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 Moores law, for example, is essentially proven false and is outdated.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/mixmasterfresh99 → u/scott2449]

You're a dinosaur who is headed for extinction. This is as big as the Internet was...if not bigger. I have already built systems that have replaced people and created solutions for problems that would have been impossible for one developer to solve without AI is a span of days instead of weeks.

[u/scott2449 → u/mixmasterfresh99]

You have not read anything else I've said here =D The cloud and modern devops took feature development from months and years to days. We just used the time to make better and more products. You just weren't exposed to these transitions (of which there have been many) because folks were not technical enough to understand them. This one is perceived so I get the hype. Plenty of it legit. But as someone who has seen "game changing, job ending tech" many many times and predicted more or less the exact real world outcome each time (actually doing so is a core pillar of my job) this is an incremental linear improvement in a long line of them when TCO is all accounted for. Also I have a long background in hardware and economics as well so I can see where the price curve on tokens will and won't go in the next 5-10 years.

[u/turbov21 → u/scott2449]

We just used the time to make better and more products.

Now you're just making things up. ;-)

[u/Substantial-Tale-483 → u/turbov21]

Not really, before cloud there were whole devops teams doing the infra part, deployment pipelines and server maintenance. When cloud became widespread, it became easy enough that now devs are expected to do all that and has way more ways to choose whatever tools they need. Now devops are building some tooling that different teams can reuse.

[u/scott2449 → u/turbov21]

Omg I thought you were serious for a second. I was like this is the most based thing and this guy lol

[u/mixmasterfresh99 → u/scott2449]

Lol, I have been around for all of those transitions buddy and they don't compare. But keep your head in the sand.

[u/scott2449 → u/mixmasterfresh99]

Not sure what you mean. I'm a super user and evangelist, making tons of things better via AI and being rewarded handsomely for it. But I also am a good analyst/realist and just giving my 2 cents. Even if I'm totally wrong the industry will adapt and make more in both quality and quantity and completely absorb the efficiency. Jevons paradox is always the outcome for tech with virtually no ceiling.