> The Chinese labs have shown that distillation is incredibly effective, but the major US frontier labs haven’t (yet) been incentivized to shrink their models in the same way
Have they, actually? A lots of speculation and claims but what is the level of admittance?
1) This would make stocks worth a lot more and produce more dividends so everyone owning stock would get money to spend.
2) Governments effectively indirectly own ~40% of all business profits via corporate taxes, capital gains taxes, dividend taxes, sales taxes. So governments would also have more revenues to spend/redistribute (this depends on governments not wasting it, spending it on wars etc.)
#1 is still mostly just moving money from the poor to the rich. Most people working for a wage are going to be in the bottom 80%, yet the top 20% own over 80% of the stocks.
Folks stop having money to buy from businesses. Other businesses buy from them instead.
There's no hard and fast rule that humans need to be involved in the economy, it's just that until recently, you needed to pay them in order to have an economy that worked.
Corporations are legally people; give them enough brains, and they may become a real boy one day.
If it frees humans up to pursue whatever we desire instead of having to work to generate more value for someone else than myself, then I'm happy.
Now obviously, hell is more likely than a utopia, but this is the sort of advancement that would be required for us to reach that point. Something has to do the work.
From other business owners. If this hypothesis is true, they're saying the share of wealth controlled by labour goes dramatically down, and the share of wealth controlled by capital goes dramatically up. So most of your revenue will come from capital holders instead of labourers.
All money is a merry-go-round when you get down to it.
That doesn't mean the wheels won't fall off, they fall off pretty regularly as is.
The difference between this loop and the previous loops, is that people making the tech used to be pretty straightforward ("invest in me, your money will let me make a machine that lets me fire 90% of my peasants and we can share in the savings"), while today they're all "invest in me, either this will kill everyone or just make the concept of money irrelevant, either way rotflmao".
The historical precedent is those people get other jobs, and/or everyone else in the economy gets richer faster than they get poorer.
If this does or doesn't happen with AI kinda depends how fast it makes multiple different sections of the population unemployed, rather than just one group like "software developer" or "vehicle driver".
That's very much not what happened in the Industrial Revolution. Hand weavers were relatively well-paid, and the new factories were more likely to employ the urban poor - including kids - than to give jobs to people who used to be hand weavers.
It took maybe a century and a half for the modern consumer economy to appear. And it didn't happen until money started being shared into the wider economy for political reasons, not technological ones.
Meanwhile the enclosure of common land was catastrophic for rural populations. Sources of food and pasture disappeared as the Big Houses took them over and turned them into huge single family estates.
Your claims are mostly orthogonal to mine; I'm not saying "this was fun for all involved" or "the specific people who were laid off got better jobs" or anything like that, though with the benefit of hindsight I can see how:
> those people get other jobs, and/or everyone else in the economy gets richer faster than they get poorer.
Could be read the way you seem to have read it. With this quotation "other jobs" was "a job" rather than "a good job", while "everyone else" was intended to refer to the aggregate economy, not to all other individuals within it personally and individually benefitting. And the "and/or" because this isn't just about the initial phase of the industrial revolution but all technological job displacement that has continued to this day.
Not even saying it was fast or error-free; another comment I made around the same time used a colourful metaphor to reference various economic depressions that keep on happening.
> The historical precedent is those people get other jobs
Heh, got fired from my old company for reasons not connected to AI. Then couldn't find job. AI suggested one that is perfect for me, helped me put up webpage (I can do everything from electronics/firmware/backend/iot/cad, but nice webpage is not something I can do easily), then helps me every day to learn new things and make useful products I always wanted to make. And I found something safe for now from AI and big companies - making old equipment work with new systems. No one will touch it, because you have only small projects here and can't extract a lot of value at once, but a single person who can do anything with some help from AI can carve out a whole niche.
I think such solution - thousands of small niches by small entrepreneurs (1 person companies) who can use AI for some small skill they are lacking - are our future and they will absolutely extract a lot of money from people, who hope to make some more money with small optimisations of already working businesses. One example of such small optimisation - making a slightly better wood drying controller for small woodmill owner. He already put up small cabinet with cheap tuya controllers and needs to control them though atrocious app. Now I can make a small module that will add several more sensors, give him some simple dedicated control panel on webpage. Not even medium company would make such small product, because planning phase alone would cost more than what I can charge for whole system and do it in a week.
And it all started with one prompt - "Given my CV, what single person job would you recommend?"
You should try to add comments with that built-in editor. You can spend hours of writing the comments, and then suddenly, some comment gets corrupted and it removes all existing comments. All work gone. You can't trust that tool.
When GPT 6 Sol & Luna were released, everything went down. I have been running Sol at max thinking and it is about the same as old Luna with max thinking, give or take. Sometimes feeling even dumber. I can't trust it to do anything big alone anymore without babysitting.
Nobody stops to think "why not" when it is so easy to add certain features to software these days. But everyone wants to capture peoples attention and adding messaging is one way to do it.
> Put a human in the loop and you just end up bottlenecking it and throwing away any purported productivity gains. Auto mode doesn't matter either, it's trivial to trick and for the agent to break out.
Productivity gains are still enormous compared to what we used to do before agents. But, I know that people don't want to stop there.
Computer says no has been a problem for decades. The human can blame the computer for the errors following it, but must assume the consecuences if they override the decision.
Individual responsibility is meaningless when talking about a system and economy level change.
Unless something is in the structure that makes individual choice and responsibility a meaningful source of friction and reduced velocity, it has no real impact on how AI is being used.
Are they? How many people claiming productivity gains are actually being a human in a loop and reviewing and understanding every code change and every line of code ran?
2 years ago I saw it, back before agents were really a thing. But I'm not sure that was an enormous productivity improvement, especially compared to agents today. As for today, everyone I talk to is some level of blindly trusting what the agent is doing or not using agents. I haven't met people in the middle ground and suspect that they are rare enough we don't really know what their productivity gains are.
Human in the loop has become a convenient security-theater-washing for agentic AI.
Outside of coding, I think the issue is even worse because humans will defer so much judgment to AI that the same would apply. Look at how much trouble we've had before modern AI where humans blindly trusted the computer's output rather than make their own judgment, even if their job was to be providing a safeguard against the computer's judgment.
I guess, but why are you even submitting/merging code that doesn't work? Like how does it even get that far that you're blocking other people from getting stuff done?
I guess I won't deny that we've had more build breakages than usual over the past couple months but they get resolved super quick. We don't hesitate to roll broken code back if something manages to slip in.
right, the solution here is not a hyper-capitalist race-to-the-bottom-of-devaluing-labor. it's recognizing discretion and diligence are things still required for work to be of a certain quality
Have they, actually? A lots of speculation and claims but what is the level of admittance?
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