> More likely (without careful vetting by the folks aggregating these models) is that the quality will go down as more and more AI-generated output gets subsumed into these models.

This assumes that there aren't algorithmic breakthroughs which reduce training/inference costs by several OOMs.

How much do these models need to do before people throw their hands in the air and say, ok this is happening. The Erdos unit distance problem, which as far as I understand was approached by multiple competent mathematicians was solved by a frontier model. Sure people argue there was no novelty there (I cannot comment as a non-mathematician) but it feels like they can draw lines laterally from deep knowledge in different fields (in this case combinatorics and algebraic number theory I believe) and solve problems.

Now if you have millions of instances running in parallel, all "probabilistic", working on frontier AI research I really don't see the blocker (and believe me I wish I did).

The only thing that matters is the economy of it all.

Open AI et al are hemorrhaging absurd amounts of money. It's not clear whether there will ever be a good balance between cost, value, and price.

Lots of companies are already questioning the value they get from LLMs at current prices which are obviously not enough to generate profits.

It’s no longer true that AI tools primarily get knowledge from their pre-training input data. That gives them a baseline, but nowadays AI chatbots and coding agents routinely assume they need to get up-to-date information in other ways, via web searches and other tool calling.

So I don’t see accuracy declining at least for programming.

> The problem for us isn’t that AI will take our jobs; it’s that snake-oil salesmen can sell the idea that AI will take our jobs, investors buy into it, companies try it, fire their folks, the snake-oil salesmen IPOs, the companies that bought into this idea implode in some form or fashion, and the salesmen have already taken the money and ran.

Or, it eventually becomes clear to enough people that the AI companies aren't going to make enough money to justify their valuations, so the asset bubble bursts, the economy crashes, and we lose our jobs.

>LLMs-as-AI can only give us probabilistic outputs based on inputs

I am not completely sure what you are saying here, but it sounds like a variation of the "it's just a stochastic parrot" argument, which is reductionist. The human brain is also just a bunch neurons firing.

>As long as the term “AI” means by-and-large LLMs with additional features sprinkled on top, the answer is no. More likely (without careful vetting by the folks aggregating these models) is that the quality will go down as more and more AI-generated output gets subsumed into these models.

Nope. This isn't how it works.

AI progress has largely been synthetic and has produced leaps and bounds capabilities increases in the last couple of years.

Sorry.

> The only thing that matters is if LLMs with sufficient scaling can become frontier AI researchers kicking off the exponential

I agree with your sentiment (about the noise), however I think this over simplifies it a bit. We may get AI that is super-human at frontier research and dramatically accelerates the pace, and still have to wait decades before it disrupts the job market (or maybe never displaces all work).

For one, the answer may depend on material science and chip manufacturing that can take a very long to build out a supply chain for even with super AI help.

And we may just find that the human mind is way more capable than we thought and even with accelerating research it's just a harder problem than anyone expected, even algorithmically.

I expect it to be a bit of both, and from ~2015 - 2025 I was in the "AI is coming for all our jobs" camp. My perspective changed last year after doing a deep dive into latest science on the human brain. (I've kept a very close eye on AI dev progress for 12+ years.

> The only thing that matters is if LLMs with sufficient scaling can become frontier AI researchers kicking off the exponential.

I think we know the answer to that already - LLMs show no sign of improving intelligence and instead providers are going down the ‘agentic’ rabbit hole.

There are too many things missing, like a world model, understanding, and taste (in the sense of knowing what is good and what is not good).

It's important not to miss the fact that AI productivity was a useful excuse for companies looking to conduct layoffs. Did some companies buy the hype? Sure - but the biggest companies would have wanted that sweet stock price layoff bump anyways and AI was a readily available justification to get it.

> LLMs with sufficient scaling can become frontier AI researchers kicking off the exponential

The cost is already outrunning the benefit to a massive amount, and the predicted expotential is not here yet. I predict it'll always be around the corner, a $1T model won't get there, but it will "look promising", but we'll sadly run out of money for the $10T or $100T model..

We have two worlds:

1. Cutting edge LLMs developing ASI/AGI. 2. AIs doing general knowledge work

The second world will be achieved far before the first world is achieved. And as the first path gets develolped, the second path becomes cheaper and cheaper to run inference on along with being democratized which reduces the margins for the cutting edge companies. It seems like a mad dash to go as far as possible until 90% of general work can be automated with more cheaply available tech

Sure, but let’s not pretend that people treated the statements of these ceos as strategic messaging. People very clearly treated what Altman, Zuck, Amodei etc have been saying as predictions, and it hasn’t been until they’ve been proven wrong that people have started with the counter-narrative.

> The only thing that matters is if LLMs with sufficient scaling can become frontier AI researchers kicking off the exponential.

What if the answer is flatly: no? All that other stuff starts to matter a lot then.

Predicating your business decisions on a potential breakthrough that may never come is frankly insane. Imagine if at the dawn of the car industry Ford decided that it's actually a race to build the first flying car and nothing else matters.

Can we just speed this up a little? I just want my $100 RAM prices back.

IMO Demis has the most reasonable takes.

> UBI is non-starter no matter what Sam Altman believes.

Do you mean it's a non-starter in the current political climate? Or that you personally just don't think it will work?

Now let’s see if there will be any real consequences for such reckless stupidity: my bet, nah.

Afer COVID and AI, the only buzzword left is WAR. Doesn't rhyme but we are well beyond funny.

You do not need developers to spend tokens, regular people can spend tokens just as easily.

This is just based on Ramp’s data about their customers, but it seems that some companies are hiring more people after adopting AI?

https://econlab.substack.com/p/we-can-finally-say-ai-isnt-ki...

> If a few CEO's wind up working at 7-11 to make rent money, all the better.

There are CEOs who have only ever failed abysmally their entire careers, and they generally only ever make more money. Accountability is for losers.

I recently tried to get customer service. I think it was from the DMV for my state. The website asked me to use the AI bot first. Completely useless. It took a phone call with a human to somewhat resolve the issue.

It's a rather useful tool... and it absolutely has been overhyped repeatedly and sold as a panacea.

If you believe AI will 10x you're developers you've drunk the kool-aid, if you believe AI will have no impact on your developers then you're being stubbornly ignorant.

Sorry, but you aren't familiar with frontier models if you think it's not "good enough". The latest models are quite a bit more capable than most people in many regards already.

> there is an oversupply of SWE and a dwindling supply of jobs which pushes wages down

Which is exactly what every one on HN with a working brain predicted a decade+ ago.

Any need to address the huge numbers of foreign workers in America putting direct, nonnegotiable pressure on those jobs?

It's time for the program to end.