Comment by pkoiralap
1 day ago
My two cents on this follow two major discussion topics.
1. Can AI models self improve? 2. Will it replace humans?
IMO, answer to both is "yes", with a big nuance. For 1, imagine millions of AI agents coming up with different ways to improve the model architecture. It will end up happening just because of sheer quantity/statistics at that point, let alone quality. Furthermore, even if it's just a 1% improvement, that's just one iteration. You can basically do the same thing again with the improved model, and get an even better one.
For 2, its also a yes unfortunately. It has been ages since I have had to write tests for my code. I read it, understand it, see if it does what it is supposed to do, and rarely add things that are missing. The rarity of me doing the said intervention has increased significantly over the course of time.
The two big nuances here are a.) Economy b.) Human element [The author touches upon this in the article in a nice way I think, so only talking about economy]. Global cognitive workforce is a $50T market (mostly middle/upper middle class, 55% to 75% of all global labor income). If the said workforce is made to quit their job, then it's just corporations paying each other. Especially given the fact that the same workforce also happens to be their biggest customer. Taking away your customer's purchasing power does not sound beneficial. Thus capitalistic forces will somehow balance it out and hopefully it will settle down. Also, for 1, running millions of AI agents is an expensive task, you have to collect funds from the same said customer base to be able to create a self improving all knowing god of a model, and I would like to believe that we are quite a bit away from that. Although, I could be wrong here and that would just suck ass.
That being said, AI companies will try to get as much as they can from that share and that will cause a serious shift in labor market. The ones to stay will be those who not just use AI, but also understand the work. At the end of the day, if your AI agent decides to run a "rm -rf /" on the production server, it is still you that would have enabled it.
>You can basically do the same thing again with the improved model, and get an even better one...
It does not make much of a difference if the "performance" is limited by the training data.
True that. It is however fair to assume that the architecture we currently have can still improve. Human brain can see information once and remember it pretty well. I wouldn't bet against AI models being able to do the same in the near future.
It seems that we all are assuming LLMs will grow arbitrary capabilities to manifest our fantasies, given enough $$$....
Great for milking the investors to the last drop...
I think for two the current chart of the economy isn’t being looked at. Things are generally either headed towards high quality high margin very expensive items or the lowest possible quality that can be sold. There are fewer and fewer “middle class” options. Once humans are replaced and can serve the elite, then the continued discussion about how to get rid of the rest of humanity will continue (https://wabcradio.com/2026/02/05/doj-files-shows-epstein-and... note almost everyone is poor relative to a billionaire) and then they’ll realize they have billions of drones and an automated military and then weee!
All technology and infrastructure needs maintenance. Sure there will be drones. However, there will also be companies and people that specialize in creating and maintaining the said drones. Additionally, the shock and immediate disruption that we all are expecting out of this is flawed assumption I think.
I do however hate to admit that it might be possible that the world simply wouldn't require as many humans to function (birth rates are already declining in developed countries), however, I am too sober to have that discussion right now :D.
Fair. And yes, the Wall-E problem still stands. We already have dark factories though. Can we design machine repairable factories that produce machines to repair machine repairing factories? I suspect we'll find out very soon.