i don’t have kids (yet) but this sounds like a social problem, not a technology problem. You literally need to have parents in a community work together to COLLECTIVELY decide what’s best for their children.
A simple technical “ban” is dumb because it’s trivial to bypass, and doesn’t actually solve the problem. Kids are not stupid, they will happily find workarounds.
For example schools could facilitate this. Don’t allow smartphones on school property until children are in high school - only dumb phones allowed. Schools can educate parents early and heavily encourage a no social media policy at home. The only reason kids want to use social media because all the other kids are using it.
These smaller companies are doing well, they just aren’t incentivised to tell you about it. The VC backed companies are, either targeting you as a consumer or an investor and n an eventual IPO.
Hey, author here. Totally agree on how helpful these people are. I have a psychologist and also some great mentors. This doesn't make you immune to things like I wrote about but helps you process and get over them when they happen.
As a side note, I'm in a much better mental space now, largely due to facing these things straight on. Things are good, and I'm motivated and sharp!
I made a joke once after the first time I watched one of those Apple announcement shows in 2018, where I said "it's kind of sad, because there won't be any problems for us to solve because the iPhone XS Max is going to solve all of them".
The US economy is pretty much a big vibes-based Ponzi scheme now, so I don't think we can single-out AI, I think we have to blame the fact that the CEOs running these things face no negative consequences for lying or embellishing and they do get rewarded for it because it will often bump the stock price.
Is Tesla really worth more than every other car company combined in any kind of objective sense? I don't think so, I think people really like it when Elon lies to them about stuff that will come out "next year", and they feel no need to punish him economically.
I would argue it’s fraud-adjacent. These tech CEOs know that they’re not going to be able to keep the promises that they’re making. It’s dishonest at the very least, if it doesn’t legally constitute “fraud”.
Exactly: the technology is useful but because the executive class is hyping it as close to AGI because their buddies are slavering for layoffs. If that “when do you get fired?” tone wasn’t behind the conversation, I think a lot of people would be interested in applying LLMs to the smaller subset of things they actually perform well at.
For me it's mostly about the subset of things that LLMs suck at but still rammed in everywhere because someone wants to make a quick buck.
I know it's good tech for some stuff, just not for everything. It's the same with previous bubbles. VR is really great for some things but we were never going to work with a headset on 8 hours a day. Bitcoin is pretty cool but we were never going to do our shopping list on Blockchain. I'm just so sick of hypes.
But I do think it's good tech, just like I enjoy VR daily I do have my local LLM servers (I'm pretty anti cloud so I avoid it unless I really need the power)
It's not really about the societal impacts for me, at least not yet, it's just not good enough for that yet. I do worry about that longer-term but not with the current generation of AI. At my work we've done extensive benchmarking (especially among enthusiastic early adopters) and while it can save a couple hours a week we're nowhere near the point where it can displace FTEs.
Yeah, I think those are coming from the same place: so many companies are trying to wedge LLMs into everything, especially contexts where you really need actual reasoning to accomplish a task, and it’s just such a “magic VC money fairy, pick us!” play that it distracts from the underlying tech opening up some text processing capabilities we would’ve thought were amazing a few years ago.
Maybe CEOs should face consequences for going on the stage and outwardly lying. Instead they're rewarded by a bump in stock price because people appear to have amnesia.
I hate the Anthropic guy so much.. when I see the face it just brings back all the nonsense lies and "predictions" he says. Altman is kind of the same but for some reason Dario kind of takes the cake.
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