This is the core hubris of everyone behind the LLM craze. I do not want to deny their utility there absolutely is some there. But the inherent assumption behind the whole thing is that with a "country of geniuses" problems will melt away. But that's not the case. The reason problems like housing or famines or war aren't being solved is because structurally there's no incentives to solve them not because there's not enough geniuses out there.

I'm immensely sad every day seeing all these posts talking about billions and trillions of dollars and where I live (part of the US btw) we don't even have fully reliable electricity and water access. In fact our electricity bills have increased and there is nothing to show for it.

I don't understand why these big labs aren't doing more to improve the electricity situation. Dump a billion dollars worth of tokens into fusion analysis, research, and simulations and try to force a breakthrough. You could buy a lot of good will with unlimited cheap energy that liberates us from fossil fuel dependencies.

What is up with this attitude in this thread? AI has taken off programming basically this year, the end of last at best. The first truly capable LLM, ChatGPT, isn't even 4 years old yet.

Just a crazy amount of doom and gloom all around this thread.

This is sort of my take. You could look around in 2016 and 2026 and honestly not much has changed... at least at first glance. There is a missing piece of the puzzle.

I'm noticing this even in industry. Yea, we can build and iterate on ideas 100x faster but has this turned into anything meaningful? Not really... Hell, look at the big companies spending billions on inference... nothing shipped and things are still buggy as ever. Where is everything?

At least for me, personal agents have been quite useful. If you integrate them well - shopping, filling random government forms, keeping track of my personal life, optimizing training plan and nutrition, planning vacations, etc. I can do more home repairs or renovations myself with help of chat

So basically you get personal digital assistant - very useful - but not changing my life.

What would I need for real transformation though? Food, house cleaning, commute - "every day chores". Even if we had ASI tomorrow, what could it do to change my life, besides taking away my job? Design good house robot to help me with food preparation I guess... Maybe finally self driving cars launched in my area? Or it will take control, "optimize humanity survival chance" and realize we don't need as many people on this planet.

This is a Western-centric viewpoint. I'm in Asia visiting a few different countries right now, including the big ones, and much has changed with AI and also in general over the past 10 years with cars, trains etc.

> AI is solving mathematics problems (that nobody - including mathematicians - wanted it to solve)

Strange viewpoint. In mathematics any novel result is useful as it expands the scope of other results. Who are these mathematicians who didn't want AI to solve the problems it did? I see trepidation about the future of the field but that is not equivalent to not wanting them to be solved.

>AI is solving mathematics problems (that nobody - including mathematicians - wanted it to solve)

Do people need permission from mathematicians to solve math problems? Is one of the Millennium problems not worth applying a new system to work on it?

I understand the despair people are feeling at AI automating their work, but we have to be serious about the fact that the frontier labs are just responding to natural incentives. Mathematics, coding, all are just applications of logic, and it makes sense that a system trained on inferring patterns from data would work well in that domain.

People need to eat, sleep, be healthy, have shelter, feel loved, be in communities...

Coding has been transformed but none of those areas of our lives have been substantive transformed by AI yet. Whoever does, will create a lot of value for the world.

This view is too cynical. The frontier advancements are certainly going to trickle down. Take cars for example. AI driven cars are already here. AI-designed battery systems, fuel systems, materials and 3d printing capabilities will come to cars. It will likely lead to cheaper, more efficient and more effective vehicles. If will just take time for the impact to percolate.

Using AI for everything digital, I end up going and doing chores while waiting for the LLM to do its thing. What an insane world, where knowledge work (dreary and uninspired as it is) is automated while I am consigned to scrubbing dishes and waiting for the machine.

I think this is related to the structures we’ve built in society. It’s lower friction to write software than just about any of the problems you listed.

It reminds me of the Ezra Klein quote that “OpenAl would need permits to cover its parking lot in solar panels, but it can accelerate into recursive self-improvement, as best I can tell, whenever it so chooses."

That pretty much sums up my experience. Everything is more expensive and worse at the same time. And it feels like we're being screwed over from every direction and in new ways every day. People keep talking about this tech is supposed to do so much but everything just gets worse.

AI is solving mathematics problems (that nobody - including mathematicians - wanted it to solve)

This is an indictment of mathematicians, not AI.

AI has only been around a few years in its current form.

It might take a decade to take what we learned from AI and turn it into something that will benefit the masses.

Most of it can't be broken down into something as simplistic as a dishwasher.

Most people won't notice cancers being found faster due to AI being better at pattern recognition than a doctor, but it's still a great benefit.

LLMs could’ve been developed a lot slower without capsizing the entire supply chain and been seen a lot more positively, China is building a lot of good AI with a minuscule of the compute power and it’s fine

there was never a need to rush other than for capitals self interest to control

if frontier labs wanna pace the frontier, they should be honest and return the compute back to the people

I don't think it's surprising that it hasn't improved life much, AI is new and change takes time, but the fact of the matter is that it also made things worse in some ways, ways that I think were entirely avoidable, if only the incentives weren't so warped.

I think that's a bit disingenuous. We've only begun to apply LLMs in the real world and a lot of industries don't move very quickly. Not to mention that we're still very hardware constrained, we don't yet have the equivalent of an ESP32 chip we can just stick into any piece of electronics to provide state of the art LLM responses. But we'll get there, soon.

Whatever benefits AI has to offer on a societal level are going to take a long long time to show up, give it some more time. We had smartphones in 2007, and e.g. By way of example, Uber didn't launch ridesharing until 2013, and then that still took years to seep into the public awareness.

By comparison, we're in the early years of AI. We're all still figuring out what this thing even means.

I think one of the hopes is they'll get smarter than us and able to solve real world problems better - disease, war, poverty etc. But they are not really there yet. Give it a little while.

The change will be slow, not sudden. Slow and devastating.

Is it reasonable to expect AI improvements to filter into all of those aspects of life that quickly? It's only in the past month or so that we've started to see major breakthroughs in mathematics. It might take several years for that level of research capability to reach areas like engineering and medicine, at least in a way that affects the average person's quality of life. But at this point it looks very likely that it will happen eventually.

Your pessimistic view doesn't hold up against the data. For a lot of the problems you mentioned, we're in a better place today than almost any other time in history. Of course, things can always be improved and we should never grow complacent or accept injustice. But by most objective metrics, there's never been a better time to be alive.

I mean there's been huge strides in electric vehicles at low prices that Americans haven't experienced.

We've just locked out a large part of modernity because the shitty American auto industry is in swing states and also gender.

Same could be said about the slow rollout of Waymo.

Lots of America is just very anti technological change, and this means any technology no matter how "magical" hits a wall.

Publicly-accessible AI started working 1 year ago, 2 years tops. What did you expect? It to solve war driving prices up?

https://nitter.xitter.cc/augeeidos/status/210940046382122618...

This reply summarizes the problem from a different angle.

The fundamental malignancy here is that powerful people have become disconnected from the foundation of society. They have suffered from model collapse. They have been talking to each other in circles for too long, and doing things that make no sense to anyone outside the elite group, and because the systems that concentrate power to the top are so strong now, they continue gaining power even while messing everything up in a nominally free competitive market.

Why fix your appliances and infrastructure and give you healthcare when the plan is to obsolete the whole lot of you?

I already felt our civilization was on a steep decline, but AI is the final nail in the coffin, technology kills my own job too, hooray.

I'll add some...

Videos are shittier. Most songs are even shittier than the autotuned pieces of shit already were. Ads are worse (even though nobody thought that was even possible). Customer support is worse.

> But hey...on the flip side...a lot of people are rapidly building software (that nobody is using)

That nobody is using and that are worse than what we used to have. And because nobody's using them, the countless issues plaguing them aren't even reported by users anymore (there are no users anymore). Full of bugs, usability issues and gigantic security holes (but which doesn't really matter because nobody's using them).

It's not even clear that it's making long-standing software (like say Linux or Emacs or Blender or QEMU) better at all.

Now I'd say though: most of the issues you mentioned have nothing to do with LLMs / AI. But it's very clear that AI ain't solving much of the world's problems and that the promises we got years ago didn't materialize.

Correction: My car spies on me and its cruise control no longer works because it slams on the brakes in the middle of the highway whenever it sees a mirage. My dishwasher broke because it got an unasked-for software upgrade.

Things worked better before we started putting bad software in everything. As a software engineer, I know what good software looks like. The fact that almost all software is now bad -- including the software that drives AI and the software that AI generates -- makes me want to flip the table. We know how to write better software and the general public should hang us if we continue to refuse to deliver it.

You are talking like we had this capabilities for a decades but it's been just a few months of truly capable AI. Virtually all of IT switched to agents that quick. Non IT people just started to make software for themselves. Vision and translation capabilities of LLMs help millions. People talk with AI's now verbally to get advice or to just hear a friendly voice. The math thing is just few weeks old. We are just getting started. How fast did the telegraph meaningfuly changed lives for the better for bulk of people? Radio? TV? Computers? Internet? Cellphones?

Has any technology made an impact on physical world faster?

> But hey...on the flip side...a lot of people are rapidly building software (that nobody is using), and AI is solving mathematics problems (that nobody - including mathematicians - wanted it to solve)

That's not fair. To first approximation, most of the progress in human condition of the last, like, forever is implementing solutions that people didn't see value in at the time of creation. Woz built a toy that could barely run software at all. The human genome project was panned as a boondoggle. Penicillin was a mistake.

The first fire pit probably looked like a dangerous stunt to the tribe faced with it, even.

Does that mean everything will come up roses? No. But LLMs only started talking to us for real like three years ago. Let's not just that fast.

I would just add that consumer products in general aren't the same - practically every business model has incorporated obsoletionism to the point it's practically cancelled out the curve of progress and evolution of tech. We could have nice things.

Have you seen the shareholder value though? That’s not nothing it’s the only thing that matters!

It’s amazing how much the goal posts move in every AI conversation. A couple of years ago the average HN thread about AI would be filled to the brim with skepticism about AI ever being able to accomplish anything other than flappy bird clones.

Now it’s comments like this lamenting that the amazing LLMs we’ve had since early 2026 haven’t entirely revolutionized the whole physical world and even global geopolitics yet.

> But hey...on the flip side...a lot of people are rapidly building software (that nobody is using),

I guarantee a lot of software you use today has substantial AI development in recent releases.

Even the Linux kernel is getting a heavy input from AI and Linus is advocating for it. Unless you’ve frozen your entire software stack in 2024, you are using software with AI generated code.

> and AI is solving mathematics problems (that nobody - including mathematicians - wanted it to solve)

Saying nobody wants those problems solved is flat dishonest. The complaints from some mathematicians are that they and their peers didn’t get to put their names on the papers, not complaints that the problems were solved.

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>Your car is still the same.

Not for Tesla owners in select countries, where their car now drives them around 99% of the time, or the people of Austin Texas, that can now hail a fully driverless Cybercab for cheaper than an Uber!

>Food quality is worse.

Food quality is higher than ever if you want high-quality food!

Unfortunately, the people crave slop.

I've been thinking about this for 2 years. At some point it will be easier for them to create self sustaining cities - free houses cars public transportation clean food clean water -

Africa is going to look like wakanda in less than 5 years if WW3 gets canceled