Comment by kace91
3 days ago
>this would be a much better world.
Would it?
We’d close one of the few remaining social elevators, displace higher educated people by the millions and accumulate even more wealth at the top of the chain.
If LLMs manage similar results to engineers and everyone gets free unlimited engineering, we’re in for the mother of all crashes.
On the other hand, if LLMs don’t succeed we’re in for a bubble bust.
> Would it?
As compared to now. Yes. The whole idea is that if you align AI to human goals of meeting project implementation + maintenance only then can it actually do something worthwhile. Instead now its just a bunch of of middle managers yelling you to do more and laying off people "because you have AI".
If projects getting done a lot of actual wealth could be actually generated because lay people could implement things that go beyond the realm of toy projects.
You think that you will be ALLOWED to continue to use AI for free once it can create a LOT of wealth? Or will you have to pay royalties?
The rich CEOs don't want MORE competition - they want LESS competition for being rich. I'm sure they'll find a way to add a "any vibe-coded business owes us 25% royalties" clause any day now, once the first big idea makes some $$. If that ever happens. They're NOT trying to liberate "lay people" to allow them to get rich using their tech, and they won't stand for it.
This. This is what I find hilarious that even smart HN folks seem unable to understand. Transformers tech products are a service offered by private companies who are under no obligation to serve it to you indefinitely. At any given point, they are free to end public access. And you better believe that they will do so if it is in their interest. inb4 open source models, those models are also hosted on the servers of private companies who are also under no obligation to maintain public access indefinitely. And even if you were smart enough to download one in advance, cloud services providers can stop providing access for transformers and you can rest assure that your machine won't be powerful enough to run it. Plus, NVIDIA and co can just keep their GPUS to themselves and only offer subpar versions to customers.
An individual will never win a fight against a corporate entity. And certainly not one in possession of a near AGI system.
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We are not ready for social media. And we are definitely not ready for transformers let alone some sort of sub-AGI that is still powerful enough to complete most projects. Economies would fall quicker than the stock market on that fateful black monday. Our economies still operate on the assumption that only humans can do most of the work that delivers value. Remove that assumption, and you have nearly zero operating costs but also nearly zero revenue for virtually every single company operating mostly in the knowledge sector.
>If projects getting done a lot of actual wealth could be actually generated because lay people could implement things that go beyond the realm of toy projects.
Suppose LLMs create projects in the way you propose (and they don’t rug pull, which would already be rare).
Why do you think that would generate wealth for laymen? Look at music or literature, now everyone can be on Spotify or Amazon.
The result has been an absolute destruction of the wealth that reaches any author, who are buried in slop. The few that survive do so by putting 50 times more dedication into marketing than they do to the craft, any author is full time placing their content in social networks or paying to collab with artists just to be seen.
This is not an improvement for anyone. Professionals no longer make a living, laypeople have a skill that’s now useless due to offer and demand, and the sea of content favors those already positioned to create visibility - the already rich.