this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2025

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What If A.I. Doesn’t Get Much Better Than This? (www.newyorker.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago by misk@piefed.social to c/technology@lemmy.zip

23 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Archive: https://archive.ph/2025.08.13-105813/https://www.newyorker.com/culture/open-questions/what-if-ai-doesnt-get-much-better-than-this

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[–] spankmonkey@lemmy.world 21 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

By design, LLMs can get faster but cannot be more accurate without a massive intentional approach to verifying their datasets, which isn't feasible because that would counter anything not fact based as LLMs don't understand context. Basically, the training approach means that they get filled with whatever the builders can get their hands on and then they fall back to web searches which return all kinds of unreliable stuff because LLMs don't have a way of verifying reliability.

Even if they were perfect, they will not be able to keep up with the content flood of new information that comes out every minute when used as general purpose answer anything tools.

What AI actually excels at is pattern matching in controlled settings.

[–] slate@sh.itjust.works 17 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

And now, lots of web searches return results of AI SEO slop chock full of incorrect information, which then fules subsequent training sets and LLM web searches and creates a negative feedback loop that could destroy the internet.

[–] spankmonkey@lemmy.world 11 points 2 weeks ago

The AI SEO slop is already destroying the internet, although that negative feedback loop is certainly accelerating it.

[–] Ramblingman@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

Apparently gpt-5 is much worse, or so the subreddit dedicated to it says. I wonder if that loop has already started?

[–] givesomefucks@lemmy.world 9 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

They're operating under the long outdated assumption that all you need to simulate a brain is match the number of neurons....

That's not how any of this works, but they've been saying "we'll be there soon" for so long now that we're almost able to do it, their gonna lose their main excuse and main reason for fundraising.

They'll have to tell investors the timeline just changed from years to maybe decades if we're lucky

And it's gonna divebomb our whole economy because fucking every fund manager is dumping insane levels of money into it.

[–] Perspectivist@feddit.uk 0 points 2 weeks ago

Which AI company has taken this approach exactly? Whose this "they" you're refering to?

[–] Perspectivist@feddit.uk 7 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

I think the title should be "What if LLMs doesn't get much better than this?" because that's effectively what the article is talking about. I see no reason to expect that our AI systems wouldn't keep improving even if LLMs don't.

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 weeks ago

Neural networks becoming practical is world-changing. This lets us do crazy shit we have no idea how to program sensibly. Dead-reckoning with an accelerometer could be accurate to the inch. Chroma-key should rival professional rotoscoping. Any question with a bunch of data and a simple answer can be trained at some expense and then run on an absolute potato.

So it's downright bizarre that every single company is fixated on guessing the next word with transformers. Alternatives like text diffusion and mamba pop up and then disappear, without so much as a 'so that didn't work' blog post.

[–] kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 week ago

Yeah, I think LLMs are close to their peak. Any new revolutionary developments in LLMs will probably be in efficiency rather than capability. Something that can actually think in a real sense will probably happen eventually, though, and unless it's even more absurdly resource-intensive it'll probably replace LLMs in everything but autocomplete (since they're legitimately good at that).

[–] theneverfox@pawb.social 0 points 1 week ago

I think that's true, but also missing the point... We've hit the peak of AI until the next transformative breakthrough

They're still fucking magic. They're really cool and useful, when you use them correctly.

But chat gpt 5 isn't much better than 3.5. It's a bit better, it requires less prompt engineering to get good results, it gives more consistent results... But it's still unreliable. And weirdly likes to talk down to you now, as if I don't know more than it...I am still the expert here, it's a light speed intern, it doesn't know what's going on

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 weeks ago

Some guy blogged that the smart ones move to advertising.

[–] m532@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 1 week ago

That's what they always say, and then... new stuff

Qwen-Image (diffusion with a LLM as text encoder) came out 10 days ago and it understands the prompt like 20x better, than, for example, SDXL Turbo

[+] Rossphorus@lemmy.world -6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Honestly? If AI systems stopped improving forever? That's probably best case scenario. LLMs are already superhuman on a knowledge level, human-level in terms of speed (tokens per sec, etc), but subhuman in many other areas. This makes them useful for some tasks, but not so useful that they could cause any sort of existential threat to humanity (either in an economic sense or in a misalignment sense). If LLMs stagnate here then we have at least one tool in our AI toolbox that we're pretty sure isn't conscious/sentient/etc., which is useful since that makes them predictable on some level. Humans can deal with that.

Unfortunately, I see no reason why AI systems in general wouldn't continue to improve. Even if LLMs do stagnate they're only one tiny branch of a much larger tree, and we already have at least one example of an AI system that is conscious and sentient - a human. This means even if somehow the human brain was the only architecture ever capable of sentience (incredibly unlikely), we could always simulate/emulate a human brain to get human-level AGI. Simulate/emulate it faster? Superhuman AGI.

[–] MotoAsh@lemmy.world 5 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

No... you're anthropomorphising the technology to hell and back...

"Knowledge" takes understanding, and no current generation of "AI" has basically any level of understanding. Being able to crap out eloquently stated BS is not knowledge nor thought.

Yet, they're still a MASSIVE economic threat, mostly because moronic investors and c-suits are also anthropomorphising them and buying in to the sales pitch BS that's straight up lies at a fundamental level... They cannot replace real workers, yet execs are trying to anyways.

This has already become a massive house of cards for the economy.

[–] Rossphorus@lemmy.world -2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

I don't want to get into an argument of semantics, whatever your definition of 'knowledge' is, LLMs can recall a greater number of factoids than any individual human. That's all I meant. Are they perfect? No, I never said that. They're still far beyond the average human, however, hence superhuman.

I said that LLMs are not an existential threat to humanity, even economically. I never said that they wouldn't threaten individual jobs, or cause a bubble. Please don't strawman me. You and I are looking at completely different levels of effects, I'm looking at the big picture - is humanity or society as we know it going to continue to exist in 100 years (in this hypothetical where AI and/or LLMs stagnated)? If yes, then LLMs are not an existential threat. That's what an existential threat means, after all.

Is AI causing en economic bubble? Sure, but like all bubbles they will burst when people realise that they have limited use due to their drawbacks. The world will then return to some semblance of normalcy. That's a non-existential threat.

Now, if we're talking about a world in which AI systems continue to evolve? All bets are off the table, which is why AI somehow stagnating to where it is now is the best case scenario.

[–] MotoAsh@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

You're still doing it. "recalling factoids" is not how they work. At all.

Me saying you're wrong about them being an economic threat isn't a strawman. It's me disagreeing about the severity of the issue. You having an ignorant opinion is not me strawmanning you. It's me calling you ignorant.

[–] Rossphorus@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Fine, you want me to be pedantic? When prompted with tokens that appear in an order that humans understand as a question that corresponds to some aspect of the universe as we understand it, the tokens predicted by the LLM correspond to an answer that humans agree is more representative than the tokens provided by the average human.

Tell me where in my initial comment I said they weren't an economic threat. I never said they weren't. I said they aren't an existential economic threat. Please read my comment.

[–] MotoAsh@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

And I disagree about them being existential threats to many, and to the whole current layout of the economy. It's not designed to perform well for everyone with high unemployment rates in the first place, let alone in The Gilded Age 2.0, let alone with a machine that supposedly can perform such a variety of jobs driving up unemployment, let alone during an economic depression caused by lunatic politicians, let alone during a time where the climate is changing drastically and changing the dynamics of many markets.

This is, indeed, a recipe for economic collapse, and "AI" is a key part of the economic turmoil already happening, let alone any unforseen speed bumps and pitfalls the other issues have in store.

[–] Rossphorus@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Don't forget this is all under the umbrella of the initial hypothetical where AI stalled at it's current level. I don't believe that existing LLMs systems will destroy the economy. They're a tool that people are trying to fit into every hole, much like blockchain during the crypto bubble. We've already seen companies fire their customer service departments, try to replace them with LLMs, then have to go crawling back when that failed catastrophically.

If AI systems continue to improve, however? As I said previously, all bets are off.

[–] MotoAsh@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Ehh, even current LLMs are good enough to fool the fools who hold the purse strings. Even you are directly admitting that. We're already aimed for a massive recession/depression, and the extra turmoil from AI, regardless of how permanent its job losses are, may be enough to ensure it hits much greater lows to the point where it will take decades to recover if ever.

[–] Rossphorus@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

This is how bubbles always go, see the Gartner hype cycle. People always overextend, try to apply new tools/tech into places that it doesn't belong, and only then do people realise the limitations of technology. This is common in business, C-suites explicitly exploit the hype cycle to secure naive investor funding, but investors always become wise eventually - it's a game to see how much money can be extracted from them before they become increasingly aware of the limitations of the technology. There will be niches where the tech actually settles, but it's always much smaller than what's promised. I'm a programmer, I've been listening to people say that LLMs are going to take my job for the past five years, and yet every time I've actually tried to apply an LLM directly to my work it's failed in a pretty drastic manner. I find existing systems useful as a tool, but that's about it.

[–] MotoAsh@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The fact bubbles grow only means that this partivular cycle's downfall will be particularly harsh, given all of the factors I've already cited are lining up.

That's the point! The fact that it is a bubble only reinforces my point.

[–] Rossphorus@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago

Bubbles are not an existential threat to society. We've had like four bubbles in the past 20 years.