alt Hacker NewsI won’t deny they are useful tools, but the hyperbole from the tech CEOs about them replacing all white collar workers in 12-18 months set the expectation so high that I’m still in the “fancy auto-complete” camp. It still feels nowhere close to replacing anyone, at least where I work. While useful, they haven’t been anywhere close to as useful as promised. Hallucinations and poor guidance are still a regular day-to-day issue that makes it impossible for me to trust agents with anything.
Had they been more realistic with the promises and didn’t frame it as replacing all of us within 2 years, I would have been more excited about the tech. Now that their claims are proving to be false and they’re trying to walk it back, it’s too late. The time for excitement has passed and it’s just something that exists.
The data center battles have also thrown a wet blanket on the tech, as they file lawsuits against towns near me to force construction to begin, despite the towns voting against it. The town can’t afford the fight, so the will of the people and the town gets bulldozed. It’s pretty gross to watch.
Replies
I remember in the weeks and months after ChatGPT was released, there were plenty of comments here - seemingly respected comments getting plenty of upvotes - about exponential grown meaning that all programmers - or even all knowledge workers - would have their jobs made unnecessary in, wow, two weeks! Or, well, maybe two months! Wait, actually, two years! Always two of something.
It’s the full-self-driving of the 2020s (complete with the never-ending ‘we actually have it now you just don’t understand!’)
[Edit: I don’t mean it’s useless, just that its boosters are overhyping it - expanding on and agreeing with Had they been more realistic with the promises and didn’t frame it as replacing all of us within 2 years, I would have been more excited about the tech.]
> the hyperbole from the tech CEOs about them replacing all white collar workers in 12-18 months
Just keep in mind that you're likely hearing from a limited subset of all tech CEOs.
"CEO Expresses Moderate Confidence that AI Can Enable Modest Productivity Gains" is not an article that gets written, because it would not generate clicks.
I think if they were more honest it would have been a nonstarter.
The amount of money these companies need seems to be all of nothing, they’re raising like it’s life or death and if you read their books or tweets they’re not shy about it
> Hallucinations and poor guidance are still a regular day-to-day issue that makes it impossible for me to trust agents with anything.
I often hear this. Can you give me a question where a major LLM hallucinates or provides poor guidance? Reproducible would be great
Just a question to stump it.
> I won’t deny they are useful tools, but the hyperbole from the tech CEOs about them replacing all white collar workers in 12-18 months set the expectation so high that I’m still in the “fancy auto-complete” camp.
Why would someone else's unrealistic assessment affect your assessment of the actual abilities you see?
Seems like your opinion is mostly politics-based
I'm thinking it's a game of CEO-bullshit-detector vs AI-bullshit-generator and the CEOs demonstrated from 2024-current that they're not good at detecting bullshit, especially if it comes from a computer and goes very fast.
Yeah, I think the missing piece on this is that the first thought they had was "we can do the same with less" instead of the growth mindset that made me interested in technology in the first place.
And it's amazing they didn't, because most of the tech industry only gets paid in a world where there are offices (either physical or virtual) full of people with money to spend during and after work.
It's still very rare for anyone to be asking "how do we do more with more?" But the person who figures that out is going to be the winner (and if no one figures it out we will all lose, even if you manage to transition to a job that still exists the world around you will be a nightmare).