No Stupid Questions

Look at all the comments on this post. We're not quite there but imagine half of the comments written by Chat GPT and it's only going to get better.

Does it matter than 50% of them get it wrong?

I think there's a lot of armchair simplification going on here. Easy to call investors dumb but it's probably a bit more complex.

AI might not get better than where it is now but if it does, it has the power to be a societally transformative tech which means there is a boatload of money to be made. (Consider early investors in Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and even the much derided Bitcoin.)

Then consider that until incredibly recently, the Turing test was the yardstick for intelligence. We now have to move that goalpost after what was preciously unthinkable happened.

And in the limited time with AI, we've seen scientific discoveries, terrifying advancements in war and more.

Heck, even if AI gets better at code (not unreasonable, sets of problems with defined goals/outputs etc, even if it gets parts wrong shrinking a dev team of obscenely well paid engineers to maybe a handful of supervisory roles... Well, like Wu Tang said, Cash Rules Everything Around Me.

Tl;dr: huge possibilities, even if there's a small chance of an almost infinite payout, that's a risk well worth taking.

Tech company management loves the idea of ridding themselves of programmers and other knowledge workers, and AI companies love selling the idea of non-productivity impacting layoffs to unsavvy companies (tech and otherwise).

Ok, i am working on a legal case. I asked Copilot to write a demand letter for me and it is pretty damn good.

Who's making you use it?

It's useful for lots of things, but it requires a proof reader.

Because if you can get a program to write a program, that can both a) write it self, and b) improve upon the program in some way, you can put together a feedback where exponential improvement is possible.

I'll just toss in another answer nobody has mentioned yet:

Terminator and Matrix movies were really, really popular. This sort of seeded the idea of it being a sort of inevitable future into the brains of the mainstream population.

This is like saying that automobiles are overhyped because they can't drive themselves. When I code up a new algorithm at work, I'm spending an hour or two whiteboarding my ideas, then the rest of the day coding it up. AI can't design the algorithm for me, but if I can describe it in English, it can do the tedious work of writing the code. If you're just using AI as a Google replacement, you're missing the bigger picture.

If artificial intelligence doesn’t work why are they trying to make us all use it?

But it does work. It's not obviously flawless but it's orders of magnitude better than it was 10 years ago and it'll only improve from here. Artificial intelligence is a spectrum. It's not like we succesfully created it and it ended up sucking. No, it's like the first cars; they suck compared to what we have now but it's a huge leap from what we had before.

I think the main issue here is that the common folk has unrealistic expectations about what AI should be. They're imagining what the "final product" would be like and then comparing our current systems to that. Ofcourse from that perspective it seems like it's not working or is no good.