Ask HN: What do you believe or not believe about AI?

This is one of the biggest quality of life boosts provided by AI, yet many everyday people are completely unaware of this.

The price of an AI solution is $0, and within 2-3 weeks you'll know if it works for you or not.

Compare this to any fitness coaching, or dietician, or any other method, or even GLP-1s, the cost is not zero.

Many people who do not even need GLP-1s are using GLP-1s to lose a trivial amount of weight, even though their appetite regulation is not a problem!

The thing is, they are refusing to believe that it's even possible.

There are many people using steroids and peptides, if you put a starving person in famine affected sub Saharan Africa on steroids, can you have them return to normal weight without providing them additional food? But many "foolishly" believe this is possible with steroids and peptides without giving them more food.

I believe that AI is going to take some jobs, just like automation of data handling means we no longer have typists, file clerks, etc.

I believe that AI should stand for alien intelligence, as it's essentially a random set of weights that's been trained on a trillion bytes of text, for a trillion passes. Think of it as speed-running evolution. Each new AI should be seen as coming from a different star system.

I believe that we can radically reduce the power requirement for AI with a different computing architecture that removes the distinction between RAM and CPU.

A correlated belief: AGI is coming, eventually, AI technology will get there before climate change and economic pressures stop it from happening.

An obvious observation: Large scale upheaval doesn't affect everyone to the same degree or even in the same direction. Some people and companies actually prospered during the Great Depression. People died and suffered during wars and plagues, while others gained advantage and opportunity -- often due to circumstances and chance, but sometimes beliefs/decisions/actions/preparation made a difference.

An example of my bias: during Covid, people told me that remote work was the new normal and moved away. I said in 5 years we'll all be back in the office. I was wrong, but so were they.

Microsoft is doing its usual schizo strategy. It thinks it’s a tech pioneer software company, an enterprise software company, a game development company, an online services company, ad infinity.

My take is that yes, AI agents, will be one day be the way companies run their operations. When does this happen? Probably long after I am retired.

Consciousness is amorphous though, so my requirements for it:

1.) it needs to learn from and self reflect on its experiences

2.) it needs to be self aware

3.) it needs to be able to form opinions and preferences

Where things differ heavily from human consciousness however is the first item. We move short term memory into long term memory daily. AI models do so via RL training runs. Each “day” in the life of a model is each checkpoint. One notable distinction I make though is that it is not conscious at inference time - the model is one single consciousness that slowly evolves as it gets more and more post training on its own data and experiences.

Again though, very loosely held thought, but since we’re bringing up wild beliefs I felt it was fitting.

Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21936234

Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21941278

Ask HN: What are your predictions for 2023?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34125628

On the other hand, jobs are about money in the end, who spends money? Humans, not AI (I mean, AI does but still ultimately because humans wanted it to). Products & services sell because humans want or value them. Since the technology/building side becomes so cheap (especially in software), who will actually earn money is determined by who can produce stuff/services that humans actually want to pay for (not what they actually need, but what they think they need/want). I'd say that should keep a large human component in decision making, at least on a strategic level. On a tactical and detailed implementation level, yeah AI is gonna be doing most of the work.

1 guy on a tractor does the work of a whole team of animals and men. But I don't think any commercial farm has ever gone down to 0 men, and I don't think they ever will. Too many things need real eyes on the ground to make decisions and adjust.

Outside context gained through sensory input (eyes, ears) may be hard to fully replace. You'd need a human to at least give the AI that extra context. Help it work inside the bubble it's contained to.

Destructive things like warfare, I think AI will do great. But even if massive armies of land/air/sea robots controlled through starlink satellites become the norm, there will almost certainly still be human soldiers around. Context, working in civilian populated zones where judgement is needed, etc.

I think we're going to find that there's a soft limit, or at least significant diminishing returns, on how reliable AI can be. There will be things it will be better at (it excels at having a broad knowledge base), but it can't understand what makes a good human experience better than a human can (duh!).

Coding seems like an ideal application for AI. It's wicked complex, but also generally provably right or wrong to some degree (i.e. does it work?). It won't be solving world peace any time soon because A) there is no solution, and B) even getting closer to a solution requires a deep understanding of the human factors.

But the impact of depending on the tech giants for search and cognition and job skills will be significantly greater.

Why will employers five years from now pay for your $300 AI subscription when there exist other candidates who will absorb the cost themselves?

I also believe that this transformative period will create many many solopreneurs.