https://x.com/AlexBores/status/2097846545408262403

https://washingtonsun.com/technology/sam-altman-privately-re...

Are we supposed to be comforted by this?

> I'm collapsing this back to the rendered outcome:

And intermixed with SaaS product page idioms from a brain-damaged marketer like:

> No broader cleanup.

> No further architecture work.

> Just the button.

Aside from the patterns everyone knows like em-dashes, "its not X, it's Y", etc. I think the key features of claude diction is it sounds like a junior engineer over their skies who is trying to make up for that with extra verbiage mixed with extremely grating SaaS marketing-ese.

Trump does have a say in how to run google, in a very real sense.

> The American mob seems intent on leading their country into the gutter. Good thing (despite what the mob has thrown at it) that the United States still has strong institutions and strong markets. Without Silicon Valley, America would have already lost its place on the world stage.

American elites are more than happy to follow basically whatever Trump wants them to do with the knowledge that they'll get preferential treatment by the law and win all the no-bid contracts he can award. But ask yourself if this would be any different if Trump were head of a large company under a smaller regulatory state. Seems pretty obvious that not much would change.

If by "the mob" you mean, a small cohort of wealthy, powerful, unscrupulous people, those people who make decisions that the rest of us have no say in, then I agree, that is a problem.

> But please lets hear more indictments from a population who can't even agree with itself on the issues already under the government's purview. Now let's set a precedent for even more state interference in the market, that way when your party (whatever side you are on) chokes the next future election away the next nut you don't agree with has even more power? Is that your plan?

In a smaller state, Trump would have continued to be an executive and the shape of his impact on the world might be slightly different, but would be no less oppressive. Ask tenants in NYC in the 1980s if they think a Donald Trump with smaller regulatory oversight who stayed in business would be better or worse for our country.

Do you think our country flips parties every year because our government does a good job of reflecting the will of the people?

I do think what you are highlighting is probably a pretty significant difference with AI and highlights the problem with the comparison, if the optimists turn out to be right!

There are a few caveats to this that everyone seems to leap over, one very important one is that the a priori control of production, land, and natural resources is not egalitarian, and there's no reason to really believe it would become egalitarian even if people could in theory produce everything they wanted/needed for themselves.

But even barring that, we live in a world with finite natural resources. And that by itself should be a serious concern for anyone who sees this as a possibility. I get that optimists also seem to believe that technology we don't have like dyson spheres, asteroid mining, intergalactic travel, etc. will solve any resource scarcity concerns, but that is not a given, and developing any of those things would still rely on our planets natural resources to even bootstrap.

We live in a world that can't even coordinate the safe development of models or nuclear anti-proliferation, and already experiences rampant injustice surrounding use of our planets natural resources, which does not bode well for the future.

And even if we did end up in a world where these problems were solved, advanced models posed no threat to our existence, etc. they would not be solved instantaneously, and would likely cause catastrophic changes to society and massive amounts of suffering. We can solve scarcity of basic needs and access to medical care, decarbonization, etc. today. Without the use of AI. We do not need to go through years of suffering because tech execs want their play things.

We do, but craft workers in the industrial revolution did lose their jobs, and at the pace AI is developing I don't see any reason to believe that professional workers will not eventually have their jobs threatened.

> Why is there this presupposition with LLMs? Are we just taking the "ai" leaders for their word?

No, I don't think we are. And let me be clear: I was very skeptical about this until recently. I think the models are objectively capable of doing a lot of the job of software engineers now, and increasingly engineers are being pressured to not only use them, but to take themselves out of the loop. There is a reason the conversation of "should we read the code" has been raised in public discourse and engineering talks now. That should concern everyone.

> From what I can see, the tech we have today is not up to to the task of replacement and capability improvements (not benchmark) seem to be decelerating.

I am not seeing that: https://metr.org/time-horizons/

And I think if things continue as they have, we are eventually going to see the price of software decline and widespread layoffs soon to follow.

If it doesn't pan out, the thing evaporates in a bubble, your job goes back to normal. If it does, your job is toast no matter what (and seemingly many jobs). If software is primarily supply constrained, that will eventually change.

Lately I'm more inclined to believe the latter is true, but I think skeptics are often hedging like this.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49538699

Points: 6

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