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'At some point you've got to make money': Goldman's top AI skeptic warns the clock is running out ahead of OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs (fortune.com)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 42 points 2 months ago (4 children)

technology is incredibly useful and probably beneficial to society

For what? It's not reliable enough to actually automate anything and people that use it regularly inevitably stop checking the output and start falling victim to hallucinations. It's pretty good at rifling through social media posts which I don't think is good for society and it's OK as a frontline support system but even that they normally go too far and just make it infuriating

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  • [–] 17 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    I automate plenty with it, no you cant be an idiot about it but i can do what used to take me weeks in hours with it.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Yeah I think Lenny’s generic take is heavily colored by the absolute morons using it moronically. That’s a large number of people because lots of people are…well, morons. But you can definitely use it in productive ways. Keeping a human in the loop right now I think is very prudent, for cost and reliability reasons, but man does it decrease drudgery in capable hands.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 months ago

    People are scared because they think they could lose their jobs. Even if they say out loud they don't think it will happen and that they think AI is useless. They need AI to fail for peace of mind.

    If anything they're most at risk for losing their job due to a stubborn refusal to adopt technology. What people don't realize is that we don't live in an ideal world where the optimal solution is the only way. Even if LLMs are less than perfect, there's a scenario where it remains commonplace because it's what's in style. The stubborn abstainers will find themselves left behind when everyone else is leveraging it to complete mundane tasks much faster and checking the work.

    We already live in a world full of cumbersome enshittified technology. There's nothing we can do but make do with what we have. At this point people are dreaming if they think the AI bubble will pop and the technology will be shelved. It's not going away. It's already demonstrated usefulness. That it's not turning a profit is a different story.

    Maybe some others are simply scared that they don't have the expertise to check the work of LLMs in the first place.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    It doesn't need to fully automate anything to make people more productive. And I think there's ample evidence it can greatly increase productivity in some fields. We're in the bumpy phase of finding out how much human supervision is needed in each field so you're bound to hear about ways it has been misused but everyone I've talked to who uses it professionally thinks it helps them get a lot more done than without it.

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  • [–] 24 points 2 months ago

    I don't believe that for a second. Everyone I know that talks about being more productive is just pushing extra work onto more responsible people by making output that looks like work but isn't sufficient.

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  • [–] -4 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    It's not reliable enough to actually automate anything

    This is half true. It's not reliable enough to automate an entire job but it is reliable enough to automate tasks that would otherwise take a lot of time, usually related to sifting or searching data.

    If I need to look through a massive set of data like Google for something thst I can only describe with an explanation, the LLM will do a much faster job actually finding what you need rather thsn spending an hour manually sorting through SEO slop.

    You don't even need the cloud models for this, you can slap SearXNG onto a local model at home.

    It's basically just an autocomplete search on steroids which is its biggest advantage. Any documentation you need is immediately accessible, which is especially useful if you have zero experience with something niche or new.

    Now actually getting the LLM to consistently generate output is a completely different story lol.

    We call that vibe coding.

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  • [–] 16 points 2 months ago

    If I need to look through a massive set of data like Google for something thst I can only describe with an explanation, the LLM will do a much faster job actually finding what you need rather thsn spending an hour manually sorting through SEO slop.

    You could also use any other search engine since Google intentionally wrecked their search, and use the adblock list that filters out the seo slop. Just as efficient and less glacier melting

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago

    , usually related to sifting or searching data

    No matter the harness, no matter the spell, no matter the model, it is failing me daily in that regard, in my field of expertise. And the failures are random between inconsequential to grandiose.

    Heck, the thing it should be doing best - summaries - are constantly either missing the point or focusing on wrong take.

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