The AI dooooooom thread

[Jacob]

All you people thinking AI is just a speculative waste of resources, I wish I shared your optimism.  Speculative bubbles are painful when they burst, but humanity has survived them plenty of times before.  I'm not sure humanity is ready to survive the AI that delivers on its promises.

Agreed, unfortunately.

[Josquius]

Could be. To an extent I think it's there already. Purposefully bad AI pictures used in an ironic way.

For AIs long term potential - long term AI is of course the end of the world as we know it. Absolutely society breaking.
If it is possible.

LLMs on the other hand are not that. They are a fad bubble which will pop. They won't go away completely. Look at amazon and others with the.com bubble. But the consensus increasingly seems to be   they're a bit of a dead end for AGI.

[Tamas]

There is a Microsoft Teams AI plugin called Facilitator (and Copilot can summarise for you from the transcript obvs). It's actually pretty good when the discussion on the call is easy to summarise and turned  into a list of actions.

I missed a call this morning I wanted to know where things are and how they are getting unfucked, and I went to read the Facilitator summary, which was exactly what I needed, confirmed with my direct report on the call if it was legit what was decided, and that was it.

Certainly has its uses. And people who think project managers just glorified note-takers and meeting organisers may very well conclude they no longer need PMs.

[Syt]

Note taking is definitely a big plus - but as CC pointed out above it probably depends on the topics discussed. Nuanced legal discussion may be more difficult to do accurately compared to our project progress updates (and even then one of us usually goes through it and makes edits before sending them to the other participants ... still a lot better than someone having to dedicate brain power constantly to taking notes).

[DGuller]

In my previous job, I had ChatGPT Enterprise edition, with access to some heavy duty reasoning models.  I used it to develop and document a custom algorithm, and it handled both extremely well.  Unfortunately in my current job all I have is Copilot, which frankly feels like three steps back.  Forget helping with developing a novel algorithm, sometimes just remembering what I was talking about in the previous prompt is a challenge.

[Syt]

We have ChatGPT Enterprise at work and I find its 5.1 model quite useful.

[Admiral Yi]

Which white collar jobs are not at risk?  It's a brave new world. I'm glad I'm not entering the work force right now.

[Baron von Schtinkenbutt]

The vast majority are not at risk, at least in the foreseeable future.  LLMs replacing people is one of the most overhyped aspects of the current systems.  Used properly, they (or rather, the systems they are built into) are productivity enhancers that allow fewer people to do more.  Yes, in a manner of speaking that threatens white collar jobs, but not in a way that's unique in nature or scale to prior technological innovations.  However, LLMs are just not sufficient to do anything more than assist a human.  The human is still necessary in the loop.

That's not going to stop some cheap companies from trying... and failing.

[The Minsky Moment]

All you people thinking AI is just a speculative waste of resources, I wish I shared your optimism.  Speculative bubbles are painful when they burst, but humanity has survived them plenty of times before.  I'm not sure humanity is ready to survive the AI that delivers on its promises.

Those are not exclusive options.

[DGuller]

All you people thinking AI is just a speculative waste of resources, I wish I shared your optimism.  Speculative bubbles are painful when they burst, but humanity has survived them plenty of times before.  I'm not sure humanity is ready to survive the AI that delivers on its promises.

Those are not exclusive options.

They're intended to be exclusive.  If AI is just a speculative waste of resources, then it won't deliver on its promises.  If AI delivers on its promises, then there may be a speculative part to it still, but it wouldn't just be that.

[Admiral Yi]

Joan's point is AI can replace huge swaths of human labor but still not make money.

[The Minsky Moment]

In a world where AI delivers on its promises, some AI companies will probably make some money at some point, but many AI companies will still likely fail. It's quite possible (likely I think) that the trillions of LLM investments are indeed a speculative bubble that will burst, but at the same time it is also possible that out of the ashes of such a crash, AI development will continue and fulfill its promises.   And it's also possible that AI will fulfill its promises but that the AI companies themselves won't be able to monetize that benefit sufficiently for themselves to justify the expense.

[Razgovory]

These people genuinely think they are going to create a technological singularity.  They would destroy the entire economy in their mad quest for immortality.

I remember years ago reading about Thiel funding biotech technology that promised a form of immortality derived from the blood of young people. If it had been fiction I would have derided it as being to obnoxiously didactic a metaphor.

Also these billionaires really do seem to want to set themselves up as demi-gods.

It's weird supervillain stuff.  It's like we put Cobra Commander in control of the economy.

[DGuller]

In a world where AI delivers on its promises, some AI companies will probably make some money at some point, but many AI companies will still likely fail. It's quite possible (likely I think) that the trillions of LLM investments are indeed a speculative bubble that will burst, but at the same time it is also possible that out of the ashes of such a crash, AI development will continue and fulfill its promises.   And it's also possible that AI will fulfill its promises but that the AI companies themselves won't be able to monetize that benefit sufficiently for themselves to justify the expense.

My worry about the case where AI fulfills its promises is a little more existential than the ROI of companies making investments in AI.

[viper37]

Google's Agentic AI wipes user's entire HDD without permission in catastrophic failure — cache wipe turns into mass deletion event as agent apologizes: "I am absolutely devastated to hear this. I cannot express how sorry I am"