[mycentstoo]

I am just not having this experience of AI being terribly useful. I don’t program as much in my role but I’ve found it’s a giant time sink. I recognize that many people are finding it incredibly helpful but when I get deeper into a particular issue or topic, it falls very flat.

[alex-moon]

This is my view on it too. Antirez is a Torvalds-level legend as far as I'm concerned, when he speaks I listen - but he is clearly seeing something here that I am not. I can't help but feel like there is an information asymmetry problem more generally here, which I guess is the point of this piece, but I also don't think that's substantially different to any other hype cycle - "What do they know that I don't?" Usually nothing.

[tim333]

A lot of AI optimist views are driven more by Moore's law like advances in the hardware rather than LLM algorithms being that special. Indeed the algorithms need to change really so future AIs can think and learn rather than just be pretrained. If you read Moravec's paper written in 1989 predicting human level AI progress around now (mid 2020s) there's nothing about LLMs or specific algorithms - it's all Moore's law type stuff. But it's proved pretty accurate.

[dsign]

The argument goes like this:

- Today, AI is not incredibly useful and we are not 100% sure that it will improve forever, specially in a way that makes economic sense, but

- Investors are pouring lots of money into it. One should not assume that those investors are not making their due diligence. They are. The figures they have obtained from experts mean that AI is expected to continue improving in the short and medium term.

- Investors are not counting on people using AI to go to Mars. They are betting on AI replacing labor. The slice of the pie that is currently captured by labor, will be captured by capital instead. That's why they are pouring the money with such enthusiasm [^1].

The above is nothing new; it has been constantly happening since the Industrial Revolution. What is new is that AI has the potential to replace all of the remaining economic worth of humans, effectively leaving them out of the economy. Humans can still opt to "forcefully" participate in the economy or its rewards; though it's unclear if we will manage. In terms of pure economic incentives though, humans are destined to become redundant.

[^1]: That doesn't mean all the jobs will go away overnight, or that there won't be new jobs in the short and medium term.

[amanaplanacanal]

Investors are frequently wrong. They aren't getting their numbers from experts, they are getting them from somebody trying to sell them something.

[ThrowawayR2]

> "One should not assume that those investors are not making their due diligence."

The sort of investors who got burned by the 2008 mortgage CDO collapse or the 2000s dotcom bust?