Fuck AI

I’m at least as deep in the industry as you likely are and I didn’t make comment on what “their goals” are. I made that comment after watching hundreds of thousands of interactions with these systems at a range of skill levels, and am considering it from a development and leadership perspective. And youre right. Their goals aren’t my goals. But they’ve been very clear with me about what their goals are. You could simplify them down to “turn a profit” but I think that’s a misunderstanding, or that it hides deeper goals.

I don’t think profit is the goal, at least, I don’t think it’s the goal yet, or maybe at all. I think that the goal is the collapse of the human skill set which has resulted in a wide, large, and deep pool of talented capable people. The goal isn’t to be profitable per se, but the monopolize people’s ability to work independently of their products.

I perhaps didn't go into enough detail about what i think their motivations are, when i say profit i should have said profit/power/control, they aren't all the same but they could be considered different faces of the same rough concept.

i did imply that they were only in it for the money and that i think is where a miscommunication is coming from.

For the past 15 years my job has not only been to develop ml technologies, but also to and mentor people into becoming programmers focused almost exclusively in ml. And within that, I work pretty domain specific. I work in the “for good” side and always have (except that stint in the US military when I was 17) and if you look through my posts you’re gonna find some of the more public stuff. I work with a lot of satellite and environmental data. I work in academia, public sector and also private sector, just depending on the contract. It’s mostly environmental mapping applications (water, fire and forests) globally.

What I’m seeing as an effect of these tools is an erosion of critical thinking and problem solving skills at a fundamental level. Jr scientists and developers just aren’t learning the basics anymore and with that, their ability to detect bullshit or dogshit, or cat shit wrapped in dogs it is utterly diminished. And so a lot of dog shit ends up in the final product. Bit along with that, it’s easy to let the hallucinating machine convince you it knows more than it does. It’s practically nothing but dark patterns to do exactly that. It uses couched cautionary language to create the appearance of considering a problem from multiple sides. It asks clarifying questions, which both draws a used in but also creates the illusion of understanding.

And it sounds good. But the problem (and this is my editorial opinion as some one who was in the beta for these products) truly is that the underlying models haven’t actually improved in their core capabilities in 4 years. The glitz and the glam and the tooling and the redundancy, their ability to use tools, be integrated into other things… sure. All that has improved. But they’ve never been able to overcome some core issues which imo are fundamental to the architecture and can’t be overcome in this current framework.

I fully agree with all of that and i wasn't arguing against it.

I was simply arguing that countering all the problems you mentioned isn't the goal of the companies/corporations selling the pickaxe infrastructure.

ML (and AI) in general hasn't been the kind of problem we are seeing now until the introduction of the current incarnation of LLM's, it's why i specifically mentioned LLM's as the target of my thoughts.

There have been AI winters and bubbles before but the scale and cultural penetration of this wave seems different (though i suppose we'll see over time if i'm right about that)

It's not only a difference in scale/scope but it seems to be one of those problems that's cumulative and feeds off of itself once it's hits a critical threshold of adoption/usage.

It happens to be wildly profitable(fiscally and in terms of power/control) for the companies involved, which doesn't help.

By profitable i don't mean that the companies are making money on the P&L sheets, i mean the few individuals who are accumulating power/wealth/control from the shenanigans that are ongoing.

So to me the problem is two fold. First, they’re putting all current developers in a acid bath which is eroding their ability to solve problems independently, or preventing them from developing those skills in the first place. And there is no way to do that learning without just putting in the time. Second, they aren’t what they say they are. These tools, if you need some basic code, are phenomenal for just something small. But you need to maintain the idea or conception of what you are doing. They have no practical ability to architecture real solutions or any kind of deep critical thinking. But they’ll do their best to convince you otherwise.

Also agreed.

I would further argue that the possibility of the erosion of skills being something of an active goal is non-zero. \ mid to long term power/control/profit can only be helped by fostering a dependence on throwing more and more tokens at a problem because the developer no longer has the ability to solve it themselves.

Though that's some full tinfoil hat speculation there on my part.

And finally, into the profit motive. I think we should take Musks purchase of twitter as a cautionary tale. The internet regaled in how stupid Musk was for doing so. How he was overpaying for something that wasn’t profitable. And on and on. I’m sure you remember. But that unprofitable decision allowed them to steal an election. Even years later it’s probably still questionable if that decision was ever directly profitable for Musk, bit that was never the point for them. Theirs was a calculus of power, and they did get their considerations right in this regard. Likewise, I think if you narrowly focus on profits for these companies, you’ll miss the forest for the trees. Profit is a pathway to power, but it’s now power itself, and money asymptotes with its ability to exercise power. Power is ultimately power, and I believe that is the game these companies, acting in coordination, are pursuing.

Also agreed, although profit has always been a gateway to power , the exchange rate is at an all time high.

As i said before, i was intentionally being simplistic when i said profit, i just didn't necessarily want to go full capitalist oligarchs/ruling class/erosion of the current version of society.

To the twitter purchase, it doesn't have to be a line item on a sheet for it to be useful investment, he was able to leverage that inflated valuation to "borrow" money against it that he didn't need to pay the prerequisite amount of tax against , which is a common tactic for people already rich AF.

It's a similar thing to what's happening with the LLM investment circle/bubble that will fully fuck over the american stock market (and tangentially everything else to some degree).

Nvidia, openAI, anthropic, microsoft etc , all trading imaginary purchases on speculative future resources to inflate the valuation of each other in a big circle is similar in concept, if more extravagant in execution.