this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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Yet I've still seen many people clamoring that we won't have jobs in a few years. People SEVERELY overestimate the ability of all things AI. From self driving, to taking jobs, this stuff is not going to take over the world anytime soon
Idk, an ai delivering low quality results for free is a lot more cash money than paying someone an almost living wage to perform a job with better results. I think corporations won't care and the only barrier will be whether or not the job in question involves enough physical labor to be performed by an ai or not.
They already do this. With chat bots and phone trees. This is just a slightly better version. Nothing new
Right, but that's the point right? This will grow and more jobs will be obsolete because of the amount of work ai can generate. It won't take over every job. I think most people will use AI as a tool at the individual level, but companies will use it to gut many departments. Now they would just need one editor to review 20 articles instead of 20 people to write said articles.
AI isn't free. Right now, an LLM takes a not-insignificant hardware investment to run and a lot of manual human labor to train. And there's a whole lot of unknown and untested legal liability.
Smaller more purpose-driven generative AIs are cheaper, but the total cost picture is still a bit hazy. It's not always going to be cheaper than hiring humans. Not at the moment, anyway.
Compared to human work though, AI is basically free. I've been using the GPT3.5-turbo API in a custom app making calls dozens of times a day for a month now and I've been charged like 10 cents. Even minimum wage humans cost tens of thousands of dollars* per year*, thats a pretty high price that will be easy to undercut.
Yes, training costs are expensive, hardware is expensive, but those are one time costs. Once trained, a model can be used trillions of times for pennies, the same can't be said of humans
You can bet your ass chat gpt won't be that cheap for long though. They're still developing it and using people as cheap beta testers.
I think it's reasonable to assume that AI API pricing is artificially low right now. Very low.
There are big open questions around whether training an AI on copyrighted materials is infringement and who exactly should be paid for that.
It's the core of the writer/actor strikes, Reddit API drama, etc.
The problem is that these things never hit a point of competition with humans, they're either worse than us, or they blow way past us. Humans might drive better than a computer right now, but as soon as the computer is better than us it will always be better than us. People doubted that computers would ever beat the best humans at chess, or go, but within a lifetime of computers being invented they blew past us in both. Now they can write articles and paint pictures, sure we're better at it for now, but they're a million times faster than us, and they're making massive improvements month over month. you and I can disagree on how long it'll take for them to pass us, but once they do they'll replace us completely, and the world will never be the same.
To be fair, in my experience AI chatbots currently provide me with more usable results in 15 minutes than some junior employees in a day. With less interaction and less conversational struggles (like taking your junior's emotional state into account while still striving for perfection ;)).
And that's not meant as disrespect to these juniors.
Yeah it's pretty weird just how many people are freaking out. The pace ai has been improving is impressive, but it's still super janky and extremely limited.
People are letting they're imaginations run wild about the future of ai without really looking into how these ao are trained, how they function, their limitations, and the hardware and money it takes to run them.