Technology

Starting this conversation with Sam Altman is like showing up at a funeral in a clowncar

At one time software developers might spend days setting up the framework of a new project, and now an LLM can do the bulk of the work in minutes.

No and no. Have you ever coded anything?

Cool, know what job could easily be wiped out? Management. Sam Altman is a manager.

Therefore, Sam Altman doesn't do real work. Fuck you, asshole.

CEO isn't an actual job either, it's just the 21st century's titre de noblesse.

At one time software developers might spend days setting up the framework of a new project, and now an LLM can do the bulk of the work in minutes.

I'd not put an LLM in charge of developing a framework that is meant to be used in any sort of production environment. If we're talking about them setting up the skeleton of a project, then templates have already been around for decades at this point. You also don't really set up new projects all that often.

Says the guy who hadn't worked a day in their life

Sam Altman is a huckster, not a technologist. As such, I don't really care what he says about technology. His purpose has always been to transfer as much money as possible from investors into his own pocket before the bubble bursts. Anything else is incidental.

I am not entirely writing off LLMs, but very little of the discussion about them has been rational. They do some things fairly well and a lot of things quite poorly. It would be nice if we could just focus on the former.

Talking psychology, please stop calling it AI. This raises unrealistic expectations. They are Large Language Models.

Executive positions are probably the easiest to replace with AI.

1. AI will listen to the employees
2. They will try to be helpful by providing context and perspective based on information the employee might not have.
3. They will accept being told they are wrong and update their advice.
4. They will leave the employee to get the job done, trusting that the employee will get back to them if they need more help.

What do we need the mega rich for anyway? They aren't creative and easily replaced with AI at this point.

You know what, he actually wouldn't be horrificly wrong if he were actually pushing for something there. Lets say hypothetically our jobs, aren't real work, and it's no big deal that they are replaced.... the actual intents of progression of technology... was originally that when the ratio of work needed to be done and people shifts... we'd work less for more pay etc... but no we just capitalism it and say "labor is in high supply, so we need to cut it's price until people can find use for it".

Sam, I say this will all my heart…

Fuck you very kindly. I’m pretty sure what you do is not “a real job” and should be replaced by AI.

says the guy who never did real work in his life

The problem is the capitalist investor class, by and large, determines what work will be done, what kinds of jobs there will be, and who will work those jobs. They are becoming increasingly out of touch with reality as their wealth and power grows and seem to be trying to mold the world into something, somewhere along the lines of what Curtis Yarven advocates for, that most people would consider very dystopian.

This discussion is also ignoring the fact that currently, 95% of AI projects fail, and studies show that LLM use hurts the productivity of programmers. But yeah, there will almost surely be breakthroughs in the future that will produce more useful AI tech; nobody knows what the timeline for that is though.

If OpenAI gets wiped out, maybe it wasn’t even a “real company” to start with

Can't AI replace Sam Altman?

He doesn't know Jobs was wiped out by cancer?

To be fair, a lot of jobs in capitalist societies are indeed pointless. Some of them even actively do nothing but subtract value from society.

That said, people still need to make a living and his piece of shit artificial insanity is only making it more difficult. How about stop starving people to death and propose solutions to the problem?

creating value

This kind of pseudo-science is a problem.

There is no such thing as "value". People serve capital so they don't starve to death. There will always be a need for servants. In particular capital needs massive guard labor to violently enforce privilege and inequality.

The technologies falsely hyped as "AI" are no different. It's just another computer program used by capital to hoard privilege and violently control people. The potential for unemployment is mostly just more bullshit. These grifters are literally talking about how "AI" will battle the anti-christ. Insofar as some people might maybe someday lost some jobs, that's been the way that capitalism works for centuries. The poor will be enlisted, attacked, removed, etc. as usual.

I have been working with computers, and networks, and the internet since the 1980s. Over this span of 40-ish years, "how I work" has evolved dramatically through changes in how computers work and more dramatically through changes in information availability. In 1988 if you wanted to program an RS-232 port to send and receive data, you read books. You physically traveled to libraries, or bookstores - maybe you might mail order one, but that was even slower. Compared to today the relative costs to gain the knowledge to be able to perform the task were enormous, in time invested, money spent, and physical resources (paper, gasoline, vehicle operating costs).

By 20 years ago, the internet had reformulated that equation tremendously. Near instant access to worldwide data, organized enough to be easier to access than a traditional library or bookstore, and you never needed to leave your chair to get it. There was still the investment of reading and understanding the material, and a not insignificant cost of finding the relevant material through search, but the process was accelerated from days or more to hours or less, depending on the nature of the learning task.

A year ago, AI hallucination rates made them curious toys for me - too unreliable to be of net practical value. Today, in the field of computer programming, the hallucination rate has dropped to a very interesting point: almost the same as working with a not-so-great but still useful human colleague. The difference being: where a human colleague might take 40 hours to perform a given task (not that the colleague is slow, just it's a 40 hour task for an average human worker), the AI can turn around the same programming task in 2 hours or less.

Humans make mistakes, they get off on their own tracks and waste time following dead ends. This is why we have meetings. Not that meetings are the answer to everything, but at least they keep us somewhat aware of what other members of the team are doing. That not so great programmer working on a 40 hour task is much more likely to create a valuable product if you check in with them every day or so, see "how's it going", help them clarify points of confusion, check their understanding and direction of work completed so far. That's 4 check points of 15 minutes to an hour in the middle of the 40 hour process. My newest AI colleagues are ripping through those 40 hour tasks in 2 hours, impressive, and when I don't put in the additional 2 hours of managing them through the process, they get off the rails, wrapped around the axles, unable to finish a perfectly reasonable task because their limited context windows don't keep all the important points in focus throughout the process. A bigger difficulty is that I don't get 23 hours of "offline wetware processing" between touch points to refine my own understanding of the problems and desired outcomes.

Humans have developed software development processes to help manage human shortcomings, humans' limited attention spans and memory. We still out-perform AI in some of this context window span thing, but we have our own non-zero hallucination rates. Asking an AI chatbot to write a program one conversational prompt at a time only gets me so far. Providing an AI with a more mature software development process to follow gets much farther. AI isn't following these processes (that it helped to translate from human concepts into its own language of workflows, skills, etc.) 100% perfectly, I catch it skipping steps in simple 5 step workflows, but like human procedures, there's a closed loop procedure improvement procedure to help perform better in the future.

Perhaps most importantly, the procedures are constantly reminding AI to be "self aware" of its context window limitations, do RAG (research augmented generation) of best practices for context management, DRY (reduce through non-repetition and use of references to single points of truth) its own procedures and documentation it generates. Will I succeed in having AI rebuild a 6 month project I did five years back, doing it better this time - expanding its scope to what would have been a year long development effort if I had continued doing it solo? Unclear, I'm two weeks in and I feel like I'm about where I was after two weeks of development last time, but it also feels like I have a better foundation to complete the bigger scope this time using the AI tools, and there's that tantalizing possibility that at any point now it might just take off and finish it by itself.

This guy needs to find Luigi.

I am starting to dislike Altman spam more than Elmo spam.

Regarding the philosophical points, there is some truth to the arguments, but one thing is absolutely certain (you can have zero knowledge of "AI" services to know that), you can't trust Americans in such matters.

I agree with the sentiment, as bad as it feels to agree with Altman about anything.

I'm working as a software developer, working on the backend of the website/loyalty app of some large retailer.

My job is entirely useless. I mean, I'm doing a decent job keeping the show running, but (a) management shifts priorities all the time and about 2/3 of all the "super urgent" things I work on get cancelled before then get released and (b) if our whole department would instantly disappear and the app and webside would just be gone, nobody would care. Like, literally. We have an app and a website because everyone has to have one, not because there's a real benefit to anyone.

The same is true for most of the jobs I worked in, and about most jobs in large corporations.

So if AI could somehow replace all these jobs (which it can't), nothing of value would be lost, apart from the fact that our society requires everyone to have a job, bullshit or not. And these bullshit jobs even tend to be the better-paid ones.

So AI doing the bullshit jobs isn't the problem, but people having to do bullshit jobs to get paid is.

If we all get a really good universal basic income or something, I don't think most people would mind that they don't have to go warm a seat in an office anymore. But since we don't and we likely won't in the future, losing a job is a real problem, which makes Altman's comment extremely insensitive.

I've worked for big corporations that employ a lot of people. Every job has a metric showing how much money every single task they do creates. Believe me. They would never pay you if your tasks didn't generate more money than they need to pay you to do the task.

That's rich coming from the leader in the field of manufacturing demand out of whole cloth.

...and still they are throwing money at him, as fast as they can.

Mistake of the century.

Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.

-- The Orange Catholic Bible

Also, that pompous chucklefuck can go fuck himself. There are people who could barely feed themselves at less than a couple dollars per day.

That would actually be true if companies were run by the people doing the work.

Apart from questionable quality of the result, a big issue to me about LLMs is the way it substitutes human interaction with other humans. Which is one of the most fundamental way humans learn, innovate and express themselves.

No technological innovation replaced human interaction with a facsimile, that way before.