Comment by lifeisstillgood

7 hours ago

I have been noodling around this for a day or two now and I worry the hype train is clouding everyone’s thoughts (I’m looking at you Dwarkesh)

So we are on a weird combination of science (look Language can be modelled, how does that relate to real world concepts, can you even understand the word love without experiencing emotions) and ultra-capitalism (you get that part)

So my first thought is you cannot monetise AGI

I honestly don’t know where that line is, and different humans will draw it in different places but if (it’s a big if) we do achieve AGI by throwing compute at a pile of language (and seriously that is wrong way round for evolution?) if we do get a model everyone just recognised as alive then, just who in society is going to say “yeah slavery that’s the right approach - those companies definitely should be allowed to keep a data centre of Einsteins, not pay them, and replace call centres for zero cost.”

The goal of the journey just is not monetiseable. If we do create alien intelligence we really want to treat it like they landed in a spaceship.

Plus you know there is bound to be a Hollywood film in productions already about an evil billionaire who creates an AI and tries to lock it away and make it do his bidding. It ends badly.

But even putting AGI aside and just focusing on a word guessing machine that can check its own guesses over and over, you know not an actual intelligent thing but something that is a tool.

Just how much of the amazing cost savings and job replacements from LLMs are really just low hanging fruit available to POS (Plain Old Software). Very very few companies are what Inwoukd call software literate - run through and through with programmatically accessible components at every level and people with skills to use them. The old SOA / API based company is first rung on that ladder.

But the point is, almost every time we are going to replace some jobs it’s “we never digitised this before but now we can just chuck compute at it.” You know what’s cheaper than chuckingncompute at it - doing the hard graft of getting your software and data aligned and then fixing your processes. Then it can run like the scripts that intern wrote last year but no one listened. Yes CV is used in killchains in Ukraine - but the whole killchain is not AI - it’s hard graft building a process just like any business. With AI used as small Part of a larger ecosystem.

Oh and yeah the AI labs and the chip vendors - they are not keeping the value created by firing paralegals. Data centres with almost identical models in them just become utilities.

And did I say value created ? So far all the big value is cost reduction - you know the refuge of the business consultant with no ideas.

I still am waiting for the big new thing - the company that could not exist otherwise. All I hear is cost reduction and yeah that matters at scale, but if it’s all I hear I begin to suspect it’s all anyone can think of.

And moving value around does not count as value creation - Amazon has done amazing things, but if e-commerce did not exist, would humans in America have never bought crap from China ? Or has amazon just mostly taken the growth of the past 30 years away from Walmart ?

And talking of that, Amazon has massively reduced warehousing costs - using POS, and these things called robots. If I had to bet it would be the AI revolution (maths proofs apart) is a robot revolution. And that has the usual scaling laws of design, manufacture, deployment and so on.

Maybe the reason I am Not seeing a AI killer app, is that the iPhone does not have arms.