I've always thought of myself as more "centrist" (feel free to make fun of me), but seeing so many tech CEOs cheer for layoffs and destruction of the job market has been a bit of a wake up call. Also just being confronted with the sheer idiocy of these people. They are making hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but they barely understand the tech they are cheering for. They act as though being broadly "bullish on AI" and being overly enthusiastic about its short-term potential was some kind of visionary stance, when in fact they are just repeating the same ideas as every other idiot in the silicon valley VC bubble.
My personal bet would be that in the medium term, there will be a reversal of the idiotic belief that you can immediately just lay off developers because of LLMs. If your developers are more productive because of LLMs, you still have an advantage by having more developers than the competition. There's also a lot of institutional knowledge that's just not documented. You fire key people, you can cripple your organization.
In the longer term, I think AI will eventually take jobs, and unfortunately, it will have major negative societal impact. I doubt that our governments will be proactive in trying to anticipate this. They will just play damage control. There's probably going to be an anti-AI social movement. You'll have the confluence of more and more disinformation and AI slop online along with more and more job loss. There are probably going to be riots. Some people think UBI is inevitable. I think the problem is that if the government puts UBI in place, they will only give you the minimum necessary so that you don't starve. Just enough to afford to rent a bedroom, eat processed food and stay online all day.
> imbue it with the intrinsic desire to keep humans around, doing human things.
It's not the AI you have to convince, it's your government and the people running tech companies. Dario Amodei was cheering for AI to take all programming jobs (along with the others). If that happened, it would be an unmitigated disaster for millions of people. Imagine a student who comes out of a CS major with tons of student debt. How much sympathy does Dario feel for this person? Getting him to STFU would be a good first step.
> the political will to stop AI development
The reason that's not likely is that it's an arms race. You stop AI research here, but how can you trust that China and Russia are doing the same? Unlike nuclear bombs, the potential harms are less tangible.
> Imagine a student who comes out of a CS major with tons of student debt. How much sympathy does Dario feel for this person? Getting him to STFU would be a good first step.
I don't need to imagine this student, I'm friends with some who are going through this right now. They graduated almost a year ago and haven't found work yet. One of them jokes about suicide often and I don't know how to help him
The social contract between labour and capital has been frayed for a long time, but it is near breaking now. It's going to get worse, maybe a lot worse, before it gets better. If it ever does get better
That's the direction the field is already going with "agents". People want autonomous AI agents that are capable of acting independently and that have more and more capabilities. For example, something like Claude code, but that acts as a sidekick that is constantly running, and able to act without being prompted. That's what people are imagining when they talk about teams of agents. You act as a manager, but your coding agents are off working on various features and only check in periodically.
First, believe it or not, 3 years is not that long. It's also not a given that LeCun was given the resources he needed to work on this tech at Meta. Zuck wanted another llama.
Second, AMI Labs just secured a billion in funding, and while that's a lot of money, it's literally just a fraction of the yearly salary they are paying to Wang. Big tech companies are literally throwing tens of billions to keep doing the same thing, just on a bigger scale. Why not try something else once in a while?
This would be an expensive benchmark to run on a regular basis, though I guess for the big AI labs it's nothing. Code quality is hard to objectively measure, however.
Maybe not a particularly astute observation, but what I've seen in 10 years of investing is that the stock market seems to like to do the opposite of what most people expect. There's probably a game theoretic explanation to this, but as you seem to be suggesting, it basically comes down to: if the stock market was easy to predict and everyone could easily anticipate its movement, then everyone would make money, and this isn't really possible. There are big fish trying to take your money. The people selling you stocks or buying stocks from you do so because they think they are making the better move.
IMO we'll see a correction some time after people get used to the crash not coming. Maybe the narrative will shift back to "money printing means it can't crash" for a while, the market will go "risk on" and then we'll get a surprise correction.
3% is considered a "safe withdrawal rate" for stock investments, not so much if you have the money just sitting in a bank account, but you're right nevertheless. You can do whatever you want with that kind of money.
My personal bet would be that in the medium term, there will be a reversal of the idiotic belief that you can immediately just lay off developers because of LLMs. If your developers are more productive because of LLMs, you still have an advantage by having more developers than the competition. There's also a lot of institutional knowledge that's just not documented. You fire key people, you can cripple your organization.
In the longer term, I think AI will eventually take jobs, and unfortunately, it will have major negative societal impact. I doubt that our governments will be proactive in trying to anticipate this. They will just play damage control. There's probably going to be an anti-AI social movement. You'll have the confluence of more and more disinformation and AI slop online along with more and more job loss. There are probably going to be riots. Some people think UBI is inevitable. I think the problem is that if the government puts UBI in place, they will only give you the minimum necessary so that you don't starve. Just enough to afford to rent a bedroom, eat processed food and stay online all day.
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