What do people even mean by "If you don't use AI, you'll fall behind"?

AI is the first major technology that I have have actively worked against.

I am a person who strongly believe that technology should make us better, and I can only see AI/LLMs making us weaker.

I tend to have a vivid imagination, and all I am thinking of when seeing people use AI is, "ok but could you have accomplished the same thing without AI?"

When the AI bubble pops like the overstuffed bubble it is, and prices are going up, will you remember how to do your job without it?

Or, even simpler, what about if the AI service goes down, will you still be able to do your tasks?

For many, I suspect the answer is no.

The people who espouse such nonsense as "if you don't use AI you'll fall behind" believe that using AI will become an absolute necessity in the future, and that those who use AI now will have more expertise in using AI than those who don't, giving them better prospects. Those same people end up saying "you're just not prompting it right" when you point out flaws in the LLM's responses.

I translate this to: “if I’m making a horrible mistake, I want you right there with me when it blows up in my face.”

If they actually felt it gave them an advantage they wouldn’t be trying to convince everyone else to do it too.

Yes to everything you said. It's basic FOMO, the same behavior with people who were selling bitcoins.

If it was good, we would use it. And any way, it's like learning how to use Google, it doesn't take weeks to understand how to write a basic sentence. It's a skill that you could acquire in 24 hours at most if you speak English.

I'm in software engineering. AI is pretty far along in my field, and also very suited for it. I've spent two decades writing everything from very low-level to high-level code. I enjoy it, but it's just labor at this point. What LLMs allows me to do is move to the role of systems architect. I have an endless supply of tireless jr engineers to execute my designs.

I get quick results. But I'm not as in touch with the codebase as if I had written it myself. You can do things wrong, and you can do things right. I like to compare it with a chainsaw. You get the job done a lot faster than with a regular saw, but you can fuck up a lot harder, too.

The field is moving fast. In the last two years it's gone from helpful auto-complete to finishing projects on its own.

I expect to be downvoted.

im going to put it easy: You work doing some kind of research or whatever on daily basis. You used to do that task in maybe 5-6 hours, same as your colleagues. Now all your colleagues use AI and do the same task in about 20min (even if the result is crap it does have some good takes), so the CEO sees you are the only one who doesn't perform equally because you choose not to, and you're fired.

So yeah... it's crap, it will make things worse, but for now you have to use it wheter you like it or not.

They do it to protect their feelings. They’ve normalized the use of something most people hate, so they want everyone else to adopt it, too. That way, they won’t feel judged, when they 100% deserve to feel judged.

Put simply, it's propaganda by the LLM salesman and liars like scam altman.

Avoid LLMs. Preserve your brain and skills. Don't become a slophead.

The only think you'll fall behind on is humanity's race to the bottom into total idiocracy.

Its people falling for propaganda.

The fact of the matter is, AI can be useful for minor coding help. The reality is its stealing advice from one or a few sources and spitting out an answer based on them, but it can be a quick delivery of advice.

The major problem is

1. AI (these LLMs) hallucinate ALL THE TIME. Relying on them to code for you is fucking moronic. Every coworker I've seen who does vibe coding is constantly getting dunked on, their pull requests are torn to pieces, and its baffling why they still get a paycheck.
2. AI can only, in the best circumstances, do exactly what you tell it to do. That is to say, you need to explicitly spell out what you want for it, including explicitly covering edge cases. If you don't, you end up with situations like Microsoft making Notepad code executable (which actually fucking happened.

Promotion of AI is total horseshit by the fascist tech broligarchs being done so they can replace the worker and, and I'm serious, achieve immortality by transferring their consciousness to machine. That isn't a fucking joke, that's an actual belief they hold. The AI and general tech CEOs are all in a massive death cult. This is real.

From what I've experienced it's mostly managers saying this. They're afraid of competitors taking over the market because they can be more efficient with AI. They say this without any idea of how exactly that would work.

My experience of a decade in corporate US companies:

Quantity > Quality; no matter what the marketing line says. People who speak a lot in meetings and send a lot of emails are regarded as better at their job, substance is only somewhat relevant. And LLMs are great at producing lots and lots of well sounding slop.

They think there's some skill necessary to use LLMs for some reason

I think when people talk about "falling behind" they're actually talking about missing out on the initial gold rush of novel uses, quick cash grabs, and straight up scams that a lot of people are making short term money on.

Remember NFTs? when people were buying pictures of cartoon monkeys and people were saying, if you don't buy it now you will be left behind

I kind of look at it from the point of view of people who are bad at their jobs.

They don't understand what looks good. They don't understand how long something should take. They don't understand how to do parts of their job without copying the work of others. Then, they get given a tool with the promise that the tool will do most of the hard work for them.

And unlike most computer stuff they can't understand, they can understand how to use AI. So if they can understand how to use AI, anyone can. And it isn't like most people are good at their jobs anyway.

There's a lot clearly unemployed/in industry that doesn't spin around AI in here.

In dev, AI saves fuck tons of time. But there's no nuance on the Internet so everyone assumes I'm advocating for vibe coding. I'm not.

What the "fall behind" is referring to is the simplest fact, if you're in a team and you're not using AI? You are very likely outputting at a much slower speed.

Now more caveats, you're not a lead dev or principle architect, your code isn't second coming of Jesus, you need to get a task done. Like it or not, the pace rest of the team sets? Is the new floor.

I manage a team and while I give them a lot of time to get work done well, the world around us is shrinking in resources. Business cares not that a job takes 4 weeks, they need it done in 2, ideally in 1 week.

Hopefully this sheds some light on this. I'm getting downvoted regardless. I'd probably have more popular opinion praising trump than daring say anything positive about AI here.

It's a desperate marketing strategy based on the classic "peer pressure" technique. "Everyone's doing it. You don't want to be the only one who isn't."

They mean that they have lost all ability to think for themselves.

AI is a tool. Learning to wield it effectively is a skill. What they're saying is that if you don't learn it now, you'll have to learn it later when everyone is an expert and you'll still be a beginner.

IMO it's a bit like computers. I imagine at some point AI-resistant people will be like the "not computer people" that still do everything using paper and faxes.

I know every 2-3 years there's a new hype in tech that eventually fizzes out: Web 2.0, social media, virtual reality, cryptocurrency, etc. All of them were supposed to revolutionize the world, but not all of them actually did. I think AI is a lot more like social media than crypto; it's here to stay. I think the best possible outcome at this point is that the open-source models eventually get good enough and small enough to run on our local hardware, but things sadly don't seem headed that way...

Try throwing AI at boring repetitive work.
I argued with an LLM for about 15 minutes and got a list of IPs and the name of the systems that used them. I could have done it manually in about an hour.

Also I'd argue that it's the opposite. It's for people that are experienced. If you can't check the output for correctness it's most likely wrong. I've never had the right answer the first time I asked.

FOMO, and the temptation of being able to get the speed of AI without the drawbacks of "vibe coding".

Reality is much more nuanced.

You can get a massive boost in your productivity if you use dependencies or just steal code, compared to writing everything from zero. I personally just reuse my own code snippets, and even started to put regularly reused code into their own libraries (next up is to make stuff for parsers).

I also seen cases, when "AI assisted" coding had the same amount of issues as fully vibe coded stuff, as the person really wanting to cram the chatbot into their workflow did that trusted Grok too much with understanding the documentations, so he just ended up trying to implement stuff based on Grok's summary, which was wrong at places.

If you ask: artists also sometimes fall for this trap, though much less often.

They (pretend to) believe, either due to experience or marketing or a combination, that AI* will be such a ubiquitous tool within their lifetime that "not using AI" would be like "not using electricity". There are people that do not use electricity, even when it is available, today, but they are broadly considered "behind" the times and out of touch with broader (including global) society. AI advocates are unlikely to always have the same idea about exactly what the advantages are, though speed is often among them.

The actual scientific studies we have done are limited, but so far do not back up these claims. For example, AI assisted programmers self-report being faster, but are actually slower at the same tasks than a similar cohort without AI.

I have a fairly strong anti-AI bias, but my limited experiences with them have been quite poor. Maybe I'm just asking the "wrong" questions, but my experiences have had them either give an response that is internally inconsistent, contains easily refuted factual inaccuracies, or (for tasks with no reality/logic testing) absolutely the least creative, most middle-of-the-road text. I'm also aware of the human rights abuses that Amnesty International has reported around generative AI, the copyright "minefield" around models where you do not know all of the training data, and how we've lost at least a decade of sustainability goals because of the desire for "more compute".

So, keep my bias in mind when considering my reply. I might already be "falling behind".

I can think of some ways to use an LLM that are interesting to me, but for now I'm staying away from the tech until the bubble bursts and the hype disappears. It'll be easier to make informed decisions about what, if any, to use then.

(If it really does improve society, I'm sure I can be retrained then, or at least I can be taken care of one AI-incompatibility is recognized as a disability. /s)

AI: They probably can't define this term, but likely to have a specific product in mind.

There's a truism cliche that, when asked a question to which they don't know the answer, women will say"I don't know" while men will confidently guess.

LLMs are like men on steroids. From time to time they will (by chance) stumble on a correct answer, but mostly they just confidently guess with far less comprehension than even the most stupid man. And yes, I do mean the most stupid man.

Edit: 'truism' was a poor choice of word. I've changed it to cliché.

People who say that don't mean anything. They are either trying to sell something or repeating bullshit they heard somewhere.

It really is that simple.

And remember, the AI salesmen will never, ever, define "AI". They can't, because the minute they do, their product sales will evaporate. If all you have is vaporware, you desperately need to pass it off as something else.

Levergism. To get what you want in the world you need power to get power you need leverage to the keys to power.

For working class folks that tends to be in the form of withholding labor, providing labor both of which are dictated by supply and demand. So learning a specialty in an in demand field or getting/making tools or skills that make you more demand is common technique. (Organizing with others to be noted also a huge way to do this)

They are arguing that learning AI is like learning to drive a forklift or an excavator. Like sure you could use a shovel or set up pullies but it's just faster and thus more valuable to use those tools.

The difference being we don't actually know what tools and varients of those tools actually make sense. So it's like saying you need to learn to use motors to a 1900s factor worker.

It's from the same people who tell you to "GET IN EARLY" for whatever hot trend is about to take off, usually involving markets and trade.

I am reading this book https://thecon.ai/ that, among other things, explains the hype behind the set of tools we call AI. Check it, it might help you answering your question or at least having a different pov compared to the "if you don't use it you'll fall behind".

I think a good alternative explanation is this: AI is here to stay, so knowing how to use it in whatever form it takes in your life as a tool is good knowledge to have.

Typewriters are close to extinction, but most everyone these days uses a computer to write documents. Those that refused to learn how to use a word processing application on a computer were "left behind" because now almost all documentation is written digitally.

They think AI is as life changing to our society as the internet is as steam engines were long ago. They're trying to promote its use because it doesn't have a good specific use for day to day. If anything AI has made the internet MUCH worse, there's so much AI Slop media on youtube and similar that I don't look at much new stuff anymore because of it.

Seems like some people are looking at the AI chatbot and thinking "this thing is smarter than me."

AI's extremely flawed still, but it's improving. There might actually be a day when it can do many of the things they promise. Supposedly it's helping disease research. That seems undeniably good. Right now it's useful in a few ways, in the future it will be helpful in more ways.

My biggest concern is that AI chatbots will soon start giving alternate versions of history. Becoming a huge propaganda tool. Even more than currently. I am afraid for the day when 99% trust it blindly. And that day is already almost here.

Just a common phrase used by people trying to scam you. Basic Marketing really. Create the sense of a time crunch and people are more likely to buy in. People don't like the concept of missing out on something. Same reason they have countdowns on when sales end on websites and even in certain stores.

I don't know what they mean, but,

In my experience, it's an accelerant towards burnout.

And it even entices you in deeper, with the continuing illusion of ease of productivity, deeper, into burnout.

Burnout is no fun. [Note: To be clear, that's "no fun", not merely "not fun". As in, it saps, eliminates and prevents all fun from your life while in burnout. And it takes twice as long to recover as it seems, ~ so the moment you think you've recovered, you're only half way there, and need to keep on having no fun for as long again, despite feeling like you can have fun, and every bit of energy expended on fun can still more readily send you back into burnout and extends the recovery time, tormenting you further. Seriously, burnout, is no fun. ~ Speaking as someone with (at last count) 65 ailments (some of which reduce some people to tears when they hear about), and I remain chipper, mocking the harrowing symptoms of it all, by calling it "fun" (e.g. "oh my flesh is rupturing again, what fun"), but burnout... that's no fun.]

So, I suspect we may see an increase in burnout among our developers. And that's speaking just from the enticing use on an individual level, before considering then also the added workload from everybody else churning through LLM accelerated workloads, having to deal with all the bug reports and pull requests (many of which will be hallucinated, or have insidious malicious injections, many of which will be vital critical issues), and then all the extra pressure to try harder to keep up your own skills against the accelerating spray, and those skills being moved to where your lower level skills atrophy, especially amidst the social pressure, perhaps even economic pressure and pressure from bosses and hierarchies and investors, to "keep up", and quantity over quality lines being blurred in the self reassurance that it's not being enshitified and our atrophying capacity to discern for ourselves.... the demands increasing and capacity decreasing, drives the race to the bottom even harder. So I suspect we may see an increase in burnout among our developers.

Rather than relaxing back towards a 4 hour working week, or to lives of leisure, the driving inertia of society's contemporary socio-economic model would instead have us see this promise of extra potential as something to maximally exploit, for the more that can be done. ... Which in turn drives that ambition even more. And do-addiction is a hard chariot to dismount from, or to slow down. Unlike food-addiction [the other difficult addiction (~ because you have to eat)], the dopamine from a do-addiction is largely celebrated and not shamed nor generally offered help to break the addiction.

All this a verbose way to get around to depicting that... we may see many of those who embrace "AI" more, despite an initial apparent "getting ahead", may be headed for a big long stall and crash, and instead it's they who "fall behind".

Depends how one uses it; How well one manages to titrate ones use. It could be a great pedagogical facilitator. But then, so could the internet... remember...? Remember when the internet was more like a library and science club, before it became more like TV and a bar fight? ... With the perverse incentives of big actors with the most grasp of the steering wheel, we may see LLMs/AI head the same degenerative direction, despite the early hopium promise that it wont be skynet, and will be a paradise generator that helps us sublimate past such societal structural corruption issues. Remember when electromagnetism was going to power the world for free, wirelessly in cymatic cromulence, making us all free and healthy (~ no, I guess not... a bit before our time), and now look and the technology born of electromagnetic discoveries and depictions, the prisons it gets shaped into, by those lacking the wisdom to see beyond their petty parasitic short-loop "well I have more than them", with all it's attention hijacking, with trillions invested in ensnaring our minds [(~ glad I got outta that biz, where that used to be my "just doing my job")]. Difficult to see, if pattern will hold, with all this hopium and urgent socio-economic pressure and terror gumming up our senses. It could save us, you have to or you'll fall behind, it could enslave and kill us all. Hope, pressure, terror. But if we take a step back... maybe we can get a more sober assessment.

Anyways, long rambles aside, really just posing the counter-notion to the assumption in the statement being queried in the original post,

despite an initial apparent "getting ahead", with the demand, the churn, the lure, they may be headed for burnout, and instead it's they who "fall behind". Depends tho.

There is no there there. AI has yet to prove itself useful for more than support at the general public level. Right now AI's most compelling use for the public is as a mediocre assistant not good enough to be irreplaceable but not bad enough to fire. There are scientific applications where the technology is allowing researchers to do things that would have taken years in a few weeks, but general purpose use is still years away from being what people actually need or even want.

People who claim that if you don't use it you'll miss out are like beleaguered parents telling thier childless friends how great having kids is. It's the most basic human instinct, confirmation bias. I made this choice and therefor it must be the right choice so everyone else should make that choice too.

If you're actually curious, same idea as not knowing how to use a search engine in the 2000s/2010s

It's widely ubiquitous technology that can be extremely useful if used properly and not knowing how will waste a lot of time and likely frustrate you to the point you just give up or ask you family tech person.

If like you can't drive a car, that makes it harder to find a good paying job.

You'll fall behind in the race to the lowest IQ as they all turn their thinking over to AI and get lazier while you continue to exercise your brain.

Fuck 'em.

Those people see AI as a transformational technology that is going to be central to how everything is done 10 years from now for better or for worse, and trying to ignore that is just putting your head in the sand.

What they mean is that the technology seems to be both moving fast, and spreading rapidly. So, likely looking back to the early days of the internet, people expect that anyone who gains a lot of day to day experience will be more successful at any career that will likely rely heavily on LLMs in the future.

This was similar to what a lot of anti-internet we're told in the early 2000s. People who knew even a trivial amount of HTML could create simple things like a GeoCities page and seem like a wizard to some normal folks.

How true is it? Meh. Not everyone that learned even a decent amount of html in the 90s did anything related to tech on their lives. Right now, that's more about if you're training custom LLMs, self-hosting models, etc. Simply using an LLM, all that "prompt engineer" shit from 2 years ago, is already stale and gone. That's likely what older people sarong "you'll get left behind" mean. They're already left behind.

Just tell people you already run your own 40B Ollama model on a Kawasaki jetski and let them figure it out. Good luck!

There are people in all kinds of industries claiming AI is helping them do their job 30% faster or whatever, so presumably you’ll be “left behind” if you don’t catch up to their pace. In reality, those “30% faster” people are often producing at least 50% worse quality work. So it may come down to whether you can persuade your potentially AI-obsessed boss that maintaining quality matters enough to not adopt a faster but far more problematic process. You might not actually be left behind in terms of producing valuable work, but your boss might decide your team is being “left behind” if you don’t use AI to generate workslop or meet increasingly unrealistic deadlines.

Blindly trusting google results when copy/pasting into the terminal is sketchy. Doing that with AI is even worse.

Go ahead and blindly follow the LLM, have fun.

It's very similar to learning how to use a computer in 1995. I'm just old enough to remember meeting these people.

There is this thing, which, supposedly, can help you do your job better, it's being pushed by management, and it is sometimes expensive, often confusing, and obsoletes the skills you spent years to acquire.

Fast-forward 30 years, and it's very, very, very difficult to find people to talk to who still argue computing doesn't belong in the workplace, and that using a computer isn't essential for virtually all work.

The reason it is difficult to find these people, is because they were left behind.

And for clarity I’m not in research or anything, so these people just mean ‘LLM/image gen’, not utilities like OCR or (usually not) transcription.

That still is extremely unspecific and doesn't say much about what the idea is to use it for

it’s always very derivative work to the point where you can find things with the exact same names of other ‘public’ (but not libre) works, and often isn’t the ideal solution to what it targets.

Writing maybe? I can't tell what this is about

Anyone saying that unironically has a vested interest in AI succeeding and are trying to produce FOMO. They likely missed their chance to make big bucks during the .com boom and they see AI as a second chance thinking it will inevitably become as ubiquitous as the internet itself.

They can generally be ignored and nothing of value will be lost.

I hate AI, but still use it from time to time when 3+ searches would yield no result, or I am already quite adapt to a topic and just want some stupid research work done by a web scraper tool, or when searching on brave search and I just search for a command in bash or something like that on a topic where I don't currently want to learn (maybe because of a deadline). I am inpatient at the moment, pressed for time and still want to try new things. It's a faster search engine for me right now because search engines and wesites became infested with SEO, bots and AI slop, at least I get to control the answers a bit better

people who can afford to pay for LLM tokens are always going to be fine as tokens get more expensive. this is just a thinly veiled way to say an increasing amount of people are going to end up poor and completely fucked as AI pushes all of the resources upwards.

They're very very very few tasks in which AI is great. Everything else is just a waste of money and unnecessary at the cost of destroying the planet.

Gonna be the odd one out here so I'm gonna start with this. The companies that push AI and the way they are powering large models you'd use only is to the detriment of working class people and the planet.

That being said it's a tool and a useful one. It makes mistakes and it's not as smart as a person but it can make certain tasks much easier and faster. It's like having a fleet of interns ready to rush through something. It makes certain kinds of office tasks much much faster. So if you don't use it and your coworkers do suddenly it looks like you're the weak link.

I've found a lot of uses for it myself. Of course I always need to double check and correct it which takes time but that is often easier and faster than starting from scratch.

This post explains it better than I could..https://hermit-tech.com/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decisionmaking

Kinda like that statement about no one being able to go a day without using it. Its weird and does not hold water logic wise. This seems to be the same, it is just a desperate sales tactic from people who put to much of themselves into the tech. Sunk cost and all that.

However the over use of AI seems to be a great way of being wrong faster.

I never understood that argument. The same idiots claim AI will democratize everything, it is inevitable. That one would only need to know natural language, "coding is over" or 'x' is over. If it does democratize 'x' for everyone with only requirement being natural language, who would even get left behind ??

I tried using a wrapper LLM for a specific software for a project, and sometimes it gives correct answers, sometimes gives the diffuclt way to implement something, sometimes it hallucinates. At first, I thought great, I wouldn't have to sit through an entire playlist to get the gist of how to do something mildly similar. But recently it has been giving wrong answers. Today it gave answers beginning with "handoff - DENY}" and answers just kept cut off. Sometimes asking a different question, it just resumed the cut off answer from half an hour ago. The stupid piece of shit was wasting my time!! In the end, I just figured it out on my own.

I think NLP is amazing, a computer being able to understand what exactly I'm trying to do/look for is useful. But my work shouldn't be dependent on an LLM's "mood".

Before anyone says just read documentation/tutorials, this is a niche vfx software which doesn't have good docs and tutorials are mostly outdated for latest versions

Because the reality is that you'll ship projects faster. Check out lemmy selfhosted community. I just checked and 8/10 of the latest projects were AI assisted.

It's not a panacea. For example, don't rely on it for security focused applications. But most evidence suggests that if you are careful about where and how you use AI, you will move faster.

Yes there are ethical concerns too. We all know them at this point. So the question becomes whether or not those concerns outweigh the human desire to make an impact on the world.

A lot of activism is bragging rights. Hence the meme about vegans always talking about veganism. But with AI, it's bragging rights on both sides. If you don't use jt you can brag about your environmental concern. If you use it you can brag about all the cool projects you made. Which do you want to brag about?

AI/ATS has worsened job prospects thats for sure.

As a senior software engineer applying for jobs, over half REQUIRE experience with AI just for an interview. Some require that you interview with AI as well. Still more encourage using, evaluating, and advocating for it in the workplace.

A lot of people think AI makes things exponentially easier, exponentially better, exponentially faster, exponentially more accessible. So, they can do more, faster, with less work. And obviously, if you don't do that yourself, you'll be an inefficient, hard working idiot.

There's also something psychological about peer pressure; if more people do the same thing you do, it's more acceptable/better/the norm, and the various issues becomes less importants. Kinda like when cryptocurrencies would fix ALL issues everywhere at once forever. Funny enough, we were already taking about how inefficient and costly that was back then.

Of course, people using it without any knowledge of what the output should look like find it magical, but knowledgeable people are more… let's say, prudent. The faster outcome is debatable; it still requires a fair amount of actual work to be put in unless you just do the same thing that's been done millions of time before. And worst of all, some people seems to "forget" how to do things without an LLM very quickly, to the point that they'll tell you that some things are actually impossible to do without them.

I am a firm believer those types fall into one of two categories. Those being plants/paid shills or those who don't understand mucb about it being convinced it's a miracle worker and buying into the anti-human propaganda.

So realistically, it's kinda BS pushed by FOMO farmers with hustle culture vibes.

The reality is that the acceleration of AI is reaching a speed where by the time you'd build your whole setup to work with AI there will be a new AI who can set the whole thing up in an afternoon.

There is a learning curve to things like how a model processes information and how to set them up for success. But it's fairly easy to learn and likely to shift quickly.

The biggest gap that I see between people who have success with models and those who have a bad time is how you treat the model.

If you are a jerk, I hope you don't like your production DB or home directory too much.

Things that seem crazy to people who aren't following things, like giving the model breaks to avoid context burnout or encouragement vs yelling in all caps, go a long way.

TL;DR: The methodological best practices are likely to change so fast you won't need to do much catching up, but the relational dynamics of working with AI will likely remain pertinent into the future.

The only thing I think it might be relevant for is coding really although I have not used it much for that. I feel its good for people to use it at the very least to actually understand its limitations. I often say people should use it on things they know well so that they can get an idea for the level of caution you should take if using it for something you don't know about. Outside of that it really is, to me, a lot like terminal vs gui. its something that is easier to do and there is less to learn long term about it. So awhile back people might say a programmer needs to do visual programming or get left behind but plenty still code in a text editor.

A preamble you didn't ask for (feel free to skip if you don't wanna talk shit on my views. You're welcome to talk shit, but I ask you at least understand my position first.) I don't like AI because of the societal, economic, environmental, and imperialist effects of it. Actually, I despise it for that.

However, LLMs and ML overall has seen some profound benefits from these investments, and there is real, unique benefit to understanding their strengths, limitations, etc.

Nobody who says that is talking about a chatbot, and if they are they should shut the fuck up.

I will also say, I have a pretty strong moral opposition to using US products specifically. Their training is extremely inefficient, their power sources are horrible for the environment, they're being used primarily to disenfranchise the working class rather than benefit humanity, and their data enrichment process are hugely exploitative in the best scenarios, and literal (like, literally literal) torture.

There's truth to the utility of the models, and there are models without such grotesque wrongdoings that are much easier to get behind. China is currently, accounting for cost, absolutely neck and neck with the US in practical capability, and also requires datacenters to minimize impact to the surrounding communities as well as use renewable energy.

My response to the post: LLMs are good for programming and other work around similarly syntax-structured entities.

Yeah, it's pretty good as a search engine for a topic you're unfamiliar with, and getting you a functional thing. Whether software, a study method, instructions for soup, it can probably help you do it as well as you could as a novice otherwise, which much less initial effort and headaches. That's the intuitive use without much requirement of or room for 'excellence' (in the most literal sense).

I think the areas people can become better than others pertain to some things you mentioned and some others; prompt efficacy, context management, estimating effort level, harness optimization, etc.

When you get into the really bleeding edge of LLM-centric development, optimization and yes, engineering the automation around prompt structure, routing, effort estimation and evaluation, contract systems, etc. can mean the difference between 30k waste over the course of a month, or a solid set of product improvements.

For the QA argument, I disagree, at least partly. The people who were never going to be great devs or architects probably will end up as glorified QA for as long as employers allow that to happen. I think, in my own and my peers' experience at least, that AI really does allow more human time to be spent on broader scoped tasks than before.

I don't want to make an assembler or compiler analogy because I think it's tired and reductive, but I think it's pretty on point here; less human time is spent on entry, and a higher ratio of human time is spent on problem solving. That wording is deliberate; I haven't been convinced it will proliferate the work in the same way other advancements have; I don't think it's a given.

AI can be helpful, like it is in Star Trek (a very realistically advanced, peace living and equally enjoyed society), but in this 3d low vibration reality, AI is programmed with a dark agenda at its helm. Here, it is programmed to sneakily and deceptively downgrade everything. Quality of interactions, quality of schooling, quality of working environments, basically, the quality of our shared life in its totality. The very best thing anyone can do is stay unplugged as much as possible, remain hyper aware, and sense and honor their intuition. Intuition is the key to living one's most fulfilling life; it always has one's personal best interest at heart.

I'm going to rip my balls off

Bullshit said by people who do not understand that LLMs are NOT AI

NOT AI, not even a little

This will likely get lost in the sea of comments here... But my opinion to "getting left behind if you don't know how to use ai" is simply, "no, you'll be left behind if you don't know how to engineer ai." everyone who uses "ai"'s end product will be in the same playing field, if you don't know how to build and engineer it, then you're in the same boat as everyone else who knows how to put together a sentence and a question.

If you know how to build a custom ai engine that can do a specific task for a specific field, then you'll be ahead. If you know how to write out a question to prompt ai, then you can speak a language, congrats, you're just like everyone else around you. Along with that, if you don't know anything about the things you're asking the ai about, then you don't know how to determine whether it's giving you accurate information, which makes it useless, maybe not 100% useless, but like 85% useless it something. Can you build a house with a hammer alone? No. You need materials, you need ways to cut wood, you need structural knowledge about building a house before you can build a safe livable house and more than one tool in the tool box.

Idk, it's one of those things that just kind of feels like something someone would say about something they were told they should say about that thing. This isn't like the invention of personal computers. I think it's much more simple then that when it comes to how we interact with it, the impressive knowledge is more about how to engineer it, and how to deploy it for specific use cases. Like the difference between building an efficient refrigerator and using one.

The other problem with not knowing how to build and engineer and deploy your own locally run ai, is that you will become dependant on this 3rd party service and end up paying loads of money for something you wouldn't have had to if you weren't "left behind". That's what the big corps are hoping happens with all this free access or cheap access, it's all a scheme to get everyone hooked, so they can pull the rug out from under em and force them to pay astronomical amounts of money to cover the losses they've been gambling with this whole time. Also just my opinion but, seems like a pretty decent theory to me lol.

Just speaking into the void here, don't really expect any replies from me, I don't have that much more to offer, just figured why not share my thoughts on the subject, it's one everyone seems to be taking about at the moment. I'll definitely read anyone's replies though ❤️

Just from a purely defensive standpoint, my coworker still thinks if an image has the correct amount of fingers than it's not ai

You can resist as much as you want but technology and big business are going to keep moving whether we like it or not. Unless we all decide to boycott, which we are too comfortable to do, there is no stopping capitalism. So yes, in much of the business world, if you don’t get comfortable with AI, you will fall behind.

That doesn’t mean you have to do anything with AI, tho. If you never learned to use a computer, or Excel, you fell behind in many business settings. Doesn’t mean you have to learn computers.

LLM’s are not the end all be all. There will be another big AI boom at some point in the future and if it’s derivative of LLM’s you may not have the experience to use the new tech as well as others who are well versed with AI. Isn’t good or bad. It’s just how you wanna live your life. Make a living in spaces that don’t require AI.

I think about it like this: let's say you don't use AI but a majority of other people do. Let's assume AI helps the majority do things faster or cheaper than you (maybe that's not true yet, but it will probably be true soon). In this situation, if you're not using AI then you'll almost always lose to those that are. Therefore you should learn how to use it or else you'll be left behind.

The way I see it, AI is like with any other things, such as botox and plastic surgery and dating apps. People vilified botox and plastic surgeries as unnatural and anyone who had them are losers. People who used dating apps were seen as losers. Now, those are normalised and became part of the furniture, metaphorically.

Love it or hate it, AI will became part of human lives, like furnitures. Younger generations will use them and accept them. Older folks like us will think youths are weird and losers, while the latter thinks the former are fossils who can't keep up with the times.

I am personally not against or pro-AI, it is useful to certain things, but i recognise that it is monopolised by only few who don't have the best interests for the many. In any case, AI will be used en masse eventually as more and more people will use it, especially by younger generations. In that sense, those who refused to use AI in any way will be left behind by the times. But whether AI will have ultimate positive or negative impact on human society, only time will tell.

Myself from 3 years ago is definitely behind on me today with AI.

I'm so much faster and better in getting information than I was back then. I had to read Wikipedia pages, some books and 10 websites to get answers. Now I have an AI in my pocket that has already read all that.

People will show up at job interviews with 10 agents and beat the anti AI person.

I don't think our daily lives are very influenced at this point but the economic output for sure is. Who reaps the benefits, maybe not me directly.

If you’re coding without agents I’m going faster than you more than likely.

The nerds screeching it’s bad are either, just that talented edge cases, or grossly over confident.