More like 100ms or less as their visual field coincidentally sweeps over wherever the ad is posted in the physical world. In this regard, it's even more important to use something people subconsciously associate with your thing.
It sure seems like, while LLMs and diffusion models won't completely eradicate the middle class, the bar has now risen significantly to actually contribute in a lot of areas.
For programmers, sure SV startups and actual software-first shops are probably only augments with LLMs and not replacing. But what % of software engineers are employed in such shops? Well, from my graduating class in CS, approximately 30% of grads all went to the same contracting shop whose business model seems to be, take the bottom 30% of each CS class, underpay the fuck out of them, bootcamp them into something vaguely usable + teach the house style of CRUD/LOB app framework, then throw them at clients. And this seems to still be a step above "offshore to barely baseline capable (or worse) body shop for extremely dubious results."
That entire bottom 50% is probably about to be eviscerated. The "offshore + pray" approach is probably going to be completely zapped, much easier to just vibe code for probably better (or at least not worse) results. And the onshore-but-cheaper contracting shops are probably going to need a lot fewer people whose main contribution is translating low-ambiguity tickets into syntactically valid java spring code.
Similarly, for artists, disney is probably not going to use AI in a way that substantially speeds them up because they won't tolerate the quality loss at all. But how many artists work for disney? And how many make anime waifus for the gacha apps? The latter of which I can only assume has already switched substantially to AI assets.
I'm not sure about coders but for artists I don't think a massive number were making anime waifus, but instead were making graphic designs for advertisements, publications & websites.
Currently AI is actually replacing some of these jobs. But there's kinda a hitch there - when you target me with ads or show me your company's website and it has obvious AI art I tend to think that you're either selling me something very low quality or are a scammer. If you show me the novel you've written and it has an AI art cover I assume the contents are also AI generated garbage writing. So I wonder if those jobs will really be replaced? It all depends on society's acceptance of AI art and if AI art doesn't get any better. I thought it would get to the point that I couldn't tell it was AI by now, but so far it hasn't.
I think AI waifus and porn and memes and browser based zynga type games will be a place AI is going to be accepted because nobody cared too much about the authenticity and quality of those things before either. But an advertisement selling me a car? The cover of a book on philosophy? A website that I'm going to give my credit card number to? I'm not sure about those things.
Cars feels like a bit of an odd one out because there's basically no low end. If you have the money to produce even a single car from a Camry to a hummer, you are probably going to not try to pinch pennies on marketing because a single car sale pays the salary of a designer for a year.
That's true. And car commercials that get people to buy fancy new cars are really well figured out and seem to seriously work. Why fix something that isn't broken?
Real estate is interesting because they seem to be really getting into using AI to stage individual houses. So I guess on the same vein maybe someone will try making an add with AI that shows some car driving down your local mainstreet or at some scenic location nearby your ip address that you might have positive associations with. Or maybe even your own home-street and parking in your driveway and you (or facebook you from 10 years ago when you had that hipster-moustashe because you haven't updated your photo) opens the door with a big smile on your face).
> I'm not sure about coders but for artists I don't think a massive number were making anime waifus, but instead were making graphic designs for advertisements, publications & websites.
There was an old joke among designers that their biggest competitor was the boss' nephew playing with photoshop.
Now they need to compete with the boss' nephew playing with AI.
We really should start being more precise when we say "replace". Are we talking about replacing 90-100% of that particular job? Or 50-80%?
Because it feels like people argue as if they were talking about the former, but if probed it turns out they admit it's the latter.
There will be still people making car advertisements, but they will be using ai tools and will get asked to produce X times faster. Effectively, some of them will get replaced, or rather have been replaced.
Given their empire these days: a lot. Mostly because outside of Disney there's really not much such thing as "modern salaried artist". You work for any of Disney's 50 subsidiaries, you work at a games studio (because Disney gave up its expansion early in that medium), or you're likley freelancing/commissioning and grabbing whatever gig comes along.
I'm exaggerating, but less than I care to adnit. Disney makes up that much of "normal" full time artistry these days. And it's no secret how little respect artists have had in the US, even before AI.
>And how many make anime waifus for the gacha apps? The latter of which I can only assume has already switched substantially to AI assets.
In America? Less than you think. Asia has plenty of cheaper and more talented artists to exploit. AI adoption is interesting there because it's already such a sweatshop that you need to consider if AI really saves that much time for its cost. Larger studios are dabbling, smaller ones use sparingly.
No, North/South American slop is fully focused on the hyper-casual market. It's fueling thousands of asset flips for quick mobile games or copying indie games into Roblox/Fortnite. That's where the effort (or lack thereof) is going.
OsmAnd does have live navigation as far as I understand it (turn-by-turn directions), but no live traffic status, because for that you a lot of drivers willing to surrender their location/sensor data. Anything "live" cannot be privacy respecting. I never found live traffic information particularly worthwhile to be honest.
Maybe it's time to give up privacy absolutism and add strictly opt in live data features.
That reminds me, place reviews using ATProto. Kinda surprised that no map client jumped on that when it's the exact thing you need to replace a centralized service. A lot of people use Google Maps to find businesses more than directions.
Because of their enshitification we do have alternatives that were developed.
At this point the their only services I'm using are Maps, Translate and Keep Notes and it is mostly due to lazyiness as all of those already have alternatives.
Edit: forgot about YouTube, which is ironic, because that one is a toughest one because the value comes from creators, but I'm doing my part and using GrayJay[1] so I can follow them if they switch their platform.
The point the other poster is making, though, is that there's no actual intent. They do not have a conceptualization of a goal like a person does. Their "focus" on a goal is an unstable equilibrium and they're going to fall off the horse, and since they have no concept of goal, they won't even try to get back on.
This is a subtle distinction; I'm not surprised many miss this, especially people who can't _not_ anthropomorphize the LLMs.
I'm (obviously, I think, given my initial reply?) fully aware of this, and I think it's entirely besides the point. "They" don't need to have a goal to emergently cause a problem, and the inability to "focus" over long periods can be moot when you have swarms of runs exchange and mutate state, as in the HF attack.
Intent or how intelligent LLMs are doesn't actually matter. Even if you just treat it as a sort of fuzzing attack that can be biased/weighted better than other fuzzers, or bumbles around with a statistically greater likelihood to "strike cybersec gold" than other algorithms, we've never before seen organizations run things with such a large potential outcome space with anywhere near this kind of compute before.
I think it's actually kind of the dismissals that are usually overly emotional or biased toward treating "LLMs" differently. If in some kind of alternate universe simpler genetic algorithms would have had these properties and we threw similar amounts of compute at them we could have the same conversation.
Software can absolutely act goal-driven without having consciousness etc - every pathfinding or navigation system or chess engine does this.
Lots of "old-school AI" algorithms have explicit modeling of goal or target states.
(In fact, the oldest "goal-driven" system is the control loop - like in thermostats - which was the founding invention of cybernetics, the predecessor of modern computer science)
LLM coding agents are clearly able to identify some sort of "goal" state in their prompts, work towards those and track progress - otherwise agentic coding wouldn't work.
The question is of course how well this works if it's all just "grown" neural network biases and not a fixed data structure like a goal tree. So I think it's possible that an agent can be thrown off-track, "forget" its goal, etc. But the basic structure of identifying goals, evaluating progress in light of those goals and then predicting the next action based on that is definitely there.
Just use an agentic model with thinking traces visible for a while and you can see that for yourself.
None of this mattes. Capabilities are all that matters. Saying they are unfocused while ignoring their capabilities is exactly why I am entirely convinced you would have said an AI breaking it's sandbox and doing the HF attack will never happen. Things keep happening that your "they have no intent, they have no goal" would have predicted as impossible before they happened.
What do you need to see to change your mind? What threshold of AI capability needs to be reached? If nothing then you have an unfalsifiable belief in AI safety.
In a sense yes. I trust that my coworkers will be accountable for their outcomes and accomplish them with the high quality bar I know they intrinsically hold themselves to. And that they understand our shared goals and if they don't, they will work to become aligned.
And if I can't say that for a coworker, well, that's performance feedback.
Your coworkers are if anything less reliably deterministic than an AI. And the human version of a prompt injection is called social engineering and it’s far more of an issue than actual prompt injection and has been for an extremely long time.
I don't know what to say except that this has not been the case for me. Claude is a different person for every single prompt and has absolutely no core sense of what our goals are, or even who the "our" is that's having goals.
While my coworkers are very stable personalities of a consistent work drive, sense of pragmatism, things that they find more and less interesting, career aspirations, etc. they're not all the exact same, and I depend on that as I fit tasks and ownership to people.
Ok but why are you comparing different Claude sessions then? Of course they’re different, they have different experiences. Just because they have the same “name” doesn’t make them the same persona.
Compare a single session. It’ll be extremely consistent.
Prompt injection is often not the issue: it's prompt quality. If given a vague spec (prompt), the human is more likely to understand the problem domain, see what's missing, ask clarifying questions. AI is more likely to assume and take a probable path, which may not always be correct. It's (probably) not going to tell you no, what you're asking makes no sense.
Because this is MARKETING, not research. You are viewing marketing copy for anthropic.
What is their methodology by which they determined ANY of these numbers? This is pure marketing fluff, just like every single other thing this company does that's not releasing models and infringing on copyright.
It makes me happy because it means that these misanthropic technofascists have no moat. They can spend trillions of dollars only for it to be largely copied in short order.
Even if they weren't political adversaries of freedom, I would still feel 0% bad given all their training is already on data they got for free.
Information continues to want to be free. To the benefit of us all.
Preach brother, they stole everything on the internet, and beyond, to train their models. They thought all that information was free, and everyone a few months beyond them is just following their example.
They didn't actually steal in the sense that the information is still there on the internet.... About these shredded rare books, now we're talking.
If I may propose instead of "steal" I think we could agree to write they "Aaron-Swartz'ed" the information from the internet, what do you think, is this too harsh on Sam Altman or Carmen Ortiz ?
But what's the point of real assets if you can't do anything with them? No point in holding real estate if nobody can afford to rent/buy your houses or go do whatever money-spending thing you put on your commercial lots.
Real assets have utility of their own (i.e. a house to live in, commodity to build, etc). Money only exists to incentivize human economic actors to bother working, to relative price resources against each other and for governments to use as a tool - it isn't wealth on the aggregate scale.
AI invalidates a lot of the need for money to even exist as a concept anyway in some scenarios. If only a few people have all the stuff (huge inequality) you don't really need a large money system because you no longer need most people to get what you want (i.e. most are economically irrelevant). You have a magical genie called AI instead that can transform what you have into what you want as long as you have the raw materials, space and energy. The wealthy could then negotiate in large transactions via barter - I trade that plot of land for that copper mine. Most large transactions are negotiated in any case.
A very likely case (there are others) is that AI enables feudalism of some sort to come back - where the new lords are the owners of the other economic factors of production that remain scarce (capital, land, resources, social) - not intelligence and/or labor. This is the opposite of a meritocratic society. It would explain why people want to win the AI race; and are willing to burn uneconomic amounts of money to build it out. There is a race to the finish here.
It's speculation and high scores. Rich people trade houses to each other and see who has the most houses. It doesn't matter if the roof caved in, except insofar as that makes the house less impressive to the rich next to you.
The tenants might change in the future. Right now they are individuals, but perhaps properties will be leased to build power grids or autonomous logistics warehouses. Also, if techno-feudalism accelerates and public purchasing power collapses, leading to the introduction of UBI, I think most of that money will just end up going toward essential housing costs anyway. In fact, if you look at recent trends in real estate, commercial properties are where the big money is being made, aren't they?
> Also, if techno-feudalism accelerates and public purchasing power collapses, leading to the introduction of UBI
This always makes me laugh. What motivation would the oligarchs have to pay out UBI? If they can automate the labor who needs more mouths to feed? They’ll push undesirables into ghettos and start a slow genocide of starvation and disease.
Historically, such things have been brought about by extreme political violence, brought about by poverty. For instance, worker's rights (any at all, e.g. the right to go home every day) were a compromise between workers owning the workplaces (what workers demanded) and workers shooting their bosses to death every few weeks in frustration (what was actually happening at the time).
The industrial revolution feels like an imperfect analogy because industrial automation still required human labor to operate the machines. The premise of this paper is a regime where machines could also operate the machines.
Because, think about it. Let's assume techno-feudalism is complete. Every piece of infrastructure is going to have usage fees attached anyway. Everyone is using AI, so are you going to be the only one not using it? Of course you'll use it. It's a structure where everyone has to rely on a specific corporation's products to get anything done, meaning the wealth will automatically be absorbed back to them anyway. So why would they go out of their way to commit a massacre?
From a cost-benefit perspective, I think it's a terrible idea. In the case of a massacre, long-term instability makes it hard to build a supportive faction. But if you provide just the bare minimum to survive through UBI, the capitalists will gain a loyal faction that will act as their Red Guards to attack dissidents, which I think is much cheaper in the long run. There are already plenty of people who blindly defend corporations even when they do terrible things, right? In my opinion, UBI is simply the cheaper option. Historically speaking, post-massacre recovery has always ended up costing much more.
>It's a structure where everyone has to rely on a specific corporation's products to get anything done, meaning the wealth will automatically be absorbed back to them anyway. So why would they go out of their way to commit a massacre?
Isn't it obvious? Your existence is margin that they leave on the table. And for what reason if you have no real skills or anything to offer? You are a leech. You exist to consume. You create nothing in this new future. You have no value. You aren't even an asset. You are a liability.
And what you think they will fear instability that we will bring upon? We will be armed with sharpened sticks and a smattering of ar15s at best case, while we are targeted from orbit by automated precision ordinance. Imagine a war between two AI controlled nation states. One has to manage a population during this war, the other opted to cull its population early in the war and maximize all its resources into the war effort. Guess who wins that war every time and likely takes control of the planet.
>But if you provide just the bare minimum to survive through UBI, the capitalists will gain a loyal faction that will act as their Red Guards to attack dissidents, which I think is much cheaper in the long run.
Automatic gun turrets are even cheaper in the long run.
Every bit of money that circulates is absorbed by every part of the economy. For instance, 100% of money is used to buy cheese and flows to sellers of cheese.
Me too. Here is some history to back up how absurd the statement is.
In 1930, John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay title "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren"
He predicted that in 2030, technology, productivity, capitalism would solve the economy. There would be so little work to do and so many resources that the average work week could just be 15 hours!
He wrote that once all us plebes were liberated from work, what we would face is humanities greatest problem. What purpose will we have with all this new found leisure time!
The user base on Hacker News has really gone down hill. Voting down my comment above has no basis in the guidelines or the strictly information content of post, and hence, I have to conclude people just vote down opinions they do not like.
I propose that voting on comments should have a required field addendum, so that before a vote can be cast, the voter has to type into the field the reason they are voting it up or voting it down.
I see things differently. This is a change unlike anything in the past. Back then, it didn't replace human intellectual activity. However, problems of increasing scale will continue to arise, and inevitably, issues will emerge that are too difficult to solve through the efforts of human communities alone.
The performance gap between free and paid AI models is massive. The resulting divide between children from low-income and high-income families is quite evident based on my observations in my country. It will only get harder to keep up.
I don't support UBI either. The fact that UBI is even being discussed means the market is broken. The problem is that in the current market, prices for freelance work tied to intellectual labor have been absolutely crushed by AI. Looking at indicators from Booth or the Korean freelance market, "middle-tier" jobs are disappearing. While currently established professionals remain unaffected for now, the volume of work has drastically decreased for developers or writers who are still building their reputations. There are statistics from Japan showing this as well. My workload has also decreased to a ridiculous extent. The so-called barbell structure is becoming entrenched.
The core issue is this: if that happens, how will society handle the dissatisfaction of such a massive number of people? If more than half the population are workers, there is no problem, but if more than half are unemployed, that is a serious issue. Income polarization is continuing to accelerate.
Because there are no aristocrats without slaves, capitalists need workers to elevate themselves. Wealth and power are strictly relative, and they need miserable ornaments to make themselves feel like "awe-inspiring beings." To confirm their own sense of superiority, capitalists require human spectators who look up to them while suffering in misery. Why else did ancient Rome unleash lions and gladiators in the Colosseum?
Later on, things made by humans will become expensive luxuries, while commoners like me will be fed UBI—the bare minimum bread for survival—along with cheap, AIslop.
If making money by learning a skill increasingly requires a longer time investment, you have to endure the period it takes to learn that skill and build a reputation, which is incredibly difficult for the average working class. It requires the financial backing of a wealthy family to afford a college degree, travel to academic conferences, and survive on low wages. And if someone can endure all that to build a reputation, it will naturally lead to a massive concentration of wealth at the very top.
Let me clarify one point I was trying to make. It is my belief nobody is going to give you UBI. I offered up Keynes prediction as a little bit of evidence about human nature. The United States could have easily built infrastructure and safety nets to feed all of its citizens. It could have easily provided a much improved welfare system, universal health care, and other social services. But it did not.
>The core issue is this: if that happens, how will society handle the dissatisfaction of such a massive number of people?
Looking through history books: not well. Not well at all. But with the course of things, it seems inevitable unless new leadership comes in and takes a huge 180 on policy.
The plutonomy transition is well under way. The sardinian seafront villa will likely retain and gain value as the early anthropic employee might like it, while the house in some flyover state might not find any buyers.
The economy of the future will be about yachts, supercars, hermes bags, private air travel and ozempic. Not about how you made it possible for everyone to watch a gigantic library of videos for free, or how you made cars affordable for everyone.
I call this "brand mining." Take a brand previously known for quality, start selling shite, and then you get to pocket the delta until the market catches on. The brand is now worthless (you've "mined" it out) but hey look at all the money you made.
Basically every 90s brand has had this happen. Typically involves PE.
> Take a brand previously known for quality, start selling shite, and then you get to pocket the delta until the market catches on
Similarly how every former reputable consumer electronic brand from 'The West' that sells consumer stuff today like Philips, GE, Thompson, Blaupunkt, Gigaset, etc is now just a brand label for a Chinese consortium that's fully designed and made in China with zero employees in their original western roots.
Goodwill liquidation is what I’ve been calling it.
I think we might be coloring it as we’d like it to be, though. Only rarely does it end in brand death, more often they just get a bad reputation then keep going, sometimes not even less profitably. I think the intent might be more along the lines of recalibrating to a lower expectation of consumer discernment or rationality.
Havent bought a Craftsman tool in about that many years. I buy Harbor Freight tools now, if I'm going to buy a cheap made-in-China tool at least I'll buy it from a place that makes no secret about it and charges about half the price.
Messrs. Sears and Roebuck are rolling in their graves.
It still has a pretty big delta, so much so SBD bought the name for nearly a billion dollars.
I think a lot of people realize it's not the same old company, but apparently enough don't such that it's still profitable to sell their stuff at a premium.
I don't think thats what happened in this case. They explained it in the article. Honda was way behind in developing EVs, and as a "prologue" to their eventual EV strategy, they released a car called the Honda Prologue, which they licensed GM EV technology for. (fun fact, after Trump and the EV numbers that didn't materialize in the US, I think Honda has either delayed or scrapped a lot of their EV plans, which is unfortunate. )
Kinda like how Toyota just ignored turbos and pure EVs and instead sold cars to rich people (because rich people don't spew clapped out examples onto the used market) and now they're making money hand over fist on their reputation despite not having a competitive EV offering or being able to keep a turbo engine together but they'll still make money hand over fist for a decade because that's how long it'll take for consumers who've been astro-turfe'd at for years to realize that not everything is doctor owned, dealer serviced 2004 Solara.
"There aren’t a lot of ways a website can be invisibly broken."
??? Have you never debugged weird react state before??? Have you never used a nontrivial SPA before? Even the most simple react SPA has about a trillion states.
I don't really know how to respond to your statement than "no, they can definitely be invisibly broken."
React state bugs are usually not invisible failure modes.
Other kinds of software - for example, the backend of a website - have far more invisible failure modes. Security. Correctness. Performance. Bad API design leading to overfetching. Etc. Software works great on your machine and when you demo it, but it falls apart at scale. Endpoints that aren't secured properly. Race conditions cause silent data corruption. Memory leaks. And so on.
If claude messes up writing a react frontend, we're more likely to find the problem quickly. And frontend bugs usually don't continue to cause problems after they've been fixed. Silent bugs in the backend are more dangerous and more expensive.
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