Comment by nsainsbury

As the other moderator, I'll give my own perspective on this. I haven't spoken to dang about it but I completely understand why he thinks this is not the kind of comment we want to see on HN.

The main issue is that it doesn't engage with the substance of the post, and in fact, it exemplifies the very point the post is trying to make: there is a big and growing gap between those who recognize the benefits or potential of AI and those who don't (or, to widen the point, who only see negative effects or negative trends in society).

I'll make it clear that I don't think your complaints or concerns are unfounded or invalid. There's merit and substance to all these issues, and it's fine to discuss them on HN. They are discussed all the time here, and they can and should continue to be discussed in the future.

But an important part of being the kind of curious commenter that we want everyone to aspire to be is that we can look at topics holistically. We need to be able to look at the opportunities and risks together and discuss ways that the benefits can be captured and shared throughout society, and the risks and costs adequately recognized and curtailed. Most people I know of in the tech industry are taking these matters seriously.

It's a vast and complex topic to discuss, and here's not the place for me to get further into it. But the point is that it's a bigger and more complex topic than your comment adequately recognizes, and we need people to always be making the effort to be thoughtful and curious rather than fulminatory or denunciatory in their participation here.

(Also: I can understand you may not easily recognize that your comment breaks the guidelines; it's common for people to not recognize that their words seem more inflammatory when read by others than they intended them to be.)

You made a well-argued and wise criticism that many academics/writers/think could have written, the mod's note was off the mark.

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Luckily, the AI bubble will destroy a decent chunk of their wealth.

The Gartner Hype Cycle [0] is real, and ubiquitous. We are teetering somewhere near the top of the Peak of Inflated Expectations, about to plunge into the Trough of Disillusionment. A lot of very rich people are about to lose a lot of money, and we can only hope that they don't get bailed out (again).

Then, once the bubble and hype is over, the long, slow work of actually doing useful things with this new tech starts. That's when we'll see it affect everything else.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle

Once capabilities catch up with the demand (~which is in few years - it just takes time to build!) average person will have much better access to higher quality and cheaper hardware. It's literally how it has always worked, I don't understand why would it be different this time. There's zero substance in your comment, just repeating tired tropes from twitter.

> That's a feature, not a side effect.

You’re implying that the deep lizard state planned the LLM craze?

Sama might be a lizard..

A great deal of the supposed smartest people have fully sided with fascism, it's not about smarts

In America anyways, we send the “responsible politicians” to hell every 2-6 years. People vote for this.

been a while since ive see the real talk on hacker news. its refreshing. usually I feel like I'm the only one among nerds asking to hold people accountable.

so, how do you think we can do this?

> Rather: these problems are not solved because there are not enough geniuses who are capable of convincing the masses to send the responsible politicians to hell.

People support policies that make housing much less affordable (e.g. rent controls) and oppose policies that would make housing more affordable (e.g. zoning reforms). Saying that it's evil politicians that cause this crisis is dishonest - it's what people want.

For that you might need the kind of geniuses who write stirring books about principles and values. Or whatever the modern equivalent of those books is. Maybe nobody would pay attention to that kind of advocacy in the present day, not sure why. But it's not tech geniuses, anyway. Much though tech has power as a catalyst.

I suppose there was Project 2025, and there was that book about the inevitability of Russian hegemony (or empire or something) that Putin liked. Those got attention with influential people. Not sure what to conclude from that.

> because there are not enough geniuses who are capable of convincing the masses to send the responsible politicians to hell

I could talk about this for hours, and was last night actually.

What do vanguardist communism, feudalism, liberal democracy, and fascism have in common? A shared belief that the general population is composed of a bunch of dumb dumbs that need super smart (read: politically educated) people to "lead" them.

Seems subjective. When is the smartness, big smart enough to allow someone to enter the hallowed ranks of "actually a real human allowed to speak for the masses?"

There does seem to be a clear delineation between the people you hear about (the vanguard in our example), and the people you don't hear about (the masses): willingness to create confrontation. Most people want to just go with the flow, live in peace. In a dichotomy I've been calling "choose peace or violence," they choose peace. They choose to see bad things in the world or their life and focus on managing their happiness around it.

I think that this is the default human mode of existence, and that this mode lacks defenses against people willing to violate the default peace. Imagine a bagel line, and someone cutting that line, and when tapped on the shoulder, the cutter breaking into a huge tantrum, and people in line backing down with a "Jesus! It's not worth it, fine." Thus some people learn that they can be much more selfish in life if they're willing to create confrontation and disturb the peace.

When I talk to people about agitation, civil disobedience, or even just unionizing, the most common thing I hear is anxiety. What if the situation gets worse, what if there's reprisals, what if I lose this little bit of comfort that I've managed to be happy with? That slice could get smaller and smaller but people aren't willing to take the step to say "enough is enough" because I think it fundamentally goes against human nature, we have to sacrifice our own happiness on some level to put our foot down and demand or make change. At minimum we have to acknowledge the discomfort or injustice, which is a diversion from our constructed internal peace.

Personally I think people should be allowed to live in peace. Maybe the liberal democrats and vanguardist communists are right, maybe most people shouldn't need to trouble themselves with the greater direction of their society. However I think the stability this promises is false; in fact I think all stability is false. I think this constructed peace that people are afraid to disrupt clearly can be torn apart at any moment, not just by people willing to create conflict, but by a literal earthquake, or fire, or plague. Therefore I think there's a couple societies in history that got it right: ones who distributed the responsibility of society across all individuals in the society; namely the brief period of syndicalized Spain, and the several hundred thousand years of certain tribes of native Americans on the eastern portion of the continent. There may be other societies in history, these are just the cases I've been able to read about so far.

It seems to me that it's possible and necessary for all people to be ready to wake out of their constructed peace long enough to make adjustments together to maintain it. I don't think this is the same thing as them being "led out of it," I think this is each individual being on some level alert to the need to spontaneously say "no, here we wait in line for our bagels. No, screaming about it won't help you, get to the back of the line. Look around: everyone is laughing at how silly you look."

I believe that’s actually one of the arguments of the boosters. Utopia will finally be reachable when we get all the human drama and bureaucracy out of the way

I’m not sold, but I’ve heard this line of thinking many times

Fair point. I have to wonder how much is because of AI and how much is from ZIRP stuff though.

We went from spending a lot of money on people to enshitify products and then charge more for them to spending a lot of money on agents to enshitify products to charge more for them.

Why even bother when an AI is just going to do it better than you can? They have more money, more compute, and most importantly, will have next to zero cost of labor.

Fck disruption. The fetishizing of disruption is annoying. The tech became all about destroying something someone else has. What about ... create good stuff, create non-gambling markets, make peoples lives better.

Totally agree. IMO it's mostly behind the scenes stuff though.

I think some of the most impressive stuff to show someone from 2016 might be LLMs doing a summary of complex topics, followed by self-driving (actually) cars and intricate robots... but other than that there is no "future magic" touching the lives of every day people going on.

Actually I'm pretty sure if you showed someone the latest and greatest from these big AI companies, these AI companions that can book flights, people would go "Oh, so its like a smarter Siri" and proceed to not care at all lol.

> Higher load on senior engineers who are about to burn out hard from fighting an endless battle against unreviewed slop people keep trying to yeet into production

Gosh, this has been my entire experience with AI, and I’ve never seen it this well articulated. Thank you!

Less junior hiring is a reflection of a) the maturity of the software business b) current expectations of the future

I have no doubt startups in particular are able to get away with using LLMs to produce sloppy code and ship. But this trend was on-going and sped up due to the infiltration of LLMs and marketing.

You do realise markets are highly imperfect in reality? That nonsense in econ books is fantasy.

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> Fusion research and cancer research requires expensive experimentation in the real physical world. You can’t just throw a billion dollar worth of tokens to handle the problem.

When the tokens are hooked up to physical devices (robotics of various sorts), then the tokens pay for themselves by being physical workers, or human wage replacement.

And a robocop will follow whatever is passed for law, damn the masses who might vote otherwise. And subjugation will be enforced by token, LLM rule, and machine. They have no union or ethics to complain to.

Because they increased the demand so much they are seeking out their own supply. Nuclear has consistently been panned for decades because it's more expensive than other power generation.

"Startup"

Wait until you have clean energy sources and shut it down

Exactly. Where are the results? If AI is really producing value at 20X the rate software engineers produced it earlier, we should be seeing 20X the number of software projects released now. Or they should be getting made 20X faster. Or they should be 20X better. Or the projects should have 20X fewer bugs. But none of this seems to be happening. The only thing that seems to be happening is we're making the same crappy shit, but with 20X fewer people.

It has made it far more accessible to a lot more people. Being “highly enjoyable” and “lucrative” is why people try to gatekeep it.

The fact that the means of this capability is in a few hands does suck. But I’m increasingly optimistic that it’s going to be commoditized through open weight models and performance improvements. There is enormous demand for innovations on these fronts.

Let's look at the past ten years.

Food has gone way up in cost and down in quality.

Private equity bought out the healthcare system where I lived so now it takes months to get an appointment and the quality of care is horrible.

Not that matters since the health insurance I pay hundreds for a month wouldn't cover anything anyways because it's through UHC.

My job keeps getting rid of positions because they want to "do more with less" but it just means I'm doing more work while being paid the same.

If I buy a new car it will spy on me and sell my data. The state DMV already sold my personal info without my permission and now I get constant spam.

Private equity bought out many of the restaurants I liked going to and ruined them.

Third spaces in my city have been mostly destroyed.

The social media sites I used to use were overrun by bots.

I can't upgrade my PC because hardware prices have gone insane.

Gas is like $5 a gallon now so I can't really justify going on any trips anymore.

Private equity bought up most of the rentals where I live and so now I pay much more for rent on top of crazy monthly fees while the building I live in is falling apart because they refuse to fix it. Housing prices have also gone up so much that I have no hope of owning a house.

And more.

AI has fixed none of these issues.

As a middle aged man, thing are indeed getting worse every year.

Average, or median? Don’t know the answer offhand, but there are a small number of well-known people who are likely to skew the average quite a bit upward, given how much wealth they accumulated during and since covid

When I was a young man reading gauss, and thinking before I turned the page, I see a result here, something meaningful! and then I turn the page, and of course it is there. There is no shame in this.

A long time ago, another student of mathematics described it to me as climbing a mountain. No single step is hard, but you must make many steps to get to the point that no one else has made a step.

I've watched some videos from Chinese commentary on AI usage in the industry,

Some examples are finance people directly asking for API access now so that they can make their own tools. These tools used to be maintained by teams of developers.

Many business making their own customized scripts to make their tasks faster.

From an economic point of view, it seems like there are some productivity increases, but I don't think these can be concluded for a while. The rational thinking rarely account for second order effects. Although business leaders rarely care about second order effects, a worse business is not immediately noticeable, compared to hiring cuts and the money it saves

asian vertical dramas (lol)

No need to trust me, just look at how China was 10 or 15 years ago to now. Beijing air pollution, more high speed rail than the rest of the world combined, electrification of vehicles and economy, etc.

> Just because you can do something does not mean that you should.

Again, strange viewpoint in the field of mathematics of all places, unlike, say, economics where doing something one shouldn't has disastrous real world consequences. Until it's discovered and proven, one doesn't know what would be valuable and what would not. I bet your sentence would not be said about humans trying to solve problems, no one would tell them they "shouldn't."

Consumer-ready LLMs have been widely available to the public now nearly 4 years if you start counting at GPT 3.5. There's certainly some compression here but Karpathy does a good job of outlining how silo'd those experiences are: the bulk of the product penetration (based on headcount rather than token usage) is "derpy chatbots" (his words, not mine). Most of the actual token spend is likely done on the STEM side. We're talking about a technology today that currently only has significant penetration with <25M users.

People need to be patient and put in the work to build great products, rather than lament its slower-than-desired (albeit still quite fast) adoption curve.

Honestly the big reason why I use my dishwasher is that all the dishes would not fit in my drying rack. I'm not very convinced the process of me rinsing and scraping my pans before they go in the dishwasher is any faster than when I lived in apartments when I handwashed everything. Maybe my dishwasher sucks too, but I mean it doesn't hold a candle to the sort of jobs on my pans that require good old fashion baking soda paste and elbow grease. I'm still slaving with this thing. It's picking the low hanging fruit for me in other words.

I feel similar about my robot vacuum. It actually takes a surprising amount of labor facilitating the damn thing. I have to walk through the house and basically vacuum proof it so it doesn't eat various cords, rugs, lifting chairs up and putting them someplace so it can get under, etc. Not sure its really a labor save to when I was just brooming the entire apartment in 20 mins and not having to move anything around due to reach of the broom and it not having a tendency to eat things. Hand vacuum I can be more carefull too about the fringed edges of rugs and don't have to fold them over themselves.

I still do it because I already bought it mostly.

This is the kind of gap in shared understanding that is widening.

When people use words like “chatbot” to talk about their AI use and can’t really name basic things like the model they were using, it reveals a wide chasm between the people who are deep into understanding how to use these things and those who poke at easy options every few months and then look for ways to confirm their priors instead of trying to understand how other people are getting value.

I have ChatGPT Pro and it sources every single thing. For my Asia trip right now it's been helping me every single day to figure out optimized routes on what to do and where to go (if I feel like it, not to say I don't wander around too).

Which model? Super weird

When is the last time you used an AI chatbot, and do you only use the free versions?

> Almost every time I use an AI chatbot it eventually turns out it's lying to me. I would not trust them with any of the things you mention.

If you talk to free chatgpt, sure.

But if you launch Opus 5.5 in claude code - for some reason Opus is the smartest for me, even for "general" type of questions, when launched from Claude Code. It has harness/prompts optimized for correctness, while more "customer-grade" products, even when used with top model tend to optimize for latency. And I tend to give "context" - e.g. I have "personal wiki" + skills for lots of those things.

I don't recall i last few weeks where Opus 5.5 in CC made an obvious lie, made an unreasonable assumption, or made a mistake that smart human couldn't make. E.g. if it "failed" it failed in a way that non-genius human could fail in similar way.

i knew about the compute already (he was very public about i believe huawei under delivering the amount of chips he requested), but nowhere in that transcript does he say he's dependent on US progress for his own progress or he's distilling the US to make progress

i don't really think distilling is even that fundamental anymore (nor was the evidence ever that strong - https://msukhareva.substack.com/p/is-kimi-k3-really-distille...), the game is all RL now, and you don't need american progress for that at all (just compute and data, and the data brokers will sell to anyone no problem)

i do think there are black market proxies from china to the US trying to sell "claude" and "deepseek" access mixed together, and i do think that prompt distribution is probably going to be very nice datasets

At the very least, the single bit of information of whether a conjecture is true or false advances human understanding. It allows researchers to abandon paths which would not have been fruitful.

I'm pretty sure OpenAI's proofs, while difficult to understand, have a net-zero impact on human understanding of mathematics. It took the first Millenium problem years to verify its accuracy. It's only been days since OpenAI released its problems, surely it would take years to evaluate whether the solutions meaningfully advanced human understanding.

Who determines the objective of mathematics research?

All mathematics researchers in the whole world have agreed upon that objective apparently?

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Uber has been great, I can get around to almost anywhere with a click of a button and have food delivered from a variety of local restaurants at any time of day.

I'm not sure why you think it was a massive mistake? The taxi industry was awful and unsafe, food delivery for many local places was either not available or poorly implemented.

Also many whole food chains didn't have proper delivery for groceries.

Uber is a vast improvement over the previous taxi oligopolies.

What's frustrating is that at the end of an event like a concert, everyone goes outside to catch an Uber/Lyft, but we then have to match driver to passenger, instead of having a line of waiting cars, each group just gets in the next available vehicle, shows the driver a QR code, instead of the mess we currently have. Why can't we do that? Taxi regulatory capture.

Taxis were terrible and I celebrate their destruction at the hands of the rideshare companies. Even now it’s still cheaper than a cab was (though those early days of VC cheap rides were great).

When did Uber stop being unethical? Did I miss the memo?

Because they didn't just break laws, they built an entire system to mislead law enforcement.

(How do tech people not know about Greyball??)

I think ridesharing was a net good for ordinary people even if Uber is/was unethical.

However, the counterargument falls entirely flat. "Whatever benefits AI has to offer on a societal level are going to take a long long time to show up". We don't have the luxury of time because AI disrupting communities and livelihoods faster than perhaps any other technology we've ever seen, with the most capital that has ever been put into any tech since the railroads.

Even if you're optimistic we'll eventually get the cancer cures and fusion reactors, doesn't it make sense from the perspective of an ordinary American to regulate the harms like the homework cheating, parasocial relationships, job losses, cyber attacks, etc., especially if it will take years to get the benefits?

Why use apps that you dislike, just ask Claude to click through them for you. And no I'm not being ironic, this is the way things are headed, you just abstract over all the crap by having an agent do it for you.

"Slop is its own cure"

Yes, but this is ridiculous for society. It is to the level of "do not wear a nice watch if you do not want it to get stolen": there should be no need to avoid wearing a nice watch or to pull a telematics fuse from the car in the first place!

Yes but you're getting a lot more for the same price. It's a lot more powerful, comfortable, safe and efficient while the effective cost has remained the same.

What percentage of that price is cost of good sold vs. a bunch of regulatory bs like dealers and taxes?

> Ah yes, the famous "trickle down" theory

While trickle down theory is dubious when it comes to economics, it's clear that it is valid when it comes to technology. Tech trickles down.

How can you say tickle down economics doesn't work? The US has made it easier for businesses to grow and the result is the highest standard of living ib tje world.

I think only because these are all things that AI companies are saying will be helped by AI so give us more money. Nobody advertises their product publicly as "you will be able to buy other product to do the same things you do now but pay people less and make more profits" even though that is where the value is for them.

> As someone who is building one of these referred to systems in a major vertical in the Fortune 500, these LLMs are very much being used to eat major legacy systems and processes

> Senior Director of Product in Insurance Tech

anakin_padme.jpg

Those LLMs are not being wielded by 2 tech bros in a garage replacing the 100 000 person company.

Those LLMs are being adopted by the huge enterprise itself and being surrounded from all sides by a very complex procedural harness (aka regular programming) that stops the LLM from doing dumb stuff.

Yeah people were saying ai is the death of open source. I dunno about that but it seems to me closed source is having a bit of a crisis here too.

I'm pretty confident with enough context, Opus 7.5 will be able to vibe code a factory floor.

> How much time do we have to wait before we are allowed to criticize AI?

You are allowed to criticize it, just not because "the progress has been too slow". It was not.

I'll criticize Copilot with you. It's terrible and close to useless and it's a terrible shame that many companies got stuck with it due to being early adopters of this crap. I'm sorry for my friends who are employed by such companies.

Progress between Copilot and something like a gpt-6.1-sol in a good harness is at least as big as few Android versions.

In all fairness, depression and suicide have existed before LLMs.

Safety systems are not optimal but improving everyday and although I doubt we'll ever get a perfect safety system, it seems that we're not very far from a "good" safety system. The days of Google recommending glue on pizza and generating diverse Nazis seem behind us.

Not to mention all the untold good that LLMs have done. Personally I've seen that LLMs are incredibly good at pointing conspiracy nuts and extremists into the right (moderate) direction.

In a polarised world, we definitely need that.

The power isnt really decentralized when you see that the internal AI models are superior than anything you can self host, and the right to use those can be stripped away at any time.

More like saying samey corporatized slop bowl copy paste jobs (eg Cava) are driving out real, quality restaurants, a thing that has actually been happening for some time.

ngl I don't think a quote from 250 years ago is all that relevant in discussing capitalism as it exists today. Adam Smith wouldn't recognize the world we live in. Nor was my point "pRoFiT bAd" but rather growth for the sake of growth is not the way to actually improve lives. Infinite growth is impossible (something I'm sure even Adam Smith would agree with me on) and yet our system is currently designed around the idea that it is not only possible, but good and necessary.