how will it change the average person’s life in 1 - 3 years?
To be blunt, it’ll probably make them worry about losing their job. AI can’t do everything and it does a lot of stuff pretty shitty, but so do a lot of people.
Comment on Will AI Startups End Up Like Blockchain Startups?
yarr@feddit.nl 4 days agoA lot will fail yes, but I think there’s actually a lot of value in AI and many will succeed. Blockchain has always been a solution in search of a problem, but AI actually can help in a lot of ways.
Well, what are those ways and when can we expect to see them? I keep hearing that “oh yeah, the very NEXT version of AI will do your job for you” but it always seems to be on the way. In the same way I can use blockchain tech for a few things here and there, I can use AI in the same way today. However, with all these billions and billions of dollars getting invested into AI right now, how will it change the average person’s life in 1 - 3 years? I use that scale of time because that’s pretty much how long startup runways last. If they don’t turn a profit in that time frame, they go to the big AI graveyard in the sky.
Shadow@lemmy.ca 4 days ago
yarr@feddit.nl 4 days ago
Tech workers, artists and other industries have long had to compete with work being sent overseas. Now it’s even cheaper and faster.
This is the part I don’t entirely see eye-to-eye with you on. Right now, AI is eating the extreme low end of the work… for example, if someone needs a picture for their article, they might generate it with AI instead of buy stock illustrations from a real person.
If someone is making a site on WIX for their new business, that leverages AI too, but just for simple stuff.
By the time AI is able to do those jobs full stop, then I’ll have a worry. “Serious” artists do a heck of a lot more than just sit down with a pen. They go visit clients, figure out what to do, research, negotiate with other people at the business, etc. Same thing with developers. They aren’t just typing in code all day, they are meeting with other departments, figuring out requirements, etc. None of that is easy or quick. By the time you have an AI smart enough to either do 95% of a developer’s job or 95% of an artists’ job, it will be smart enough to do nearly every other job in America. If the same AI also comes with humanoid robots that can reason about their environment and move things around, then you’re also risking a lot of labor jobs, like picking in a warehouse. However, unlike proponents of AI I think all of the above is decades away, not years away. If it’s really decades away, you can kiss the current round of AI startups goodbye because they won’t exist by that point.
For many, many, many of the AI startups today, if they don’t start showing a profit within 1-3 years they are GONE. Part of showing a profit is being useful, and I think outside of little niches here and there, the amount of money getting poured into it does not in any way resemble the money coming out of it.
jrs100000@lemmy.world 4 days ago
It doesnt have to be useful to you and it does not have to replace every job, it just has to show revenue and rapid growth. There are lots and lots of tasks out there were management doesnt really care if its perfect as long as its cheap and it gets done. AI will automate that stuff first, but people in rich countries probably wont notice because that sort of work was outsourced years ago. In the meantime, its all going to be about efficiency, having fewer people do the same work with AI assistance.
yarr@feddit.nl 4 days ago
it just has to show revenue and rapid growth
Yeah, that’s kind of the point. There’s so much money leveraged on it right now that if the revenue and/or growth doesn’t materialize soon the limited patience of the investors will expire and the money is going to disappear.
Shadow@lemmy.ca 4 days ago
I think there’s a lot of grunt work artists than you might be aware of. My last job was at a video game studio and it was kinda eyeopening the amount of generic story boarding / art work they would send over to Eastern Europe / Asia to be done for cheap.
The visible side of the industry (what you’re talking about) yeah I agree, but AI is slowly going to pick away at the lower skill levels until only experts are really useful. How does a junior become an expert in that world?
yarr@feddit.nl 4 days ago
How does a junior become an expert in that world?
They don’t.
yarr@feddit.nl 4 days ago
My last job was at a video game studio and it was kinda eyeopening the amount of generic story boarding / art work they would send over to Eastern Europe / Asia to be done for cheap.
Sure, but don’t you have to like work with those guys, give them a brief on what to do, provide feedback do revisions and all that. By the time there is an AI as good as those Eastern Europe fellows, it’ll be smart enough to do a lot more than storyboards. I see a lot of people reducing a field to one of its activities.
Let me put it this way, if I gave a business a magic box that all you had to do was explain your problem and it generates perfect code, they’d still have problems. Because we have those boxes today, they’re called software engineers, and there’s a lot more work that has to be done besides just typing in the code. Business people aren’t sure what to ask for, how to ask for it, how to get it done, etc. All that mushy soft stuff in the middle is why you have developers making a decent payday, because it’s a lot of work and not at all easy to just hand to ChatGPT.
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 4 days ago
My wife uses AI to write complex Excel spreadsheet formulas saving hours. She still has to double check them but it saves enormous time. My friend uses it to write proposals again it needs to be checked and again it saves hours of time.
AI doesn’t replace people. It provides a productivity boost and it has been doing it for 2 years now.
Asking what AI is going to do for the average person in 1-3 years is like asking what is the PC going to do for the average person in 1980. There’s nothing that AI can do that can’t be done by a person. But like using a PC instead of a pocket calculator, it makes you more productive.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 4 days ago
chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
To me it’s obvious that AI is and will be really useful, but one of the great things about it is that it looks like a lot of that won’t be possible to gatekeep. Which seems like it would also mean that efforts to monetize it will fail.
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 4 days ago
People can easily self host email, file backup, etc but pay for service anyway. AI will be prohibitively expensive to self host for a very very long time.
chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
Who pays for email? Who pays subscriptions for file backup? Why would you when you can just use another companies service that is free? Self hosting AI is increasingly viable, but that isn’t even the problem for companies hoping to make billions on it, the problem is that as soon as they try to put the squeeze on their customers they will just go somewhere else that offers the same thing. Look at what happened with Deepseek; OpenAI can’t maintain dominance.
It already isn’t, there are tiny models that are practical for some things that will run on basically anything, and there is a lot you can do with a mid to high end graphics card. Nvidia is artificially limiting vram but that’s not going to remain the limitation for long. But even if AI running on datacenter hardware maintains a big advantage, that’s not enough for these companies to make huge profits.
yarr@feddit.nl 4 days ago
If you were a PC startup in 1980, this was very a relevant question, since PCs at home really didn’t take off in a big way until the web which was almost 20 years later. Look at how many PC manufacturers went out of business between 1980-2000. This is kind of my point, AI is so over-invested right now that if there are not HUGE returns in a short timeframe, there’s going to be some serious blood out there.
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Oh yeah, as others said many startups will fail. But you wrote as if AI does nothing like blockchain.
yarr@feddit.nl 4 days ago
I won’t say AI does nothing. I’d say they do a similar amount right now. In the same way that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies do a few million transactions a day, AI helps with some tasks here and there. The similarity for me is that initially both technologies were hyped as something far larger than they are right now.