tech sector and mover of markets, claims we will be in a post-scarcity AI-fuelled utopia by 2036. Since his words move the market, clearly the market heeds his words.
In that context, it seems quite modest to expect obvious material gains from using AI by now. When the car was invented, you could prove its utility immediately by getting between to places faster than ever before. When space flight was invented, you could prove its utility by relaying messages around the planet. When insulin were invented, you could prove its utility by curing people bed-ridden awaiting death.
My point is, real paradigm-shifting inventions demonstrate how they’ll do that right away, in an undeniable way. So, AI is either not a paradigm shifting technology, or its not done yet and people are buying a half-baked product.
Elon Musk is an idiot, and you’ve already noted that the market doesn’t track reality.
The paradigm shifting invention was the transformer (the T in GPT). If you’ll forgive a shitty analogy, it’s like someone invented a microscope and you’re asking why we don’t yet have insulin. Not having insulin doesn’t make the microscope useless.
As far as these things go, AI is improving at a breakneck speed-- hence why so many people in the field are begging for a pause in development. We don’t really understand why this technology works as well as if does, and that has a lot of people worried that we’re going to do something dangerous without understanding what we did.
Your example is another one that illustrates my point. When they invented the microscope, they could instantly demonstrate its utility in it’s ability to observe previously invisibly tiny things. The following inventions that enabled are great, but the microscope itself was great, too, and all could see why.
AI is almost all hype. When anyone asks what it can do that was impossible or too difficult before, people point to what they think it will do, yourself included.
So, again, what previously intractable problem does AI solve? Please do not include answers of problems you think it might one day solve. Like the microscope can immediately let you see tiny things, what does the AI let you do that was impossible before? Bonus points if what it does is worth spending a planet’s worth of resources on.
When they invented the microscope, hey could instantly demonstrate its utility in it’s ability to observe previously invisibly tiny things.
I assure you that 400 some odd years ago, most people would not have grasped the utility in the microscope. Just like many people today don’t understand what the transformer has done for machine learning.
But some could, and they could articulate their reasoning. “Machine learning” is not even necessarily a path to anything. Its hard to argue that against your example, which is literally unlocking secrets of the universe.
Again, you’re using 400+ years of hindsight to inform your conclusion. “Looking at small things” doesn’t immediately imply “unlocking the secrets of the universe”, it’s only after hundreds of years of building on that invention that you can easily point to that conclusion.
And admittedly the analogy was not great, I’m just trying to get across that you’re looking at the output of the invention and asking “is that it”? But we’ve only had this technology for a decade or so, and it’s only really been public facing for, what, 4 years?
These various technologies we refer to as “AI” are not yet at the point where they can replace any human at any task, but they can replace some humans at some tasks, and as far as the evidence shows, we can continue to improve it with more training and more compute. They are writing prose well enough to pass as humans, solving math problems we haven’t been able to solve for decades, writing medium complexity code in minutes instead of days-- the technology isn’t solving all the world’s problems and ushering in a post-scarcity utopia, but no one is claiming it is, today. Will it? I doubt it, but that’s more to do with capitalism corrupting everything it touches than anything else.
If you think “AI” is not useful, you’re probably considering a very narrowly defined type of “AI” in a very narrowly defined scenario where AI does not perform well.
Edit: I want to take a second to say that I’ve enjoyed this conversation with you. I can’t say that about many conversations on this topic. This isn’t me ending the conversation.
I’m not even drawing a conclusion anymore. I’m asking for anyone anywhere to point to the previously impossible thing that AI lets me do. Even if that thing is of questionable utility, what is it? I just want an answer to that question.
Then, we can start talking about if that’s worth the cost. Most previous inventions cost someone’s life savings, or corporate focus on technology. This one’s costing us the GDP of South Korea, so it better be good. Like “the microscope” or “the wheel” good.
That is one thing it could look like which is captured in my examples. We dont see any company like that. Remember that stock valuation is not, in the present day, correlated to any business metric. There are companies with huge valuations that have never netted $1 (like these AI companies, for example). So, even in your narrower example, there are no companies I have heard of that meet its criteria.
There would necessarily be a lag time between layoffs and unchanged productivity. And even then, if we’re being fair, that’s not conclusive evidence of AI being useful; it could just be that they had more employees than they needed.
My point is more that I’m not sure we’d see an obvious sign that AI was changing the market yet.
Elon Musk, the apparent thought leader of the tech sector and mover of markets, claims we will be in a post-scarcity AI-fuelled utopia by 2036. Since his words move the market, clearly the market heeds his words.
In that context, it seems quite modest to expect obvious material gains from using AI by now. When the car was invented, you could prove its utility immediately by getting between to places faster than ever before. When space flight was invented, you could prove its utility by relaying messages around the planet. When insulin were invented, you could prove its utility by curing people bed-ridden awaiting death.
My point is, real paradigm-shifting inventions demonstrate how they’ll do that right away, in an undeniable way. So, AI is either not a paradigm shifting technology, or its not done yet and people are buying a half-baked product.
Elon Musk is an idiot, and you’ve already noted that the market doesn’t track reality.
The paradigm shifting invention was the transformer (the T in GPT). If you’ll forgive a shitty analogy, it’s like someone invented a microscope and you’re asking why we don’t yet have insulin. Not having insulin doesn’t make the microscope useless.
As far as these things go, AI is improving at a breakneck speed-- hence why so many people in the field are begging for a pause in development. We don’t really understand why this technology works as well as if does, and that has a lot of people worried that we’re going to do something dangerous without understanding what we did.
Your example is another one that illustrates my point. When they invented the microscope, they could instantly demonstrate its utility in it’s ability to observe previously invisibly tiny things. The following inventions that enabled are great, but the microscope itself was great, too, and all could see why.
AI is almost all hype. When anyone asks what it can do that was impossible or too difficult before, people point to what they think it will do, yourself included.
So, again, what previously intractable problem does AI solve? Please do not include answers of problems you think it might one day solve. Like the microscope can immediately let you see tiny things, what does the AI let you do that was impossible before? Bonus points if what it does is worth spending a planet’s worth of resources on.
I assure you that 400 some odd years ago, most people would not have grasped the utility in the microscope. Just like many people today don’t understand what the transformer has done for machine learning.
But some could, and they could articulate their reasoning. “Machine learning” is not even necessarily a path to anything. Its hard to argue that against your example, which is literally unlocking secrets of the universe.
Again, you’re using 400+ years of hindsight to inform your conclusion. “Looking at small things” doesn’t immediately imply “unlocking the secrets of the universe”, it’s only after hundreds of years of building on that invention that you can easily point to that conclusion.
And admittedly the analogy was not great, I’m just trying to get across that you’re looking at the output of the invention and asking “is that it”? But we’ve only had this technology for a decade or so, and it’s only really been public facing for, what, 4 years?
These various technologies we refer to as “AI” are not yet at the point where they can replace any human at any task, but they can replace some humans at some tasks, and as far as the evidence shows, we can continue to improve it with more training and more compute. They are writing prose well enough to pass as humans, solving math problems we haven’t been able to solve for decades, writing medium complexity code in minutes instead of days-- the technology isn’t solving all the world’s problems and ushering in a post-scarcity utopia, but no one is claiming it is, today. Will it? I doubt it, but that’s more to do with capitalism corrupting everything it touches than anything else.
If you think “AI” is not useful, you’re probably considering a very narrowly defined type of “AI” in a very narrowly defined scenario where AI does not perform well.
Edit: I want to take a second to say that I’ve enjoyed this conversation with you. I can’t say that about many conversations on this topic. This isn’t me ending the conversation.
I’m not even drawing a conclusion anymore. I’m asking for anyone anywhere to point to the previously impossible thing that AI lets me do. Even if that thing is of questionable utility, what is it? I just want an answer to that question.
Then, we can start talking about if that’s worth the cost. Most previous inventions cost someone’s life savings, or corporate focus on technology. This one’s costing us the GDP of South Korea, so it better be good. Like “the microscope” or “the wheel” good.