[kunai]

I never quite understood why AI and LLMs are marketed the way they are, or why the powers that be behind its massive push seem so keen on selling it as a wholesale replacement for human careers (which given the current curve of improvements despite what the naysayers of human intellect might suggest, is unfeasible).

Accountants didn't die off when calculators came on the scene. In no scenario is an LLM a drop-in replacement for any career field the same way CAD was a drop-in replacement for draftsmen -- and even then, draftsmen are still around today, in slightly smaller numbers, doing CAD drafting and design rather than using raw pen-and-paper skills.

Claude and Codex are exceptionally useful for reducing workload and improving productivity. But that's all they are. They're calculators replacing the slide-rule, drafting-esque drudgery of typing out all your code by hand. So why not market them like that? As helpers, assistants, tools to enable you to do things better and more efficiently? Which, in my usage of them, is what they're really only good at. Instead, there's been a mad rush to shoehorn agents and LLMs and genai into everything, outlandish claims like GPT writing better than Hemingway and Ginsberg, and creating absurd tools like Grok or Sora that are fundamentally broken, don't work well, and have flooded the internet with noise and disgusting slop.

And in all of this, they've created a cancerous gold rush that threatens to wipe out the entire economy when the jig is up and people realize how useless these claims are, and that at the end of the day, it's a fancy search engine, a calculator, that can think a little better and reason more than the ones of old.

It really feels like all of these CEOs are just borderline running a cult at this point.

[tech_ken]

> I never quite understood why AI and LLMs are marketed the way they are, or why the powers that be behind its massive push seem so keen on selling it as a wholesale replacement for human careers

Because labor is the largest line item in almost every software company on Earth. Executives' primary KPI is their market cap, so convincing investors that your profit/expense ratio is going to 2x in 6 months when you finally get full LLM adoption is an excellent way to juice your performance metrics, and thereby your bonus (mutatis mutandis for various finacial setups).

[kunai]

But then what about the fact that it's exposing so many firms to immense risk and essentially straight-up lying to investors as well as product adopters? No one thought of that reality, when the chickens finally come home to roost?

[tech_ken]

My read is that it's a mix of tech firms having overhired a lot during the ZIRP+COVID era, as well as executives having a pretty short horizon for risk if the potential bonus is large enough.

[kunai]

> executives having a pretty short horizon for risk if the potential bonus is large enough.

This single line explains succinctly what is probably responsible for most of the economic dysfunction of the past 20 years

[cess11]

There's an easy fix, you start hiring again. Probably don't even have to explain it, what happened just before was that you improved corporate finances by lowering your labour expenses, i.e. you're clearly growing and hence you need more people.

[cess11]

That marketing has been used to fire a lot of people, I think that's an important reason why it has that character. Then there were some true believers too, who were obviously important to the people firing other people.

Being able to remove a lot of people from your large work force and have other corporations do it too is quite profitable, on average it pushes down the price of labour and you'll rehire some of them and replace some of the others, and perhaps your organisation managed to become more efficient at the stuff that make you money in the short run too.

Then there was that thing with the change in US tax code, where R&D became more expensive some years ago.

[_aavaa_]

> CAD was a drop-in replacement for draftsmen -- and even then, draftsmen are still around today, in slightly smaller numbers

You’re off my an order of magnitude here. Even ignoring departments that were significantly downsized, you would need substantially more draftsmen to do the work currently done by a smaller number with AutoCAD.

The skill required is also much lower, doubly so if you consider Solidworks/Inventor. You get everything for free; design the 3D model and your projections are free.

[caycep]

lack of regulation in the VC space? I mean, in order to get these vast sums of money, they have to make all these sky high claims, but I feel like in the old days, someone would get at least a wrist slap for defrauding investors

[kunai]

I mean that's certainly part of it, but Altman's grotesque comments today about the idea of raising a child being "more inefficient" than training an AI model there's something deeper, darker, psychologically I think; that the VC people are fundamentally misanthropic and antisocial and despite AI not really fulfilling their desire for a world where humans are entirely fungible they want to sell it that way as a sort of bizarre wishcasting. It's just incredibly odd.

[lm28469]

> I never quite understood why AI and LLMs are marketed the way they are, or why the powers that be behind its massive push seem so keen on selling it as a wholesale replacement for human careers

> It really feels like all of these CEOs are just borderline running a cult at this point.

Because the people at the top of these companies have absolutely no idea about how the average human goes through life or what a normal human life even is. They don't know what having a job means, what a job is, what it means to be in charge of a family, to struggle for basic things, &c. Look at zuck presenting his ridiculous image gen ai [0], or their embarrassing "Uh HeLp Me MaKe A SaUcE FoR My KoReAn SaNdWiCh" [1], or his Wii tier metaverse that no one above the age of 13 found remotely interesting, this is what these people spent hundreds of billions on, that's what they dream about, that's the future they want even though 90% of the population does not give a single shit about it, And then you have altman and his very unsettling takes on all kind of topics like "ai will develop bioweapons in 2027 but ai is also the solution to this problem", "humans use too much energy" or "I cannot imagine having gone through figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT” no shit my dude, a gay man who never worked a day in his life, exit scammed his way to the top and who paid for someone to incubate their offspring have no clue about what evolution should have encoded in his DNA over 300m+ years? and we have to give him $7 trillion to speed run the next stage of evolution, lol, lmao even...

Ah, and they need to raise trillions of dollars, literally, that's why they keep mentioning outrageous (but very profitable) things like curing cancer, skynet, terraforming mars and solar powered satellites datacenters even though none of these things make any fucking sense. They need the next """hypergrowth""" vector, one more scam before we eventually reach the point of no return, it's all greed and FOMO as always. One day they shill self driving cars, the next bitcoin, the next AI, always full of "in two years it'll be amazing we promise, I can't explain how or why but give me a few trillions", meanwhile it's going downhill fast for everyone outside of these echo chambers

[0] https://youtu.be/TWpg1RmzAbc?t=570 [1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/4-9xz77tQnQ