The real AGI is the friends we met along the way (to financial crisis)

Wow, is this Hacker News? Where have you been? Last night I had two agents up autonomously developing and training deep learning models much faster and better than I ever could as a professional. Seems the reddit bubble of "AI doesn't work but also it's somehow evil" has taken over this place as well.

Can you not feel it’s growing presence?

I'm literally replying to you right now while it's chugging away on my work, so yeah?

no, it's very hot, and the fans are loud and obnoxious so they keep putting it in data centers near places that don't really want it, and they install lots of natural gas turbines because the grid isn't enough and that's louder too, and then the cooling often needs a lot of water, and -- really unpopular overall, as it turns out!! huge backlash. and that's before, you know, allll the job impacts, which is when it gets ugly and threatens to complicate the whole consumption-driven structure of the economy.

... but the little dgx spark is in the room with us! it's pretty smart-ish, in a pinch!

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Agreed. The "singularitarians" always seem to overlook one simple truth: we don't use the intelligence we already have. The appearance of a 100-fold increase in cognitive resources will have no immediate effect at all.

The value was driven by the size of the user base. We gave each user an arbitrary price but didn’t understand how to turn that into actual money. So if you had a website with 30M users it was valued at $900M. The late 90s early 2000s were wild times in VC, and some lucky people realizing how nonsensical all that was cashed out on time.

Yes, I have no doubt that AI is going to seriously impact the economy over time. I have lots of doubt that it can impact the economy sufficiently quickly and with enough impact to pay out all the very, very, very large bets being made on it. Even as the AI quality curve has been running ahead of most predictions, its actual impact on the economy has been running well behind.

I am watching the dawning realization among the management class that even if coding costs drop to zero, Amdahl's Law means that perhaps productivity doubles for most software engineers, rather than goes to the MOON. AI can help some of the other bottlenecks, but not 100%.

On the positive side, we programmers have been trying to collectively explain to management for decades now that our jobs are not just 100% banging away at code on keyboards, we're not just interchangable code monkeys. Well, they're getting their noses rubbed in it now, complete with metrics and charts and all the other things they value more than the feedback from their employees.

In fact I was just noticing this week... in the past few months I had been really banging away at a lot of code projects. I was doing that whole "3 or 4 streams going on at once" that many of us have talked about, with a variety of mixed feelings. But in the past few weeks that seems to have starved out. I seem to have burned through the things that I was blocked on code for, and had a reasonable business case to pursue. Now my projects are all blocking up on non-code things again... communication with other teams. Review of documents that are irreducibly things humans need to review. Coordination and planning. Applying human attention to cover over the way that even the best frontier models still seem to have huge gaps in their superficially-expansive automated testing code that they write for their own code. I'm still sometimes unblocking multiple things at once and can briefly have multiple projects going, but then I hit a blocker somewhere and I end up unable to continue having multiple simultaneous code projects going at once.

(The document review is a particularly interesting case. The documents in question are something we expect some humans to at least skim, but are going to be basically a meta-program for AIs programming the rest of the company's code. It is important to get it right because every error is going to magnify quite a bit. AIs are helping a lot with that document, yes, I certainly agree we are proceeding more quickly with it than the same project 5 years ago would have gone, but it is also irreducibly sopping up a lot of human attention.)

Point of all this being that the casual presumption that AI will just utterly destroy the entire economy because it is good at coding may prove to be, well, yeah, exactly the same as the assumption that we are going to all be rich by 2002 because we'll just shift the entire economy to be on the internet and everything will multiply by 1000 in just a couple years as a result. But everything can't be shifted on to the internet. I can't eat a web page. AI can't do everything, and as it advances the things it can't do become a larger and larger percent of the remaining pie as a result. It seems to rhyme a lot with the dot com crash.

>The dot.com bubble didn't pop because the web was a bad idea.

The web WAS a bad idea though.

I don't doubt there will be a big crash at some point, but I actually doubt we've reached that point yet. So far stock increases have been driven by earning increases, not speculation. I know an "earnings bubble" can be a thing, but given how useful I know these models to be, and how few use them in the way they can be, I think we have far to go still.