Will these models eventually replace all knowledge work, leaving lawyers, doctors, product managers, software developers, and others out of a job?

If the benefits were shared across humanity, that could bring us closer to utopia. My worry is that we’ll instead end up with a handful of even wealthier billionaires and millions of people out of work.

> Will these models eventually replace all knowledge work, leaving lawyers, doctors, product managers, software developers, and others out of a job?

Effectively yes, in the current forms. Those professions will likely evolve, but the traditional forms (ie writing code by hand, writing law filings by hand etc) are all dead.

> Those professions will likely evolve, but the traditional forms (ie writing code by hand, writing law filings by hand etc)

there will still be writing initial and incremental prompts by hands, until and if LLMs surpass humans in all intellectual functions.

Writing a brief by hand isn't the knowledge work of being an attorney, it's knowing what to write. The writing it down is the most trivial part.

in that case, legal cases would just come down to who has more compute lol. Many times cases win on their merits, but we've also seen evidence where overwhelming legal pressure can influence cases.

bigger spender already has a huge advantage, up to millions of dollars

this is more likely to democratize the legal system by reducing the cost of a good legal team

May I just note that there are other jurisdictions on this planet that are less money-biased than than the US one but will be disrupted by law-LLMs as well?

It seems much more probable to me that these LLMs will make good things worse than that they will make bad things better.

Everywhere a good lawyer costs a lot of money.

where does more money to pay a better legal team not help?

Just a few years ago people were paying 400k for pictures of apes. We always make up new stuff to spend money on.

You know most of that was wash trading, right?

If we have enough energy and raw materials to keep building, yes, it will be an utopia made real. But if there is energy scarcity, then other two outcomes can arise.

This also assumes that the AI owners _want_ a global utopia, or that governments will enforce that outcome.

As it stands, it seems far more likely to result in a wonderful life for a few, and an absolute catastrophe for most.

XIX century dickensian society and Gilded Age barons were replaced by the time of the New Deal.

No, it will only leave those without a professional license jobless. Like software developers.

Doubt it. When someone can go to Astra MD for 75% of what they used to go to the doctor for, then the remaining doctors only have 25% as many visits. When doctors only have 25% as many visits, they have to compete on price and they make less per visit.

Same argument for plumbers. Everyone always jokes about what a good time it is to be a plumber. But what happens when all the software engineers turn to plumbing? Suddenly it's not such a good time to be a plumber anymore.

What happens when the AI makes a mistake with a diagnosis? I can hear it now 'Oh how perceptive you are, yes that pain in your knee could have been a torn meniscus'.

Eagerly awaiting your robot plumbing startup. I highly doubt anything in plumbing is compute-limited.

Reread my comment if you think I was talking about robots doing plumbing

True, unless you're a surgeon.

I mean that's what all of these execs are openly telling everyone: they want you out of work, they want their ai to be the one to bring the world to it's knees, they want to surveille every second of your day, they want killer drones to use, they want to lay all of your cities to rubble and build "paradises" on top of them like in gaza.

They also openly tell you what they are afraid of btw: collective worker power. something that is massively lacking in our industry, although i feel like it would be one of the easiest industries to unionize in terms of # of workers.

Interesting interview I just watched about how powerful and dangerous these "wishes" or "prophecies" are especially in the hands of the ultra-wealthy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eR7grHa1NR0

I went from IDE (VS Code) to terminal (wezterm) running half a dozen agents in an app called Herdr. My computer work is mostly in the terminal now, prompting agents. And they have access to my Obsidian vaults. Can read, and add to them. And access all my notes via a local RAG. I neither need projects in Claude, nor IDEs. Just agents accessing my local vaults and code repos.

Yes, we need agent-oriented IDE not the old VS code style!

Some 20 years ago, the telecommunications sector in Germany was liberalized. Many telephone card providers entered what had previously been a barely competitive market. They advertised their products with aggressive claims like: “Buy our €10 top-up card and get 660 minutes to destination X.”

For the first few weeks, they would actually provide those 660 minutes to establish trust in their cards. But after a while, they would quietly start reducing the number of minutes on subsequent top-ups—say, from 660 minutes down to only 300. They wouldn’t do this for every card, so it was difficult to prove. Instead, they relied on averages across their customer base to make the economics work.

Lately, I’ve found myself wondering whether something similar may be happening with frontier AI models. Companies launch with an exceptionally strong model and generous compute limits to build adoption. Once the model is established as a market leader, the incentives change, and users may start perceiving the service as becoming more constrained or less capable over time.

I don’t have evidence that this is what’s happening with Anthropic—or with any other AI company. It’s simply a pattern that the current situation reminds me of.

Which prompt, though? Just the initial one, or the entire conversation? During a project you’ll prompt the agent dozens of times. Are all of those prompts considered the source?

For those who moved away from GitHub: do you miss the social/discovery side of it?

I mean things like comments on issues/PRs, stars, followers, finding existing repos, seeing which projects are popular, and getting drive-by contributions.

Or does that matter less than I imagine once you self-host and mirror public repos back to GitHub/Codeberg?

I used to love browsing GitHub Explore Trending but in the last two years it is almost exclusively AI apps that are slight improvement on the previous trending page of AI apps.

GitHub explore could be way more interesting with a simple filter algorithm.

I‘d go with Scheme. You‘ll learn the basics in a day. The language spec is only a few pages. And Scheme reads like pseudo-code with parentheses.

Wouldn’t a modern app like iA Wtiter or any other distraction free full screen text based writer be just as good? Or why does WordStar still have his fanbase decades later?

What is the incentive of the U.S. government? Is it to prevent adversaries from accessing this powerful technology? Because of security concerns? Or is there a fear that European, Asian, Latin American, and other companies could use it to build competitive products? What happened to free trade? What about all of humanity advancing and making progress?

Are GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.8 the last models we're going te be allowed to use in Europe? Is there going to be a cut, and we're only be allowed to use less capabale models outside of the US?

I mean, if they deem Fable 5 to powerful to share with the rest of the world, what's left for us?

That's a real possibility for a time, but eventually people will look back at fable 5 the same way we look back at gpt2

We have le chaton fat, worry not