Submitted by mjrossman t3_11ws42u in Futurology
mjrossman OP t1_jd2c8ty wrote
Reply to comment by Disastrous_Ball2542 in AI displacing jobs is a red herring, how we self-organize is the more fundamental trend by mjrossman
my point was that some jobs are more exposed to layoffs because of their nature. likewise, some aspects of labor economy are exposed in some way to future technological discoveries no matter what they are. I would say we are more than one inning in; there's OSS text-to-image and NLP that's trained at scale and inferred on retail hardware, with the corresponding backlash. the inning we're in is the battle over executive function, or the scale at which human workers opensource the standard operating procedures they're most familiar with. the takeaway should be that monolithic firms with tens of thousands of employees are volatile enough as it is, but the least exposed jobs within, with respect to AI, are going to want to compete as smaller, more insulated firms.
Disastrous_Ball2542 t1_jd2co7w wrote
Not to be rude but ill be blunt. It's a lot of words you've typed but you ain't saying much other than hey its not happening now but some time in the future AI will replace a lot of jobs, some more likely than others... not exactly an original or controversial take on things
mjrossman OP t1_jd2dube wrote
with all due respect, isn't it kind of a cliche to preface something with "not to be rude" with the self-awareness that you're about to state something condescending? and I'd argue the same point of originality or productivity when it comes to estimates of scale for displacement or acceleration. not going to belabor the point, but I'm just emphasizing that "AI replace jobs" is a red herring debate and a waste of time, the actual debate is whether the nature of the firm can be challenged, given the observed change to the market. "If you don't believe me or don't get it, I don't have time to try to convince you, sorry."
Disastrous_Ball2542 t1_jd2gd6m wrote
Ok I'll just be blunt this time then. Your question is basically asking the same thing, whether the market is evaluating cost effectiveness of AI replacing job it is basically same as evaluating market value of nature of change in the firm
AI has reduced $100mil in payroll vs the perceived market value of XYZ change in the nature in the firm has generated $100mil reduction in expenses or $100mil increase in value = basically same thing
mjrossman OP t1_jd2gyxk wrote
precisely the point. but it's not a theoretical conjecture, there is a very practical connection between the job exposure paper, several sources of labor market truth, and the current capabilities of Langchain + Alpaca. everyone should be asking why the public should bear anywhere the same cost to necessitate the multiple that VCs/CEOs/EAs/consultants are compensated for, given how exposed these sectors are at present.
Disastrous_Ball2542 t1_jd2h47l wrote
It is theoretical bc currently (and for foreseeable future) value multiples are more affected by interest rates than AI or any other technology
For purely speculative tech like AI, valuations don't matter, momentum and money flow does ie. Pets.com during dot com bubble
mjrossman OP t1_jd2hn4a wrote
are we absolutely sure that the average multiple during high rate environments is going to stabilize at a minimum, and during a zero-rate moment in the not-too-distant future, are average multiples going to reach a maximum because they must be dictated by retail speculation as the buyer of last resort? I'm willing to argue no to both. we're going to observe disruption that supercedes the macro sentiment.
Disastrous_Ball2542 t1_jd2hvi3 wrote
So you're basically the guy that was saying amazon.com will change the world during the dotcom bubble
And I'm saying it will be 10 to 30 years before you will be able to say "I told you so"
mjrossman OP t1_jd2i3m5 wrote
no, I'm the guy saying that books can easily sell online because they're nonperishable, dense, and can be packaged in a garage. and regardless of the chatgpt hype, we're literally days after the discovery that someone can package LLMs that hit the same benchmarks from their garage.
Disastrous_Ball2542 t1_jd2ifp0 wrote
I'm saying we are many years and at least one business cycle away from these LLMs having any economical impact other than through pure speculation while you say it will be sooner based on what?
mjrossman OP t1_jd2lq7e wrote
- the training & inference costs have dropped to triple digits and a phone app, respectively.
- given the preexisting codebase for distributed training, some non-negligible fraction of the billions of GPUs are going to be volunteered in an exascale fashion not unlike Folding@Home.
- given that many business processes have already been articulated & opensourced in natural language, effectively any SME has the means to finetune their own nuances & SOPs to drastically lower training costs and turnover for new employees. this is a multimodal trend, any apprentice in the world can snap a photo of what they're doing and ask an LLM what to do next. eventually, it will be video if that modality can be inferred on mobile hardware.
- admission to the bar and license might be the bottleneck for lawyers, but it is no longer the same bottleneck for incorporation and other legal services
- given how much operational budget in hospitals goes to administrative work, I'm curious to see how the people deal with their medical bills in the next couple of years.
- we haven't even confronted garage-tier sentiment analysis. I genuinely wonder how many markets get arbitraged due to this, starting with social media dogfooding.
- what's the necessary cost of mainstream journalism to the general public? I'm sure you'd agree that should be weighed. same as 6), what's newsworthy & why should it be published by a corporate media company?
- on the tail-end to this, legislature & lobbying costs just got profoundly cheaper. also cheaper to pick apart pork-barrel or other inconsistencies therein.
these are just a few downstream effects. and I'm leaving out the parallel gains in manufacturing automation, machine vision, crowdsourcing, etc.
Disastrous_Ball2542 t1_jd2vzrg wrote
All speculation and no possible valuations aka we are in the dotcom bubble phase not the FAANG valuation phase
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