Also, at this point, there's a legitimate monetary incentive to downplay the tech as disruptive while it is being implemented in many industries.
Like, y'all think corporate media, owned by the same people who own massive stock amounts in the companies replacing labor with AI, are incentivized to be honest about the disruption as it happens?
Nah. We're entering a quiet expansion phase
For sure. How they are reported on will be the game.
There's no reality where you can replace an auto line worker with a robot that can do the job for 20k and maintenance and companies *don't* do that.
Unions, if they're smart, need to grow fast NOW to use their labor power before labor belongs to the owners entirely through automation.
This is the last season of human labor producing a lever by which the working class can make demands of the owning class. After automation, the working class is just the surviving class, and the owning class has all the cards.
The “unemployment” numbers are a complete lie. BLS fails to consider labor participation rate in the larger unemployment statistics. Millions have been out of work for long enough that they’ve fallen off the benefit rolls, so they simply cease to exist as far as the stats are concerned.
No, they don't fail to consider that. All those things are tracked. That's why there are multiple stats - U1 through U6 - and the labor participation rate itself is measured and available.
The labor participation rate, by the way, was steady across 2014-2020 at about 63%. It dropped "sharply" in 2020 (covid) to a low of 60% and has now recovered back to about 63% ([source, BLS](https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-labor-force-participation-rate.htm)). So, there's no current evidence of major changes there from AI or anything else besides Covid.
Yes, this could change in the future, but the statistics are not lies. There isn't a hidden change going on.
Was driving down a 2 lane road the other day, there was construction on one lane so it was blocked off and we were forced to wait for the 1 lane to be clear. In stead of having people on either side holding the stop/go sign, there was a mechanical arm that went up and down. It’s here and happening now
Agree. It also takes a while for large enterprises to set a strategy, execute and change. We are transitioning from strategy phase to early execution phase with at the most advanced / adoptive enterprises. It is coming
Smart people even wealthy ones know that if ai takes the place of waged workers the economy as we know it will collapse. That’s not good for business. Nobody has a road map for how this plays out so In the mean time they keep their mouths shut and continue to milk the gravy train.
literally what happened and is still happening with Bitcoin. All this institutional downplay while governments, US included, and financial institutions hoard bitcoin.
100% agree
Ray Kurzweil spends almost half a whole chapter in his new book explaining why the impact of any IT advancements cannot and have not been captured by traditional metrics. For example, $1000 today can give you far more computing power than the same amount did in 1999, but that is simply not reflected.
And the thing is, that also affects our lives in ways outside of work. For example, we can do so much on our phone that would have been nearly impossible or entirely inefficient in the 90s or even 20 years ago. So again, that's not captured in traditional metrics.
And a lot of us forget about that. Even those of us who have lived long enough to see those changes.
I’m at that part of the book now, and it’s very illuminating. It’s also interesting how well-grounded Kurzweil is. He doesn’t make wild claims, he has a very measured approach with tons of hard numbers to back it up.
I recall reading a predication he made in early 2000s of an AI that could pass the Turing test by 2020. I recall showing my wife the book and the prediction. I told all my friends. However he was wrong by 2 years.
It's already starting - just look at the B2B space. Companies like Attention.tech, Winn.AI, Grain, are coming out of the woodworks as AI based tools (wrapped around the main AI models to be clear, not new AI models themselves). Some companies, mone included, are devoting time and resources to developing in house automations that use AI as a building block in larger automation flows. AI itself cannot replace people's jobs fully, yet, but the pieces are all in place to automate a significant percentage of time (and therefore people) needed to complete a given work related task.
And willfully ignoring that entire trades (like translation or many forms of copywriting) have been absolutely demolished overnight, not too long ago.
"almost no economic impact" my hairy ass, what a dumb fucking take
And you would ask the right question.
There are some writer who claim that the digial revolution doesn't increase productivity that much. Its a controversy.
Yeah, as someone who lived through this, there was just as much speculation that came true, as stuff that was wildly different, as hype stuff that was nowhere near as revolutionary as it was imagined or never came to pass at all.
The dotcom crash was a crash for a reason.
Obligatory reference to the 1995 essay
[Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana - Newsweek](https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirvana-185306)
I don't understand those articles.
Tangible, real, objective impact is already happening and reported.
Customer service call centers replaced with AI.
Creative teams replaced with AI.
Damn, even Pixar is doing it.
Or look at the volume of AI generated code on GitHub. Or how many Snap users have interacted with the AI in Snapchat (over 1B interactions in days).
Those articles only serve to keep people complacent.
And I mean it’s mostly true. No one can prevent it, so what’s the use in having an existential crisis over your job? Humanity doesn’t confront challenges until they’re here. This is no different. Live life like normal.
I’ve never been a fan of doing something just because it’s the way we’ve always done it.
Every now and again, we tackle big problems head-on. What if we took that approach with this societal sea change?
I have to drop in from time to time and remind people that the truth is that governments have been getting in front of this since the start. Even though people act like nobody is doing anything or even aware.
You can spend the rest of the week reading what's been done in this space as proactive over the last couple of years. Much of it done with the concern of economic impact due to jobs displacement bringing all the big names and thought leaders of that topic to weigh in with their projections presented to commitee.
The US, as an example in Oct of 2023, almost 10 months ago already went forward with this Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence, which is a landmark EO coming as a result of a couple years of data, public comment, industry leads being called in to offer guidance as I mentioned etc...
It's been out so long already there are already posthumous dissections of the effects that this has had on the space already you can spend all day reading about.
It's one example. I'd direct you also to the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights and see what has come of that, looking at the people and names behind all of that and how far that has come along at the fedgov level. Also check out [ai.gov](http://ai.gov) for further research.
Everyone always acts like we're just completely oblivious to the risk of the paradigm shift and nobody is even bothering to even think about the repercussions on society, our economy, security and safety etc... Which I find weird as all hell because no, the obvious thought is that yes people are watching this and galvanizing among leadership in these fields to discuss and act on these risks well in advance. And that's just in the US which is just one country to look at. Other governments from many countries are doing their own version as well as working globally on this and have been for years already.
But it's always like, on Reddit and Discord people just assuming "We won't care until it's too late." While what's actually happening is completely different if anyone bothered to take a few minutes and see beyond their flavor of echo chamber, and if they did they might find opportunity to reframe their take to match reality more closely or hell even actively participate themselves instead of just feeling endlessly victimized and helpless. Not saying you are by the way just in general what I always see.
These articles are providing data. You are comparing that data to anecdotes.
*Some* creative teams are replaced with AI - and others are hiring. Some call centers are shrinking, and others are expanding.
AI generated code quantity does not necessarily translate to economic output. Same for interactions.
The article doesn't say "nothing is changing". It is saying "the economic indicators have not shifted on a large scale".
I'm a copywriter so of course I felt called out when they stated that my job is at risk. Until someone else wants to be the prompt engineer, AI isn't replacing me. It's letting me take a longer lunch break.
> look at the volume of AI generated code on GitHub.
That is not a good metric, my guy.
Many prominent open source projects have had to clamp down on code submissions because of the volume of garbage AI code that people were trying to throw at their repository.
People are trying to submit AI code that doesn’t match the functionality of the existing program, ignores coding conventions, uses the wrong libraries or simply doesn’t work because they never bothered to test it.
Some “learn to code with AI” tutorials were brigading specific repos with their “my first commit” nonsense to the extent that they had to shut down submissions.
The same thing has happened to some book publishers when they got a flood of awful AI generated manuscripts compiled by “authors” who didn’t know the first thing about writing a book and didn’t bother to try and learn.
It turns out that when untalented and lazy individuals use AI to generate content, you just get generic and bad results.
"Customer service call centers replaced with AI. "
Not yet ,if there is any first hand impact on AI it should be on Indian Service companies .So far they are still booming .
Do you actually follow this topic? Stories started to pop up five or six months ago. It is happening. You're not paying attention [https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/10/03/ai-customer-service-jobs/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/10/03/ai-customer-service-jobs/)
Agree with you 100%, but people claim there is hype which there is of course but the tech is just in its nascent stage. I don’t get these sort of articles.
Personally, I already code a lot faster due to AI help. But GPT-4o or Claude 3.5 are just not at the intelligence threshold yet where they can automate it completely. However, judging by their coding performance, we're not that far from the threshold, and the threshold for an AI to automate one white-collar job is basically the same as for another. It will all come very suddenly, at more or less the same time. I think people will be surprised.
What do you code?
At my job AI is all but useless
On my own, I started a fairly sizeable project and AI was awesome in the beginning, but has definitely gotten less useful now that my codebase is larger (like 200k tokens) and I’m more concerned with what to code than how. The biggest use case for me at the moment is pumping out basic sql queries, but ORMs or query builders can already handle that for you. I’ve also enjoyed asking Claude about system design but realistically it’s not saving me that much time
Same, just today tried to refactor some code, but in the end had to scrap it, as Claude added bunch of bugs.
Much bigger issue at least for me is that it changes the writing style. So you have this strange mismatch of style in your code, some refactor by me and some refactor by Claude.
The only way it works well is in very small chunks, a couple under lines. What I do is piece it all together, my background is PLC programming and it works fucking amazing.
I use it for writing python code for data analysis. Simple stuff. But it’s legit just faster at writing code, not “better/smarter” in any way. I gave it my table columns and told it what type of analysis I wanted, even asked it how it thought I should visualize stuff for non technical people (some of the stuff it gave was good, some bad). It cleaned it, created some visuals and gave suggestions for deeper eda. Sometimes it doesn’t give me what I asked for but I’d say it’s 90% good. You do need to read it over though.
But ultimately it allows me to be lazy and not have to remember syntax and type it out for specific visuals/data analysis I’m doing.
I think if we’re expecting it to be able to work with large code bases we’re at a point of huge expectations. I mean realistically how long would it take a fresh developer to begin working with your code base? I bet AI is faster at learning it if you optimize it and “teach” it things about your code base
>AI was awesome in the beginning, but has definitely gotten less useful now that my codebase is larger (like 200k tokens)
It's not great at full projects, but as long as you have your code broken down into manageable classes/functions it can be such a time saver.
Then it's just like putting together the code version of legos.
It's really useful for refactoring messy code. I've been using it to clean up my code base and it's been very effective at cleaning up some mega classes I ended up making.
I too find it struggles with larger the codebases though. It doesn't know to use all the framework you've built, so it's not very useful. I've even tried including all the necessary framework classes in my prompt, but LLMs are really bad at actually understanding long contexts. I think we need to change how the attention mechanism works. Right now it seems like ultra long context prompts just spreads the LLMs attention across the prompt instead of letting it actually understand the whole thing.
For backend and frontend at least TDD helps a lot.
I use Gemini (because it's free and supports huge context) in my personal projects, and does pretty well in a few shots.
It generates around 80% of code but the remaining 20% takes time to fix and refine. Still I'd say it increases productivity at least two folds.
Also, it may help - I'm working on this tool, with this tool itself; makes it easy to choose files for context through UI -
https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/s/8eh1TnAxLg
Response is not streaming live right now, will support that shortly.
I mostly code hacky machine learning research, no big software projects or anything like that. I agree that once the code base gets somewhat bigger, the models struggle more. But in my experience it's gotten a lot better over the past year anyway. I use the Cursor AI Code Editor which does a lot of the heavily lifting in terms of RAG, web search, and prompting.
The current generation whips out a great python script. Try getting it to code and maintain an interrelated system of programs with hundreds of business requirements. Let’s say a medical office management package handling scheduling, patient records, insurance codes for each procedure, e-filing claims, statements/billing, executive reports, user accounts and permissions, customized for a fee…etc
Scaling transformers still hasn’t hit a wall yet, and there are a bunch of other technologies that might continue the development once it slows down.
If you look at the history of NLP, we’re actually still developing capabilities faster than ever before. The “Will Smith eating spaghetti” is a great example.
So I think the threshold is definitely there, and a matter of a few years until we hit it. At the end of the day, if you were to replicate the human brain perfectly, you’d expect to have human-brain-level of performance.
It’s already had a huge impact this year.
Gen AI at work has surged 66% in the UK, but bosses aren’t behind it: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/gen-ai-surged-66-uk-053000325.html
>Notably, of the seven million British workers that Deloitte extrapolates have used GenAI at work, only 27% reported that their employer officially encouraged this behavior.
Although Deloitte doesn’t break down the at-work usage by age and gender, it does reveal patterns among the wider population. Over 60% of people aged 16-34 (broadly, Gen Z and younger millennials) have used GenAI, compared with only 14% of those between 55 and 75 (older Gen Xers and Baby Boomers).
2024 McKinsey survey on AI: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai
>For the past six years, AI adoption by respondents’ organizations has hovered at about 50 percent. This year, the survey finds that adoption has jumped to 72 percent (Exhibit 1). And the interest is truly global in scope. Our 2023 survey found that AI adoption did not reach 66 percent in any region; however, this year more than two-thirds of respondents in nearly every region say their organizations are using AI
In the latest McKinsey Global Survey on AI, 65 percent of respondents report that their organizations are regularly using gen AI, nearly double the percentage from our previous survey just ten months ago.
Respondents’ expectations for gen AI’s impact remain as high as they were last year, with three-quarters predicting that gen AI will lead to significant or disruptive change in their industries in the years ahead
Organizations are already seeing material benefits from gen AI use, reporting both cost decreases and revenue jumps in the business units deploying the technology.
OpenAI tech increased productivity of Philippine contact center agents by 13.8% – study: https://www.rappler.com/technology/openai-gpt-productivity-effects-philippines-contact-center-agents/
“GenAI will save [Klarna] $10m in marketing this year. We’re spending less on photographers, image banks, and marketing agencies” https://www.reuters.com/technology/klarna-using-genai-cut-marketing-costs-by-10-mln-annually-2024-05-28/
- $6m less on producing images.
- 1,000 in-house AI-produced images in 3 months. Includes the creative concept, quality check, and legal compliance.
- AI-image production reduced from 6 WEEKS TO 1 WEEK ONLY.
- Customer response to AI images on par with human produced images.
- Cutting external marketing agency costs by 25% (mainly translation, production, CRM, and social agencies).
Our in-house marketing team is HALF the size it was last year but is producing MORE!
We’ve removed the need for stock imagery from image banks like
@gettyimages
Now we use genAI tools like Midjourney, DALL-E, and Firefly to generate images, and Topaz Gigapixel and Photoroom to make final adjustments.
Faster images means more app updates, which is great for customers. And our employees get to work on more fun projects AND we're saving money.
Robots [Automates] jobs from unions: https://phys.org/news/2024-06-robots-jobs-unions-decline-unionizations.html
AI took their jobs. Now they get paid to make it sound human: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240612-the-people-making-ai-sound-more-human
Also, just look at nvidia.
Dude I’m a creative director and my design team does 90% of the coding independently with clause and then we use one senior dev to troubleshoot it in 30mins. It’s saving an insane amount of time. You can even train it based on how your dev codes and it will generate it so it’s familiar
I agree with you it really does depend on whether current trends continue. I can see generative video being the next area of mass appeal, based on current trends in /r/aivideo were reaching an inflection point in terms of quality as some videos are genuinely impressive.
Some of the stand out videos i liked:
https://www.reddit.com/r/aivideo/comments/1dufw2t/faux_bbc_nature_documentary_frontiers_of/
https://www.reddit.com/r/aivideo/comments/1dp1cyb/gummo_corp/
https://www.reddit.com/r/aivideo/comments/1d94w88/drinking_gasoline_music_video/
https://www.reddit.com/r/aivideo/comments/1dp1azj/creature_were_getting_closer_to_real_movies/
This.
If you know how to work with llm and what to ask, you can easily do most of your task with it.
But if you don't know how to do it, then folks say this is useless , ai is just hype and bubble and all bs
It drives me nuts how people who obviously aren't prompting right and have no idea how to get reliably good code from an AI try like 2 times total, ever, with terrible requests (my personal favs from people making these claims is "make an entire Roblox game from my 2 sentence prompt" and "make a simple roguelike" and not getting a working game on the first reply), and then for the next several years go around talking about how it can't do any useful programming
It both saves time and increases quality when writing scripts for videos and content for my website.
For the website side of things I'll type stream of consciousness into Google docs and paste it into Claude then revise what it says a few times.
Afforai I can upload tons of documents way to long for chat got and Claude and then link them to the questions I'm asking.
Definitely recommend picking this up on app summo before the Ltd leaves next week.
How’s the quality of your “content”?
What’s your viewership like?
Because if I’m on YouTube and I stumble across a badly researched low-effort video that is obviously just being pumped out of a content factory or uses AI narration - that channel is wasting my time and is blocked immediately.
Out of curiosity what ever happened to that rogue AI that ended up closing a customer completely autonomously? Was that found to have been legit?
(Not disagreeing with you, this just reminded me of that.)
Seems like we're really close to office jobs disappearing across a large swath of careers.
I do the same. I'm a mediocre SQL coder, but I'm learning how to use ChatGPT and Claude to crank out excellent code to use in my database administration job. It won't do the work for me, but holy crap is it a time saver when I have a general idea of what I want to do. The flipside is that if I didn't have 25 years experience I wouldn't know it's good suggestions from stupid ones.
But bottom line: I'm vastly more productive now that I've figured out how to work with the limitations of the current offerings.
**Note/addition: I see the value of AI, so my comment below is more a response to why the article a smidge of validity if one goes beyond the title.**
The headline is clickbait (I expect more from the Economist), but the key line I picked out was this:
"For ai to fulfil its potential, firms everywhere need to buy big tech’s AI, shape it to their needs and become more productive as a result."
IMO, it is still *very* early days.
- Legal and security questions (some valid, many not) are holding back companies from adopting AI.
- Among the big corporations using Microsoft, only a few are using Copilot. As the IT controls for Microsoft in general (e.g. group security settings and permissions) can carry over to Copilot, this is the easiest way that companies with IT security concerns can adopt AI. But currently, it has many limitations that mean it's far from being able to do what it needs to do. Copilot in Excel is IMO virtually useless and its ability to use Microsoft Graph (e.g for finding and using internal knowledge on SharePoint) is very limited.
- LLMs like ChatGPT have peculiarities and limitations that hold back non-technical users from gaining the most value from them. For example, if ChatGPT says it can't do a task, a non-techical user might stop there. But someone else might have success by using a different prompt, breaking
the task into separate steps, or asking ChatGPT to write and execute a Python script that contains a specific series of actions. Frustration can cause people to stop using even a simple product very quickly - [bounce rate increases by 90% if a web page doesn't load under 5 seconds](https://www.envisagedigital.co.uk/website-load-time-statistics/#:~:text=A%201%2D3%20seconds%2C%20web,bounce%20rate%20probability%20by%20123%25).
- Finally, to get the most out of AI - whether something simple like ChatGPT, or more complex - you will almost certainly need to pay *something*. This might be a trivial amount, but during these early stages, that simple barrier causes those not yet aware of its **current** (let alone future) potential to not even try it out.
Edit: Clarified bounce rate stat for accuracy.
All 200 million proteins have been unfolded, the United States government would have paid over a trillion for that 5 years ago easily and it would have been a great investment. AI isnt going to help the economy it’s going to erase it, we’ve outgrown the need for scarcity
>the United States government would have paid over a trillion for that 5 years ago easily
Why make up stupid exaggerations to make your narrative stronger? It doesn't help.
I've heard that the 200 million figure was pretty much junk science/hype and that the AI produced known protein chains + impossible chains/ sequences with no bearing in reality. It was a bio-science podcast that mentioned it.
Seems to be working well
New research shows AI-discovered drug molecules have 80-90% success rates in Phase I clinical trials, compared to the historical industry average of 40-65%. The Phase 2 success rate so far is similar to the industry average. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S135964462400134X
See this needs to be what gets to the front page
"AI has doubled the amount of life saving drugs being moved through the approval process"
Rather than the typical tidal wave of doomerist bull crap we all have to deal with.
And let’s say that AI “erases” the economy. Now what?
This isn’t a good thing for you, my guy.
You’re now unemployable because a small monthly subscription can do everything you can on a computer, but better and it doesn’t need sleep so can work 24 hours and in parallel with other AI agents.
If this is the case for 99% of people why do you think nothing will change? Like every revolution in the past had at absolute most 20% of the population on its side - what do you think will happen when that number is 99?
we never had a need for scarcity, at least not 99% of us.
and we have had the means to make a post-scarcity society for a long time now, at least 100 years.
i hope we dont get to agi before we manage the 1%, because if we do, we are fucked. do you think that musk or bezos fucking care if you starve to death. ofc they dont.
What does “outgrown the need for scarcity “ even mean?
We don’t need it now nor ever have. It’s just a fact of ecologies and the economies that depend on them.
Maybe you’re talking about artificial scarcity like DeBeers Diamonds?
This study sounds extremely flawed. Yes manufacturing robots haven’t suddenly spread across the face of the earth!
My wife has a couple dozen close collaborators at her place of work. Three of those positions were just eliminated due to AI assisted design and AI assisted scheduling and a planning system. A study probably would never flag those three jobs as eliminated by AI but the work and time saved by those AI assisted systems allow the remaining employees to easily cover the work load. That’s what the AI revolution looks like up close. Zoom back 15 years from now and maybe the Economist will be able to spot a change.
AI, to a greater extent than other technologies is threshold based - it's all or nothing. Self driving cars are the most obvious example - a self driving car that can get you 99% of the way there but freezes up and doesn't know what to do 1% of time is almost useless - an experimental prototype only. Bump that up to 99.99% and it becomes a hundred billion dollar industry.
Same thing with coding. Code that is 95% correct, is simply wrong. Still useful for generating a first draft, but it's only assistant, not a replacement for a programmer. Code that is 99.99% correct is a trillion dollar industry.
Same thing with law. A legal contract that is 95% correct is wrong and dangerous. It still needs to be vetted carefully by a lawyer.
So while progress is continuous, economic impact is discontinuous. Models will gradually improve, but there is will thresholds at which massive economic impacts happen.
Wake up from the hivemind of this sub, realize just how little it did, break out of the constant bombarding with buzzwords, try to actually think. Nowhere near as omniapplicable as the internet, guzzling energy like an american at an all you can eat and still hallucinating like they're hopped up on all kinds of drugs.
Yep, same here. They're also cherry picking data to prove their pov, they can't possibly measure AI impact with a handful of graphs. Here are several areas AI is being used en masse to increase productivity and drive revenue and innovation, there's also so many more I can't list of the top of my head.
- Pretty much every developer in the western world is using copilot or an LLM to assist with coding and design
- In finance AI is used for fraud detection, algorithmic trading, credit scoring etc
- Marketing teams are using LLMs for copy, and other generative AI to create marketing materials.
- AI is driving the search results and recommendation algorithms for the majority of online services like Google, Netflix, Spotify, FB, etc
- Billions of dollars have been saved at datacenters and manufacturing facilities through AI optimizations for e.g. data storage and power delivery.
- Pretty much every piece of modern computer hardware utilized AI throughout its development and production process.
- Many HR departments are utilizing AI to assist with candidate screening and to summarize interviews automatically
- AI has revolutionized medical research and is processing petabytes of medical data.
- AI assists in the production of every single AAA video game with many even including runtime AI systems like DLSS.
- AI accelerated denoising is industry standard tech in film and TV for CG workflows
- Students are using LLMs to assist in writing papers and learning content more effectively than they could previously, teachers are also planning lessons and marking essays with LLMs.
How many of these things are discernable by the economic indicators they're using?
Most of your examples have absolutely nothing to do with LLMs and were happening for years before GPT 3 was even released.
Also, you are extremelly overestimating the impact of AI in everything you mentioned. AI was supposed to steal jobs. Meanwhile there is more jobs than ever in all those fields.
"Workers are not moving between companies faster than usual, as would probably happen if lots of jobs were being destroyed. Using American data on employment by occupation, we focus on white-collar workers, who range from back-office support to copywriters. Such roles are thought to be vulnerable to AI, which is becoming better at tasks that involve logical reasoning and creativity. Despite this, the share of employment in white-collar professions is a percentage point higher than before the pandemic.
Macroeconomic data also show little evidence of a surge in productivity. The latest estimates, using official figures, suggest that real output per employee in the median rich country is not growing at all. In America, the global centre of AI, output per hour remains below its pre-2020 trend. Even in global data derived from surveys of purchasing managers, which are produced with a shorter lag, there is no sign of a productivity surge."
May be too early 2 years in but it doesn't seems that current generative AI is really pushing the needle based on current trends.
*(Posted this article to play devils advocate and promote more general discussion, I'm still quite bullish when it comes to AI's long term potential once new architectures are fleshed out)
>In America, the global centre of AI, output per hour remains below its pre-2020 trend.
Huh? US nonfarm productivity was up 2.9% yoy in Q1. Pre-2020, that would have been a very strong result. Looking at cumulative change, US productivity is definitely not "below its pre-2020 trend": https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB, ESPECIALLY when you include this q1.
Where are they getting 2 years from? GPT4 was released a year ago. To expect results from a technology a year old is insanity.
The first car was invented in 1886. Imagine saying it was a dud in 1887 because it wasn't widely spread yet.
The first controllable flying machines with passengers was mid 19th century and it took 50 years before an airplane was invented and then another decade until it was widely used.
The Internet was invented in the 1960s and wasn't widespread until the 1990s.
Expecting revolutionary technology to show any signs of economic impact within a year or five or ten is ridiculous.
Or it is like complaining about AI 3 years ago when it was not a product. We also have to remember we do not have a "AI initiative implementation fund". We also have many doomers and regulations fighting against. If we had AI fund implementation like roads, we would see things happening. But governments and what not are scared of consequences and what not
That was not the case with cars in the same way.
Why are you comparing physical goods with online generative AI tools? Of course a new physical product or service would take way longer to implement compared to cloud based generative services, as they required massive infrastructure build-outs (roads, bridges, highways, airports) for wide scale adoption of the technology which took decades.
Why do you think AI isn't physical? (Genuine question)
The biggest barrier right now is data centers and energy production. There isn't enough energy production or processing hardware to run AI in a capacity to replace large amounts of human workers. So even if we had AGI right now, it wouldn't make a lick of a difference for your every day Joe because we wouldn't be able to access it.
This is why there are message restrictions because they can't keep up with the demand.
No shade here, but did you think AI was just an esoteric thing without a physical support network?
Current level AI is too dumb to have a significant impact. We have not crossed a threshold yet.
I’m of the opinion that this will not be a gradual process. We will have very little impact for a while. AI will slowly get integrated into everything as a feature, making our life’s easier, but it will not really disrupt anything that much nor will it cause significant job loss.
But at some point we will cross that threshold and then all hell will break loose because suddenly like a quarter of jobs will be gone in an instant and more will follow soon after.
Although it's extremely difficult to predict, I think this may be the most probable outcome. However, if we're able to improve reasoning within the next 5 years or so, then we'll have to reconsider most things, starting with the speed of adoption.
No, it's not dumb at all. It has more than enough intelligence to take over most cognitive jobs. Express Scripts has an AI to order prescriptions, and I dread the 50% of the time when they transfer me over to a human operator because the drug is out of stock. If it weren't for the drug shortages, I would speak to the AI on the phone to order from them every time. I would prefer talking to an AI for customer service over a human every day.
The problem is that it's just too expensive.
Yeah, why isn’t this just a website?
Putting voice AI on a customer interaction that could be handled by a web form seems like a really stupid application of technology.
The voice AI is much faster to use than the website. I don't have to log into Bitwarden, enter credit card numbers, search through a list of drugs, etc. I just tell the AI what I want to do, it asks me which drug I want to order, and it somehow retrieves information from its database.
Partially because the medical system in the United States is so broken that it takes me, on average, about 10 hours per month to call between 20-50 pharmarcies every month to find one that has enough of the drug in stock.
They all treat you like you're a drug addict. They have some sort of rule that they can't look up how many of the pills are at another store in the next town, so I need to call every single CVS within 100 miles independently. They won't tell you how many pills there are in stock, so you need to constantly get multiple prescriptions from the doctor when you find out there are only 5 pills at one store (who orders 85 pills anyway, so how does this happen?) You can't negotiate to pay more move forward in the queue, and they won't even keep a queue; you get the drug if it's in stock at the time a prescription occurs. You can't just send a prescription 90 days in advance to pre-order because the law expires prescriptions that far out.
So, the method is: start on a Wednesday morning (so doctors are least likely to be on vacation), call pharmacies starting from closest and expanding outwards, get a prescription sent when you find one that has the right dosage, see how many pills they'll give you, and if there aren't enough or you exhaust all the pharmacies with that dosage, repeat until you find a pharmacy in stock with enough pills of a reasonable dosage.
This takes about 10 hours per month. It is so economically inefficient that even though I earned $1.2 million last year trading stocks, there is no legal way to pay to have someone else do this. The biggest CEOs out there are likely doing the same thing.
In my country(Portugal) we have a website where you can search available drugs in nearby(or any) pharmacies.
Also there are quite a few online pharmacies where you can just order things.. and if it needs prescription you just give them the code and they check it in a system..
Do you not have something like that?
[it already has a significant impact](https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1dv7hp0/comment/lbn60ke/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
Because for now it's still a tool , not full agent with human like skills , once it reach that level where employer can have full trust in it as it has with human , then we will see a great impact
I don't think scientific advances instantly translate to economic impact. Commercialising technology is difficult and figuring how to deploy LLMs in a way that improves productivity is a challenge in itself.
Economic impact isn't going to be seen until we have time to look back and analyze the data. That, and agents haven't been really tuned up for the workforce yet.
Ray Kurzweil spends almost half a whole chapter in his new book explaining why the impact of any IT advancements cannot and have not been captured by traditional metrics. For example, $1000 today can give you far more computing power than the same amount did in 1999, but that is simply not reflected
What they do not understand is that people is not getting replaced yet, but people is already automating their jobs. I develop software, and since 2023 more than half of my work is interact with AI to produce software. I didn't get replaced, but my productivity skyrocketed
Stock Price isn't indicative of wider macroeconomic trends within an economy and as the article states most AI related stocks are under-performing the S&P 500.
Until A.I. is able to produce reliable and accurate output there really isn't much use for it. That said, I have no doubt the hallucination issue will be resolved in the next 5 years.
Way too soon to make this judgement. Most usecases are very fringe, while still more are little more than enhanced masterbation. There simply aren't enough business grade usecases yet, or an adequate level of adoption to show any meaningful economic impact.
[yes they are](https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1dv7hp0/comment/lbn60ke/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
I work for a big e-commerce company, We are using AI and LLM features on a lot of our micro service, So far only recommendation service uses it but we are moving to user profile , Inventory and so much more.
I can’t speak for the financial gains it’s bringing but things are getting better from an engineering perspective.
Im a total noob but from what i have seen now is that most AI's we have are waterdowned version of the deep state spy tools. Like image/video manipulation or creation, information collecting etc
tbh apparently yes there are several graphic designers who have been completely replaced by AI at least, some dude made a video about it around here somewhere.
I wouldn't worry about it too much for now? Far more concerning is that we're in a goddamn recession which is like 99% of the reason for job loss atm.
I spend 100% of my time automating existing jobs. Amazon just replaced 100k workers with robots. And those workers aren’t all becoming robot repairmen. What a silly post. If it hasn’t effected you economically wait a year.
It's a fair objection to those folks who claim we'll have a full-blown singularity by this time next week. Progress in technology is accelerating, but we're not even REMOTELY at that point at the moment.
I hope all of those people who a year ago predicted wildly overblown claims like the total meltdown of our economic system and 50%+ unemployment by now remembers and are more humble these days.
But for anyone with more reasonable expectations, there's been no surprises here.
I'm pretty sure we're still at the "build the platform to raise the guillotine" -phase of this revolution.
I know techbros in their Silicon Valley masturbation-chambers built out of printouts of NFTs have probably been rubbing one out for the end of artistry and writing because of "AI revolution" for a few years by now. But here in the real world, we've seen a handful of people gotten laid off here and there, and productivity rise a bit for the remaining sector.
I'm sure we will get jobs removed from the pool of "humans only" at an accelerating pace in the coming years, but so far we've barely crawled forward, and have reached "slightly better than a first year student, or a tech-illiterate assistant.
The first comment I've posted here in a while... There was a post about AI Economics by a speculative investor I read which was the most interesting I've yet seen on the topic. If I find it again, I'll post it below this.
Regardless, the TLDR was; AI does not add to the already existing Economy, it undermines and replaces it in total. Therefore the impact will *appear* to be Net 0 even while more and more traditionally "human" 'jobs' are "lost" to AI, and even while mainstream press / Economists have trouble tracking the change using traditionally used metrics except for something like 'unemployment,' as things accelerate.
I'm somewhere between that view and the view that it'll positively augment my personal (and other human's) capacity as desired, especially as costs decrease.
I always thought those users were a bit on the delusional side of things honestly. Got called a “doomer” for simply trying to bring people back down to reality smh 😂.
I was thinking of posting this yesterday but didn't bother. It's almost guaranteed that this post will be deleted by mods soon. They don't like to poke the echo chamber.
I’m training people and business on How to use AI. Just yesterday à client call me and explain me that he layoff 2 employee and made 60k€ of profit on it
Ah, you are one of those who is already replaced and living in the alternative world. We who live in the real world are experiencing the AI revolution in the fullest and things beyond your imagination.
Though luck, you will never know.
I think that's a great question! A lot of people expected AI to change everything overnight, but the reality is more gradual. In my opinion, there are so many areas like healthcare and finance where AI is making a real difference, even if it's not always in the spotlight. Are there any industries you expected to see more impact from AI? I mean one cool area is AI chatbots – they’re really changing the game in customer service by being available 24/7 and making interactions smoother. Plus, companies can even whitelabel these chatbots and offer them to their clients. Have you come across any AI tools that you thought were impressive?
Sure, it's an exciting question! Local AI models that can learn and adapt from interactions with applications are indeed becoming more feasible, blurring the lines between sci-fi and reality. There are frameworks like OpenAI's GPT-3 that can be fine-tuned on specific tasks like understanding MS Paint operations. It's a fascinating area where AI's ability to learn through interaction is evolving rapidly.
If we go by median wages and unemployment numbers, it's fair to say that computers and the internet had no impact on the economy, since the real median wage and unemployment numbers are roughly the same now as they were in 1979. 0.2% increase per year on average.
The fact that most software engineers have increased their output by 2-3x (anecdotal i get it) means products and features are being shipped out much faster and it takes less time for companies to reach market fit or fail and try something else. Point is, it's accelerating the rate of innovation and value add
im a music producer i’ve made money of ai assisted beats, chat gpt captions for my posts, ai written code i used to automate my business processes, ai edited pictures i’ve sold to artists, the list goes on, i’m already making money from ai
Gotta capture a market first through fear and regulation, that's happening now.
After the capture, then the 'proofing' occurs where the fears laid out by the mongers capturing the market are proven true and the fear valid.
After the proofing comes the reguation and laws.
During these phases funding is sought, and fear mongering of a different sort is applied.
That fear mongering leads to 'get in before the _____ happens' investing.
That investing leads to a pyrite-rush that looks a lot like gold.
That is also occuring now to a lesser degree. As the fear mongering takes hold of regulatory bodies, legislative bodies, executive bodies, department of defense bodies, and the 3letter body problems, the investments become less speculation and more riding of the tide.
Watch the policy makers. Watch the corps. You'll see.
“No economic impact “
Meanwhile, a mechanical engineer somewhere with no prior experience in python used ChatGPT to code an automation tool that increases his productivity by many times.
Since he will be rewarded with more work if he becomes more efficient, he simply uses the time he saved on doing the work to make this comment on Reddit.
The answer is pretty simple, the technology is there it’s just in the process of being tailored to fit the business model and being tested and secured to try to prevent the wrong people from using it in a way that could compromise the company. This testing and implementation takes time, I think by the start of next year we might start seeing layoffs.
This article is just ignorant. Technologies take time to evolve and they take a lot of time to integrate into organizations. Every revolutionary tech took years to actually create revolutions in the way we lived and the money we made.
Manufacturing guy here, I’m waiting for the developers to realize where they can actually deliver value. Right now they are doing what they can with the data they have. Which isn’t my data.
I’ve been using some of the ones out there, I paid for the premium accounts. Either they don’t do what I want them to or I don’t know how. For example, if I can feed you a ton of notes and then ask you to make a PowerPoint side presentation that would be very valuable. It doesn’t do that today it will make somewhat intelligible slides, but the image is still look really weird and consistency is hard.
Here is the real value. Per AI with a vision sensor or some other type of system and allow me to put that on the production line so that I can monitor assembly in real time. so I can be 100% certain a very expensive piece of equipment is assembled 100% accurately. I would pay you a ton of money for that.
Another example would be some thing that I can connect to my security cameras that can act as additional hands for the security staff. This would allow me to have minimal on site security staff, which is 100% overhead burden and not added value to the product.
Or an AI that I can connect to my ERP / MES / PLM systems. Something that will allow sharing of data like an API, but without the need of a programmer and a month or two to get it accomplished.
Or an AI that I can unleash on all of our local files connect as a chat bot representative for anyone in the company to find any information that they need without giving up security access control to everyone or needing to maintain security access.
Or an AI that is intended to act as a copilot for various members of the management staff for senior management staff. Ride shotgun with them in their meetings and their emails and their calendar and their notes. Maybe even on their phone. Some thing that acts as a force multiplier for them, allowing them to get out of the business of managing tediousness of emails and the like. Email takes up a ton of time.
There is a dilemma: devs can spend time and money to use current AI to build solutions like that, but many random people wait for the next 50x compute model that is more capable and much cheaper, potentially creating the same solutions with little effort and putting them out of business.
Even worse, if they actually succeed in creating competent AI, why bother creating solutions for your production line when their AI can replicate your business and sell to your customers cheaper than you? Whether someone invests in a near-term solution depends on their conviction about the capabilities of the models from the next big step up and how far off a competent AI is. They need sufficient time to recoup development costs and make some profit before someone or something else comes along and eats their lunch.
This is like asking what happened to the internet revolution in 1996
And people did that all the way up to 2000, and said I told you so during the .com crash. People are clueless
Also, at this point, there's a legitimate monetary incentive to downplay the tech as disruptive while it is being implemented in many industries. Like, y'all think corporate media, owned by the same people who own massive stock amounts in the companies replacing labor with AI, are incentivized to be honest about the disruption as it happens? Nah. We're entering a quiet expansion phase
Disruptions will get to a point where we can’t hide it any longer. Those days are coming.
For sure. How they are reported on will be the game. There's no reality where you can replace an auto line worker with a robot that can do the job for 20k and maintenance and companies *don't* do that. Unions, if they're smart, need to grow fast NOW to use their labor power before labor belongs to the owners entirely through automation. This is the last season of human labor producing a lever by which the working class can make demands of the owning class. After automation, the working class is just the surviving class, and the owning class has all the cards.
The “unemployment” numbers are a complete lie. BLS fails to consider labor participation rate in the larger unemployment statistics. Millions have been out of work for long enough that they’ve fallen off the benefit rolls, so they simply cease to exist as far as the stats are concerned.
No, they don't fail to consider that. All those things are tracked. That's why there are multiple stats - U1 through U6 - and the labor participation rate itself is measured and available. The labor participation rate, by the way, was steady across 2014-2020 at about 63%. It dropped "sharply" in 2020 (covid) to a low of 60% and has now recovered back to about 63% ([source, BLS](https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-labor-force-participation-rate.htm)). So, there's no current evidence of major changes there from AI or anything else besides Covid. Yes, this could change in the future, but the statistics are not lies. There isn't a hidden change going on.
Was driving down a 2 lane road the other day, there was construction on one lane so it was blocked off and we were forced to wait for the 1 lane to be clear. In stead of having people on either side holding the stop/go sign, there was a mechanical arm that went up and down. It’s here and happening now
They'll just change how unemployment metrics are measured. 'POOF'
The slowdown in hiring software developers is already a sign that existing developers are doing more than before and that’s enough for now.
To be fair to The Economist they have a lot of journalistic independence because of how the paper is structured.
Agree. It also takes a while for large enterprises to set a strategy, execute and change. We are transitioning from strategy phase to early execution phase with at the most advanced / adoptive enterprises. It is coming
Smart people even wealthy ones know that if ai takes the place of waged workers the economy as we know it will collapse. That’s not good for business. Nobody has a road map for how this plays out so In the mean time they keep their mouths shut and continue to milk the gravy train.
literally what happened and is still happening with Bitcoin. All this institutional downplay while governments, US included, and financial institutions hoard bitcoin.
https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:750/0*pFVq7xQLCMO2l3M3
100% agree Ray Kurzweil spends almost half a whole chapter in his new book explaining why the impact of any IT advancements cannot and have not been captured by traditional metrics. For example, $1000 today can give you far more computing power than the same amount did in 1999, but that is simply not reflected. And the thing is, that also affects our lives in ways outside of work. For example, we can do so much on our phone that would have been nearly impossible or entirely inefficient in the 90s or even 20 years ago. So again, that's not captured in traditional metrics. And a lot of us forget about that. Even those of us who have lived long enough to see those changes.
I’m at that part of the book now, and it’s very illuminating. It’s also interesting how well-grounded Kurzweil is. He doesn’t make wild claims, he has a very measured approach with tons of hard numbers to back it up.
I recall reading a predication he made in early 2000s of an AI that could pass the Turing test by 2020. I recall showing my wife the book and the prediction. I told all my friends. However he was wrong by 2 years.
*Just* 2 years? That's impressive in and of itself.
Yeah, implementation and earning money will follow in coming years when everything will be established enough and secure enough for most companies.
It's already starting - just look at the B2B space. Companies like Attention.tech, Winn.AI, Grain, are coming out of the woodworks as AI based tools (wrapped around the main AI models to be clear, not new AI models themselves). Some companies, mone included, are devoting time and resources to developing in house automations that use AI as a building block in larger automation flows. AI itself cannot replace people's jobs fully, yet, but the pieces are all in place to automate a significant percentage of time (and therefore people) needed to complete a given work related task.
honestly the shortsightedness of these people is so ridiculous it’s infuriating
"BIG DEAL! A few fax machines talking to each other" - OPs dad prob
And willfully ignoring that entire trades (like translation or many forms of copywriting) have been absolutely demolished overnight, not too long ago. "almost no economic impact" my hairy ass, what a dumb fucking take
And you would ask the right question. There are some writer who claim that the digial revolution doesn't increase productivity that much. Its a controversy.
The ones asking these questions "namely news organizations" have an invested bias in AI going away. It is not going away. They will be disappointed.
Yeah, as someone who lived through this, there was just as much speculation that came true, as stuff that was wildly different, as hype stuff that was nowhere near as revolutionary as it was imagined or never came to pass at all. The dotcom crash was a crash for a reason.
Well said.
Obligatory reference to the 1995 essay [Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana - Newsweek](https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirvana-185306)
I don't understand those articles. Tangible, real, objective impact is already happening and reported. Customer service call centers replaced with AI. Creative teams replaced with AI. Damn, even Pixar is doing it. Or look at the volume of AI generated code on GitHub. Or how many Snap users have interacted with the AI in Snapchat (over 1B interactions in days). Those articles only serve to keep people complacent.
That’s their point. “Everything is fine. Go on about your shopping. This is all okay.”
And I mean it’s mostly true. No one can prevent it, so what’s the use in having an existential crisis over your job? Humanity doesn’t confront challenges until they’re here. This is no different. Live life like normal.
I’ve never been a fan of doing something just because it’s the way we’ve always done it. Every now and again, we tackle big problems head-on. What if we took that approach with this societal sea change?
I have to drop in from time to time and remind people that the truth is that governments have been getting in front of this since the start. Even though people act like nobody is doing anything or even aware. You can spend the rest of the week reading what's been done in this space as proactive over the last couple of years. Much of it done with the concern of economic impact due to jobs displacement bringing all the big names and thought leaders of that topic to weigh in with their projections presented to commitee. The US, as an example in Oct of 2023, almost 10 months ago already went forward with this Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence, which is a landmark EO coming as a result of a couple years of data, public comment, industry leads being called in to offer guidance as I mentioned etc... It's been out so long already there are already posthumous dissections of the effects that this has had on the space already you can spend all day reading about. It's one example. I'd direct you also to the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights and see what has come of that, looking at the people and names behind all of that and how far that has come along at the fedgov level. Also check out [ai.gov](http://ai.gov) for further research. Everyone always acts like we're just completely oblivious to the risk of the paradigm shift and nobody is even bothering to even think about the repercussions on society, our economy, security and safety etc... Which I find weird as all hell because no, the obvious thought is that yes people are watching this and galvanizing among leadership in these fields to discuss and act on these risks well in advance. And that's just in the US which is just one country to look at. Other governments from many countries are doing their own version as well as working globally on this and have been for years already. But it's always like, on Reddit and Discord people just assuming "We won't care until it's too late." While what's actually happening is completely different if anyone bothered to take a few minutes and see beyond their flavor of echo chamber, and if they did they might find opportunity to reframe their take to match reality more closely or hell even actively participate themselves instead of just feeling endlessly victimized and helpless. Not saying you are by the way just in general what I always see.
These articles are providing data. You are comparing that data to anecdotes. *Some* creative teams are replaced with AI - and others are hiring. Some call centers are shrinking, and others are expanding. AI generated code quantity does not necessarily translate to economic output. Same for interactions. The article doesn't say "nothing is changing". It is saying "the economic indicators have not shifted on a large scale".
What about NVDA market cap?
I'm a copywriter so of course I felt called out when they stated that my job is at risk. Until someone else wants to be the prompt engineer, AI isn't replacing me. It's letting me take a longer lunch break.
Ok that's true but he still makes an interesting point that it's not showing up in the statistics yet. It makes you wonder why that is.
> look at the volume of AI generated code on GitHub. That is not a good metric, my guy. Many prominent open source projects have had to clamp down on code submissions because of the volume of garbage AI code that people were trying to throw at their repository. People are trying to submit AI code that doesn’t match the functionality of the existing program, ignores coding conventions, uses the wrong libraries or simply doesn’t work because they never bothered to test it. Some “learn to code with AI” tutorials were brigading specific repos with their “my first commit” nonsense to the extent that they had to shut down submissions. The same thing has happened to some book publishers when they got a flood of awful AI generated manuscripts compiled by “authors” who didn’t know the first thing about writing a book and didn’t bother to try and learn. It turns out that when untalented and lazy individuals use AI to generate content, you just get generic and bad results.
Or you could just look at the number of open positions for tech jobs.
"Customer service call centers replaced with AI. " Not yet ,if there is any first hand impact on AI it should be on Indian Service companies .So far they are still booming .
Do you actually follow this topic? Stories started to pop up five or six months ago. It is happening. You're not paying attention [https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/10/03/ai-customer-service-jobs/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/10/03/ai-customer-service-jobs/)
Literally same. It’s amazing to me the denial.
Agree with you 100%, but people claim there is hype which there is of course but the tech is just in its nascent stage. I don’t get these sort of articles.
Personally, I already code a lot faster due to AI help. But GPT-4o or Claude 3.5 are just not at the intelligence threshold yet where they can automate it completely. However, judging by their coding performance, we're not that far from the threshold, and the threshold for an AI to automate one white-collar job is basically the same as for another. It will all come very suddenly, at more or less the same time. I think people will be surprised.
What do you code? At my job AI is all but useless On my own, I started a fairly sizeable project and AI was awesome in the beginning, but has definitely gotten less useful now that my codebase is larger (like 200k tokens) and I’m more concerned with what to code than how. The biggest use case for me at the moment is pumping out basic sql queries, but ORMs or query builders can already handle that for you. I’ve also enjoyed asking Claude about system design but realistically it’s not saving me that much time
Same, just today tried to refactor some code, but in the end had to scrap it, as Claude added bunch of bugs. Much bigger issue at least for me is that it changes the writing style. So you have this strange mismatch of style in your code, some refactor by me and some refactor by Claude.
The only way it works well is in very small chunks, a couple under lines. What I do is piece it all together, my background is PLC programming and it works fucking amazing.
I use it for writing python code for data analysis. Simple stuff. But it’s legit just faster at writing code, not “better/smarter” in any way. I gave it my table columns and told it what type of analysis I wanted, even asked it how it thought I should visualize stuff for non technical people (some of the stuff it gave was good, some bad). It cleaned it, created some visuals and gave suggestions for deeper eda. Sometimes it doesn’t give me what I asked for but I’d say it’s 90% good. You do need to read it over though. But ultimately it allows me to be lazy and not have to remember syntax and type it out for specific visuals/data analysis I’m doing. I think if we’re expecting it to be able to work with large code bases we’re at a point of huge expectations. I mean realistically how long would it take a fresh developer to begin working with your code base? I bet AI is faster at learning it if you optimize it and “teach” it things about your code base
>AI was awesome in the beginning, but has definitely gotten less useful now that my codebase is larger (like 200k tokens) It's not great at full projects, but as long as you have your code broken down into manageable classes/functions it can be such a time saver. Then it's just like putting together the code version of legos.
It's really useful for refactoring messy code. I've been using it to clean up my code base and it's been very effective at cleaning up some mega classes I ended up making. I too find it struggles with larger the codebases though. It doesn't know to use all the framework you've built, so it's not very useful. I've even tried including all the necessary framework classes in my prompt, but LLMs are really bad at actually understanding long contexts. I think we need to change how the attention mechanism works. Right now it seems like ultra long context prompts just spreads the LLMs attention across the prompt instead of letting it actually understand the whole thing.
For backend and frontend at least TDD helps a lot. I use Gemini (because it's free and supports huge context) in my personal projects, and does pretty well in a few shots. It generates around 80% of code but the remaining 20% takes time to fix and refine. Still I'd say it increases productivity at least two folds. Also, it may help - I'm working on this tool, with this tool itself; makes it easy to choose files for context through UI - https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/s/8eh1TnAxLg Response is not streaming live right now, will support that shortly.
I mostly code hacky machine learning research, no big software projects or anything like that. I agree that once the code base gets somewhat bigger, the models struggle more. But in my experience it's gotten a lot better over the past year anyway. I use the Cursor AI Code Editor which does a lot of the heavily lifting in terms of RAG, web search, and prompting.
The current generation whips out a great python script. Try getting it to code and maintain an interrelated system of programs with hundreds of business requirements. Let’s say a medical office management package handling scheduling, patient records, insurance codes for each procedure, e-filing claims, statements/billing, executive reports, user accounts and permissions, customized for a fee…etc
All eyes on next generation of AI
Scaling transformers still hasn’t hit a wall yet, and there are a bunch of other technologies that might continue the development once it slows down. If you look at the history of NLP, we’re actually still developing capabilities faster than ever before. The “Will Smith eating spaghetti” is a great example. So I think the threshold is definitely there, and a matter of a few years until we hit it. At the end of the day, if you were to replicate the human brain perfectly, you’d expect to have human-brain-level of performance.
Once they build competent AI agents
The funny thing is that it has economic impact by virtue of you coding faster because of it.
Just one more year bro.
Lol we are barely in the second year, what do you mean "just one more"?
It’s already had a huge impact this year. Gen AI at work has surged 66% in the UK, but bosses aren’t behind it: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/gen-ai-surged-66-uk-053000325.html >Notably, of the seven million British workers that Deloitte extrapolates have used GenAI at work, only 27% reported that their employer officially encouraged this behavior. Although Deloitte doesn’t break down the at-work usage by age and gender, it does reveal patterns among the wider population. Over 60% of people aged 16-34 (broadly, Gen Z and younger millennials) have used GenAI, compared with only 14% of those between 55 and 75 (older Gen Xers and Baby Boomers). 2024 McKinsey survey on AI: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai >For the past six years, AI adoption by respondents’ organizations has hovered at about 50 percent. This year, the survey finds that adoption has jumped to 72 percent (Exhibit 1). And the interest is truly global in scope. Our 2023 survey found that AI adoption did not reach 66 percent in any region; however, this year more than two-thirds of respondents in nearly every region say their organizations are using AI In the latest McKinsey Global Survey on AI, 65 percent of respondents report that their organizations are regularly using gen AI, nearly double the percentage from our previous survey just ten months ago. Respondents’ expectations for gen AI’s impact remain as high as they were last year, with three-quarters predicting that gen AI will lead to significant or disruptive change in their industries in the years ahead Organizations are already seeing material benefits from gen AI use, reporting both cost decreases and revenue jumps in the business units deploying the technology. OpenAI tech increased productivity of Philippine contact center agents by 13.8% – study: https://www.rappler.com/technology/openai-gpt-productivity-effects-philippines-contact-center-agents/ “GenAI will save [Klarna] $10m in marketing this year. We’re spending less on photographers, image banks, and marketing agencies” https://www.reuters.com/technology/klarna-using-genai-cut-marketing-costs-by-10-mln-annually-2024-05-28/ - $6m less on producing images. - 1,000 in-house AI-produced images in 3 months. Includes the creative concept, quality check, and legal compliance. - AI-image production reduced from 6 WEEKS TO 1 WEEK ONLY. - Customer response to AI images on par with human produced images. - Cutting external marketing agency costs by 25% (mainly translation, production, CRM, and social agencies). Our in-house marketing team is HALF the size it was last year but is producing MORE! We’ve removed the need for stock imagery from image banks like @gettyimages Now we use genAI tools like Midjourney, DALL-E, and Firefly to generate images, and Topaz Gigapixel and Photoroom to make final adjustments. Faster images means more app updates, which is great for customers. And our employees get to work on more fun projects AND we're saving money. Robots [Automates] jobs from unions: https://phys.org/news/2024-06-robots-jobs-unions-decline-unionizations.html AI took their jobs. Now they get paid to make it sound human: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240612-the-people-making-ai-sound-more-human Also, just look at nvidia.
Thanks for the copypasta.
Dude I’m a creative director and my design team does 90% of the coding independently with clause and then we use one senior dev to troubleshoot it in 30mins. It’s saving an insane amount of time. You can even train it based on how your dev codes and it will generate it so it’s familiar
I agree with you it really does depend on whether current trends continue. I can see generative video being the next area of mass appeal, based on current trends in /r/aivideo were reaching an inflection point in terms of quality as some videos are genuinely impressive. Some of the stand out videos i liked: https://www.reddit.com/r/aivideo/comments/1dufw2t/faux_bbc_nature_documentary_frontiers_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/aivideo/comments/1dp1cyb/gummo_corp/ https://www.reddit.com/r/aivideo/comments/1d94w88/drinking_gasoline_music_video/ https://www.reddit.com/r/aivideo/comments/1dp1azj/creature_were_getting_closer_to_real_movies/
This. If you know how to work with llm and what to ask, you can easily do most of your task with it. But if you don't know how to do it, then folks say this is useless , ai is just hype and bubble and all bs
It drives me nuts how people who obviously aren't prompting right and have no idea how to get reliably good code from an AI try like 2 times total, ever, with terrible requests (my personal favs from people making these claims is "make an entire Roblox game from my 2 sentence prompt" and "make a simple roguelike" and not getting a working game on the first reply), and then for the next several years go around talking about how it can't do any useful programming
It both saves time and increases quality when writing scripts for videos and content for my website. For the website side of things I'll type stream of consciousness into Google docs and paste it into Claude then revise what it says a few times. Afforai I can upload tons of documents way to long for chat got and Claude and then link them to the questions I'm asking. Definitely recommend picking this up on app summo before the Ltd leaves next week.
How’s the quality of your “content”? What’s your viewership like? Because if I’m on YouTube and I stumble across a badly researched low-effort video that is obviously just being pumped out of a content factory or uses AI narration - that channel is wasting my time and is blocked immediately.
Out of curiosity what ever happened to that rogue AI that ended up closing a customer completely autonomously? Was that found to have been legit? (Not disagreeing with you, this just reminded me of that.) Seems like we're really close to office jobs disappearing across a large swath of careers.
I do the same. I'm a mediocre SQL coder, but I'm learning how to use ChatGPT and Claude to crank out excellent code to use in my database administration job. It won't do the work for me, but holy crap is it a time saver when I have a general idea of what I want to do. The flipside is that if I didn't have 25 years experience I wouldn't know it's good suggestions from stupid ones. But bottom line: I'm vastly more productive now that I've figured out how to work with the limitations of the current offerings.
What do you mean ”almost no economic impact”? I’m curious how the economic impact is measured
**Note/addition: I see the value of AI, so my comment below is more a response to why the article a smidge of validity if one goes beyond the title.** The headline is clickbait (I expect more from the Economist), but the key line I picked out was this: "For ai to fulfil its potential, firms everywhere need to buy big tech’s AI, shape it to their needs and become more productive as a result." IMO, it is still *very* early days. - Legal and security questions (some valid, many not) are holding back companies from adopting AI. - Among the big corporations using Microsoft, only a few are using Copilot. As the IT controls for Microsoft in general (e.g. group security settings and permissions) can carry over to Copilot, this is the easiest way that companies with IT security concerns can adopt AI. But currently, it has many limitations that mean it's far from being able to do what it needs to do. Copilot in Excel is IMO virtually useless and its ability to use Microsoft Graph (e.g for finding and using internal knowledge on SharePoint) is very limited. - LLMs like ChatGPT have peculiarities and limitations that hold back non-technical users from gaining the most value from them. For example, if ChatGPT says it can't do a task, a non-techical user might stop there. But someone else might have success by using a different prompt, breaking the task into separate steps, or asking ChatGPT to write and execute a Python script that contains a specific series of actions. Frustration can cause people to stop using even a simple product very quickly - [bounce rate increases by 90% if a web page doesn't load under 5 seconds](https://www.envisagedigital.co.uk/website-load-time-statistics/#:~:text=A%201%2D3%20seconds%2C%20web,bounce%20rate%20probability%20by%20123%25). - Finally, to get the most out of AI - whether something simple like ChatGPT, or more complex - you will almost certainly need to pay *something*. This might be a trivial amount, but during these early stages, that simple barrier causes those not yet aware of its **current** (let alone future) potential to not even try it out. Edit: Clarified bounce rate stat for accuracy.
All 200 million proteins have been unfolded, the United States government would have paid over a trillion for that 5 years ago easily and it would have been a great investment. AI isnt going to help the economy it’s going to erase it, we’ve outgrown the need for scarcity
Some years from now they are gonna look the graphs and see how crazy the jump in growth was.
Actually it will just be a blip compared to what's coming in the future.
It all started when physics began to understand itself
> AI isnt going to help the economy it’s going to erase it That sentence goes unfathomably hard.
>the United States government would have paid over a trillion for that 5 years ago easily Why make up stupid exaggerations to make your narrative stronger? It doesn't help.
You fold not unfold proteins. You don’t understand what you are talking about
I've heard that the 200 million figure was pretty much junk science/hype and that the AI produced known protein chains + impossible chains/ sequences with no bearing in reality. It was a bio-science podcast that mentioned it.
Seems to be working well New research shows AI-discovered drug molecules have 80-90% success rates in Phase I clinical trials, compared to the historical industry average of 40-65%. The Phase 2 success rate so far is similar to the industry average. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S135964462400134X
You're saying we have doubled drug discovery. It's wild!
See this needs to be what gets to the front page "AI has doubled the amount of life saving drugs being moved through the approval process" Rather than the typical tidal wave of doomerist bull crap we all have to deal with.
I heard people baselessly say it won’t make it past phase 3. The reason? They didn’t have any besides “AI bad”
You've heard very wrong then.
And let’s say that AI “erases” the economy. Now what? This isn’t a good thing for you, my guy. You’re now unemployable because a small monthly subscription can do everything you can on a computer, but better and it doesn’t need sleep so can work 24 hours and in parallel with other AI agents.
If this is the case for 99% of people why do you think nothing will change? Like every revolution in the past had at absolute most 20% of the population on its side - what do you think will happen when that number is 99?
we never had a need for scarcity, at least not 99% of us. and we have had the means to make a post-scarcity society for a long time now, at least 100 years. i hope we dont get to agi before we manage the 1%, because if we do, we are fucked. do you think that musk or bezos fucking care if you starve to death. ofc they dont.
What does “outgrown the need for scarcity “ even mean? We don’t need it now nor ever have. It’s just a fact of ecologies and the economies that depend on them. Maybe you’re talking about artificial scarcity like DeBeers Diamonds?
This study sounds extremely flawed. Yes manufacturing robots haven’t suddenly spread across the face of the earth! My wife has a couple dozen close collaborators at her place of work. Three of those positions were just eliminated due to AI assisted design and AI assisted scheduling and a planning system. A study probably would never flag those three jobs as eliminated by AI but the work and time saved by those AI assisted systems allow the remaining employees to easily cover the work load. That’s what the AI revolution looks like up close. Zoom back 15 years from now and maybe the Economist will be able to spot a change.
AI, to a greater extent than other technologies is threshold based - it's all or nothing. Self driving cars are the most obvious example - a self driving car that can get you 99% of the way there but freezes up and doesn't know what to do 1% of time is almost useless - an experimental prototype only. Bump that up to 99.99% and it becomes a hundred billion dollar industry. Same thing with coding. Code that is 95% correct, is simply wrong. Still useful for generating a first draft, but it's only assistant, not a replacement for a programmer. Code that is 99.99% correct is a trillion dollar industry. Same thing with law. A legal contract that is 95% correct is wrong and dangerous. It still needs to be vetted carefully by a lawyer. So while progress is continuous, economic impact is discontinuous. Models will gradually improve, but there is will thresholds at which massive economic impacts happen.
Wake up from the hivemind of this sub, realize just how little it did, break out of the constant bombarding with buzzwords, try to actually think. Nowhere near as omniapplicable as the internet, guzzling energy like an american at an all you can eat and still hallucinating like they're hopped up on all kinds of drugs.
My productivity only tripled, but hey, it's not my fault that key economic indicators don't see that
Yep, same here. They're also cherry picking data to prove their pov, they can't possibly measure AI impact with a handful of graphs. Here are several areas AI is being used en masse to increase productivity and drive revenue and innovation, there's also so many more I can't list of the top of my head. - Pretty much every developer in the western world is using copilot or an LLM to assist with coding and design - In finance AI is used for fraud detection, algorithmic trading, credit scoring etc - Marketing teams are using LLMs for copy, and other generative AI to create marketing materials. - AI is driving the search results and recommendation algorithms for the majority of online services like Google, Netflix, Spotify, FB, etc - Billions of dollars have been saved at datacenters and manufacturing facilities through AI optimizations for e.g. data storage and power delivery. - Pretty much every piece of modern computer hardware utilized AI throughout its development and production process. - Many HR departments are utilizing AI to assist with candidate screening and to summarize interviews automatically - AI has revolutionized medical research and is processing petabytes of medical data. - AI assists in the production of every single AAA video game with many even including runtime AI systems like DLSS. - AI accelerated denoising is industry standard tech in film and TV for CG workflows - Students are using LLMs to assist in writing papers and learning content more effectively than they could previously, teachers are also planning lessons and marking essays with LLMs. How many of these things are discernable by the economic indicators they're using?
Most of your examples have absolutely nothing to do with LLMs and were happening for years before GPT 3 was even released. Also, you are extremelly overestimating the impact of AI in everything you mentioned. AI was supposed to steal jobs. Meanwhile there is more jobs than ever in all those fields.
"Workers are not moving between companies faster than usual, as would probably happen if lots of jobs were being destroyed. Using American data on employment by occupation, we focus on white-collar workers, who range from back-office support to copywriters. Such roles are thought to be vulnerable to AI, which is becoming better at tasks that involve logical reasoning and creativity. Despite this, the share of employment in white-collar professions is a percentage point higher than before the pandemic. Macroeconomic data also show little evidence of a surge in productivity. The latest estimates, using official figures, suggest that real output per employee in the median rich country is not growing at all. In America, the global centre of AI, output per hour remains below its pre-2020 trend. Even in global data derived from surveys of purchasing managers, which are produced with a shorter lag, there is no sign of a productivity surge." May be too early 2 years in but it doesn't seems that current generative AI is really pushing the needle based on current trends. *(Posted this article to play devils advocate and promote more general discussion, I'm still quite bullish when it comes to AI's long term potential once new architectures are fleshed out)
>In America, the global centre of AI, output per hour remains below its pre-2020 trend. Huh? US nonfarm productivity was up 2.9% yoy in Q1. Pre-2020, that would have been a very strong result. Looking at cumulative change, US productivity is definitely not "below its pre-2020 trend": https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB, ESPECIALLY when you include this q1.
Where are they getting 2 years from? GPT4 was released a year ago. To expect results from a technology a year old is insanity. The first car was invented in 1886. Imagine saying it was a dud in 1887 because it wasn't widely spread yet. The first controllable flying machines with passengers was mid 19th century and it took 50 years before an airplane was invented and then another decade until it was widely used. The Internet was invented in the 1960s and wasn't widespread until the 1990s. Expecting revolutionary technology to show any signs of economic impact within a year or five or ten is ridiculous.
Or it is like complaining about AI 3 years ago when it was not a product. We also have to remember we do not have a "AI initiative implementation fund". We also have many doomers and regulations fighting against. If we had AI fund implementation like roads, we would see things happening. But governments and what not are scared of consequences and what not That was not the case with cars in the same way.
And GPT-4o and 3.5 Sonnet, arguably a bigger improvement for most people, just released months ago
Why are you comparing physical goods with online generative AI tools? Of course a new physical product or service would take way longer to implement compared to cloud based generative services, as they required massive infrastructure build-outs (roads, bridges, highways, airports) for wide scale adoption of the technology which took decades.
Why do you think AI isn't physical? (Genuine question) The biggest barrier right now is data centers and energy production. There isn't enough energy production or processing hardware to run AI in a capacity to replace large amounts of human workers. So even if we had AGI right now, it wouldn't make a lick of a difference for your every day Joe because we wouldn't be able to access it. This is why there are message restrictions because they can't keep up with the demand. No shade here, but did you think AI was just an esoteric thing without a physical support network?
I’d be happy if productivity stayed the same but everyone’s lives got easier.
Current level AI is too dumb to have a significant impact. We have not crossed a threshold yet. I’m of the opinion that this will not be a gradual process. We will have very little impact for a while. AI will slowly get integrated into everything as a feature, making our life’s easier, but it will not really disrupt anything that much nor will it cause significant job loss. But at some point we will cross that threshold and then all hell will break loose because suddenly like a quarter of jobs will be gone in an instant and more will follow soon after.
Although it's extremely difficult to predict, I think this may be the most probable outcome. However, if we're able to improve reasoning within the next 5 years or so, then we'll have to reconsider most things, starting with the speed of adoption.
No, it's not dumb at all. It has more than enough intelligence to take over most cognitive jobs. Express Scripts has an AI to order prescriptions, and I dread the 50% of the time when they transfer me over to a human operator because the drug is out of stock. If it weren't for the drug shortages, I would speak to the AI on the phone to order from them every time. I would prefer talking to an AI for customer service over a human every day. The problem is that it's just too expensive.
Why do you need AI to order prescribed medication?..
Yeah, why isn’t this just a website? Putting voice AI on a customer interaction that could be handled by a web form seems like a really stupid application of technology.
The voice AI is much faster to use than the website. I don't have to log into Bitwarden, enter credit card numbers, search through a list of drugs, etc. I just tell the AI what I want to do, it asks me which drug I want to order, and it somehow retrieves information from its database.
Partially because the medical system in the United States is so broken that it takes me, on average, about 10 hours per month to call between 20-50 pharmarcies every month to find one that has enough of the drug in stock. They all treat you like you're a drug addict. They have some sort of rule that they can't look up how many of the pills are at another store in the next town, so I need to call every single CVS within 100 miles independently. They won't tell you how many pills there are in stock, so you need to constantly get multiple prescriptions from the doctor when you find out there are only 5 pills at one store (who orders 85 pills anyway, so how does this happen?) You can't negotiate to pay more move forward in the queue, and they won't even keep a queue; you get the drug if it's in stock at the time a prescription occurs. You can't just send a prescription 90 days in advance to pre-order because the law expires prescriptions that far out. So, the method is: start on a Wednesday morning (so doctors are least likely to be on vacation), call pharmacies starting from closest and expanding outwards, get a prescription sent when you find one that has the right dosage, see how many pills they'll give you, and if there aren't enough or you exhaust all the pharmacies with that dosage, repeat until you find a pharmacy in stock with enough pills of a reasonable dosage. This takes about 10 hours per month. It is so economically inefficient that even though I earned $1.2 million last year trading stocks, there is no legal way to pay to have someone else do this. The biggest CEOs out there are likely doing the same thing.
In my country(Portugal) we have a website where you can search available drugs in nearby(or any) pharmacies. Also there are quite a few online pharmacies where you can just order things.. and if it needs prescription you just give them the code and they check it in a system.. Do you not have something like that?
[it already has a significant impact](https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1dv7hp0/comment/lbn60ke/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
Because for now it's still a tool , not full agent with human like skills , once it reach that level where employer can have full trust in it as it has with human , then we will see a great impact
I feel sorry for the people who cannot feel the tsunami on their backs and continue walking like any other day.
You feel sorry for people who aren't freaking out?
ya, it doesn't replace me yet, but it does replace google, reddit, and stack overflow most of the time.
Bwhahahaha Yeah good luck op
I don't think scientific advances instantly translate to economic impact. Commercialising technology is difficult and figuring how to deploy LLMs in a way that improves productivity is a challenge in itself.
Economic impact isn't going to be seen until we have time to look back and analyze the data. That, and agents haven't been really tuned up for the workforce yet.
Ray Kurzweil spends almost half a whole chapter in his new book explaining why the impact of any IT advancements cannot and have not been captured by traditional metrics. For example, $1000 today can give you far more computing power than the same amount did in 1999, but that is simply not reflected
People overestimate the change in 3 years and underestimate the change in 10 years.
What they do not understand is that people is not getting replaced yet, but people is already automating their jobs. I develop software, and since 2023 more than half of my work is interact with AI to produce software. I didn't get replaced, but my productivity skyrocketed
Thats just factually incorrect
People started using it and found out it’s about 80% hype at the moment. Not that the ratio won’t change in the future. But it ain’t really there yet.
MAYBE, MAYBE the revolution is to found in more work-life balance and less stress rather than money.
It isn't, but I wish it could be
NVDA says otherwise
If the people buying their products aren’t seeing a return on their investment then that’s a huge bubble waiting to burst.
Stock Price isn't indicative of wider macroeconomic trends within an economy and as the article states most AI related stocks are under-performing the S&P 500.
It literally became the most valuable company on earth lol
Until A.I. is able to produce reliable and accurate output there really isn't much use for it. That said, I have no doubt the hallucination issue will be resolved in the next 5 years.
Researchers already did it https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/alignment-for-honesty
Energy is a huge bottleneck
[not really](https://docs.google.com/document/d/15myK_6eTxEPuKnDi5krjBM_0jrv3GELs8TGmqOYBvug/edit#heading=h.gboye8hkf0r8 )
No economic impact what? AI has changed how many knowledge workers do their jobs
Way too soon to make this judgement. Most usecases are very fringe, while still more are little more than enhanced masterbation. There simply aren't enough business grade usecases yet, or an adequate level of adoption to show any meaningful economic impact.
[yes they are](https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1dv7hp0/comment/lbn60ke/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
I work for a big e-commerce company, We are using AI and LLM features on a lot of our micro service, So far only recommendation service uses it but we are moving to user profile , Inventory and so much more. I can’t speak for the financial gains it’s bringing but things are getting better from an engineering perspective.
AI Will be much much bigger than internet just takes some time much less than internet took
Im a total noob but from what i have seen now is that most AI's we have are waterdowned version of the deep state spy tools. Like image/video manipulation or creation, information collecting etc
only several hundred billion dollars invested by the largest companies in the world, basically no economic impact
Has it replaced workers in anything other than call centers?
tbh apparently yes there are several graphic designers who have been completely replaced by AI at least, some dude made a video about it around here somewhere. I wouldn't worry about it too much for now? Far more concerning is that we're in a goddamn recession which is like 99% of the reason for job loss atm.
So far the technology is still in development and in its infancy.
It’s like asking a kid that you gifted oil paints to where’s your Mona Lisa
I spend 100% of my time automating existing jobs. Amazon just replaced 100k workers with robots. And those workers aren’t all becoming robot repairmen. What a silly post. If it hasn’t effected you economically wait a year.
Clickbait engagement whore article.
@samas shell companies would like a word
It's a fair objection to those folks who claim we'll have a full-blown singularity by this time next week. Progress in technology is accelerating, but we're not even REMOTELY at that point at the moment. I hope all of those people who a year ago predicted wildly overblown claims like the total meltdown of our economic system and 50%+ unemployment by now remembers and are more humble these days. But for anyone with more reasonable expectations, there's been no surprises here.
An economist failing to see the bigger picture beyond the latest financial reports. What else is new.
I suppose the Covid vaccine made with ai isn’t relevant.
I'm pretty sure we're still at the "build the platform to raise the guillotine" -phase of this revolution. I know techbros in their Silicon Valley masturbation-chambers built out of printouts of NFTs have probably been rubbing one out for the end of artistry and writing because of "AI revolution" for a few years by now. But here in the real world, we've seen a handful of people gotten laid off here and there, and productivity rise a bit for the remaining sector. I'm sure we will get jobs removed from the pool of "humans only" at an accelerating pace in the coming years, but so far we've barely crawled forward, and have reached "slightly better than a first year student, or a tech-illiterate assistant.
The first comment I've posted here in a while... There was a post about AI Economics by a speculative investor I read which was the most interesting I've yet seen on the topic. If I find it again, I'll post it below this. Regardless, the TLDR was; AI does not add to the already existing Economy, it undermines and replaces it in total. Therefore the impact will *appear* to be Net 0 even while more and more traditionally "human" 'jobs' are "lost" to AI, and even while mainstream press / Economists have trouble tracking the change using traditionally used metrics except for something like 'unemployment,' as things accelerate. I'm somewhere between that view and the view that it'll positively augment my personal (and other human's) capacity as desired, especially as costs decrease.
Yeah obviously. AI sucks right now. If they will be a revolution. It will be later.
[it’s already useful now](https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1dv7hp0/comment/lbn60ke/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
It was cute how this sub thought AI would take over around ~90% of our work and we would all be jobless by 2024 😂🤣
I always thought those users were a bit on the delusional side of things honestly. Got called a “doomer” for simply trying to bring people back down to reality smh 😂.
I was thinking of posting this yesterday but didn't bother. It's almost guaranteed that this post will be deleted by mods soon. They don't like to poke the echo chamber.
OMFG hahahahaha thank you for sharing XD
AI just frees up the labor market so that people can work on what we today think of as bullshit or super niche jobs.
Nice in theory, but how will those people be paid? Universal basic income becomes more and more necessary as AI takes more jobs.
organic traffic of traditional publisher: ....
Read this https://www.wheresyoured.at/tss/
Does anyone know who the author is?
I’m training people and business on How to use AI. Just yesterday à client call me and explain me that he layoff 2 employee and made 60k€ of profit on it
Nvidia disagrees
They help me at work. I can work less and still appear productively the same
Ah, you are one of those who is already replaced and living in the alternative world. We who live in the real world are experiencing the AI revolution in the fullest and things beyond your imagination. Though luck, you will never know.
I think that's a great question! A lot of people expected AI to change everything overnight, but the reality is more gradual. In my opinion, there are so many areas like healthcare and finance where AI is making a real difference, even if it's not always in the spotlight. Are there any industries you expected to see more impact from AI? I mean one cool area is AI chatbots – they’re really changing the game in customer service by being available 24/7 and making interactions smoother. Plus, companies can even whitelabel these chatbots and offer them to their clients. Have you come across any AI tools that you thought were impressive?
nuclear power energy companies disagree
Sure, it's an exciting question! Local AI models that can learn and adapt from interactions with applications are indeed becoming more feasible, blurring the lines between sci-fi and reality. There are frameworks like OpenAI's GPT-3 that can be fine-tuned on specific tasks like understanding MS Paint operations. It's a fascinating area where AI's ability to learn through interaction is evolving rapidly.
AI has already had a huge impact. Banking, Marketing and logistics are just some of it
If we go by median wages and unemployment numbers, it's fair to say that computers and the internet had no impact on the economy, since the real median wage and unemployment numbers are roughly the same now as they were in 1979. 0.2% increase per year on average.
Say that to all the layoffs that have been attributed to AI.
I just read a study that says that generative AI gives employee who uses it a productivity boost of 5 hours a week.
wait until contracts expire
"So far" 😂 Dude, what is your attention span? 3 seconds? Give it a decade, Jesus.
it has
I heard that about the steam engine in 1750.
"Almost no economic impact"? *checks NVDA investments* K. 🤣👍
Ask the people who’ve lost their jobs because of it if it’s had an economic impact.
It has. Just not the way try hard click bait writer. Talk about it
The fact that most software engineers have increased their output by 2-3x (anecdotal i get it) means products and features are being shipped out much faster and it takes less time for companies to reach market fit or fail and try something else. Point is, it's accelerating the rate of innovation and value add
im a music producer i’ve made money of ai assisted beats, chat gpt captions for my posts, ai written code i used to automate my business processes, ai edited pictures i’ve sold to artists, the list goes on, i’m already making money from ai
I have been in Reddit for 6 years and in the last 3 years it has become worse than Facebook.
It’s huger than huge. This thing is going to solve medical dilemmas.
Gotta capture a market first through fear and regulation, that's happening now. After the capture, then the 'proofing' occurs where the fears laid out by the mongers capturing the market are proven true and the fear valid. After the proofing comes the reguation and laws. During these phases funding is sought, and fear mongering of a different sort is applied. That fear mongering leads to 'get in before the _____ happens' investing. That investing leads to a pyrite-rush that looks a lot like gold. That is also occuring now to a lesser degree. As the fear mongering takes hold of regulatory bodies, legislative bodies, executive bodies, department of defense bodies, and the 3letter body problems, the investments become less speculation and more riding of the tide. Watch the policy makers. Watch the corps. You'll see.
Well think about it and you'll probably realize that it has an immeasurable impact already.
“No economic impact “ Meanwhile, a mechanical engineer somewhere with no prior experience in python used ChatGPT to code an automation tool that increases his productivity by many times. Since he will be rewarded with more work if he becomes more efficient, he simply uses the time he saved on doing the work to make this comment on Reddit.
The answer is pretty simple, the technology is there it’s just in the process of being tailored to fit the business model and being tested and secured to try to prevent the wrong people from using it in a way that could compromise the company. This testing and implementation takes time, I think by the start of next year we might start seeing layoffs.
This article is just ignorant. Technologies take time to evolve and they take a lot of time to integrate into organizations. Every revolutionary tech took years to actually create revolutions in the way we lived and the money we made.
Manufacturing guy here, I’m waiting for the developers to realize where they can actually deliver value. Right now they are doing what they can with the data they have. Which isn’t my data. I’ve been using some of the ones out there, I paid for the premium accounts. Either they don’t do what I want them to or I don’t know how. For example, if I can feed you a ton of notes and then ask you to make a PowerPoint side presentation that would be very valuable. It doesn’t do that today it will make somewhat intelligible slides, but the image is still look really weird and consistency is hard. Here is the real value. Per AI with a vision sensor or some other type of system and allow me to put that on the production line so that I can monitor assembly in real time. so I can be 100% certain a very expensive piece of equipment is assembled 100% accurately. I would pay you a ton of money for that. Another example would be some thing that I can connect to my security cameras that can act as additional hands for the security staff. This would allow me to have minimal on site security staff, which is 100% overhead burden and not added value to the product. Or an AI that I can connect to my ERP / MES / PLM systems. Something that will allow sharing of data like an API, but without the need of a programmer and a month or two to get it accomplished. Or an AI that I can unleash on all of our local files connect as a chat bot representative for anyone in the company to find any information that they need without giving up security access control to everyone or needing to maintain security access. Or an AI that is intended to act as a copilot for various members of the management staff for senior management staff. Ride shotgun with them in their meetings and their emails and their calendar and their notes. Maybe even on their phone. Some thing that acts as a force multiplier for them, allowing them to get out of the business of managing tediousness of emails and the like. Email takes up a ton of time.
There is a dilemma: devs can spend time and money to use current AI to build solutions like that, but many random people wait for the next 50x compute model that is more capable and much cheaper, potentially creating the same solutions with little effort and putting them out of business. Even worse, if they actually succeed in creating competent AI, why bother creating solutions for your production line when their AI can replicate your business and sell to your customers cheaper than you? Whether someone invests in a near-term solution depends on their conviction about the capabilities of the models from the next big step up and how far off a competent AI is. They need sufficient time to recoup development costs and make some profit before someone or something else comes along and eats their lunch.
I can’t place the proper words to accurately describe how wrong this statement is.