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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • I’m the same, and had paid for it during the Reddit days of the app. I’m hesitant to pay a subscription this time around, though, since the creator has always left for months and come back with a flurry of updates - which is entirely up to them, but a turn-off for something I’ll pay for periodically.

    Sync is still my daily driver, and IMO few Lemmy clients come close.


  • Preface: I work in AI, and on LLM’s and compositional models.

    None, frankly. Where AI will be helpful to the general public is in providing tooling to make annoying tasks (somewhat) easier. They’ll be an assisting technology, rather than one that can replace people. Sadly, many CEO’s, including the one where I work, either outright lie or are misled into believing that AI is solving many real-world problems, when in reality there is very little or zero tangible involvement.

    There are two areas where (I think) AI will actually be really useful:

    • Healthcare, particularly in diagnostics. There is some cool research here, and while I am far removed from this, I’ve worked with some interns that moved on to do really cool stuff in this space. The benefit is that hallucinations can actually fill in gaps, or potentially push towards checking other symptoms in a conversational way.

    • Assisting those with additional needs. IMO, this is where LLM’s could be really useful. They can summarize huge sums of text into braille/speech, they can provide social cues for someone that struggles to focus/interact, and one surprising area where they’ve been considered to be great (in a sad but also happy way) is in making people that rely on voice assistants feel less lonely.

    In both of these areas you could argue that a LLM might replace a role, although maybe not a job. Sadly, the other side to this is in the American executive mindset of “increasing productivity”. AI isn’t a push towards removing jobs entirely, but squeezing more productivity out of workers to enable the reduction of labor. It’s why many technological advancements are both praised and feared, because we’ve long reached a point where productivity is as high as it has ever been, but with jobs getting harder, pay becoming worse and worse, and execs becoming more and more powerful.


  • For now, I work in AI.

    IMO, using AI to remove jobs is the business equivalent of the Darwin Award. No sane executive will look at AI and see job replacement. A dumb executive will look at AI and see more productivity gains. A smart executive will see AI as a way to improve tooling for workers that explicitly want to use AI.

    Sadly, as with most tech improvements, we’ll see lots of companies run by stupid people try to do stupid things with it. The best we can hope for is that there are opportunities for people to bail and find better job opportunities when their employer says “let’s fire HR and replace with GPT”, only to get absolutely brutalized by legal fees when their AI HR decides to fire someone for a protected reason, or refuses to fire a thief because they have a disability, or something that requires human intervention that doesn’t exist, or one of the hundreds of ways that it could go hilariously wrong.

    It happens all the time. I remember watching solid profitable tech companies pivoting to delivering large apps on the new iPhone app store because “it’s the future”, only to realise that spending two years to develop an office suite for the iPhone 4 was a fucking stupid idea in hindsight. I remember people firing web developers because WYSIWYG editors would mean that you could design and build a website in the same way you create a Word doc. Stupid execs will always do stupid shit, and the world will move on.