> The company that creates an AGI first will win and get the most status.
I doubt it. History has shown that credit for an invention often goes to the person or company with superior marketing skills, rather than to the original creator.
In a couple of centuries, people will sincerely believe that Bill Gates invented software, and Elon Musk invented self-driving cars.
Edit: and it's probably not even about marketing skill, but about being so full of oneself to have biographies printed and making others believe how amazing they are.
apples_oranges · 10m ago
And Sam Altman invented AI
begueradj · 11m ago
I agree.
For example, electric cars were around already in the mid 1800s. But some people believe Elon Musk is the original inventor.
demirbey05 · 41m ago
> If an AI can replace these repeated tasks, I could spend more time with my fiancé, family, friends, and dog, which is awesome, and I am looking forward to that.
I could not understand this optimism, aren't we living in a capitalist world ?
_heimdall · 30m ago
I don't think its about capitalism, people have repeatedly shown we simply just don't like idle time over the long run.
Plenty of people could already work less today if they just spent less. Historically any of the last big productivity booms could have similarly let people work less, but here we are.
If AI actually comes about and if AGI replaces humans at most cognitive labor, we'll find some way to keep ourselves busy even if the jobs ultimately are as useless as the pet rock or the Jump to Conclusions Mat (Office Space reference for anyone who hasn't seen it).
chongli · 5m ago
I don’t think it’s that simple. Productivity gains are rarely universal. Much of the past century’s worth of advancement into automation and computing technology has generated enormous productivity gains in manufacturing, communication, and finance industries but had little or no benefit for a lot of human capital-intensive sectors such as service and education.
It still takes basically the same amount of labour hours to give a haircut today as it did in the late 19th century. An elementary school teacher today can still not handle more than a few tens up to maybe a hundred students at the extreme limit. Yet the hairdressing and education industries must still compete — on the labour market — with the industries showing the largest productivity gains. This has the effect of raising wages in these productivity-stagnant industries and increasing the cost of these services for everyone, driving inflation.
Inflation is the real time-killer, not a fear of idleness. The cost of living has gone up for everyone — rather dramatically, in nominal terms — without even taking housing costs into account.
smokel · 7m ago
It's slightly more complicated than that. If people work less, they make less money, and that means they can't buy a house, to name just one example. Housing is not getting any cheaper for a myriad of reasons. The same goes for healthcare, and even for drinking beer.
People could work less, but it's a group effort. As long as some narcissistic idiots who want more instead of less are in charge, this is not going to change easily.
dude250711 · 50m ago
It could have been better if the entire codebase could always be provided to AI as the context. Otherwise, specifying exactly what you want is one step away from just doing it yourself.
> As a manager, AI is really nice to get a summary of how everything is going at the company and what tasks everyone is working on and the status of the tasks, instead of having refinement meetings to get status updates on tasks.
I do not understand why they are not marketing some "GPT Middle Manager" to the executive boards so that they could cut that fat. Surely that is a huge untapped cost-cutting potential?
anonzzzies · 5m ago
Cannot be worse than almost all human managers, so agreed. I am a terrible manager myself; i'm a good ceo/cto, making profits and keeping things running for almost no money, but managing i'm terrible at. And I haven't seen many who couldn't be replaced by a piece of cardboard. There are exceptions, but AI's can just as well do terrible team management while keeping their upper managers/c-levels busy with nonsense documents as is the standard for humans too. Indeed yesterday I wrote on HN that this is what LLMs are VERY good for; generating ENORMOUS piles of paper to give to all types of (middle) management to make them feel valued.
justanotherjoe · 6m ago
The obvious next step is where you can easily put new knowledge inside the parameters of the model itself.
I want the AI to know my codebase the same way it knows the earth is round. Without any context fed to it each time.
Instead we have this weird Memento-esque setup where you have to give it context each time.
nikolayasdf123 · 45m ago
they are already doing that. full-steam on. just look at HSBC made their goal to layoff middle-managers. and so does Google, Microsoft, others.
watwut · 8m ago
We already had that cycle with agile. I predict half baked models, chaos, then backslash with hiring even more managers combining models and management into one large innefective bundle.
The ones profiting the most will be consultancies designed to protect the upper management reputation.
lowsong · 38m ago
> the future of software engineering will inevitably have more AI within it
Probably not. We're deep in the hype bubble, so AI is strongly overused. Once the bubble pops and things calm down, some use-cases may well emerge from the ashes but it'll be nowhere near as overused as it is now.
> AI has become a race between countries and companies, mostly due to status. The company that creates an AGI first will win and get the most status.
There's a built-in assumption here that AGI is not only possible but inevitable. We have absolutely no evidence that's the case, and the only people saying we're even remotely close are tech CEOs who's entire business model depends on people believing that AGI is around the corner.
rco8786 · 36m ago
> We're deep in the hype bubble, so AI is strongly overused
I don't think these things are really that correlated. In fact, kind of the opposite. Hype is all talk, not actual usage.
I think this will turn out more like the internet itself. Wildly overhyped and underused when the dotcom bubble burst. But over the coming years and decades it grew steadily and healthily until it was everywhere.
Agreed re: AGI though.
codingdave · 25m ago
That is not how the dotcom bubble burst. Internet usage was growing fast before, during, and after the bubble. The bubble was about silly investments into it that had no business model - that investment insanity is what burst, not overall usage.
tovej · 12m ago
Certain parts of what we call AI will definitely be used more in the future: facial recognition, surrogate models, video generation.
I don't, however, see LLMs as consumer products being that prevalent in the future as currently. The cost of using LLMs is kept artificially low for consumers at the moment. That is bound to hit a wall eventually, at the very least when the bubble pops. At least that seems like an obvious analysis to make at this point in time.
I doubt it. History has shown that credit for an invention often goes to the person or company with superior marketing skills, rather than to the original creator.
In a couple of centuries, people will sincerely believe that Bill Gates invented software, and Elon Musk invented self-driving cars.
Edit: and it's probably not even about marketing skill, but about being so full of oneself to have biographies printed and making others believe how amazing they are.
I could not understand this optimism, aren't we living in a capitalist world ?
Plenty of people could already work less today if they just spent less. Historically any of the last big productivity booms could have similarly let people work less, but here we are.
If AI actually comes about and if AGI replaces humans at most cognitive labor, we'll find some way to keep ourselves busy even if the jobs ultimately are as useless as the pet rock or the Jump to Conclusions Mat (Office Space reference for anyone who hasn't seen it).
It still takes basically the same amount of labour hours to give a haircut today as it did in the late 19th century. An elementary school teacher today can still not handle more than a few tens up to maybe a hundred students at the extreme limit. Yet the hairdressing and education industries must still compete — on the labour market — with the industries showing the largest productivity gains. This has the effect of raising wages in these productivity-stagnant industries and increasing the cost of these services for everyone, driving inflation.
Inflation is the real time-killer, not a fear of idleness. The cost of living has gone up for everyone — rather dramatically, in nominal terms — without even taking housing costs into account.
People could work less, but it's a group effort. As long as some narcissistic idiots who want more instead of less are in charge, this is not going to change easily.
> As a manager, AI is really nice to get a summary of how everything is going at the company and what tasks everyone is working on and the status of the tasks, instead of having refinement meetings to get status updates on tasks.
I do not understand why they are not marketing some "GPT Middle Manager" to the executive boards so that they could cut that fat. Surely that is a huge untapped cost-cutting potential?
I want the AI to know my codebase the same way it knows the earth is round. Without any context fed to it each time.
Instead we have this weird Memento-esque setup where you have to give it context each time.
The ones profiting the most will be consultancies designed to protect the upper management reputation.
Probably not. We're deep in the hype bubble, so AI is strongly overused. Once the bubble pops and things calm down, some use-cases may well emerge from the ashes but it'll be nowhere near as overused as it is now.
> AI has become a race between countries and companies, mostly due to status. The company that creates an AGI first will win and get the most status.
There's a built-in assumption here that AGI is not only possible but inevitable. We have absolutely no evidence that's the case, and the only people saying we're even remotely close are tech CEOs who's entire business model depends on people believing that AGI is around the corner.
I don't think these things are really that correlated. In fact, kind of the opposite. Hype is all talk, not actual usage.
I think this will turn out more like the internet itself. Wildly overhyped and underused when the dotcom bubble burst. But over the coming years and decades it grew steadily and healthily until it was everywhere.
Agreed re: AGI though.
I don't, however, see LLMs as consumer products being that prevalent in the future as currently. The cost of using LLMs is kept artificially low for consumers at the moment. That is bound to hit a wall eventually, at the very least when the bubble pops. At least that seems like an obvious analysis to make at this point in time.