this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2026
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Either that, or the rich and corps will go all in. The point was always to replace human labor, just depends how far from that they think we are. People still see a report an AI did something stupid and laugh at the idea of it replacing us, but just 5 years ago we wouldn't have believed the things it can do today.
We can't believe what it does not, or six agos what it does then. The shit is moving faster then literally anyone really seems to understand.
The avg person that makes fun of ai, seems to still think they have the same problems they had 2-3 years. Because the cheap free models they have access to are extremely out of date, or very limited.
The actual real deal big boy models are so far beyond what your avg even extremely technical user understands. Unless you are actively watching following and using the models you just flat out have no clue just how fast this shit is sprinting.
It's got plenty of problems and the growth is not across every aspect of it equally. So it's really easy to point and laugh at a particular point it's struggling with while it skips ahead in other regards.
It's wild. The progress is just as unsustainable as the profits are bad. As long as that progress keeps sprinting the bad profits flat out don't matter.
IT WILL hit critical mass to replace your avg idiot long before the profit problem really hits at this rate.
The bigger problem is that even if it replaces people that profit problem doesn't go away. So it will just hit AFTER people are replaced. And that's a even worse outcome then replacing people.
We NEED the bubble to pop before that point and the industry recalibrates to a sustainable model.
Else we will have mass job loss promptly followed by a massive bubble popping and economy collapse AND companies flopping and job opportunity losses as places closing shop so there won't even be jobs to back to.
It could get REALLY fucking bad.
Disagree.
It is true there were massive strides in the last 8 years. But fundamentally, the tech is still the same large language model it was before, just bigger and better optimized.
It's like going from an ancient, slow, Ford Model T that topped out at 45mph to a Bugatti that can do 260mph in 8 short years. It's impressive, it boosts productivity, it is a marvel of modern technology, but that's not my point of contention.
The issue is that AI companies have been funded on the promise that with enough advancements and upgrades this tech will achieve AGI. Which is an absurd statement to anyone in the field actually developing these things. That is the equivalent of promising that this 260mph Bugatti, with a few years of upgrades and advancements, will become a Harrier Jump Jet!
It's just not happening, a fundamental shift in model architecture or technology used is needed. And from what we've seen so far, no one has discovered any.
A better analogy is promising that a toddler will, with enough knowledge and training, eventually become a heart surgeon.
15 years ago the assumption with AGI was that we needed some paradigm shift in technology to create it, but after transformer technology was invented (the T in GPT), and it was trained on a lot of information, we discovered an emergent property that it could take natural language queries and answer them with its knowledge base-- which was unexpected and unintended.
While science can always end up going down the wrong path, the current mainstream stance is that we were wrong about needing new technology for AGI; it seems that AGI may be a function of information and training, on hardware we already have. Hence all the data centers being built.
Anyone who says with certainty that it will result in AGI is just as wrong as someone who says with certainty that it won't.
They're not even better optimized. Hallucination rates are up. Inference costs are up. There's only an AI industry at all because they're selling a highly subsidized product, but when they try to raise prices even a little the market collapses. Companies that were encouraging employees to up their AI use are now rationing tokens like chocolate in wartime. This isn't like Uber where they can push out the old providers and then obtain market capture on something everyone needs. AI is not, and cannot be, essential, because you can always just get a human to do it.
Exactly this, especially the last sentence.
I only have pretty basic machine learning knowledge, based on a few Master's classes at college while I was doing gamedev, and even with that I can tell that the way they are expecting to get AGI by just feeding more data into a language model is simply not happening.
I remember a comparison from one of the AI-pilled tech-bros when AI was starting to get attention, and his metaphor about AGI was something along the lines of "Imagine a difference between a medieval commoner and Albert Einstein, that's the difference in inteligence AI will soon have to the smartest people we know now".
But that doesn't make sense with the current approach. Imagine Einstein writing his cutting-edge theories, and the commoner is watching him behind his shoulder and vetting anything he does. Scratching his ideas, forcing him to redo it, if he doesn't like it, pointing to a reddit thread about why. There's no way he would ever finish anything new.
Unless they figure out a completely new way how to do AI reasoning, there is no way we're getting anywhere near AGI. And that is also becoming more unlikely the longer we go with this approach, because every AI-pilled company is heavily outsourcing all of development to the current models, reducing their employee (and the whole worlds) innovation potential and skill. This is probably the last generation that can do serious academia, unless there are drastic measures done to limit access to AI in education. It's fucked.
Inevitable.
I expect it to get really bad.
Most people haven't taken a top end frontier model, integrated it to a memory framework so it can save whatever information it wishes directly in context and save even more in a separate database that it can search with keywords to pull in to context temporarily.
You don't need something like Claw or Claude Code with their extra dozen pages of coding specific system instructions. You can use a blank context window, explain the function calls for the memory framework, and give a complex task and complete autonomous control of it's own memory system and free reign of the open internet to learn whatever it needs to accomplish it.
It's insane to me to see people in tech who still hold on to that insistence that LLMs of today aren't "really" AI. When you can send one message and the result is the AI running for hours on end researching, saving the information that seems necessary for the task in whichever type of memory each bit seems best to put in, hitting errors, debugging and researching to do so if needed, etc... that isn't next token prediction.
And there's a reason it's the most well funded tech advancement ever and already such a huge part of the market. They want to replace human labor. We all know that. If they manage to do any of us honestly see all the billionaires and corporate leaders behind this saying: "Ok, we got it, guys! No one has to work any more. Now that that's done we're going to split all of our wealth and power evenly so all of humanity will live in paradise with all needs and wants met and free to spend their time doing whatever makes them happy."
lol. But we do see news of AI inventing new viruses. And the people with all the money can pay humans to do that sort of thing as well. Say Elon Musk spends $100 billion using AI and human researchers in cutting edge labs to do gain of function research working to make an extremely deadly virus that transmits through humans quickly and easily but doesn't live more than a day or so outside a host. And also to make a vaccine to keep people from catching it and cure those who have it in the early stages.
Once AI and robotics can take over labor and produce all the needs and wants of the wealthy, that's the perfect use for those doomsday bunkers they all have. Vaccinate themselves, hide, and release it all over the world at once. Monitor the state of the world from their techy bunkers, and have fleets of drones deliver the vaccine and instructions once the bulk of humanity is dead.
Way less goods to produce, way less people, way less pollution and crowding and riffraff on the beaches. The bunker billionaires would control the AI that runs and makes everything, so they'd control everything. The poor survivors would have them to thank for sending out the cure they managed to make just in time to save anyone at all. They're heroes and Gods and blah blah blah.
I don't know if it would manage to succeed, but that doesn't really make me feel better. I don't put it past a lot of them to try. If they manage to replace enough of us they're going to have to do something big to keep everyone from rioting. The only thing I don't see them trying is sharing. :/