> It’s much easier to say someone else’s job is going to be fully replaceable by AI when you don’t actually know what they do.

Too true. This isn't limited to AI, either. The most obvious example in my lifetime was during peak blockchain hype, when people who had never worked in finance convinced themselves that blockchain was going to act as the backbone for how money gets moved around. As if the problem that needing solving was Bank of America doesn't trust Capital One to update a number in their database.

The nice thing about AI, at least, is I can always push back and tell people, "Sure, we can do this with AI. I just need you to use Claude or ChatGPT manually to prototype how it would work." This normally results in the requestor realizing that there's human judgment calls involved in the inputs, process, or outputs that require meatbag intelligence.

What the author is getting at here:

> Climbing Mount Everest and getting a PhD are both hard. I wouldn’t say that doing one means you can do the other “no problem.”

and here:

> Surgeons and electrical engineers may be extremely smart and accomplished, but that doesn’t mean they have the ability to weigh in on climate science.

Feels tangentially like a version of Nobel disease[0], discussed here[1] a couple of weeks ago.

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[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49166918

Wait is this real? Did a random 25yo get 45B under management because he got some interviews after getting fired from OpenAI? I missed all of this and it almost seems like performance art to me.

Does the actual outcome matter or does the promise/what is sold/pushed upon society matter?

Was social media a clean win for human social interaction? Was fast food the replacement of food that was promised in the 70s? Were doctors and shrinks in phone apps rather than real life a clean win for diagnosis, understanding and improvement of life?

But society was completely shaped by the market in these questions anyways in a way that is impossible to deny.

While the author might be right about the arrogant PhDs imposing their view on other fields they know jack shit about, it doesn't make it less true when you have billions backing it and making it a reality, it will eventually be it, even if it's arguably worse.

Obviously everyone likes the think "this time it's different" but with LLM's and AI it certainly seems to be the case.

Having a machine that's even as smart as most human's + cheap robotics, does seem to lead to us having no jobs in near-ish future eventually. (5-15 years)

Though obviously AI progress could hit a brick wall tomorrow.

Working in AI was once reserved for intellectually gifted people. But with the recent advances in compute performance, working in AI today is basically not much different from pounding on a black box as long and as hard as necessary to make its output correspond to what you want it to be.

There’s a tremendous amount of naivety on display by the big labs.

A bit of that is to be expected from any disrupter, but there’s now serious questions about if these startups have the basic competencies required to survive long term.

They are going to run out of real world data very soon. AI labs need to hire non-cynical domain experts to build physical hardware/automation that can generate experimental data. They are hard to find though. Most domain experts are so tunneled-visioned within their own domain that they can't think outside of it.

The same problem happens the other way around too. Many entrenched area think they can’t be disrupted.

It’s more important to keep an open mind, and readjust your assumptions regularly.

This accurately describes a large portion of the people working in "tech", and it doesn't look to be getting better anytime soon.

The intellectual arrogance of the AI labs is just the next from of intellectual arrogance from Silicon Valley. I've seen the exact same arrogance from everything in SV for the past 15 years; it's probably been going on longer, but I wasn't in a position to notice then

Is this really 'when genius fails' or actually another 'we're very bad at identifying genius'?

It's a word that's thrown around a lot (particularly in tech) that rarely has much to back it up. Often, it seems to be used for 'confident young man', or even 'grifter', and then when the idol falls, the same people quietly focus on lionising someone new.

Great read, though huggingface is French, not American

> It’s much easier to say someone else’s job is going to be fully replaceable by AI when you don’t actually know what they do.

This exactly. As someone who once lived in Silicon Valley and then ended up interviewing 700+ CxO's of profitable (or nearly profitable) SaaS businesses in various domain specific fields, it amazes me how many prominent "experts" in SV believed they were consistently "right" simply because they made enough bets to eventually get one right. Maybe not in enterprise value terms, but in volume of companies there are FAR more successful and profitable SaaS businesses that you've never heard of because they were started by entrepreneurs in their respective domains (the MD who started an EHR platform or the truck driver who started a TMS solution, etc.).

This goes to show that everyone is an expert in a bull market, where everything you buy can go up. (until it doesn't)

Ahh well. Let them fail if it's so obvious they will. Let the financiers fail too since they're all so dumb.

There's idiocy and overconfidence everywhere. When more money is involved, I guess it's more entertaining to watch. At least they're trying something. Maybe there's more effective ways to fleece people of their money that yield greater societal benefits, but I think there's some beauty in someone thinking they have it all figured out being able to lose their money on a shitty bet.

Now once they cry for government help, that's where I care.

The failure of an over-leveraged hedge fund run by someone with no investing background who was just regurgitating what other people have been saying does not mean that labor markets are going to survive. The author has intellectual arrogance of his own to consider.

Everyone has some sort of category error to an extent. But more than that, the part about safety guardrails really resonates with my experience. I inevitably have to go down to the low-level to inspect memory, but because of safety issues, I can barely use Codex as it keeps prompting me for 'trusted access.' AI is actually really good at catching bugs, so I'd love to use it, but it does this every single time...

This article is being downvote-brigaded HARD wherever it gets posted on the internet right now.

Interesting.

Are there any interesting predictions in this post that I need to pay attention to? Or is this just venting at how "annoying" tech bros are?

I just skimmed it, so I'm hoping someone with more fortitude can summarize.