Because the pace of development is intense. I would love to be financially independent and watch this with excitement and perhaps take on risky and fun projects.
Now I'm thinking - how do I double or triple my income so that I reach financial independence in 3 years instead of 10 years.
If you look at something like smartphones, for example. Smartphones, from my perspective, got drastically better and better from about ~2006-2015 or so. They were rapidly improving cameras and battery life and it felt like a new super cool app that would change our lives was being released every day, but it feels like by ~2016 or so, phones more or less hit a ceiling on how cool they were going to get. Obviously things still improve, but I feel like the pace slowed down eventually.
I think AI is going to have the same path. GANNs and transformers and LLMs and the like have opened the floodgates and for the next few years clever people are going to figure out a ton of really clever uses for them, but eventually it's going to plateau and progress will become substantially more gradual.
I don't think progress is linear, I think it's more like a staircase.
I don't think this will age well.
It's a matter of simple compute power to advance from realistic text/token prediction, to realistic synthesis of stuff like human (or animal) body movement, for all kinds of situations, including realistic facial/body language, moods, and so on. Of course perfect voice synthesis. Coupled with good enough robotics, you can see where I'm going with this, and that's only because my imagination is limited to sci-fi movie tropes. I think this is going to be wilder than we can imagine, while still just copying training sets.
Yup. It's "just" a compute advance away. Never mind it's already consuming as much computing as we can throw at it. It's "just" there.
The plateau in this case is presumably how far you can advance intelligence from the current model architectures. There seems to be diminishing returns from throwing more layers, parameters or training data at these things.
We will see improvements but for dramatic increases I think we'll need new breakthroughs. New inventions are hard to predict, pretty much by definition.
I use ChatGPT daily for school, and used Copilot daily for software development; it gets a lot wrong a lot of the time, and can’t retain necessary context that is critical for being useful long term. I can’t even get it to consume an entire chapter at once to generate notes or flashcards yet.
It may slightly change some aspects of a software job, but nobody’s at risk.
If that's your bar for whether or not it changes the job outlook for software development over the next DECADE, I think you need to recalibrate.
But to address your point, my "bar" is that OpenAI's ChatGPT fails to solve problems for me on a many-times-a-day basis. It's an immensely helpful tool, but I still need to drive it, so it's not replacing me, it's augmenting me.
Is voice and image integration with ChatGPT a whole new capability of LLMs or is the "product" here a clean and intuitive interface through which to use the already existent technology?
The difference between GPT 3, 3.5, and 4 is substantially smaller than the difference between GPT 2 and GPT 3, and Sam Altman has directly said there are no plans for a GPT 5.
I don't think progress is linear here. Rather, it seems more likely that we made the leap about a year or so ago, and are currently in the process of applying that leap in many different ways. But the leap happened, and there isn't seemingly another one coming.
You can think about your daily job and break down all the tasks, and you'll quickly realize that replacing all this is just a monstrous task.
Anthropic’s Claude 100k is your jam, then. And Amazon just invested $1 billion in them.
It feels like we're at the end of history. I don't know where we go from here but what are we useful for once this thing is stuck inside a robot like what Tesla is building? What is the point of humanity?
Even taking a step back, I don't know how I'm going to feed my family in ten years, because my skillset is being rapidly replaced.
And to anyone mentioning UBI, I'm pretty sure they'll just let us starve first.
Here's the thing about that. At first it's about you running faster and the bear getting the slow ones, but this is actually a very short term situation. When things start getting bad, it's not the bear you need to worry about, it's your neighbor stabbing you in the leg so you're the slow one.
Why do you have only one? Learn some trades. AI isn't going to be demolishing a bathroom and installing tile any time soon.
We're going to keep automating more and more things. I think that much is inevitable. Eventually, we may get to a point where very few jobs are necessary for society to function. This should be a good thing, because it would mean fewer people would have to work and could therefore pursue things that actually interest them, but it would be a catastrophe under the current system.
People, NOT machines, are the ultimate judgers of what is valuable and the ultimate producers of value.
“no one should have to work to eat” is the most ridiculous gen Z meme going around lately. Like, technically yes, not eating would make you unhealthy and thus unable to contribute yourself, but we also don’t want the opposite of people just sitting home all depressed about being oppressed and not utilizing their gifts while living off mysteriously-produced (paid for or labored over by whom?) gourmet sushi. How about another common meme in response? “We live in a society.”
Although there is certainly a lot of fuckery going on with the money (currency) itself, but if that's the problem you're alluding to, I don't think summarizing it as "capitalism" is accurate.
I see UBI as a solution to inequality (real problem) not as a solution to lack of jobs (not a problem). AI will probably lead to reduction of inequality and therefore there will be less need for UBI.
In theory, the "mental" workers who get replaced by AI could simply move to manual jobs and total production and average wages would go up. But they may not like it, at least I wouldn't.
Why would manual job average wages go up? You're increasing the size of the labor pool.
We're looking down the pipe at a truly dystopian future.
Aside from rolling out the guillotine, I don't see UBI a possibility until the 2nd half of the 21st century. There's just too many forces and entities alive that don't want it
This is tricky territory! Be wary of the treadmill where as your income rises, your sense of what's an acceptable restaurant, vacation, car, home, etc. escalates just as fast. Then you'll always be n+1 windfalls away from your goal. If you're really wanting "financial independence," which is a weirdly opaque phrase, focus at least 49% of your energy on keeping your spending rate low.
Even if you were, your money would be invested in something which is tied to the overall economy and if a huge proportion of knowledge jobs are at risk, you would still be exposed to it through whatever assets you own. Don't expect stocks (or currency, or property) to do great when unemployment is 30%+.
