A lot of the long tail tools are used so rarely or for some very specific functions in certain organisations that there is a good case to be made that these can definitely be targets of simpler GPT guided automation.

There are a lot of redundancies within the tools and the pricing is such that one cannot do much about it, generally some companies pay for the brand, and some tools like SAP are integral to companies of certain size. A sufficiently integrated AI tool that learns the workflows might actually be able to find optimisations here as well, but definitely auditability, testing and other concerns will remain and this is what might become the USP of SAAS providers.

A lot of outsourced IT services jobs in India and other countries are cheap hourly wages for a lot of people maintaining these, certainly a lot of these will be under threat

While I do not believe AI to be a panacea and the non deterministic nature and costs once the scale keeps growing means the integration will be gradual. I am still excited for it to define what an organisation is and what do a lot of people actually do especially in fields like accounting etc. where repetitive work is billed at quite high rates.

Law etc. is a field where the gatekeepers might hold on much longer by adding more ridiculous rules and logic. Ultimately humans have decided what is constitutional and what is legal and subjective rules are what maintain human power.

I feel the right model is smart domain experts of humans making strong and useful harnesses that help AI be effective with the workflows of the organisation, however this might be the biggest fear of middle managers who will never let it happen easily

>> however this might be the biggest fear of middle managers who will never let it happen easily

Will this be different in a company like Amazon, or the new internet companies, that we're born with a deeper understanding of disruption and has it in their DNA?

Accountants get to charge high rates largely because good advice saves their customers large amounts of tax. When we're talking tax accountants of course. There's all sorts of accountants though - audit, management, forensic etc.

Honestly it seems like they knew this would happen, but they managed to really make the most of it. If anything it is an example of how important marketing is in influencing culture and choices

If anything, much later than what I anticipated it would take. One place where one has to appreciate Chinese scale.

Also while developed countries are affected , developing countries like Bangladesh, India are disproportionately affected, mostly a function of geography and a lot of history (very high population etc.). Honestly once AI becomes powerful enough most of these people will literally be leftovers with nothing left to contribute to the world with civil war precursors you see in other forms today essentially the same symptom of fight for limited resources.

The developed countries have so much land, water, resources that they will adapt although inequality within will be an issue and tbh at this point there is never any thought given to the wider world, which if one things about honestly never was.

I find almost nothing to agree with here.

Renewable energy will power places like Bangladesh towards far greater wealth and prosperity. Aside from the distastefulness of using the term "leftovers" on any group of people, I think its clear that India will become massively more powerful due to their education system, once its further enabled by cheap clean energy and AI.

The US is falling into civil war over stupid culture issues as India is rising. The US is dismantling its education system, its research system, to spend it on wasted defense spending (just in the past few days huge amounts of research money from the National Institutes of Health have been funneled over to DoD. Or DoW, whatever).

Additionally the US's terrible culture war is resulting in slow adoption of cheap energy, which will further lower the US's global position.

There will always be limited resources. If not one, the other. But cheap renewable energy is a great leveler and the US will be leveled far more for its refusal to lead the way with it. India will be hugely ascendant as a massive nation with coordinated, highly educated human resources. Even in the era of AI, perhaps more so, human resources are the ultimate limit on human happiness.

> most of these people will literally be leftovers with nothing left to contribute to the world

A lot of people from bangladesh and india are working in Russia. China and Russia are also investing, and building factories there.

there might be 8 billion GPUs in the world by 2040 but they will be controlled by 8 corporations across the world.

So how is it different from now, you can name any industry for example

OK, here are a few industries: Food. Construction. Power. Logistics.

“In our story contest, we ask people to imagine the future, evenly distributed.”

I think there are scenarios, however (un)likely that will lead us to this point. Imaging them and spreading such ideas can make that more likely.

But the contest does not ask what needs to happen to achieve even and fair distribution of wealth, it specifically asks what might happen after we reached that point. That kind of blindness towards today's political and socio-economic conditions has always been very typical for this kind of techno optimism. I believe it actually prevents revolutionary thought by assuming some kind of revolution has already occurred somehow in order to then attribute all following societal progress to the technology alone.

Telling the story of how we averted the current dystopian path and moved to an utopian AI-assisted society would be a very nice story to read. We desperately need more utopian science-fiction and we can't rely on Star Trek to provide a path forward or an ideal goal for our civilisation.

This is kind of why we need more Star Trek. Not that I don’t enjoy others, but I prefer space communism to almost any other possible future, especially the ones Peter Thiel has reserved for us.

Read more Star Trek then, the Peter Thiel world came first and the survivors made the Star Trek world.

And there was a nuclear war as well. I know that, and I’m happy it’s not often we explore that in detail or treat the “dark age of Star Trek” as something that could be normalised. It’s always portrayed as a barbaric time humanity escaped from through by growing up.

I find this idea that we need to go through hell to reach salvation to be such a common trope. An unhelpful one. It affects how we see relationships and mental health too.

Maybe we should seek out the good things directly and not act as if the bad things are somehow going to purify us.

If we can skip the Thiel version of Hell, we really should.

Everyone will probably go through the 5 stages of grief w.r.t AI adoption in their field and the gatekeepers will (rightfully) hold onto hallucination and errors as reasons to delay incorporation or to incorporate it with more human handholding.

See, the issue is CEOs capture a fair amount of value but ultimately it is the owners and the main shareholders who hire them for that value to insulate themselves from day to day running of the company. The maximum value of the company is accruing to the shareholders in a public company anyways. While the morality of the right nos compared to median 'worker' can always be debated, I still find CEO earns 500x that of median worker type comparisons a little bit disingenuous and it totally insulates the owner class.

The funny thing is Decentralised Autonomous organisations (DAO) under Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies had similar goals originally. I do not know where they stand and if ever a useful DAO was created.

If nothing this is a useful demo in real world if used that will show that there are good reasons why hierarchy forms anyways and how power law is at the center of it. Too much democracy may not work in some instances but there may be many cases where the values can hopefully be aligned as well as be lean enough to adapt

If you research the origins of Dwarkesh, even more conspiracy level points emerge. I do not think even in the handful videos post Leopold fund collapse he has addressed it in any ways. That is the point of so called observers, they pretend to be impartial but everyone is a hustler in some way.

A flood of releases today, really difficult to make out for someone who does not use or test all these models on complex real world use cases as to how people decide which ones to use (besides price)

Count yourself lucky that you don't feel compelled to try them all yourself immediately. I'm just trying to decide whether to get a Z.ai coding plan or wait until it appears on OpenRouter. 5.2 was quite solid, but it was just shy of Opus 4.8 in my benchmarks of security auditing capabilities. I've mostly been using Kimi K3, because American vendors won't let the peasantry use their best models for security work.