The rate of change is just phenomenal. Last year I started reading a lot about how the big companies have huge AI models running on basically super computers on the web. This a few months later I heard that people are running these models on high end desktop machines running high end graphics cards. Just in the last few months I got three AI programs running on my old intel macbook air. This machine has 8GB of RAM. This is about the minimum to run AI, nothing runs on another intel machine with 4GB of RAM. Having 16GB of RAM would things running faster or able to run bigger models.
Whisper AI can translate just about any language from just about any music or video file, into english subtitles. Including sung lyrics in a music video. A couple of years ago I wouldn't have believed this is possible. This replaces the need for a translator and a person to do subtitles.
DiffusionBee can make images from a text prompt. Just about anything you can describe. It helps to have models that were trained on the subject of the art. A lot of these models have been reduced in size to just 2GB. This eliminates the job of an artist.
Finally llama.cpp is a dependency free program that lets you run a small chat model on a lot of different hardware. It is not super fast, but types its responses at the speed of a human being that is medium good at typing. This eliminates the need for a team of writers. This eliminates the need for a programmer. It could teach math and science, so it eliminates the need for a teacher.
None of these things by themselves are all that wild, but I was never able to do these things on my computer before this. And now I can do all these of these things on an old laptop with a medium amount of RAM. No crazy processor, no high end, expensive, power hungry graphics card. I have never seen software go from running on super computers to running on old hardware so rapidly.
And starting now just about every new computer, even phones and pad computers are going to have ai accelerator chips built into every processor. A phone will be a faster ai than this old laptop. I had my step dad run diffusion bee on his Macbook M1 laptop and it was literally 60 times faster than my laptop. And this is the first generation of these models. Already people have figured out how to reduce the sizes of these models to very small sizes and still get real work done. Just imagine how powerful these models will get once they start training themselves.
The part that scares me is that just my one old macbook could do the jobs of a dozen people. I don't think companies are going to let the opportunity to reduce their workforce while they multiple the ability of the remaining workers to do a dozen times as much work in a day. I think the bigger companies are going to reduce their workforce by half, and smaller companies will become one person and an ai assistant in size.
Last year I started having my order taken by robots in the drive-thru. How many workers does this eliminate from the workforce? How long before every company has robots taking orders? Will robots do customer service too? Will robot supervisors manage the few workers that are left?
I don't worry about robots destroying us. I worry about companies creating a huge depression from reducing the need for humans to work, until there aren't enough folks left to buy anything. It took decades to recover from the Great Depression. What could happen if governments don't get in front of this will laws to protect human workers, would make that Depression look like happy fun times.
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