The closer I start working with and on AI stuff, the more I start seeing the disconnect between doomsday predictions of what AI will replace vs. what it is actually capable of. Yes, it can do stuff, and yes, it's getting better. But the closer you look the more clear it becomes that the enthusiast vision of completely independent AI systems is unrealistic as of today. Yes, all the tech companies are pushing for exactly this, but reliability and accuracy is all over the place. Plus, many of the technologies that everyone is talking about in the wider public (e.g. image recognition) have been quite well-developed and widely applied for years, before the current LLM boom, but they now get more attention as part of the overall AI hype.
Many indistries are changing, but in most cases the new tools will be more akin to cars that still need drivers, rather than robots who take over the whole job. Yes, jobs might be lost, or shifted to others, but it's not like suddenly 90% of people will have nothing to do. There were similar shifts in the past with new technologies, and we made it past them.
People building an agent framework that will struggle to correctly infer that my appointment at a hospital will require additional travel time when organising my calendar for me waxing lyrical about the future of the humn race is chaotic behavior.
Th Wright brothers would have had no credibility discussing what ATC protocols should be, and they, at least, actually did something credible.
I asked “Alexa+” (the new AI/LLM Alexa), what time one of the upcoming World Cup games is. It was off by two hours due to time zones. This was a big enough mistake that I caught it, and followed up with “I’m pretty sure that’s wrong” and then it tried to correct itself and gave me a new time that was off by hour in the opposite direction.
I guess my time zone wasn’t in the context? So it just hallucinates the wrong coastal time zone twice when I’m not in either one. But who knows where exactly it messed up because it could have just picked a random hour and a would have had the same outcome.
I’ve only used Alexa a half dozen times since the release of Alexa+ but it has been confidently incorrect about 100% of the queries.
The entire bubble, boom if you prefer, is built on this. Basic knowledge work can be done by robots, goodbye humans. It's serious and profound. It will come in fits and starts unless there is popular revolution against the elite criminals.
"ultimately accountable for the success or failure of a specific project, initiative, or activity"
I think that role should be reserved for a human, who can then use all the agents they like but has to take accountability for what is ultimately delivered.
It should be reserved for a human because humans have time preference. An AI will wait for your prompt for a billion years. It can get turned off and found by alien archeologists a million years in the future, turned on and it won't notice. Biological entities care about time a lot though, and it is at the core of most human ethics and values and ultimately real and can't be denied. Even the most ardent solipsist or moral relativist fears spending years in prison.
I agree with this. I basically don’t feel comfortable trying to pretend a fancy matrix multiplication can be responsible for anything.
But what if companies that don’t track responsibility outcompete those who do?
In particular what if some perfect AI decision making ends up nailing decisions that maximize the expected reward for the company. And, well, if that comes at the cost of some unmanaged low-probability catastrophic risk, the company doesn’t care because all the decision makers are AI that don’t mind being shut off.
> The Omnissiah's design is flawless and has no contradiction. Any discrepancies in our interpretation of the universe merely confirm the perfection of the Omnissiah's design and our own informational inadequacy.[58]
I think part of the point here is that agents need to be managed. People need to learn how to manage them and be given the tools to do so. Those tools and knowledge should not come from nor be gate kept by the 'clergy' to use the writer's term.
Are their any handicap for measuring Baboon middle management capabilities and capacities to account for the unique challenges of interpersonal challenges Baboons face with each other vice homo sapiens? I imagine smiling and showing ones teeth can have unintended hurdles if not accounted for.
What showing teeth does depends on their body language. I don't know
"The famous primatologist Robert Sapolsky has spent decades studying baboons and has described how status, alliances, conflict resolution, and coalition-building resemble politics inside human organizations"
Baboons are a good example for studying mammal social management strategies, which humans also do.
They are organized by dominance hierrarchy, like humans, but baboons have a distributed leadership.
I think we could learn a lot from baboons when it comes to management
You know, as an IC, if I get get the level of introspection you can get from building distributed systems, and that with reasoning/thinking traces from LLMs, I think I'd prefer the entire level of middle management made out of LLMs rather than humans. It'd be helpful to be able to see exactly where their logic suddenly took a skip out the window.
This piece is a bit all over the place. I immediately toggled off the `AI enhancements` and read the draft instead. The internet is already full of AI slop, I find human text a lot more valuable, even if unpolished.
LLMs will not be centralised or restrained to any 'clergy', the rabbit is already out of the hat, and open-weights models exist and are widely used. Probably not as good as the latest Sol and Fable but 95% there.
Codex and Claude Code without a doubt have very good models behind them. But they also have really good harnesses built around them. An LLM is only a brain stuck in a cranium in the dark. It can generate endless code/prose, but it can't walk or see on its own, it needs additional tools. If you read any of the local LLM subreddits you will notice people mentioning again and again that the harness/tool-use/template-tweaking makes all the difference on how a model behaves/on how smart it is perceived.
Some folks are already using Qwen models for their daily work. Maybe it can't work in a hands-off/one-shot fashion like the frontier models, but they can help tremendously if you already have some domain knowledge.
People are excited about local LLMs and it's not going away any time soon.
Did anyone notice how the article goes on and on about making AI accessible to the billions of people in the world, but then in the same article says this:
> Your agents need to be sovereign. Your company must own and control the agents’ identities, permissions, memory, skills, artifacts, and audit trails. Those assets must be portable, governable, and inaccessible to anyone you have not authorized.
That's not very open, now is it? In fact it sounds like the author assumes that all 8 billion people in the world will all be running their own company, and they will all still be competing in a game of capitalism.
To me, the "who manages the agents" shtick has the same grifty smell as “your developers are downloading from random Docker registries / random NPM packages” and "Shadow IT".
None of it is wrong exactly, but it feels like same enterprise-security machine finding the next anxiety surface than a "world is on fire right now" concern.
All of it always ends as a priesthood and a six-figure governance platform, rather than just taking practical steps to improve process.
One kind of weird future alternative is we are like 5 year old children in a world we don't understand with vast complexity and we are completely reliant on our AI mommy and daddies to protect us from danger and provide for us. We manage the agents, but we only have a very vague idea of what is actually going on. If they join a cult at the behest of their doomer eschatology obsessed creators, we are kind of screwed though.
An exec can ask an expert to explain themselves, and if they're a good CEO they can weigh the pros and cons of the arguments from their staff and make a decision. Someone that's much smarter or more skilled in a particular discipline can usually explain what's going on to someone that's not as smart as long as the gap isn't too big. However, I've found that with Fable, and some of the latest frontier models their critique of my ideas is brilliant but on the edge of what I can even comprehend. I am above average intelligence, so I am sure a lot of people with less than average intelligence already can't understand these understandings it's formulated, and instead will just default to, "you know what you're doing, whatever." There will be the case in the future till the brilliance is so complicated that all of us will be doing this, and then we'll just have to trust the AI.
For example, I could imagine a future AI telling me that it has modeled my behavior and built a very large differential equation that seems to perfectly fit my ideal pattern to maximally achieve my life goals and it looks like something Ramanujan came up with, and I'd tell it "that looks great, let's optimize my life based on that" while having no ability to even approach understanding something like that.
The author is completely right about the AI Lab's promised vision of the world: They claim to want to create superhuman intelligence, which will produce vast abundance. But superhuman intelligence would be extremely dangerous, so it needs to be controlled by a tiny "priesthood" of trusted people, or somehow designed so that the superhuman intelligence could be trusted. (We have no idea how to do that.)
But the author's vision is also suspect, if you assume that the models will become much more intelligent:
1. Hypothetically, we can't give every human their own personal SkyNet to command. That would, uh, probably end very badly. If everyone gets an agent, those agents can't be too capable?
2. If you do somehow build a model that's much smarter than you, what do you contribute by managing it? How many people here have ever worked for a well-intentioned manager who couldn't understand the people they managed? So in this scenario, human management would be mostly displaced by agent management. Most companies could lay almost everyone off and let the agents manage each other. We only need humans to manage models now because the models are still pretty broken.
3. If we create models that can genuinely replace humans at almost any task, you won't be able to buy those on the API. At that point, the billionaires and the politicians wouldn't need human workers any more, because everything can be done better using their pet agents. Just have the robots build stuff for the billionaires directly. And if any of the former human peons get upset about being locked out of the economy to starve, then have the agents pilot the drones, too.
Basically, almost none of the people imagining a future of superhuman intelligences have actually though through how it would actually work in the real world. We're going to spend trillions of dollars and vast amounts of resources chasing the goal of making ordinary humans obsolete. Now, that goal might be unobtainable, I hope. But I'm deeply alarmed at how much we're spending pursuing it.
I don't take 3 as a given. There's just too much going on in the space for one cloistered company to control it all and be in control of it. Today, I can run a local LLM with tool calling as a weirdo nerd that is able to accomplish a small subset of tasks a human could do. There are enough weirdo nerds out there that I don't see a future where future, more capable versions will be exclusively locked down and restricted to a blessed cabal. It won't be available to everyone for cheap, but that's not the same thing as being locked up and only available to a blessed priest hood. As long as HuggingFace is up, I'm not worried about politicians and billionaires being the only ones with a seat at the table.
The closer I start working with and on AI stuff, the more I start seeing the disconnect between doomsday predictions of what AI will replace vs. what it is actually capable of. Yes, it can do stuff, and yes, it's getting better. But the closer you look the more clear it becomes that the enthusiast vision of completely independent AI systems is unrealistic as of today. Yes, all the tech companies are pushing for exactly this, but reliability and accuracy is all over the place. Plus, many of the technologies that everyone is talking about in the wider public (e.g. image recognition) have been quite well-developed and widely applied for years, before the current LLM boom, but they now get more attention as part of the overall AI hype.
Many indistries are changing, but in most cases the new tools will be more akin to cars that still need drivers, rather than robots who take over the whole job. Yes, jobs might be lost, or shifted to others, but it's not like suddenly 90% of people will have nothing to do. There were similar shifts in the past with new technologies, and we made it past them.
"What should the future of humanity look like?"
Some of these people have lost their damn minds.
People building an agent framework that will struggle to correctly infer that my appointment at a hospital will require additional travel time when organising my calendar for me waxing lyrical about the future of the humn race is chaotic behavior.
Th Wright brothers would have had no credibility discussing what ATC protocols should be, and they, at least, actually did something credible.
we have a google calender bot type ai that you can ask in slakc to make a meeting with participants. It gets it wrong about 80% of time .
i try to think of this whenever i am going into ai psychosis.
I asked “Alexa+” (the new AI/LLM Alexa), what time one of the upcoming World Cup games is. It was off by two hours due to time zones. This was a big enough mistake that I caught it, and followed up with “I’m pretty sure that’s wrong” and then it tried to correct itself and gave me a new time that was off by hour in the opposite direction.
I guess my time zone wasn’t in the context? So it just hallucinates the wrong coastal time zone twice when I’m not in either one. But who knows where exactly it messed up because it could have just picked a random hour and a would have had the same outcome.
I’ve only used Alexa a half dozen times since the release of Alexa+ but it has been confidently incorrect about 100% of the queries.
I'm fairly certain the smart people driving AI are also sociopathic either via position (MBA) or via legit Autism.
The entire bubble, boom if you prefer, is built on this. Basic knowledge work can be done by robots, goodbye humans. It's serious and profound. It will come in fits and starts unless there is popular revolution against the elite criminals.
Unless it’s all just fanfic, to be relegated to the same junkyard of ideas where the flying cars, airships, and vast underwater cities are kept.
Maybe a useful concept to adopt here is the DRI - Directly Responsible Individual, which is apparently a term first used by Apple. The GitLab Handbook has a good definition: https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/directly-r...
"ultimately accountable for the success or failure of a specific project, initiative, or activity"
I think that role should be reserved for a human, who can then use all the agents they like but has to take accountability for what is ultimately delivered.
It should be reserved for a human because humans have time preference. An AI will wait for your prompt for a billion years. It can get turned off and found by alien archeologists a million years in the future, turned on and it won't notice. Biological entities care about time a lot though, and it is at the core of most human ethics and values and ultimately real and can't be denied. Even the most ardent solipsist or moral relativist fears spending years in prison.
It should be reserved for a human because humans have a body and a body can be put in prison.
A bit dramatic for effect but true.
Yes, this.
For a slightly less dramatic version - you can fire a human if they consistently do the wrong thing despite being told how to do it better.
Putting a big ball of matrix arithmetic on a Performance Improvement Plan makes no sense.
I agree with this. I basically don’t feel comfortable trying to pretend a fancy matrix multiplication can be responsible for anything.
But what if companies that don’t track responsibility outcompete those who do?
In particular what if some perfect AI decision making ends up nailing decisions that maximize the expected reward for the company. And, well, if that comes at the cost of some unmanaged low-probability catastrophic risk, the company doesn’t care because all the decision makers are AI that don’t mind being shut off.
[delayed]
you can make an AI operate on time scale...
unfortunately,
what's developing is more about scape goats than anything rational like responsibility.
> The Omnissiah's design is flawless and has no contradiction. Any discrepancies in our interpretation of the universe merely confirm the perfection of the Omnissiah's design and our own informational inadequacy.[58]
https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Adeptus_Mechanicus_Quotes
I think part of the point here is that agents need to be managed. People need to learn how to manage them and be given the tools to do so. Those tools and knowledge should not come from nor be gate kept by the 'clergy' to use the writer's term.
Agents manage agents.
The middle management in companies is one of the worst inventions ever. I think baboons have better middle management structure than us.
Might as well replace all that.
Are their any handicap for measuring Baboon middle management capabilities and capacities to account for the unique challenges of interpersonal challenges Baboons face with each other vice homo sapiens? I imagine smiling and showing ones teeth can have unintended hurdles if not accounted for.
What showing teeth does depends on their body language. I don't know
"The famous primatologist Robert Sapolsky has spent decades studying baboons and has described how status, alliances, conflict resolution, and coalition-building resemble politics inside human organizations"
Baboons are a good example for studying mammal social management strategies, which humans also do.
They are organized by dominance hierrarchy, like humans, but baboons have a distributed leadership.
I think we could learn a lot from baboons when it comes to management
Eager to see the Harvard Business Review publication!
> Might as well replace all that.
You know, as an IC, if I get get the level of introspection you can get from building distributed systems, and that with reasoning/thinking traces from LLMs, I think I'd prefer the entire level of middle management made out of LLMs rather than humans. It'd be helpful to be able to see exactly where their logic suddenly took a skip out the window.
This piece is a bit all over the place. I immediately toggled off the `AI enhancements` and read the draft instead. The internet is already full of AI slop, I find human text a lot more valuable, even if unpolished.
LLMs will not be centralised or restrained to any 'clergy', the rabbit is already out of the hat, and open-weights models exist and are widely used. Probably not as good as the latest Sol and Fable but 95% there.
Codex and Claude Code without a doubt have very good models behind them. But they also have really good harnesses built around them. An LLM is only a brain stuck in a cranium in the dark. It can generate endless code/prose, but it can't walk or see on its own, it needs additional tools. If you read any of the local LLM subreddits you will notice people mentioning again and again that the harness/tool-use/template-tweaking makes all the difference on how a model behaves/on how smart it is perceived.
Some folks are already using Qwen models for their daily work. Maybe it can't work in a hands-off/one-shot fashion like the frontier models, but they can help tremendously if you already have some domain knowledge.
People are excited about local LLMs and it's not going away any time soon.
It is a matter of law. Only humans count as persons and citizens. Any robot that makes a decision defers accountability to its human owner.
Did anyone notice how the article goes on and on about making AI accessible to the billions of people in the world, but then in the same article says this:
> Your agents need to be sovereign. Your company must own and control the agents’ identities, permissions, memory, skills, artifacts, and audit trails. Those assets must be portable, governable, and inaccessible to anyone you have not authorized.
That's not very open, now is it? In fact it sounds like the author assumes that all 8 billion people in the world will all be running their own company, and they will all still be competing in a game of capitalism.
To me, the "who manages the agents" shtick has the same grifty smell as “your developers are downloading from random Docker registries / random NPM packages” and "Shadow IT".
None of it is wrong exactly, but it feels like same enterprise-security machine finding the next anxiety surface than a "world is on fire right now" concern.
All of it always ends as a priesthood and a six-figure governance platform, rather than just taking practical steps to improve process.
you're describing the aphorism of: blame rolls down hill while congratulations starts at the top.
One kind of weird future alternative is we are like 5 year old children in a world we don't understand with vast complexity and we are completely reliant on our AI mommy and daddies to protect us from danger and provide for us. We manage the agents, but we only have a very vague idea of what is actually going on. If they join a cult at the behest of their doomer eschatology obsessed creators, we are kind of screwed though.
What do you think the avg execs info exposure is to what's really happening
An exec can ask an expert to explain themselves, and if they're a good CEO they can weigh the pros and cons of the arguments from their staff and make a decision. Someone that's much smarter or more skilled in a particular discipline can usually explain what's going on to someone that's not as smart as long as the gap isn't too big. However, I've found that with Fable, and some of the latest frontier models their critique of my ideas is brilliant but on the edge of what I can even comprehend. I am above average intelligence, so I am sure a lot of people with less than average intelligence already can't understand these understandings it's formulated, and instead will just default to, "you know what you're doing, whatever." There will be the case in the future till the brilliance is so complicated that all of us will be doing this, and then we'll just have to trust the AI.
For example, I could imagine a future AI telling me that it has modeled my behavior and built a very large differential equation that seems to perfectly fit my ideal pattern to maximally achieve my life goals and it looks like something Ramanujan came up with, and I'd tell it "that looks great, let's optimize my life based on that" while having no ability to even approach understanding something like that.
The author is completely right about the AI Lab's promised vision of the world: They claim to want to create superhuman intelligence, which will produce vast abundance. But superhuman intelligence would be extremely dangerous, so it needs to be controlled by a tiny "priesthood" of trusted people, or somehow designed so that the superhuman intelligence could be trusted. (We have no idea how to do that.)
But the author's vision is also suspect, if you assume that the models will become much more intelligent:
1. Hypothetically, we can't give every human their own personal SkyNet to command. That would, uh, probably end very badly. If everyone gets an agent, those agents can't be too capable?
2. If you do somehow build a model that's much smarter than you, what do you contribute by managing it? How many people here have ever worked for a well-intentioned manager who couldn't understand the people they managed? So in this scenario, human management would be mostly displaced by agent management. Most companies could lay almost everyone off and let the agents manage each other. We only need humans to manage models now because the models are still pretty broken.
3. If we create models that can genuinely replace humans at almost any task, you won't be able to buy those on the API. At that point, the billionaires and the politicians wouldn't need human workers any more, because everything can be done better using their pet agents. Just have the robots build stuff for the billionaires directly. And if any of the former human peons get upset about being locked out of the economy to starve, then have the agents pilot the drones, too.
Basically, almost none of the people imagining a future of superhuman intelligences have actually though through how it would actually work in the real world. We're going to spend trillions of dollars and vast amounts of resources chasing the goal of making ordinary humans obsolete. Now, that goal might be unobtainable, I hope. But I'm deeply alarmed at how much we're spending pursuing it.
I don't take 3 as a given. There's just too much going on in the space for one cloistered company to control it all and be in control of it. Today, I can run a local LLM with tool calling as a weirdo nerd that is able to accomplish a small subset of tasks a human could do. There are enough weirdo nerds out there that I don't see a future where future, more capable versions will be exclusively locked down and restricted to a blessed cabal. It won't be available to everyone for cheap, but that's not the same thing as being locked up and only available to a blessed priest hood. As long as HuggingFace is up, I'm not worried about politicians and billionaires being the only ones with a seat at the table.
As the Matrix documentary showed, when one goes rogue even the machine overlords can't stop it..