[reducesuffering]

We're fast approaching the point that any value someone can provide through a digital interface could be better done by a model. What do we use digital interfaces for? Practically everything.

Oh well not being a plumber, electrician, or farmer... but our society's current productivity, technology, automation reduced our need for 80% of the population needing to be farmers to now 1.3% in the US. Can you imagine what the equivalent of 1 billion digital engineers unlocks in understanding and implementing robotics?

[sidibe]

Yes when the knowledge jobs are all done best by AI the rest will follow shortly. we will need to adapt to being "useless" as far as work goes and find other sources of worth. There's still a lot of people who want to compare it to Bitcoin hype around here, IMO the next few years everything is going to change way faster than than it ever has.

For the record I always thought Kurzweil and that crowd was clowns, now I think I was the wrong one

[hansmayer]

> IMO the next few years everything is going to change way faster Honestly, after hearing this for the past 20 years (ever since ML and LLMs became a thing), it is actually more like the level-5 autonomous car hype and less like Bitcoin. Only that the driverless car hype never required such a humongous investment bubble, as does the Statistical-Text-Generator-as-AI one.

[alpaca128]

Meanwhile I haven't seen any real progress that I'd care about in a while.

Is GPT-4xyz better than the last one? I'm sure some benchmark numbers say that. But the number of applications where occasional hallucinations don't matter is very small, and where it matters nothing really changed. Companies are trying to use it for customer support but that predictably turned out to be a legal risk. Klarna went all-in on AI and regrets it now.

Some media are talking about Microsoft writing 30% of their new code with AI, but what Nadella actually said is less impressive: "maybe 20-30% of the code that is inside of our repos today in some of our projects are probably all written by software". Which, coincidentally, is the ratio of code that can be autocompleted by an IDE without LLM, according to Jetbrains.

I have yet to see any evidence that anything will change way faster than it ever has, aside from the readiness of many younger people to use it in everyday life for things it really shouldn't be used.

[sidibe]

Yes they have gotten better. If you give Gemini 2.5 the right context it seems to solve whatever. Drop in the folder + docs and it tends to be right about how to proceed now. I think people who don't find LLMs useful now aren't trying with the right context.

[Der_Einzige]

I’m with you. Weak version of a singularity seems likely. Recursive self improvement isn’t just possible, it’s inevitable. Models are capable of extrapolation, but they don’t even need it to do good interpolation which itself is enough to get us recursive self improvement.

I tend to think that it’ll have an optimistic ending. The key to solving most political problems is eliminating scarcity.

[tuatoru]

A challenge for people who think this way: be first in line to have a robot change your six-month-old daughter's nappy.

[sidibe]

Now that'd be crazy, like letting a Tesla drive you around in the back seat.

Give it a decade though and people won't think twice about it, though I do hope we'd still do that kind of thing ourselves