What is the value of technology which allows people communicate clearly with other people of any language? That is what these large language models have achieved. We can now translate pretty much perfectly between all the languages in the world. The curse from the tower of Babel has been lifted.

There will be a time in the future, when people will not be able to comprehend that you couldn't exchange information regardless of personal language skills.

So what is the value of that? Economically, culturally, politically, spiritually?

If you just wanted land, water, and electricity, you could buy them directly instead of buying $100 million of computer hardware bundled with $2 million worth of land and water rights. Why are high end GPUs selling in record numbers if the AI trend is just a cover story for the acquisition of land, electricity, and water?

What does consciousness have to do with AGI or the point(s) the article is trying to make? This is a distraction imo.

  > But then I wonder about the true purpose of AI. As in, is it really for what they say it’s for?

  > There is a vast chasm between what we, the users, and them, the investors, are “sold” in AI. We are told that AI will do our tasks faster and better than we can — that there is no future of work without AI. And that is a huge sell, one I’ve spent the majority of this post deconstructing from my, albeit limited, perspective. But they — the people who commit billions toward AI — are sold something entirely different. They are sold AGI, the idea of a transformative artificial intelligence, an idea so big that it can accommodate any hope or fear a billionaire might have. Their billions buy them ownership over what they are told will remake a future world nearly entirely monetized for them. And if not them, someone else. That’s where the fear comes in. It leads to Manhattan Project rationale, where any lingering doubt over the prudence of pursuing this technology is overpowered by the conviction of its inexorability. Someone will make it, so it should be them, because they can trust them.

IMHO the bleeding edge of what’s working well with LLMs is within software engineering because we’re building for ourselves, first.

Claude code is incredible. Where I work, there are an incredible number of custom agents that integrate with our internal tooling. Many make me very productive and are worthwhile.

I find it hard to buy in to opinions of non-SWE on the uselessness of AI solely because I think the innovation is lagging in other areas. I don’t doubt they don’t yet have compelling AI tooling.

  My experience with AI in the design context tends to reflect what I think is generally true about AI in the workplace: the smaller the use case, the larger the gain.