it’s getting to the point where I notice people say it a lot, especially IRL now for whatever reason recently.
And for clarity I’m not in research or anything, so these people just mean ‘LLM/image gen’, not utilities like OCR or (usually not) transcription.
Some have argued it’s just more efficient (which I can kind of get), while others think you’re actively hindering your intelligence somehow.
On the first point:
I’ve tried it occasionally to see how it compares to my own skill, and while it produces a functional result, it’s always very derivative work to the point where you can find things with the exact same names of other ‘public’ (but not libre) works, and often isn’t the ideal solution to what it targets. So I can see how you can get things out of it, but it never felt really that profound to me.
But for the second… isn’t this supposed to be the tool for people to do things they aren’t experienced in? If anything, you probably need to be able to understand how to write pertaining to the task so the token probabilities are biased toward writing from that area.
And even then, if all you end up doing is prompting AI, then wouldn’t you ultimately serve no purpose outside of being glorified QA?
I guess I’m trying to figure out what exactly non-users would be ‘falling behind’ in that affects them more than those who use AI?
It means they preach bullshit.
What society before us had AI, and how much more successful were they? Einstein didn’t need AI. Newton didn’t need AI. Oppenheimer didn’t need AI… The list goes on. Who does, other than the lazy and those who can’t think for themselves?
im going to put it easy: You work doing some kind of research or whatever on daily basis. You used to do that task in maybe 5-6 hours, same as your colleagues. Now all your colleagues use AI and do the same task in about 20min (even if the result is crap it does have some good takes), so the CEO sees you are the only one who doesn’t perform equally because you choose not to, and you’re fired.
So yeah… it’s crap, it will make things worse, but for now you have to use it wheter you like it or not.
100% this in corpo developer jobs.
We need to pin this answer on every post about AI in the workplace.
My experience of a decade in corporate US companies:
Quantity > Quality; no matter what the marketing line says. People who speak a lot in meetings and send a lot of emails are regarded as better at their job, substance is only somewhat relevant. And LLMs are great at producing lots and lots of well sounding slop.
They think there’s some skill necessary to use LLMs for some reason
It’s a desperate marketing strategy based on the classic “peer pressure” technique. “Everyone’s doing it. You don’t want to be the only one who isn’t.”
They think AI is as life changing to our society as the internet is as steam engines were long ago. They’re trying to promote its use because it doesn’t have a good specific use for day to day. If anything AI has made the internet MUCH worse, there’s so much AI Slop media on youtube and similar that I don’t look at much new stuff anymore because of it.
Ai is more like adding lead to gasoline; it does stuff we could already do ever so slightly better, but for an immense and irreversible cost.
i wouldn’t say better, a better analogy, is cheaper gasoline, with worst results than more expensive gasoline.
honestly, depending on how it affects media in the future, it could really have a similar effect on us, even if it doesn’t directly poison people. Poorly presented information/misinformation has, and will certainly continue to result in so many preventable tragedies.
Remember NFTs? when people were buying pictures of cartoon monkeys and people were saying, if you don’t buy it now you will be left behind
Yeah, BUT only YOU own the gorilla with the pink cowboy hat! You just gotta understand NFTs man! /s
NFT was literally a foreshadowing of what was to come. You know that villain hero beats up at the start of the film but main villain is someone else?
Ah yeah, remember when NFTs solved a millennium prize? That was crazy. Such a fad tho.
AI didn’t solve the navier stokes equation; the mathematician using an LLM did.
jfc grow up.
What mathematician?
OpenAI heard that a millennium prize was potentially about to be claimed by an Anthropic researcher and assigned it to a swarm of 10,000 autonomous agents at a cost of an estimated $15 million in inference.
We used a system of coordinating agents powered by our internal model. The agents had access to tools such as the ability to read from a cached version of the internet and the ability to run code. Agents were subdivided into groups with the ability to communicate within the group. The groups varied in size, and the group that produced the Navier–Stokes resolution involved on the order of 10,000 concurrent agents.
There isn’t a mathematician sitting there working with a LLM. OpenAI’s solution seems to have been a brute force and mostly autonomous event to try to get ahead of other “mathematicians with their LLMs.”
how fucking dumb are you that you think there wasn’t a mathematician involved in solving one of math’s greatest challenges?
“Mathematicians Tristan Buckmaster and Levent Alpöge spent about a year studying a related version of the Navier-Stokes equations with the assistance of AI. Their work showed that a solution in the friction-free version of the equations can develop a singularity in finite time, a result often described as mathematical “blow-up”.”
furthermore, OpenAI’s solution is almost certainly built upon this work.
“The most consequential part of OpenAI’s Navier-Stokes claim remains unverified. If its model has genuinely produced a valid proof of the full problem, it could represent an extraordinary moment for both mathematics and AI. But until the proof is made available for scrutiny, questions over its origins are likely to remain just as important as the claimed breakthrough itself.”
OpenAI can end the discussion by making the proof available but hasn’t.
and I’ll add:
It does not appear to be directly built upon it, and they are allegedly in the process of submitting “substantial progress” on the Hodge conjecture and setting aside the inference to try the same approach on the other prize problems.
Give it a week or two and let’s see.
If even a single other problem falls, it seems really unlikely the process by which Navier-Stokes was solved relied upon allegedly copying the work of the mathematicians involved in it, and that instead massive amounts of inference with current internal SotA models is sufficient.
You don’t suddenly solve two different problems by relying on the work of a mathematician working on only one of them.
Edit: And just to explain Tao’s comment — he’s not saying “oh, they copied the work of my colleague.” He’s saying “holy crap, if tech companies are going to be adversarial and spend millions of dollars on inference to scoop my field when they hear we are getting close, it becomes risky to share that we’re making progress on a given problem because then the lab can say to their AI ‘here’s millions in tokens, go work on X problem there’s probably a solution.’”
His quote strengthens my point that this was accomplished without human mathematicians working on it, as that’s effectively the core of his point.
I think when people talk about “falling behind” they’re actually talking about missing out on the initial gold rush of novel uses, quick cash grabs, and straight up scams that a lot of people are making short term money on.
You’ll fall behind in the race to the lowest IQ as they all turn their thinking over to AI and get lazier while you continue to exercise your brain.
Fuck 'em.
its already been shown HS and college grads have even poorer reading writing skills due to it.
Levergism. To get what you want in the world you need power to get power you need leverage to the keys to power.
For working class folks that tends to be in the form of withholding labor, providing labor both of which are dictated by supply and demand. So learning a specialty in an in demand field or getting/making tools or skills that make you more demand is common technique. (Organizing with others to be noted also a huge way to do this)
They are arguing that learning AI is like learning to drive a forklift or an excavator. Like sure you could use a shovel or set up pullies but it’s just faster and thus more valuable to use those tools.
The difference being we don’t actually know what tools and varients of those tools actually make sense. So it’s like saying you need to learn to use motors to a 1900s factor worker.
This is so spot on. VFD’s revolutionized manufacturing, but telling that to someone in the 1900 would have been crazy.
They mean that they have lost all ability to think for themselves.
They (pretend to) believe, either due to experience or marketing or a combination, that AI* will be such a ubiquitous tool within their lifetime that “not using AI” would be like “not using electricity”. There are people that do not use electricity, even when it is available, today, but they are broadly considered “behind” the times and out of touch with broader (including global) society. AI advocates are unlikely to always have the same idea about exactly what the advantages are, though speed is often among them.
The actual scientific studies we have done are limited, but so far do not back up these claims. For example, AI assisted programmers self-report being faster, but are actually slower at the same tasks than a similar cohort without AI.
I have a fairly strong anti-AI bias, but my limited experiences with them have been quite poor. Maybe I’m just asking the “wrong” questions, but my experiences have had them either give an response that is internally inconsistent, contains easily refuted factual inaccuracies, or (for tasks with no reality/logic testing) absolutely the least creative, most middle-of-the-road text. I’m also aware of the human rights abuses that Amnesty International has reported around generative AI, the copyright “minefield” around models where you do not know all of the training data, and how we’ve lost at least a decade of sustainability goals because of the desire for “more compute”.
So, keep my bias in mind when considering my reply. I might already be “falling behind”.
I can think of some ways to use an LLM that are interesting to me, but for now I’m staying away from the tech until the bubble bursts and the hype disappears. It’ll be easier to make informed decisions about what, if any, to use then.
(If it really does improve society, I’m sure I can be retrained then, or at least I can be taken care of one AI-incompatibility is recognized as a disability. /s)
AI: They probably can’t define this term, but likely to have a specific product in mind.
People who say that don’t mean anything. They are either trying to sell something or repeating bullshit they heard somewhere.
It really is that simple.
And remember, the AI salesmen will never, ever, define “AI”. They can’t, because the minute they do, their product sales will evaporate. If all you have is vaporware, you desperately need to pass it off as something else.
yeah, imho it’s AI slop junkies making excuses for their own laziness and incompetence.
AI is a tool. Learning to wield it effectively is a skill. What they’re saying is that if you don’t learn it now, you’ll have to learn it later when everyone is an expert and you’ll still be a beginner.
IMO it’s a bit like computers. I imagine at some point AI-resistant people will be like the “not computer people” that still do everything using paper and faxes.
I know every 2-3 years there’s a new hype in tech that eventually fizzes out: Web 2.0, social media, virtual reality, cryptocurrency, etc. All of them were supposed to revolutionize the world, but not all of them actually did. I think AI is a lot more like social media than crypto; it’s here to stay. I think the best possible outcome at this point is that the open-source models eventually get good enough and small enough to run on our local hardware, but things sadly don’t seem headed that way…
I think AI is a lot more like social media than crypto; it’s here to stay.
Do you think that comparison means that it’s a positive thing? Social media did a lot of damage.
Yeah, I choose that comparison intentionally. Social media was seen as good early on, but got enshittified beyond recognition. Shitty as it is, it’s still very much a necessity in modern life (see: institutions using it to broadcast information, non-tech people using it to communicate and organize events, etc).
AI will be similar, it’s already changed how I work: developing software now is much more about managing the process than writing code. I don’t mind that much; writing code was never the fun part for me. I also wanted to go into management at some point, but not like this… I’m also worried about the future of the profession; how are we going to create new senior devs if there are no juniors today?
Where do they say it is a positive thing?
They are saying it is here to stay. Whether it is like the common cold or the vaccine is up to you.
If like you can’t drive a car, that makes it harder to find a good paying job.
