boshalfoshal (u/boshalfoshal)

boshalfoshal commented on Will AI Replace Human Thinking? The Case for Writing and Coding Manually ssp.sh/brain/will-ai-repl... · Posted by u/articsputnik

boshalfoshal · 4 months ago

Yes, it will replace human thinking. Thats quite literally the explicit goal of every AI company.

Historically every technological recolution serves to replace some facet of human labor (usually with the incentive of squeezing profits as technology gets cheaper over time, but wages do not).

Industrial revolution == automate non dexterous manual labor

Information age == automate "computational"/numerical thinking

AI == automate thinking

Robotics + AI == automate dexterous manual labor

boshalfoshal commented on Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears telegraph.co.uk/business/... · Posted by u/pera

boshalfoshal · 4 months ago

Clickbait title and article. There was a large reorg of genai/msl and several other teams, so things have been shuffled around and they likely don't want to hire into the org while this is finalizing.

A freeze like this is common and basically just signals that they are ready to get to work with the current team they have. The whole point of the AI org is to be a smaller, more focused, and lean org, and they have been making several strategic hires for months at this point. All this says is that zuck thinks the org is in a good spot to start executing.

From talking with people at and outside of the company, I don't have much reason to believe that this is some kneejerk reaction to some supposed realization that "its all a bubble." I think people are conflating this with whatever Sam Altman said about a bubble.

boshalfoshal commented on Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding reuters.com/technology/mi... · Posted by u/spenvo

throwoutway · 5 months ago

This is what I expect. Theyre Not hiring even engineers. By the time they have a strategy, plan, hire, and act on that plan they will be behind the curve, and force to use the $ to acquire someone who did.

boshalfoshal · 5 months ago

Well this is blatantly false, she linked the career page and I know of people that received offers recently.

They have very strong talent from Meta's FAIR/Pytorch teams as well as a lot of strong people from OAI.

boshalfoshal commented on Nvidia Becomes First Company to Reach $4T Market Cap cnbc.com/2025/07/09/nvidi... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

TheAlchemist · 5 months ago

This should be compared though to the general trend in current US stocks valuations, that are on par with Tulip Mania and Dot-com bubble.

Some examples:

- Palantir - valued at 337B USD (more than Meta less than 3 years ago !), with a revenue of 2B and net incomre 500M

- Gamestop - valued at 10B USD, with a quickly declining revenue of 4B and net income 100M (they lost money most of the time in the past 10 years)

- Coreweave - valued at 74B USD, on 1B revenue (growing quickly), 300m net loss, and very discutable accounting

- Tesla - valued at 1000B USD, on 100B revenue (which is now collapsing), 7B net income which will most probably turn into a less starting this quarter (no more ZEV credits) or next quarter (no more 7500$ subsides)

- xAI - valued at what, 100B USD ? On probably 0 revenue and huge losses.

Same goes for OpenAI, SpaceX etc, and I'm not even starting to talk about crypto (yeah, Dogecoin has a 'market cap' of 27B USD...).

We are living almost unprecedented times in terms of US stock valuations.

boshalfoshal · 5 months ago

I think Teslas valuation is a bit disconnected from fundamentals too, but saying "collapsing" revenue is a bit dramatic.

boshalfoshal commented on I don't think AGI is right around the corner dwarkesh.com/p/timelines-... · Posted by u/mooreds

boshalfoshal · 5 months ago

Keep in mind - this is not reaffirming HN's anti-AGI/extremely long timeline beliefs.

The article explicitly states that he thinks we will have an AI system that "Will be able to do your taxes" by 2028, and a system that could basically replace all white collar work by 2032.

I think an autonomous system that can reliably do your taxes with minimal to no input is already very very good, and 2032 being the benchmark time for being able to replace 90% - all white collar work is pretty much AGI, in my opinion.

Fwiw I think the fundamental problems he describes in the article that are AGI blockers are likely to be solved sooner than we think. Labs are not stupid enough to throw all their eggs and talent into the scaling basket, they are most definitely allocating resources to tackling problems like the ones described in the article, while putting the remaining resources into bottom line production (scale current model capibilities w/o expensive R&D and reduce serving/training cost).

boshalfoshal commented on CEOs Start Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud: AI Will Wipe Out Jobs wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-white-... · Posted by u/planetjones

jmathai · 5 months ago

"AI won't take your job. Someone who uses AI will."

That someone is your co-worker and will soon be your co-worker's co-worker.

I don't see how the rate of job creation can come close to the rate job loss we'll see for a few years.

boshalfoshal · 5 months ago

The first line is just some cope people use to tell themselves they are different.

Someone using AI won't "take" your job, they'll just get more done than you and when the company inevitably fires more people because AI can continue to do more work autonomously, the first people to go will be the people not producing as much (i.e, the people not using AI).

In the limit both groups are getting their jobs taken by AI. Knowing how to use AI is not some special skill.

boshalfoshal commented on GitHub CEO: manual coding remains key despite AI boom techinasia.com/news/githu... · Posted by u/andrewstetsenko

boshalfoshal · 6 months ago

Imo this is a misunderstanding of what AI companies want AI tools to be and where the industry is heading in the near future. The endgame for many companies is SWE automation, not augmentation.

To expand -

1. Models "reason" and can increasingly generate code given natural language. Its not just fancy autocomplete, its like having an intern - mid level engineer at your beck and call to implement some feature. Natural language is generally sufficient enough when I interact with other engineers, why is it not sufficient for an AI, which (in the limit), approaches an actual human engineer?

2. Business wise, companies will not settle for augmentation. Software companies pay tons of money in headcount, its probably most mid-sized companies top or second line item. The endgame for leadership at these companies is to do more with less. This necessitates automation (in addition to augmenting the remaining roles).

People need to stop thinking of LLMs as "autocomplete on steroids" and actually start thinking of them as a "24/7 junior SWE who doesn't need to eat or sleep and can do small tasks at 90% accuracy with some reasonable spec." Yeah you'll need to edit their code once in a while but they also get better and cost less than an actual person.

boshalfoshal commented on The Gentle Singularity blog.samaltman.com/the-ge... · Posted by u/firloop

colesantiago · 6 months ago

> " I hope we will look at the jobs a thousand years in the future and think they are very fake jobs, and I have no doubt they will feel incredibly important and satisfying to the people doing them."

So when AGI comes, I am curious what the new jobs are?

I see that prompt engineer is one of the jobs created because it's the way to ask a LLM certain tasks, but now AI can do this too.

I'm thinking that any new jobs AI would make, AI would just take them anyway.

Are there new jobs coming from this abundance that is on the horizon?

boshalfoshal · 6 months ago

Pesimistically, you are right, there will be no new jobs. The entire goal of these companies is to monopolize near 0 marginal cost labor. Another way to read this is that humans are unnecessary for economic progress anymore.

All that I hope for in this case is that governments actually take this seriously and labs/governments/people work together to create better societal systems to handle that. Because as it stands, under capitalism I don't think anyone is going to willingly give up the wealth they made from AI to spread to the populus as UBI. This is necessary in some capitalist system (if we want to maintain that) since its built on consumption and spending.

Though if its truly an "abundance" scenario then I'd imagine it probably wouldn't matter that people don't have jobs since I'd assume everything would be dirt cheap and quality of life would be very high. Though personally I am very cynical when it comes to "agi is magic pixie dust that can solve any problem" takes, and I'd assume in the short term companies will lay off people in swathes since "AI can do your job," but AI will be nowhere close to increasing those laid-off people's quality of life. It'll be a tough few years if we don't actually get transformative AI.

boshalfoshal commented on The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine cnn.com/2025/05/30/busine... · Posted by u/lwo32k

indigoabstract · 6 months ago

So if I understand correctly, it's basically down between:

1. cure cancer

2. fix the economy

3. keep everybody happily employed.

And he's saying we can only pick two, or pick one. Except for the last one, that's not really an option.

boshalfoshal · 6 months ago

And as it stands, AI is nowhere close to (1) and (2), but is pretty close to making all of (3) redundant.

This could be because most work is actually frivilous (very possible), but its also easy for them to sell those since ostensibly (1) and (2) actually require a lot of out of distribution reasoning, thinking, and real agentic research (which current models probably aren't capable of).

(3) just makes the most money now with the current technology. Curing cancer with LLMs, though altruistic, is more unrealistic and has no clear path to immediate profitability because of that.

These "AGI" companies aren't doing this out of the goodness of their hearts with humanity in mind, its pretty clearly meant to be a "final company standing" type race where everyone at the {winning AI Company} is super rich and powerful in whatever new world paradigm shows up afterwards.

boshalfoshal commented on A Song of “Full Self-Driving” thebulwark.com/p/elon-mus... · Posted by u/latexr

ddalex · 6 months ago

Full self driving is either a hard problem - requiring advanced sensors and algorithms; or an easy problem - solvable with cameras and neural nets.

If it's hard, Waymo has an insurmountable lead. If it is easy, everyone can replicate easily what Tesla is doing.

I'm not seeing any strategic moat on Tesla's side

boshalfoshal · 6 months ago

You are thinking about "hard" and "easy" in the wrong frame of mind. What Tesla does is not "easy" either. Their moat is manufacturing and the R&D they've spent on codesigning their HW and SW stack, and their insane supply chain.

Ford does not suddenly have several million cars with 8-9 cameras to tap into for training data, nor does it have the infrastructure/talent to train models with the data it may get. I think you are underselling the Tesla moat.

Its the same reason why there are only 3-4 "frontier" AI labs, and the rest are just playing catchup, despite a lot of LLM improvements being pretty well researched and open in papers.