this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2025
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"The real benchmark is: the world growing at 10 percent," he added. "Suddenly productivity goes up and the economy is growing at a faster rate. When that happens, we'll be fine as an industry."

Needless to say, we haven't seen anything like that yet. OpenAI's top AI agent — the tech that people like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman say is poised to upend the economy — still moves at a snail's pace and requires constant supervision.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 3 weeks ago (11 children)

That's because they want to use AI in a server scenario where clients login. That translated to American English and spoken with honesty means that they are spying on you. Anything you do on your computer is subject to automatic spying. Like you could be totally under the radar, but as soon as you say the magic words together bam!...I'd love a sling thong for my wife...bam! Here's 20 ads, just click to purchase since they already stole your wife's boob size and body measurements and preferred lingerie styles. And if you're on McMaster... Hmm I need a 1/2 pipe and a cap...Better get two caps in case you cross thread on.....ding dong! FBI! We know you're in there! Come out with your hands up!

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

R&D is always a money sink

[–] [email protected] 21 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

It isn't R&D anymore if you're actively marketing it.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Uh... Used to be, and should be. But the entire industry has embraced treating production as test now. We sell alpha release games as mainstream releases. Microsoft fired QC long ago. They push out world breaking updates every other month.

And people have forked over their money with smiles.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Microsoft fired QC long ago.

I can't wait until my cousin learns about this, he'll be so surprised.

I'd tell him but he's at work. At Microsoft, in quality control.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Make sure to also tell him he's doing a shit job!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

He's probably been fired long ago, but due to non-existant QC, he was never notified.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 weeks ago
[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 weeks ago

Especially when the product is garbage lmao

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

For a lot of years, computers added no measurable productivity improvements. They sure revolutionized the way things work in all segments of society for something that doesn’t increase productivity.

AI is an inflating bubble: excessive spending, unclear use case. But it won’t take long for the pop, clearing out the failures and making successful use cases clearer, the winning approaches to emerge. This is basically the definition of capitalism

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

What time span are you referring to when you say "for a lot of years"?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Vague memories of many articles over much of my adult life decrying the costs of whatever the current trend with computers is being higher than the benefits.

And I believe it, it’s technically true. There seems to be a pattern of bubbles where everyone jumps on the new hot thing, spend way too much money on it. It’s counterproductive, right up until the bubble pops, leaving the transformative successes.

Or I believe it was a long term thing with electronic forms and printers. As long as you were just adding steps to existing business processes, you don’t see productivity gains. It took many years for businesses to reinvent the way they worked to really see the productivity gains

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

If you want a reference there is a Rational Reminder Podcast (nerdy and factual personal finance podcast from a Canadian team) about this concept. It was the illustrated with trains or phone infrastructure 100 years ago : new technology looks nice -> people invest stupid amounts in a variety of projects-> some crash bring back stock valuations to reasonable level and at that point the technology is adopted and its infrastructure got subsidized by those who lost money on the stock market hot thing. Then a new hot thing emerge. The Internet got its cycle in 2000, maybe AI is the next one. Usually every few decade the top 10 in the s/p 500 changes.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

AI is burning a shit ton of energy and researchers’ time though!

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 3 weeks ago (7 children)

I've been working on an internal project for my job - a quarterly report on the most bleeding edge use cases of AI, and the stuff achieved is genuinely really impressive.

So why is the AI at the top end amazing yet everything we use is a piece of literal shit?

The answer is the chatbot. If you have the technical nous to program machine learning tools it can accomplish truly stunning processes at speeds not seen before.

If you don't know how to do - for eg - a Fourier transform - you lack the skills to use the tools effectively. That's no one's fault, not everyone needs that knowledge, but it does explain the gap between promise and delivery. It can only help you do what you already know how to do faster.

Same for coding, if you understand what your code does, it's a helpful tool for unsticking part of a problem, it can't write the whole thing from scratch

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

For coding it's also useful for doing the menial grunt work that's easy but just takes time.

You're not going to replace a senior dev with it, of course, but it's a great tool.

My previous employer was using AI for intelligent document processing, and the results were absolutely amazing. They did sink a few million dollars into getting the LLM fine tuned properly, though.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

YES

YES

FUCKING YES! THIS IS A WIN!

Hopefully they curtail their investments and stop wasting so much fucking power.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 3 weeks ago

I think the best way I've heard it put is "if we absolutely have to burn down a forest, I want warp drive out of it. Not a crappy python app"

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