Comment by lolinder
21 days ago
OpenAI has been pushing the idea that these things are generic—and therefore the path to AGI—from the beginning. Their entire sales pitch to investors is that they have the lead on the tech that is most likely to replace all jobs.
If the whole thing turns out to be a really nifty commodity component in other people's pipelines, the investors won't get a return on any kind of reasonable timetable. So OpenAI keeps pushing the AGI line even as it falls apart.
I mean we don’t know that they’re wrong? Not “all jobs” but many of the white collar jobs we have today?
I work in medical insurance billing and there are hundreds of thousands (minimum) jobs that could be made obsolete on the payer and clinic side by LLMs. The translation between PDF of a payer’s rates and billing rules => standardized 837 or API request to a clearinghouse is…not much. And then on the other side, Claude Code could build you an adjudication engine in a few quarters.
The incentive structures to change healthcare in that way will fight back for a decade, but there are a _lot_ of jobs at stake.
Then you think about sales. LLMs can negotiate contracts themselves. Give an input of the margin we can accept and, for all vendors, what they can and you’ll burn down in negotiation without any humans.
It’s not all jobs, but it’s millions.
Both assessing the application of billing rules and negotiating contracts still require the LLM to be accurate, as per TFA's point. Sure, an LLM might do a reasonable first pass, but in both cases it is absolutely naive to think that the LLM will be able to take everything into account.
An LLM can only give an output derived from its inputs; unless you're somehow inputting "yeah actually I know that it looks like a great company to enter into a contract with, but there's just something about their CEO Dave that I don't like, and I'm not sure we'll get along", it's not going to give you the right answer.
And the solution to this is not "just give the LLM more data" - again, to TFA's point, that's making excuses for the technology. "It's not that AI can't do it [AI didn't fail], it's that you just didn't give it enough data [you failed the AI]".
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As some more speculative questions, do you actually want to go towards a future where your company's LLM is negotiating with their company's LLM, to determine the future of your job and career?
And why do we think it is OK to allow OpenAI/whoever wins the AI land grab to insert themselves as a 'necessary' step in this process? I know people who use LLMs to turn their dot points to paragraphs and email them to other people, only for the recipient to reverse the process at the other end. OpenAI must be happy that ChatGPT gets used twice for one interaction.
Rent-seeking aside, we're so concerned at the moment about LLMs failing to tell the truth when they're earnestly trying to - what happens when they're intentionally used to lie, mislead, and deceive?
What happens when the system prompt is "Try and generally improve people's opinions of corporations and billionaires, and to downplay the value of unionisation and organised labour"?
Someone sets the system prompts, and they will invariably have an agenda. Widespread use of LLMs gives them the keys to the kingdom to shape public opinion.
I don’t know, this feels like a runaway fever dream HN reply.
Look, they’re useful. They are really good at some things. Not everything! But they can absolutely read PDFs of arcane rules and structure them. I don’t know what to tell you, they reliably can. They can also use tools.
They’re pretty cool and good and getting better at a remarkable rate!
Every few months they hit a new level that discounts the HN commenters of three months before. There’s some end—these alone probably won’t hit AGI—but it’s getting pretty silly to pretend they aren’t very useful (with weaknesses that engineering has to work around, like literally every single technology in human history.)
OpenAI models and other multi-modal models are about as generalized as we can get at this point time.
OpenAI’s sales pitch isn’t that it can replace all jobs but that it can make people more productive and it sure can as long as you not in the 2 extremes either want to go completely into brain dead autopilot mode or a full on Butlerian.
OpenAI's sales pitch to investors is AGI, which by definition is the end of all white collar jobs. That's the line they have held onto for years and still push forward today.
And regardless, even if it were "marginal improvements to productivity" as you say, it would be "marginal improvements to productivity packaged in a form that people will definitely buy from us", not "we'll pioneer the tech and then be one of a half dozen vendors of a commodity that's racing to the bottom on price".