I think this recent post by AI industry CEO Matt Shumer is worth a read. In it, he basically explains how quickly LLMs (large language models) are evolving to supplant many developers and programmers, and how that disruption is coming to other industries quickly. He also warns critics of AI to adjust their priors and realize the AI tools you mocked just six months ago, aren’t the ones in use today:
“I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just… appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave.”
While the post is interesting (with the understanding this is somebody making and selling automation software), you might notice something: absolutely nowhere in the blog post does he meaningfully acknowledge the widespread problems with existing AI use. Either because his financial self-interest doesn’t allow for honest acknowledgment of them, or because he simply doesn’t find those aspects all that interesting.
Maybe both.
no mention of how the affluent, surveillance-obsessed exec dictating its trajectory enthusiastically cozied up to fascists
There are so many surveillance-obsessed AI CEOs that this one wasn’t in my top two guesses. Excellent reminder, Techdirt.
Stories like this Times piece will often fixate on the AI “doomer narrative” (SkyNet will kill us all), but downplay that this specific strain of doomerism (very often pushed by wealthy industry insiders), often exists to both misrepresent what LLMs are capable of, but also to direct attention away from more realism-based criticism the industry doesn’t really want to talk about.
The amount of attention the pro-business doom narrative gets, is fundamentally at odds with this realism, because the reality is that LLMs aren’t all that great.
Yep. These guys WISH their dumb little toy was capable of world domination.
What it is actually capable of is inaccurate spreadsheets and B+ middle school history papers.
