I don't think this is the death of creativity. It is just a new kind of non-creativity. He is comparing to a baseline of zero (or perhaps negative) creativity before AI.
Without AI, it's likely that neither of these videos would have been made, right? Five years ago, was it a normal thing for even one, much less two, groups of wedding guests to produce a video to show at a wedding, and if so, would the video even have been good? I mean actually good, not "it's the thought that counts, A-for-effort" good.
Isn't this like saying, "I decided to write a song for my friend's wedding, and I used AI to help me, and I played it and everyone liked it, and then someone else played the song that they had AI write for them, and it sounded just like mine, and everyone loved that too!"
Writing songs is something that's been around long enough, that if guests had made a habit of performing their original songs at weddings, even a graybeard like me would have experienced it. The baseline to compare to is no original songs were performed.
As it happens, in the weddings I've attended, I've heard exactly one such wedding song, and it was awful.
I think one of the saddest thing is that the kind of person who would recognize, "we can solve this seemingly complicated problem by just applying this formula", would often have trouble even getting recognized in many corporate environments.
I managed a guy like that. He was capable of very complex thinking, but he wasn't in love with complexity, he was in love with simplicity. His solutions tended to be of the form, "we can ignore all these things, and just focus on X, and it will provide all the value." He'd notice something and simplify it and the benefit to the company would be measured in multiples of his salary.
Every manager who'd ever directly managed him knew what a treasure he was, but it was often hard for us to convince others of the value of his solutions because they were so simple, and people were convinced that hard problems must have complex solutions. (or else they would have solved them, right?)
He eventually got bored. He retired and joined a seminary.
> I managed a guy like that. He was capable of very complex thinking, but he wasn't in love with complexity, he was in love with simplicity. His solutions tended to be of the form, "we can ignore all these things, and just focus on X, and it will provide all the value." He'd notice something and simplify it and the benefit to the company would be measured in multiples of his salary.
I did some of that a few times in my life. But I also realised that a large part of the value I brought was not necessarily in coming up with the solution, but in convincing the rest of the company---and in training up enough of the rest of the team to understand and maintain the system.
For example at Goldman, I used an integer linear programming solver to re-shuffle how we assigned compute capacity in different data centres to various departments and how to compute fail-over plans ahead of time.
The actual modelling and implementing barely took any time at all; I used an off-the-shelf open source solver. But I spend multiple weeks teaching the team enough about linear programming so that they can eg change the model when business requirements change.
This is basically my professional career. I've stayed 5+ years at the same place now and it's gotten to the point where people ask for me to build an optimization before it's even clear they have a problem amenable to optimization. Yay! My work has a good rep. But also I'm called upon entirely too frequently to explain work I did years ago or to answer questions like which constraint "comes first". Honestly it's getting very tiring. I think a switch to a new company would help but I wonder what will happen to the optimization work at my current company after I leave. It's weird that such a useful academic field still feels like black magic to much of corporate America. I guess it's just sophisticated enough.
Maybe, though just applying a commercial or open-source off-the-shelf solver is a lot easier than most of what they ask you to figure out in your average programming interview. Probably about as hard as doing some SQL queries, which we even entrust semi-technical people with.
Of course, when your first naive modelling attempt doesn't work (eg can't be solved in any reasonable amount of time), there's a bag of more complicated tricks and some real ingenious engineering you can do; but again, the lower rungs of that aren't all that dissimilar from what your local database guru does when she tells you to add more indices.
I imagine this is where the reputation of a good manager comes in and the ability to say to their boss "hey, we should keep this guy... just trust me on this."
I think thats a good start probably haha. I am not a manager, and have not had a "good" one in a very long time, so I have no resources unfortunately. That isn't to say mine are bad, they let me be autonomous as an IC and I have a lot of flexibility. I am coming more from a human angle, and not a "these are the 5 things you need to do to be a good manager" angle. In my company, most people are too busy with day to day activities to really focus on developing people. When I parted with my last one, he thought we had only been together for 2 years...it had been 5. I think a lot of managers just don't really listen, they nod their head and give some advice and then 4 weeks later we're just having the same conversation again.
Everyone's situation is different, so without context this probably just reads as pouting or possibly me being incompetent haha.
If the company runs on reputation it’s only a matter of time until a consultant comes in and processes are established to move to a more efficient metric based management style.
Yeah, it's tough either way. Some managers might be biased and keep praising some of their reports that don't actually provide good value for the company. For an outside observer that has no intimate knowledge to the work, how could this be differentiated from the manager having a backbone to support a report that does truly great work but there is no good metric to prove it?
If his monetary value to the company was as said why would any other metric like complexity even remotely matter or need convincing assuming the main goal of the company was to make money.
Money would matter even more than the interpersonal stuff in most cases but on top of it even the managers treasured him so there should've been even less of an issue of communicating value.
Getting bored is totally understandable though given his calibre but that's a separate issue from how the company evaluates performance.
> If his monetary value to the company was as said why would any other metric like complexity even remotely matter
Here is why: I turned off a feature flag in our feature flagging service which saved company 10% infra cost, do you think I can be promoted to Staff+ and lead 50 engineers?
Promotions and/or recognitions in corporate environments works differently.
I don't agree with it, but this is how it works: If what you did feels simple, anyone else can do it as well, why should we promote you for finding such silly mistake or improvement.
Well, I was on the tech side which (at least at Goldman) has comparatively higher powered titles at less reports compared to the real bankers.
I suspect it's because the tech side doesn't run the model where ambitious young people without a clear idea of what to do go work for an investment bank for three years as sort-of 'finishing school'. So there are less juniors to herd for the techies.
Models of extra compensation works elsewhere, like commissions and base salaries. I would think we could come up with something for engineers and ops in return for saving the company money that doesn't result in exploitative behavior.
There is just no collective bargaining power to put it into effect.
Maybe. It looking easy isn't the point. If you have the knowledge and skills such that doing so is a semi-repeatable endeavor, especially in a world where your colleagues apparently missed that 10% savings lying on the floor, is that not (part of) the point of a promotion? [0]
> lead 50 engineers
That's a totally separate ballgame. Nothing in your example says anything about leadership ability. Maybe you have those skills, and maybe you don't, but technical acumen is separate from leadership.
> If his monetary value to the company was as said why would any other metric like complexity even remotely matter or need convincing assuming the main goal of the company was to make money.
I'll just be the Nth commenter to say it, but corporations, especially larger ones, are anything but efficient. I don't know if it ever was true, except maybe for companies focused on producing high volumes of highly standardized/specific products in a competitive environment. That's not to say that efficiency isn't desirable or beneficial in general, but as soon as it becomes difficult to put a value tag on the work being done (which unfortunately gets harder in more services oriented corporations), competing for clever ideas just rewards less than competing for the boss's attention. There's no justice or fairness in that.
Companies can be efficient and inefficient at the same time. Efficient at some things, and inefficient at other things.
For things with direct bottom line impact and fierce competition, many companies can suddenly become very efficient. But in a big company, that's often the exception rather than the rule.
> even the managers treasured him so there should've been even less of an issue of communicating value.
I’m not a fan of doing politicking, bjut after much courses on writing and communication, I strongly believe that such simple solutions could have been presented in a way to justify rewards.
There are people that do nothing worthwhile and can find words to justify themselves. If someone brings value, you can find words to earn him recognition.
This is what i hate about modern corporate culture (or human culture in general perhaps).
I dont want to expend effort politiking. I dont want to expend effort blowing my own trumpet. The value of my work is self-evident, but requires an equally intelligent person to understand.
And most people do not understand, and thus, fail to recognize the value.
I don't think this has anything to do with _modern_ corporate culture. There was never a golden age where corporate culture was better across the board.
Sometimes they do understand, but often your nice work may highlights someone's else egregious errors. And the political landscape may not work in your favor. So private praise (if you're lucky) and public silence.
Oh, I've worked in more than a dozen of software companies. When it comes to planning activities and setting goals, I've rarely seen a lot of sense.
I mean, we are in the industry where it used to be a standard practice, not so long ago, to deliver daily reports about one's activities while "planking", or throwing a beach ball to another person doing some silly acrobatics...
It should come as no surprise that there's no rigorous assessment protocol for these kinds of things anywhere. Retrospectively, I will admit, that enormous amount of effort and resources are wasted due to bad planning. But it's still not done.
I can imagine that with the field becoming more competitive, eventually, the industry specialists will come together and try to address the problem, but so far and for so long the resources just kept flowing in, the huge waste wasn't really a problem.
>> He eventually got bored. He retired and joined a seminary.
Wow, got bored and joined a seminary - Do you know how does he feel there? A genuine question - Did he expect to get excited and challenged in a seminary?
I think a better way to think about it is that humans in general just make so many mistakes and imperfect judgements. Smart people just do them slightly less.
Smart people also typically have biases as well which affects their judgement, their basis are just more complicated than normal people.
Like obviously being smart is an advantage for any decision, but saying if someone smart does something it must be smart makes no sense in a world where smart people usually can’t agree on what is right.
it's a pretty good guess that when a smart person does something like this, it's something he considered long and hard and applied his full smartness to, and therefore it is probably the smart move. Right? Let's not split hairs.
A good quote. I didn’t mean the question as “atheist vs believer argument”, but rather as an environment where ideas are accepted and flourish. Because I understood the parent comment: “He eventually got bored.” as "He got bored by the corporate environment not getting his ideas and thus went to a better organization in that regard."
So now, how was he, the one with brilliant and unorthodox ideas, got accepted in an institution like seminary? How he felt having arguments there, etc. …
well, they are known for being places to discuss theology all day. Theology isnt that far from philosophy, it's certainly interesting enough to talk about
It tells a lot about the state of software "engineering" if it's difficult to convince people of the value of the very best ones (the "lazy and smart officers" in the old story). No good engineer can ever be in love with complexity, that's like an automatic disqualification.
I have the opposite experience with this, and I personally also default to simplest solutions at least as a baseline. However it’s important to distinguish between simple solutions that approximate the problem very well, to simple solutions that work in limited context or with heavy sacrifice in assumptions because those will hurt you in the long run.
How is that sad? A disruptive competitor will come along and eat their lunch. Creative destruction is the natural order of things. Ideally the badly managed organization will eventually be liquidated, thus freeing up resources for more productive activities.
okay, another POV is that hardly any real problems are math problems, but we seem to call solving math problems "problem solving" when that's really not true at all. like the easy part is the math. the hard part is persuading other people.
A great many real world problems have, at their crux, a mathematical problem. A mathematician paired with a subject matter expert can be powerful indeed when each sees deeply into the others' blind spots. But, I've heard statements like yours a lot over the years: assuming mathematicians aren't fully aware of the limitations of what you think math is.
Its all a math problem, and if it isn't a math problem, its a database problem.
I come across a lot of problems, and since I always try to reduce it to a math problem... I intuitively come up with both the solution to the problem, but solutions to other problems. But, if it's not a math problem, of course, its a database problem.
I would safely assume that there are no limitations of what mathematicians can do, with one important exception: Andrew, for whom I argued about the mis-uses of Infinity. Andrew is, well, rather famous.
It means they rebased all their changes on top of the new version. This is usually time-consuming because AOSP is not developed in the open, so you can't do this incrementally as things change -- you just get a massive drop sometime after release.
Android makes yearly releases. It is developed in cathedral-style. Google releases the source as a single big update. GrapheneOS is a fork. They need to port their customizations and extra software on top of the new release.
Every six months, not yearly. Google releases the major version and QPR2 as part of AOSP. QPR1 and QPR3 are Pixel-only.
Since they switched to QPRs and Pixel drops, major releases have become less important because feature roll out throughout the year. It's just that nobody outside GrapheneOS and Samsung (to my knowledge) rolls out QPR2, so for non-Pixel/Samsung, the major releases are... major.
I think another major source of work for GrapheneOS is when Google releases QPR1 and QPR3, because GrapheneOS had to rebase the driver/firmware changes on top of QPR0/QPR2.
It's a fork of the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) with major privacy/security improvements and alternatives to Google apps/services. The massive set of changes needs to be ported to new major versions of AOSP.
The apps also need to be updated to the Android 17 target API level but that can happen over several months following the OS itself being ported to it. The app aspect is something all Android developers need to deal with due to new target API levels bringing backwards incompatible improvements.
Exactly, it's a failure of Anthropic and others to understand cyber security. Finding security bugs in software is a good thing and not evil. It will lead to more secure software.
Defense and offense in cyber security are two sides of the same coin.
Yes, it's so wildly silly if you assume good faith on the part of both parties.
Hence why I think the real explanation lies in bad faith positions from both the US Government and Anthropic:
Anthropic's doomerism-as-marketing (in reality its like 17% better at coding) basically enabled the US Gov to plausibly take them down on an irrelevant technicality as retribution for the dept of war showdown.
Both groups (the current US Admin and Anthropic) are full of authoritarian-minded people, just on opposite ends of the political spectrum. Which is the only thing I find scary here, not the silly LLMs.
To me, OpenAI seems like the least bad option given they're a quaint old "center-left in the streets, center-right in the sheets" capitalist enterprise.
At least I know why they make the decisions they make. I trust the people building a profit-seeking enterprise more than I trust people trying to build a religion using compute.
Not specifically about drinking water or jackets, but I've often wondered why air-conditioning condensate is plumbed into the sewer instead of someplace useful. An A/C is a water-from-air device, and they run in much of the year in most homes in the southern US.
The typical design that I've seen plumbs the main condensate drain into the sewer, and usually has an overflow that dumps somewhere harmless if the main line clogs. (like out of the ceiling over the bathtub or out of an exterior wall in a visible location, so you can see it and fix it)
The few times I've seen the overflow, it's been quite a fair amount of water. Certainly enough to help with garden irrigation, if nothing else.
Since A/C (or similarly, dehumidifiers) function by moving a large volume of air over a set of chilled coils, one consequence is that dust tends to accumulate on those coils, and be mixed in with the resultant condensate.
If you're looking at grey-water applications (e.g., watering plants, flushing toilets), this isn't a major concern. But if you were interested in drinking that water, you'd have to run it through additional filtration steps, and it would tend to clog those filters pretty quickly.
(I discovered this tasting the water from a household dehumidifier tank some time ago.)
The constant dampness also makes the same condensate tend to hold mould or fungus, which may not be especially conducive to health, whether of humans, pets, livestock, or even plants.
Climates in which A/C is most likely to produce a large amount of condensate (humid climates) tend also not to be especially water-constrained, so that the optimisation of salavaging A/C water is limited at best.
Not to say it's never useful, but there are more considerations than might be initially apparent.
It's very common to plumb into grey-water systems where they're installed, because you're right, it's perfectly useful water. Plumbing it into some kind of cistern like a rain catchment system would also make sense.
I think he could have gotten away with naming his daughter Photophone, but he would have to pronounce it as if she were a character from an ancient greek epic: phoTOphoNEE.
Actually seems absurdly simple now, but sometime last year I was trying to figure out what I'd need to tow my daughter's car cross country with my truck: what are the trailer/dolly options, what do they cost, can my truck actually tow the combined weight, etc.
I started out prompting ChatGPT kinda how I would with Google, one small prompt at a time, asking about various details. But after one or two of those I just tried "I want to tow a car of make A with my truck model B, from point C to point D, what are my options?" And it wrote me a report with comparison tables and computed towing weights and other details for different options.
At that point, I was like "Oh. This is different. And it's just the beginning."
Out of laziness I several times asked Claude and ChatGPT each some torque figures and other simple, hard data related to my dirt bike. They often got it completely wrong, but full of confidence every time. I never trust LLMs with hard data, unless you RAG the PDF into the context and even then it's sketchy.
Dates matters. Questions I asked about my Mazda a year ago that were total hucillunations were answered very well this year. To me it feel like the early days of computing. What was not possible one year became possible when a new generation CPU or GPU came out and you have to consistently re-evaluate your expectations or else you'll miss the things that others are discovering with fresh eyes.
I made this personal 'benchmark' of odd and strange questions a few years back when this took off and I would keep re-running these questions whenever some big news came out about a new model and also going back and fourth between the different companies to see where they all stood. (Obvioulsy with clean cache/new accounts)
10 questions: In 2023 it could only get past question 3-4 to reaching the last question and still hacillunating(last year) to providing sources pulled from really obscure books(this year).
For example, one of the harder questions was about the transition of a particular 30 second portion of a background song used in a 30+ year old Bond film that was only played once in the entire film. Went from totally making up nonsense to accurately describing the music theory defintiion of the transition(called a 'stinger') to also explaining why it was done in that particular scene of the film and also providing sources from a snippet of a unrelated interview with the composer explaining his mindset at the time.
Maybe this isn't considered a real benchmark as its not reproducable but for a 'personal benchmark' I came away impressed. I would consider everyone to define their own benchmarks and 'tests' and to consistantly challenge the models to see if there are any meaningful improvements. Now I treat the AI as something to keep skeptical but to also to always consider what it proposes as an answer(ie. dont ever dismiss it outright). I sometimes wonder if this is slowly messing up my biases and maybe thats what Altman, Amodei and others want.
Hard numbers, no. Even high level concepts and theory you need to triangulate and prompt in different angles, across different models, and figure out what overlaps to build a mental mode that’s - even then - roughly 80% correct. It’s better than google, but the information isn’t free
Similarly, I used gen ai to review a real estate purchase. I provided Zillow listing photos and serial numbers of all appliances, the electric panel, and a few additional not pictured areas that I took during the walk through.
I prompted the AI to write a report as if it were a home inspector and it actually did a better job and identified some issues the paid 750 usd inspector missed.
It noticed a flooding area due to low grass by the walkout door. It noticed mixed 15 and 20a receptacles on the same circuit. It noticed warped siding and recalled circuit breakers still in use.
What, the Zillow listing of you home doesn't have pictures of mixed 15 and 20a receptacles on the same circuit that an AI caught but that an inspector missed?
Fascinating; you used a non-deterministic tool - one that disclaims its own accuracy - to calculate critical information that could result in serious damages or physical injury? Did you like, double-check the results?
One must imagine how many claims have been denied by insurance companies for doing something like this...
Just recently it occurred to me that the sage parenting advice, "Don't try to make a happy baby happier," applies to so many other things. Once I had this idea, it seemed like everywhere I looked were people trying to make happy babies happier. Improving tools that work fine, optimizing things where the available margin for improvement is small, etc.
I really think a majority of NYTimes and ABCnews consumers don't know the difference between a 2/3 chance (super close) of winning and 2/3 of the vote (a landslide).
That’s far more believable than 10,000 elevator attendants. I was an adult in 1990 and used travel agents. But I can’t remember ever encountering an elevator attendant.
Without AI, it's likely that neither of these videos would have been made, right? Five years ago, was it a normal thing for even one, much less two, groups of wedding guests to produce a video to show at a wedding, and if so, would the video even have been good? I mean actually good, not "it's the thought that counts, A-for-effort" good.
Isn't this like saying, "I decided to write a song for my friend's wedding, and I used AI to help me, and I played it and everyone liked it, and then someone else played the song that they had AI write for them, and it sounded just like mine, and everyone loved that too!"
Writing songs is something that's been around long enough, that if guests had made a habit of performing their original songs at weddings, even a graybeard like me would have experienced it. The baseline to compare to is no original songs were performed.
As it happens, in the weddings I've attended, I've heard exactly one such wedding song, and it was awful.
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