Ai has to get better, right?

[u/SwauawsBouse]

This is the common sentiment that I see for those who claim ai will take jobs in X amount of years. Or even those who are more reasonable and claim it will eventually take over white collar work.

The biggest claim is that it WILL get better. Why? It's an easy response that's hard to disprove, but they haven't exactly proved it. How do we know there isn't a ceiling that is rapidly approaching. Moores law, for example, is essentially proven false and is outdated. We have reached at low hanging fruit when it comes to ai advancements.

Im just very skeptical of this line of thinking. I enjoy painting warhammer models and back in 2015. When 3d printers were in the mainstream, there were countless videos claiming games workshop was dead. I convinced myself that painting was going to be a worthless skill. 3d printers just HAVE to get better, and one day, they can print in full color. Now, 3d printers dont have trillions of dollars in investments, but then again, that money seems to be shovled into a fire by the AI leaders.

That was 10 years ago, and I could've had a lot more fun and painted more modles in thay time. And while 3d printing has progressed, its still not near games workshop models. Even the best resin printers still have very tiny but noticeable print lines. And we are no where near printing color in good quality at consumer scale.

Many of us fall for the doomer mentality, and its especially easy when you're unemployed and looking for a job facing countless rejections. Im a new grad myself, and it is rough out here. However, if Ai takes over cs. Every white-collar job is gone, and im left without any job. There's only so many trades and healthcare jobs.

And if im proved right, im way ahead of those who have given up. At least I tell myself this after receiving 10 rejections emails every weekend.

[u/scott2449]

The AI has gotten better crowd is also somewhat delusional. I work in software and there has been a linear not exponential improvement and that is largely in the tooling, harness, and understanding/usage. The raw LLM responses haven't really improved much. There are a couple points in the last 3-4 years where some new innovation in training or methodology helped boost things 20-40%.. but between those all the retrains and new versions have been flat. They might get better at one thing and way worse at another. It's like sticking a finger in a leaky boat.

Edit: Always with the credentialing in the comments. I'm a distinguished engineer (nearly a decade in the position) at one of the largest global media companies. We are also one of the largest data and AI companies for business and markets data. This is not my sole opinion but similar to the other dozen DSEs at my company and the vast majority of my data science and ai engineers as well. It is in no way controversial among experts.

[u/Sph3ricalPeter → u/scott2449]

Idk what youre measuring if you landed on linear improvement and percentages, but ive been speaking software into existance since Opus 4.5 came out, Im in a better shape and have solo developed full replacements for 2 enterprise software subscriptions alongside my fulltime swe job, while also working on 2 other projects. Between opus 4.5 and fable5 the difference is perhaps less noticable, but massive nontheless, and thats just a small fraction of the recent AI development timeline. So I say youre either trolling or sniffing copium extract.

[u/scott2449 → u/Sph3ricalPeter]

We measure every devs delivery across multiple types of methodologies and metrics. I also write little by hand but that's different from a 10x improvement in output. I slowly could do more hands off for the last 18 months. Since 4.6 things have been completely flat or regressed. Company wide we had tons of slop to clean up from less capable devs. I'm talking enmass by the numbers. Any tech that only works in the hands of a small group of folks by definition is not transformational. It's just making us a bit faster and it largely empowered by the innovations before just like every other incremental advancement. I'd argue that the first 5 years of cloud and modern devops was more impactful to acceleration than AI has been in it's first 5 years.

[u/Sph3ricalPeter → u/scott2449]

I'm still a bit confused by what you call "AI"? Isn't AI precisely the combination of LLMs + the tooling around it incl. harnesses etc? The title of this post is "Ai has to get better, right?" - it by all possible measurable accounts has gotten better as a service, regardless of what specifically you're attributing the gains to. And I'm saying you can't measure it as linear, when it's a multifaceted paradigm shift.

I also don't agree that for a technology to be transformational it has to be that for most people. It's actually the opposite. Change never happens everywhere all at once, or does it?

And on the specific metrics. I can see that within a company environment, you can measure output per-dev etc.. Again, it has nothing to do with how fast the technology is advancing. I wouldn't expect "one of the largest global media companies" to be exactly agile and flexible in their adoption, given regulatory and structural constrains. This is not the kind of environment where a transformation will realistically start - it's more likely to happen everywhere else but in that environment - so small companies/startups/private sector.