[al_borland]

When the narrative around AI is that people should rely on it all the time, people will be judged by your token use (it better be high), the AI is smarter than everyone and will take all the jobs, the AI is the best programmer, and more… When things fail repeatedly, it highlights that the emperor has no clothes.

If it’s as good as they say, why can’t it figure out how to not go down every day?

How can people rely on it for their job if it goes down everyday? Maybe they shouldn’t rely on it.

If it’s supposed to be such a good engineer, why should it have the same scaling issues as Twitter did 20 years ago with 20 years of lessons learned and 20 years of development for more modern and scalable infrastructures? Shouldn’t it know all the tricks to scale and have redundancy to keep availability high? Does it not know the demands?

When expectations are out of line with reality, there will be snark when things fail. Those expectations have been force fed to us by these AI companies for years now, so I don’t have much sympathy or patience to offer them. They created these expectations of their platforms and if they can’t live up to them, then maybe it’s time for recalibrate the public image of what AI really is and what it can do… and what its limitations are.

[dgb23]

I have to agree with this. The economic culture around this tech is very toxic.

There seems to be a mass anxiety around the job market even. I‘ve seen a lot of social media content, including videos of people giving advice, especially to younger tech workers.

The most dangerous (psychologically, socially, economically) are people in important positions, who understand just enough to see some of its usefulness, but not enough to assess where its assumptions and guarantees actually are.

Even moreso if they see workers as a mere cost center instead of an asset.

But here is my perhaps naive, hopefully brave prediction: the real winners of this shake up are not decided yet, and neither bean counting nor superficial engagement with the topic will be sufficient or even useful.

[sassymuffinz]

So true, we’re constantly told that we’re now obsolete, a magic robot can do everything we can do without sleeping and for a fraction of the cost. Except occasionally the robot just doesn’t turn up to work or occasionally he appears drunk on the job. The elites think it’s fine now while it’s cheap but just wait until the agents are priced properly and cost 5x or 10x more.

Suddenly the fleshy meat sacks who used to do all this work, just slower, who have persistent memory, who get better and more experienced over time, who only require a few bananas to power their brains start looking like the more reliable option again.

The only reason these chat bots exist is because the upper crust don’t want to pay us to live properly, not because the robots can do it better, they just want to pay as little as possible.

[runeblaze]

I mean I used to work on model reliability with my little PhD degree and the models i manage go down all the time.

Some profs have a team of PhDs and things go to shit all the time. I don’t know why we expect $FRONTIER_LLM to do better

[al_borland]

We accept human errors, limitations, and failures. We can empathize with team of humans doing the best they can, and we know any failure is a chance for them to learn and grow.

The sales pitch of AI is that it’s better than humans and has no real limits; it will make us all obsolete. This framing they created means I expect it not to make errors, not to have limits, and not to fail. I expect it to be able to learn and adapt at the speed of light and solve complex problems beyond what a PhD could do. This is what we’ve been told with the narratives around future jobs, AI performance on PhD level tests, how coding is a solved problem, and pictures painted of what a future with AI will look like. While we may know this isn’t true, this is what they are selling, and that’s the standard I’m going to hold them to.

I don’t blame the customer for being upset the snake oil didn’t live up to its promises, I blame the snake oil salesman. We have every right to be upset with the snake oil salesman and ridicule him when his product doesn’t work. Maybe we don’t need better more reliable snake oil, maybe we need real medicine. If real medicine don’t exist, its better to be honest than to mislead people and say it does.

This isn’t to say AI is completely useless, but it’s not what’s being sold. The downtime just proves that, unless they aren’t using their own product. If that’s the case, why not?