RigelKentaurus

I think we're on the cusp of an intelligence explosion, but most jobs have no real purpose besides giving us sometime to do and a paycheck. Automating those jobs and making them 10x faster won't really help anyone. Read Bullshit Jobs by Graeber.

FWIW, why I'm rooting hard for AGI: -In the best case, AGI will lead to UBI, so unemployment for all becomes the default scenario. Sounds scary but unemployment is better than many soul-sucking occupations, e.g. cold-calling. -If AGI does result in a productivity boom due to automation, we're in for a deflationary spiral, so we don't need a huge amount of money for a decent standard of living.

It does lead to the question of how we'll find meaning in our lives, but I think we'll adapt in a few years.

Sorry, I'm not buying the fear. The post sounds similar to a 1920s-era farmer shouting "don't use tractors and farm machinery". Every technology has problems early on, and they take some time to get sorted out.

Not true. The company deploying or using the AI (not the frontier AI lab building it) needs to make sure that the AI works. Just like anything else. Not sure why this is complicated.

Not to say that I don't agree with you to an extent, but you should see AI-delivered healthcare numbers to human-delivered and make it a fair comparison.

From Google:

"Annual Deaths: Over 250,000 people die each year in the U.S. due to medical errors made by healthcare professionals, including doctors and nurses. Ranking: This figure positions medical errors as the third leading cause of death in the United States, following heart disease and cancer."

It is highly possible that in a few years, AI will be a lot safer in the majority of healthcare situations.

This article makes me super angry. Ours is an Indian-American family from the SF bay area. 3 years ago, my son graduated from one of the top high schools in the bay area with a 4.0+ GPA and 1600 SAT, getting all 5's in his 9 STEM AP classes, and was not accepted into a single UC for CS and Math. His HS counselor had asked us to lower our hopes, saying "to the UCs, he's just another very smart Asian or Indian kid. He's a statistic." That year, none of his (very high achieving) Asian friends with high GPAs and SATs got into UC Berkeley, UCLA, or UCSD. I recall that my rant got a crazy battle started here on HN.

Since then, he's done very well at a non-California school, but I will forever be pissed at the UC system. They passed on a brilliant student in the service of DEI.

BTW, I saw in the article the 2 sample math questions that stumped much of UCB's incoming class. What a freaking joke.

The only cure: throw out the entire board that decides admission policies; they are all incompetent. Ask professors to decide on admissions, not sociology and gender studies graduates. Heavily weigh the SAT and GPA instead of the essay. Hopefully this brings back some sanity to the process.

I'm saying that people can't discern between human- and AI-built apps, because the vast majority of human-built apps are not any better than AI-built ones.

Thought-provoking article, makes sense on some levels but it cuts too broadly.

For physical goods (clothes, purses,..) most buyers can discern high quality goods from bulk manufacturing with cheap materials. When it comes to digital goods, for movies, songs, books, etc. the buyer can discern a clear difference between AI- and human-generated, so the TEMU-fication argument is valid.

But for software engg, design, etc., I suspect that very few people can (or will be able to) discern the difference. There may be people who care about manual output, but then you have to come up with proof of manual work. Something like "prove to me that you have coded this application or designed this site without using AI". I don't see that happening.

I'm not sure I follow this argument.

>>But that is not the case for AI. In AI, profit margins are higher the further you get from the end user, see chart below.

This doesn't necessarily mean that the following is true:

>>This is important because it means the AI boom's profits are currently being funded by investors rather than earned from customers.

I think that AI is adding value to customers who are paying for it, but the value is going mainly to the frontier labs and hyperscalers since they, and not applications, are doing the main burden.

Hi, I am not a user of mechanical keyboards, but I did want to say nice work on the website. The fonts, the colors, the layout -- I loved it all! Good luck, hope you sell a lot of keyboards.

My (semi-educated) guess: it's about the quality, not quantity, of that revenue. If I opened their books, I expect to see lots of SMB customers with low deal sizes and non-trivial churn, non-sticky product usage, not many large enterprises signing up, and low NRR. Add a high customer acquisition cost in an undifferentiated space to complete the picture.

I didn't understand why a CRUD app (yes, with lots of integrations and bells and whistles) would need to raise more $1B+. I think most of that went into GTM, not into product development.

(Addition: Airtable had $900M in the bank at the time of acquisition so they spent "only" $400M, but still, my guess is that a lot of that went into GTM.)

Comment · 3 months ago

>>I say all of this b/c at some point, most people don't care if the movie was hand painted cels, CGI done by humans or fully AI generated with human text prompting. If the feeling is strong, people will have a "bigger" reaction which in turn will make it more memorable.

I think in the near future, people will start filtering out movies that have a non-trivial share created by AI. (It remains to be seen what "non-trivial" means in this context.) I think a movie 100% generated by AI won't succeed. The story, the emotional impact, etc. all may be good, but people won't give it a chance.

Very useful, thank you for building it and sharing it.

Both sides should take a deep breath and stay away from predictions.

The most glaring gap in this "analysis" is that it's too early to tell. I don't understand how people can be certain in both extreme viewpoints.