> You don't trust the multi-billion dollar behemoth, but you trust the militarized multi-trillion dollar behemoth to play 'robin hood'?
Nobody's trusting anyone, we're just enjoying the benefits of true competition much like the working middle class gained benefits between the ideological competition of the Cold War.
> till I have the feeling that this only works because of the vast accumulated knowledge pre-AI
I'm not about to say that there's nothing new under the sun, but parsers are a really well-understood problem where 99.9% of people don't need frontier knowledge and wouldn't be in a position to use it anyway.
And I don't think that people doing research on parsers would ever rely on LLMs for precisely that reason. But we're not parser researchers right?
My point is, we have programming languages like C and C++, we have operating systems like Linux and FreeBSD, we have an empire of software and knowledge accumulated because of the intellectual battles fought by people before AI. With AI, we all are getting our coding easier (and are kind of being forced to), in a way that we will skip these kind of battles. That is, if we all use AI to make our job easier it will have some short term gain but we will end up as a whole ceasing to advance human knowledge with new stuff that has to come from real intellectual work. Like, I don't see people coming up with new outstanding technology if we all sucumb to be AI dependent.
I'm not really sure that I agree. The LLM paradigm basically allows for the same development techniques, for better or worse, but amplified.
So if you were lazily copying the first blog result in Google, getting the first answer from an LLM is equivalent, but the output is actually likely to be better.
If you wanted to do your research on various techniques and evaluate alternatives, LLMs can amplify your capacity to research and to have specific considerations for your specific problem.
LLMs aren't going to solve people's natural inclination towards laziness.
Additionally, while it's true that people may read and learn less about the "lower" levels of software plumbing, it enables enormous possibilities of higher level thinking that before were limited by the amount of manpower you needed.
For example, with LLMs I can try different test sharding strategies or trivially change from factories to fixtures in large test suites. This would have been busywork or drudgery; now I can evaluate several architectural solutions which would not have been possible before.
He's not apologizing for young energy. Young energy is a wonderful thing but without accompanying wisdom and restfulness for the vast majority of people is just spinning your wheels in place burning out and not achieving anything of importance.
Yeah. My point is that this is the double edged sword of youth vs. experience.
We’ll never know if the world would have been better of Id software were managed by more tempered, middleaged people, but (since I was merely the gamer) I’d rather not risk it.
That said, it is completely natural to reflect, as Carmack does, on what could have been different. I simply assume there’s a strong correlation between the result and the naivety of the people behind it.
They are saying a very different, obvious thing if you don't want to be cynical. And I say this as someone with some very strong opinions about many things.
Yeah, I think people have the correlation backward. I suspect that driven people are more likely to get rich and less likely to be happy, so there seem to be a lot of angry rich dudes.
Meanwhile, people who get rich by accident often seem able to improve their own lives and those of others with their money. The recent article about the founder of Craigslist comes to mind.
People who get rich by accident (e.g. lottery winners) typically spend it all and end up back where they started. Money is hard to hold on to for people who are unsophisticated about money. Predators and grifters come out of the woodwork to take a lot of it, and the rest gets frittered away on trinkets.
* The tech billionaries were not publicly associating with far-right figures or cryptofascist belives, or at least were doing so quietly while promoting ideas of technology as social progress
* A lot of the tech startups were seen as fighting entrenched interests grounded in regulatory capture and people had the illusion that the next generation of companies supplanting these wouldn't succumb to the same factors.
* Donald Trump as a phenomenon of current politics did not quite exist yet, so we didn't have to witness these people sucking up to him
A lot of people in the past few decades seem to have made a political dogma out of the inevitability of progress and attributing it to the "nature" of capitalism.
This should remind us that progress is very much a political choice and a confluence of factors beyond the specifics of the economic systems.
Nobody's trusting anyone, we're just enjoying the benefits of true competition much like the working middle class gained benefits between the ideological competition of the Cold War.
reply