I prefer that scenario to the one we had before where too many smart people were building out social networks and similar services trying to maximize ad impressions.
We are still dealing with the consequences…
I don't know, I feel like llms are the even worse replacement for social networks and maximized ad impressions. Now you don't even need a network or users to produce the addictive content and inject narrative that is so impactful on our brains and lives
I have more meaningful intellectual conversations with LLMs in a given day than in a month on social networks. And the LLMs never try to make me feel angry or stupid, they never ignore my arguments to go on their own soapbox, they almost never feed me misinformation (and never deliberately), and they've yet to tell me to my face that the purpose of their interactions with other people is not to convince or even communicate with those people but to perform for an audience (often one that doesn't feasibly exist).
Some caveats here: my view of social media is biased by the fact that jerks tend to pull me out of the woodwork- I get ragebaited, although I think I avoid the literal bait- so many of my interactions are with jerks. Looking around, I expect I'm not alone, but this may not be the default experience. And the LLMs certainly aren't perfect. They can hallucinate, they're often sycophantic, they're bad at judgment in a number of ways, probably others I'm missing.
Compared to actual people, they suck. Compared to social media as it exists today, they have orders of magnitude to fall before your comparison makes sense to me. And, at least for now, the LLMs are the ones getting better while the social networks are- AFAICT, universally- getting worse.
> I have more meaningful intellectual conversations with LLMs in a given day than in a month on social networks.
If by "social networks" you mean platforms like X, Reddit or HN, then sure, but bar is pretty low there.
But let's not forget that both technologies mainly isolate and alienate you from real world and real people. The fact that the more recent one doesn't suck as much yet is not very comforting.
> I have more meaningful intellectual conversations with LLMs in a given day than in a month on social networks.
This is kind of making the parent's argument for them about the dangers...
> And the LLMs never try to make me feel angry or stupid, they never ignore my arguments to go on their own soapbox, they almost never feed me misinformation (and never deliberately), and they've yet to tell me to my face that the purpose of their interactions with other people is not to convince or even communicate with those people but to perform for an audience (often one that doesn't feasibly exist).
You're basically asking to be coddled, affirmed, validated, and protected. The world has conflict. Not all conflict is bad. Yes, social media weaponizes that conflict for ads, but I think the opposite is more dangerous in creating completely distorted realities. What you're describing sounds worse than the worst nightmare I've ever had, a world in which I'd be constantly disconnected from everyone else and would be disillusioned into thinking I'm not.
> Some caveats here: my view of social media is biased by the fact that jerks tend to pull me out of the woodwork- I get ragebaited, although I think I avoid the literal bait- so many of my interactions are with jerks.
>You're basically asking to be coddled, affirmed, validated, and protected.
Incorrect. My interactions with LLMs simply don't look like this. I don't know where you got this idea from what I said. I have a prompt that begs the thing to call me out, and it currently does so too much, which is exactly what I prefer.
What it doesn't do is rub minor disagreements in my face, jump to conclusions about who I am based on pre-existing beliefs, or tell me to go to therapy when I earnestly admit my humanity.
> I have more meaningful intellectual conversations with LLMs in a given day than in a month on social networks
Social media felt this way in the early days, too.
> they almost never feed me misinformation (and never deliberately)
This is dangerously untrue. LLMs will deliberately tell you the things you want to hear. They even "call you out" in exactly the ways that are most palatable to you. There is ample evidence that LLMs can be biased. The ability to broadly influence individual opinions, without even needing bot accounts on social media is exactly one of the reasons so many people who want power/money are flocking to control these LLMs.
> so many of my interactions are with jerks
This is one of the ways that the LLMs are "scarier" and more powerful than social networks. Real people are more likely to be obviously pushing agendas or otherwised easily dismissed.
> LLMs are the ones getting better
Getting better at what? The things you list are exactly the things that make LLMS subtly powerful and far more dangerous that social media. It's the reach and anonymity of social media without needing to control a feed algorithm, deal with content or people that doesn't fit your agenda, or produce fake content that does.
Did you mean to say you feel LLMs will be made into an even worse replacement? Otherwise not clear on your "early days" point.
The second half of your second paragraph is also forward looking- as I said, LLMs would have to get orders of magnitude worse for this to be a concern versus social media. I am surrounded by people- smart, informed people- who were convinced by instagram or TikTok or whatever that Mitch McConnell was brain dead a few weeks back, despite their being wrong about Trump in the same way several times already. We're in a thread mentioning "all the negative externalities from AI development", and I just have to hope they're not talking about water usage and electric prices and silent-but-deadly infrasound because everybody inexplicably believes that those are real, serious concerns. LLMs aren't doing this! This is the status quo!
The chatbot I'm interacting with does not tell me the things I want to hear. This is just not true. I don't know how to convince you otherwise.
>Getting better at what? The things you list are exactly the things that make LLMS subtly powerful and far more dangerous that social media
? At not hallucinating, not being sycophantic, making good quality judgments, making good strategic judgments. The things I listed. I don't know how this connects with the rest of this paragraph.
My "agenda" is believing true things and not believing false things. Sorry, but if someone is opposed to this for me, they are not a person I'd like to speak with.
> I remember lamenting all through the 2010s that all the high paying jobs were basically ad revenue supported.
That's never been true for financial services, many of which offer very high-paying jobs for high-frequency trading, hedge fund management, market operations, etc. There are many other industries with high value IT jobs that are not ad-supported.
Those jobs are much more niche, and require much more specialized knowledge. Google alone probably has more software employees than all of the high paying trading firms combined. It's a possible career path, sure, but its like comparing taxi driver opportunities with stretch limo driver opportunities IMO. Totally different scales.
AI is much more similar to classic cloud/infra with a lot more OSS than finance afaik, and probably already employs more devs than prop firms.
(I'm not counting big bank jobs because those are definitely not high paying)
> too many smart people were building out social networks and similar services trying to maximize ad impressions.
Honest question: where should these very smart people work then in your opinion? Nearly all suitable-looking, "smarter" ideas that come to my mind will bring less revenue/profit in expectation than, for example, letting them maximize ad impressions.
I of course wish we lived in a "more intelligent" world where this is not the case. :-(
Call me crazy, but the smartest people I know have rejected maximizing their employer's revenue and profit as their goal. Or even their own company if they go that route. Find a niche, work it, enjoy it, and enjoy the rest of your life, too.
Probably not on systems that rot democracy, freedom, and human expression. Companies like Google and Meta are net negative for humanity and the people that built these companies and continue to work for them are evil in their apathy towards the human cost of their salary.
The problem with this is people investing their time/expertise/money/energy into the common good and then have a small number of people ruining the benefit for their own ends, knocks the well-meaning out of the most positive people. The common good only works well when everyone wants the common good.
You seem to have independently discovered the market failure commonly know as the Free-rider problem, for which there are many solutions, and which is not a dispositive preemptive argument against the establishment or management of common good(s).
For example, Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for her work illuminating design principles illustrated by long enduring common pool resource institutions.
> Ah, then my second wish will be for everyone to want the common good.
People have very different, often contradictory opinions what the "common good" is.
I would even claim that this question is a special case of the millennia-old philosophical problem of defining what "good" actually means (i.e. defining ethics), which has resulted in myriads of different opinions:
> where should these very smart people work then in your opinion?
Anywhere else. Ads are a net negative to society and provide no value. ANY activity outside of pushing ads is a better contribution to society as a whole.
> I mean, war, in all its cruelty and tragedy, at the same time it brings the worst from people is also able to bring out the best.
I can see it from here: out of tens of thousands of people, one man takes a stand to save a handful of children from all the pillage, rape and murder.
In an alternate world, this man might have (gasp) tried to run a business instead. Sure, the children and city would still be alive instead of burning to ashes, but who cares?
Look, there's not much positive to say for the ad-driven Internet, but to consider "pixels on screens that you disagree with" to be worse than actual mass killing is maybe a tad hyperbolic here.
> but to consider "pixels on screens that you disagree with" to be worse than actual mass killing is maybe a tad hyperbolic here
And who considers this?
I never wrote that world with war but without business would be overall better than world without war but with people profiting from ad business. I merely pointed out that war can bring out the best from people - mercy, valor, honor, sacrifice, selflessness. Business cannot, as it is about commodification and profit.
That will certainly come in time. We're already starting to see/hear the beginnings of it. My hope is that the market maintains competition because the moment one or two corps have monopoly/duopoly they will go full throttle toward that I'm afraid.
It is not enough to invent a new medicine. You also need to make it easily available. People investing in AI are not interested in giving new awesome medicine to people that couln't afford it.
Talk to employees at anthropic and OpenAI. Listen to the talks from the higher-ups. Sam Altman even said something to the effect of “we don’t need a working business model because AGI will figure out how to make money”.
My guess is these AI companies are counting on the money to come from traditional SAAS style services only. This whole AI would be used to gather enough capital to rewrite most of the existing SAAS services under one umbrella, sort of super APP concept. The SAAS businesses doing the layoffs will soon realize that for this whole time they were just pouring their money into their own demise
I'm not even sure that I do prefer the AI train to the social media / ad train. I certainly would if the direction was "we're throwing ourselves blindly in AI so to gradually free citizens from the need to work", but right now it's "we're throwing ourselves blindly in AI so that we can sacrifice workers for higher corporate profits".
Not to mention how they will be used by terrorists and evil people to create biological weapons and other tools of mass slaughter. Or how it will be/is being used by criminals to target vulnerable people and businesses. Or how coupled with drone warfare the world becomes an unlivable hellhole in the next decade. But Marc Andreesan said only losers are against “tech accelerationiism” on twitter so here we are.
You can, right now, find out how to synthesize VX or sarin, or how to weaponize anthrax. You can and have been able to acquire this knowledge without the use of AI. Knowledge is not the obstacle to proliferation of biological and chemical weapons. It's hard to set up the infrastructure. See Aum Shinrikyo.
If you believe that AI is powerful enough to help the good people (however you define that), why isn't that also coupled with the belief that it is powerful enough to help the bad people (ditto)? Either the capability of this tech is completely overblown or it can help a wide swath of people including those with conflicting ideologies.
I absolutely believe that AI can be used by bad people in harmful ways. I don't think that's going to take the form of mass murder. I don't think knowledge is the missing component there.
Well, you’ve convinced me. Ai changes nothing, so then we should be terrified of the capital being poured into and the opportunity costs lost to the current thing(tm).
Sounds like you're reading into Amodei's propaganda as to why they should control AI. The information to make biological weapons for example is nothing new, it has been on the Internet for decades.
Should we control nuclear weapons? Is nuclear technology of the sort we’re fighting a war over right now a bigger technological advance than AI when it comes to war fighting capabilities? I suppose if you think ai is nothing big, it makes sense to not want to control it. Or, if you are all for widespread nuclear proliferation, then your position would make sense. ELSE: you’re totally illogical.
An LLM can't help you build a nuke. LLMs can't paper over hard engineering challenges like "You need to reinvent the centrifugal separator industry" and "rocket engineering is pretty difficult" and "you need really really good data to simulate things before you can actually build an implosion device" and less engineering challenges like "The CIA keeps murdering anyone who works on this"
There's never been an information access problem with nuclear weapons. The information was so public that most physicist realized everyone was building bombs from the sudden lack of published papers on how you could build bombs.
It's just silly how people seem to believe that if you just have a page worth of text saying something, you can suddenly do that thing.
Even a magical superintelligent AI could not do these things. It's going to tell you the exact same thing that has been known for nearly a century now:
"Hire 100 engineers and a couple physicists and 1000 very skilled machinists and laborers, and spend a billion dollars on plumbing, and then do that a second time if you need to deliver the device using a missile"
Meanwhile a dirty bomb is trivial.
These things don't happen because people who want to cause mass harm are generally poorly resourced.
"The smartest people" were not working on ads because building an advertising behemoth is not a smart thing to do.
When there's nothing good being invested in, "the smartest people" are simply underutilized. They do things that they think are good instead.
"The smartest people" have never sought maximum capital accumulation, and have not historically been driven by "highest wages" jobs.
The computer industry formed out of WW2 because a bunch of smart people ran into each other and did what they thought was really cool and had realized was suddenly possible. Von Neuman literally met one of the other guys and discussed computers as a theory at a train station and that meeting was influential on the future industry. They did not try to make billions of dollars. They had fairly average jobs that paid average. Often working for the government itself.
"The smartest people" did not work on targeting ads at people, and while some of them may have been involved with early transformer work, they certainly would be disillusioned with LLMs by now and would not be working at companies burning trillions on them.
This both destroys discourse, and centralizes the means of production into ~4 companies, with everyone else paying them an economic tax in order to be competitive.
None, but for actual communication by lay people, it cost a ton of money for audio and video calls by having to pay their phone service provider a lot, or calling cards, or whatever.
I mean there are ads in certain chatGPT plans. There have already been multiple studies showing that regular use of genAI makes you less intelligent...
Additionally, it's pretty clear that the owners of this tech (dario, altman, etc..) do not have the best interest of "the people" at heart and only care about accumulating as much power and wealth possible. Not that it's their responsibility to save humanity or something, but I'm not sure this future is much better...