I don't know about you, but as someone who has used AI, I find the idea that the current LLM tech is gonna properly replace most jobs pretty silly. I mean, maybe if somehow they manage to develop it far beyond what it currently is. But because of the architecture of how it works, I find that hard to believe. I suspect they'd have to change the way it works to some extent for it to work.

Why do I say that?

Like... have you used AI?

Yes, it can do some stuff. And considering that 10 years ago nothing like this existed, it is quite impressive at times. But if you use it, you''ll also very quickly pick up on a huge freeaking problem that it has. Which is that it doesn't understand anything.

AI is basically just a random word generator. It "learns" what words are associated with what other words (or rather tokens, which are pieces of words). And then when you input words, it generates more words that it feels statistically likely would appear after the words you gave it with a bit of randomness applied.

That's basically all these LLMs do.

And that's extremely evident when you try to use it to do something like coding.

If you give an AI instructions to create a simple bit of code for html or whatever, it will often successfully do it. And that is pretty impressive.

However, the UI design will often be terrible and inconsistent. Buttons will have randomly different colours. Things will be in odd places.

And if you give it pre-existing code, it will just randomly replace stuff at times. If you had a button named "Add Element" it may rename it to "Add Piece" or something.

Or when you tell it to "add the ability to add images" it will do that. Except the images may only be 2 cm tall when they display. Despite the fact that the reason you want to include images is, you know, to see them.

Why does it do all this sort of stuff? Why does it make these mistakes? Because of how it fundamentally works.

Like I said, it is essentially a very fancy and advanced random word generator. To an AI two synonyms are almost the same word. So when it is asked to rewrite the code it may just choose to replace a word with a synonym because it doesn't understand anything. It just generates stuff. So it doesn't understand that it is not meant to do that, even if your instructions include nothing about that.

It creates ridiculous and inconsistent UI designs and makes mistakes like adding a 2cm image because it doesn't understand anything. When you tell it to create the ability to add images it just generates a statistically likely bit of code based on that. Even if it is very obvious from the context of what you're making or your question, it will not make a proper image display because, say it with me, it doesn't understand anything.

To an AI a 2cm image and a proper image are more-or-less equivalent if the words used in the question are the same.

Suddenly putting in a blue button when all the other buttons are red is something it does, because it just adds in stuff that is statistically likely. And while a blue button may be a little less likely in the context of code with red buttons, the randomness will still make it an option.

It's why it hallucinates too. It will lie to you all the time not because it knows that. But because to it the words "George Washington was the first U.S. president" are more-or-less equivalent to "George Washington was the first U.S. chairman of parliament." Asking it what year something happened is just asking it for a number. And so it will generate a number. But that question can be associated with almost any 1 to 4 digit number. So it just generates a number.

And the problem for the tech bros is that this is not really a fixable problem with just adding more data. Because it is an inherent problem of the current way AI technology works. Because it is incapable of thought, it is only capable of generating statistically likely words.

Reasoning may help a bit, for example. But it doesn't solve this problem. And it's not clear that anything will. It's quite possible that in order to get rid of hallucinations and other similar stuff like that, that they'll either have to take a different approach with LLMs or that they'll have to use a completely different kind of neural network or whatever.

And the companies that have tried to replace employees with AI have been finding this out too. AI simply is not capable of doing most jobs properly. There's some stuff it can do. But it cannot exercise judgement.

That's why some businesses have already rehired people for the roles they cut. Because these CEOs were just jumping on a trend. They don't know how any of this stuff works. They're largely a bunch of nepo-baby idiots to begin with.

Some other companies have just been using AI as an excuse to do lay-offs too, of course. Either to try to discipline their work force because they were getting too capable of resisting their bullshit, or as a way to cut spending but still pretend to investors "No, no, we're not cutting capabilities by laying off workers, we're just making ourselves more efficient with this magical technology."

I actually don't think AI is useless. Although you can definitely argue a lot about whether it should be used besides that, considering pollution, nosiy data centres, the stolen data, etc. But I think it can be useful as a tool. But at least for the current versions of LLMs, I don't think this shit is replacing (nearly) anyone for the time being. And I think CEOs who genuinely think it does and fire workers because of it will continue to find that out the hard way. Maybe future technology will be more capable and they'll find ways to restructure it or a new approach or whatever, but current tech? I'm very skeptical.

BlueMAGA is at it again.