That's an intended effect. It doesn't matter to those in power who know what AI is really for. Once you get so exhausted that you can't work any more, there will be a hundred bright-eyed naïve programmers who will step into your place and who think they can do better. Until they burn out in a few years time.
The ultimate purpose of AI is indeed to remove cognitive autonomy. Little pieces here and there may seem empowering, but added all up, it pretty much takes control away from people.
Companies shouldn't ever be allowed to be so wealthy or powerful. This sort of power allows them to bypass legal regulations, squash small companies (something MS has been doing for a long time), force technology on people faster than they can react (think of the average clueless user that will just use anything MS puts on Windows), and create a true state of anti-competition (what kind of small company can compete with MS and not be bought out).
The only reason why they do exist is because the people with the money are the people with the power.
> Companies shouldn't ever be allowed to be so wealthy or powerful.
I see MS as a US gov approved monopoly.
I didn't check their SEC filings, but I suspect that US gov is a number one buyer, while various EU countries combined make number two. That's a coercion to me, not software business.
I would agree with that. And if that is so, it makes it even more apparent how broken our system is. The United States after all was built on decent values but without mechanisms to safeguard the average American from the interplay and long-term effects of very advanced technology interacting with the free market economy.
I would think so, given how important (whether we at HN like it or not) their stack has become, it's basically critical infrastructure at this point for a lot of industries.
I think I could see that happening to several companies, not just MS as well - once something gets so huge that it would be detrimental to the survival of a nation if it failed, it gets nationalized.
> - Maybe they can keep running Azure, since it's unpopular
That I'm not sure about though. Azure is unpopular with SaaS, but it's increasingly popular with non-tech enterprises, as well as basically anyone that remotely competes with Amazon. Good chance that if a company's core product isn't SaaS, they are on Azure.
There's no such thing as a large bureaucratic organization that is "good". The larger the scale, the less morality enters into the picture at all.
Making large companies state-owned wouldn't preclude them from being monopolies, it just changes who's in charge of monopoly abuse. With state-owned monopolies you end up with something more like USSR.
No, OP is right: this much concentrated power just shouldn't be allowed, period.
I disagree. The EU one of the largest and most bureaucratic organisations in the world and while they often make dumb laws - especially around technology - it's usually at least with the intent of making things better for people.
State owned monopolies really only make sense for natural monopolies (e.g. transport and communications infrastructure), and I wouldn't really count desktop operating systems as that. Windows is a monopoly due to extremely strong network effects.
That sounds like a good partial solution. Unfortunately, it's easier for governments to use tax dollars to expand, create more comfortable positions for federal civil servants, and watch the money roll in.
> We build ChatGPT to help you thrive in all the ways you want.
Wrong, you're building it to profit of the loss of others. Thriving doesn't mean efficiency, it means enjoying tasks in a mindful way.
> To make progress, learn something new, or solve a problem
All of these things are much more fun without AI.
> Our goals are aligned with yours.
If so, then why don't you wire half your profits to my bank account?
> We don’t always get it right.
You never get it right.
> Helping you solve personal challenges. When you ask something like “Should I break up with my boyfriend?” ChatGPT shouldn’t give you an answer. It should help you think it through—asking questions, weighing pros and cons.
This sort of phenomenon is becoming quite scary. People are supposed to do that, and because technology has isolated people, making more to step in is only ruining the world further. Keep this in mind, for anyone who works at OpenAI: you are ruining the world.
It's not hyperbolic. It is wrong to take profits when the system originally designed to exchange value (money) is modified by technology in such a way that taking profits means that all the profit gets concentrated at the very top 1% due to a technology no one could have easily anticipated.
And why "please stop". Are you afraid of having an argument or having your capitalistic values threatened by some random guy on the internet?
OpenAI is a true menace to society, and I will never stop arguing against their existence. They have invented a technology that is too dangerous to handle, and are using the existing social tendencies of the modern world to utterly wreck it. If you disagree, that's fine but I certainly won't stop voicing my opinion over it, especially when an article is posted that is filled with blatant commercial propaganda.
> Also if you buy an ultimately useless trinket, well that's just life. Everything we do can be considered 'ultimately' useless.
Dumb philosophy. Some things in life are at least worthwhile, like spending time with friends and making the lives of others better. But increasing efficiency for intellectual stimulation in a narrow domain truly useless and shows how pathological we have become.
Fact is, there is some level of meaning in life if you accept there to be any meaning at all, and making mindless diversions certainly isn't within that domain.
> like spending time with friends and making the lives of others better
Those are good things, but they are not the only things. Life is short, but there is room for "mindless diversions," as you phrase it. Without this, there would be no creativity, no craftsmanship, no art. Is it not also important to enrich oneself with hobbies and side-projects? Further, there is no authority who can make the judgement call on what is "worthwhile" to spend time on and what is not.
> Without this, there would be no creativity, no craftsmanship, no art. Is it not also important to enrich oneself with hobbies and side-projects? Further, there is no authority who can make the judgement call on what is "worthwhile" to spend time on and what is not.
It's not binary. There is nothing wrong with mindless diversions, but there is a healthy proportion of them. And when it becomes pathological (i.e. when AI allows spending a disproportionate amount of time on them), then it's a serious problem.
AI is a tool that has to be learned and the research is compeletely flawed in my opinion. For me AI is a sort of a colleague that is always there on demand which helps me see projects to the finish (this is really the fault either a variant of adhd or some other disorder). I don't know if it's healthy seeing AI this way, but I know for sure that I wouldn't have come close to the amount of progress I've made on projects that I have been pushing off for years. (replied to the wrong thread, but oh well)
> but I know for sure that I wouldn't have come close to the amount of progress I've made on projects that I have been pushing off for years.
Of course, at its inception, AI will mainly be seen as something that can help improve efficiency. Same with the smartphone: it was an entire optional tool that was mainly beneficial. But after this initial inception, technology tends to grow, and now smartphones for example are often mandatory due to 2FA, or at least difficult to avoid. And they constantly find new ways to bother people.
So for now, AI can be helpful for some, but it will grow, become more entrenched and insidious, and in lots of cases entirely replace people or at least be annoying and difficult to get rid of.
It doesn't make sense to argue for AI by stating its benefits in its nascent stages. Babies are all basically innocent creatures that bring emotional benefits but some can grow up to be killers, and this is what will happen with AI.
Well I kinda do agree with that, it feels like using not getting the hang of AI will leave you behind because AI in 10 years will be so much better - to a point we can't even estimate right now. But I think AI will make life a lot better and will actually help solve inequality since providing quality development during early years and help support children after the first few years of becoming independent (I still consider people children until around 21 to 25 years old).
AI will help close the gap between the people who were privilidged and given the environment to learn versus those who didn't.
However, beyond that I have absolutely no idea what will happen because I had a friend sending me porn that grok generated (the moderation is a joke). AI girlfriends will definitely be a thing and a lot of people will use those services, but I can't really wrap my head around what that entails for the future.
AI was never supposed to automate the boring parts. It's what it was advertised to do. Sort of like how those "as seen on TV" weight loss pills are "supposed" to help you lose weight.
The purpose of AI is supposed to *make a few people richer*! Not take away the boredom from tasks. That's only a side effect of it used to sell it.
> I don't get these articles. First the author claims that AI made us more productive but now the time we saved is spent on more work (!)
Well, that is a general phenomenon of technology. Technology does indeed often save time at first (in the short-term) but then compensates in a bad way and gives us more work in the long term. Pretty much every technology past a certain point of sophistication does this:
- Smartphones immediately can help us organize stuff, but then they also make it easier for people to call you when you don't want, you get more spam, etc.
- Cars make it easier to get from A to B but then in the long run now we have to spend countless years of work to clean up the climate/environemtn
- Computers make typing and storing information more efficient but now we have to spend countless hours on securing them
The bottom line is that efficiency increases from a technological creation point of view but life simplicity decreases, in general.
> One, there is no way LLMs in their current state are capable of replacing human translators for a case like this. And two, they do make the job of translation a lot less tedious. I wouldn't call it pleasant exactly, but it was much easier than my previous translation experiences
On the other hand, one day they will replace human beings. And secondly, if something like transalation (or in general, any mental work) becomes too easy, then we also run the risk of incresing the amount of mediocre works. Fact is, if something is hard, we'll only spend time on it if it's really worthwhile.
Same thing happens with phone cameras. Yes, it makes some things more convenient, but it also has resulted in a mountain of mediocrity, which isn't free to store (requires energy and hence pollutes the environment).
Technically modern LLMs are handicapped on translation tasks compared to the original transformer architecture. The origami transformer got to see future context as well as past tokens.
> Yes, our civilization rewards and encourages short circuiting effort, depriving us of the basic positive feedback loop of effort to reward.
To some extent, but so far before AI it has been at a speed and magnitude most people could handle. With AI, they can't.
> It's been like this since the invention of the wheel and fire. It's up to us to find and/or create meaningful (and effortful) lives, and it is more sustainable to focus on the path than the destination; every zen text teaches this.
You are ignoring again the magnitude of the effect of AI, which is much worse than previous technologies. One can always focus on "the path" but Zen teachers also teach practicality: why make your life complicated? AI makes things complicated unecessarily.
Excellent realization. AI is fundamentally destructive, and is one reason I never use it, ever. Automation was never meant to infringe upon the creative domain, only the truly mechanical.
