> it'd have to be impacting the real world
By writing business plans? Getting lawyers punished because they didn't realise that "passes bar exam" isn't the same as "can be relied on for citations"? By defrauding people with synthesised conversations using stolen voices? By automating and personalising propaganda?
Or does it only count when it's guiding a robot that's not merely a tech demo?
Apparently so: https://www.businessinsider.com/jobs-lost-in-may-because-of-...
Note that this article is about a year old now.
> Comparing it to the internet is insane, based off of its status as a highly advanced auto complete.
(1) I was quoting you.
(2) Don't you get some cognitive dissonance dismissing it in those terms, at this point?
"Fancy auto complete" was valid for half the models before InstructGPT, as that's all the early models were even trying to be… but now? The phrase doesn't fit so well when it's multimodal and can describe what it's seeing or hearing and create new images and respond with speech, all as a single unified model, any more than dismissing a bee brain as "just chemistry" or a human as "just an animal".
~ Paul Krugman, winner of the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences
Replacing all jobs except LLM developers? I’ll tell my hairdresser
But we do have a huge number of examples of jobs disappearing thanks to machines — even the term "computer" used to refer to a job.
More recently and specifically to LLMs, such losses were already being reported around this time last year: https://www.businessinsider.com/jobs-lost-in-may-because-of-...
Maybe they didn't know, maybe none of their colleagues used it, their company didn't pay for it, or maybe all they need is an Excel update.
But I am confident that using Copilot would be faster than clicking through the sludge that are Microsoft Office help pages (third party or not.)
So I think it is correct to fear capabilities, even if the real world impace is still missing. When you invent an airplane, there won't be an airstrip to land on yet. Is it useless, won't it change anything?
