[keyle]

I'd help build Gas City and Gas State, and Gas Country if that would mean we actually would solve the things AI promised to solve. All sickness, famine, wealth ...

The problem is, we're just fidgeting yolo-fizzbuzz ad nauseam.

The return on investment at the moment is probably one of the worst in the history of human investments.

AI does improve over time, still today, but we're going to run out of planet before we get there...

[ViscountPenguin]

As of yet, the AI models doing important work are still pretty specialized. I'd be happy to pitch in to run something like an open source version of alpha-fold, but I'm not aware of any such projects.

I have trouble seeing LLMs making meaningful progress on those frontiers without reaching ASI, but I'd be happy to be wrong.

[Terr_]

I think part of the problem/difference is that all "important work" needs to be auditable and understood by humans. We need to be able to fix bugs, and not just roll the dice and hoping that a lack of symptoms means everything is cured.

[camgunz]

Even alphafold generated a bunch of slop,like impossible proteins and such.

[alecco]

That doesn't make any sense.

Yegge named it Gas Town as in "refinery" because the main job for the human at this stage is reviewing the generated code and merging. "

The whole point of the project is to be in control. Yegge even says the programmers who can read/review a lot of code fast are the new 10x (paraphrasing).

[colin_jack]

"I’ve never seen the code, and I never care to, which might give you pause"

https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...

[alecco]

Oof, he changed that. I stand corrected.

[colin_jack]

Yeah and its not a big focus of the posts which is interesting. I'd have thought he'd spend a lot more time talking about the workflow he's using, the specs/feature definitions he's writing, and so on.

[soulofmischief]

The Wright brothers are idiots, if it were me I'd have made a supersonic jet from the get go and not waste my time mucking around with prototypes.

[ncruces]

The prototype phase meant data centers are now measured in MW instead of TFLOPS.

At a time where we were desperate to reduce emissions, data centers now consume around 20% of the energy consumed by the entire aviation sector, with consumption is rising at 15% YoY.

Never mind the water required to cool them, or the energy and resources required to build them, the capital allocation, and the opportunity cost of not allocating all of that to something else.

And this is, your words, the prototype phase.

[neoromantique]

Emissions and Energy consumed do not necessarily have to be linked up.

We have plenty of ways to make clean energy, it is only matter of incentives.

As long as burning coal is simply cheaper, business will burn coal.

[soulofmischief]

The computing power in a crappy cheap modern phone used to fill up a warehouse and cost a ton of energy, relatively. Moore's law might not remain steadfast, but if history is any indication, we'll find a way to make the technology more efficient.

So, yes, prototypes often use more energy than the final product. That doesn't mean we shouldn't sustainable build datacenters, but that's conflating issues.

[jpfromlondon]

the Wright brothers sold me a subscription to a supersonic jet and I've got a bundle of matchsticks and some canvas.

[soulofmischief]

On the other hand, flight is ubiquitous and has changed everything.

[kibwen]

Flight changed everything when it comes to warfare. But as far as individuals are concerned, the average human on the planet will take a handful of flights in their lifetime, at best, and nearly all flights that are taken are for recreation which is ultimately fungible with other forms of recreation that don't involve taking flights, and of the flights that aren't for recreation most could be replaced by things like video calls, and the vast and overwhelming majority of the goods that make up the lifeblood of the global economy are still shipped by ship, not shipped by air.

Which is to say, the commercial aviation industry could permanently collapse tomorrow and it would have only a marginal impact on most people's lives, who would just replace planes with train, car, or boat travel. The lesson here is that even if normal people experience some tangential beneficial effects from LLMs, their most enduring legacy will likely be to entrench authority and cement the existing power structures.

[soulofmischief]

It's silly to say that the ability to fly has not changed society. Or that it won't continue to change society, if we manage to become space-faring before ruining our home planet.

The phrase, "The average human on the planet will take a handful of flights in their lifetime" is doing a lot of work. What are those flights to? How meaningful/important were the experiences? What cultural knowledge was exchanged? What about crucial components that enable industries we depend on? For example, a nuclear plant might constantly be ordering parts that are flown in overnight.

In general you're really minimizing the importance of aviation without really providing anything to back up your claims.

[ares623]

We were promised supersonic jets today or very soon though and our economies have been held hostage waiting for that promise.

[eru]

The passive voice is doing a lot of work in your sentence.

[troupo]

We are perpetually just months away from software jobs being obsolete.

AGI was achieved internally at OpenAI a year ago.

Multiple companies have already re-hired staff they had fired and replaced with AI.

etc.

[soulofmischief]

Your problem is thinking that hype artists, professionals and skeptics are all the same voice with the same opinion. Because of that, you can't recognize when sentiment is changing among the more skeptical.

[troupo]

You are responding to some voices in your head, not to the context of the conversation.

You're also presuming too much about what I'm thinking and being dead wrong about that.

[meowface]

The AI bubble will pop any month now.

See? I can do this too.

[soulofmischief]

The first recorded supersonic flight was in 1947.

[windward]

Supersonic passenger planes failed commercially.

[Kostchei]

Are you saying that people can't work out what to code using these? Or that code is not a worthy subject to use AI for? 'cause I got news for you... 1. Improving coding improved reasoning in the models. Having a verifiable answer that is not a single thing is a good training test. 2. Software has been used for fairly serious things. We used to have skyscrapers of people doing manual math. Now we have campuses of people doing manual code. You might argue that nobody would trust AI to write code when it matters. History tells us that if that is ever true, it will pass. 3. We are not going to run out of planet. It just feels to folks that there is not enough planet for their dreams and we get population panic, energy panic etc. There is a huge fusion reactor conveniently holding us in it's gravity well and spewing out many orders of magnitude more energy than we can currently use. Chill.

I think at Gas Country levels we will need better networking systems. Maybe that backbone Nvidia just built....

[krupan]

Replacing human computers with electronic computers is nothing like what LLMs do or how they work. The electronic computer is straight up automation. Same input in gives you the same input out every time. Electronic computers are actually pretty simple. They just do simple mathematical operations like add, subtract, multiply, and divide. What makes them so powerful is that they can do billions of those simple operations a second.

LLMs are not simple deterministic machines that automate rote tasks like computers or compilers. People, please stop believing and repeating that they are the next level of abstraction and automation. They aren't.

[toephu2]

AI can't even find a cure for the common cold.