261–270 of 326 posts
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> The number of people saying it Popular sentiment is a pretty meaningless metric for predicting the future.
Then we shouldn't use the 10 year-old (lesser) popular sentiment as a reason to discount AI either.
I‘m arguing public sentiment will be right 50% of the time (in difficult binary predictions), not 0%.
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One thing that LLMs have made me realize is just how ungrounded a lot of mainstream academic philosophy was in the 70s and 80s. For example, so much of Derrida's work centered around the impossibility of truly communicating shared meaning between individuals through language. The fact that we can now communicate so effectively (with remarkably few contextual errors and razor-sharp conveyance of intent) with an entity…
>The fact that we can now communicate so effectively (with remarkably few contextual errors and razor-sharp conveyance of intent) with an entity/technology that is not even human pretty much destroys so much of Derrida's oeuvre as false and delusionally solipsistic Isn't the LLM just good at giving us the illusion of such effective communication? How can we have true "shared meaning" with a device designed to simulat…
When I use GitHub Copilot, I'll often write a comment describing some code I want it to implement and then it spits out a suggestion. Occasionally it fails badly at this and I realize I worded my comment badly. When I reword the comment better and then find that Copilot's next suggestion nails it what I wanted, is that not the result of me effectively communicating with it through the comment? (If I did that with a human coworker instead, is that communication?)
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Yes, this stuff is fun to work with and use as an aid to programming. But I think what's dawning on a lot of us is that it seems to be able to facilitate a large increase productivity. And given that large productivity increase will industry need as many software developers (and other knowledge workers)?
I can already feel it dramatically increasing my personal productivity. I expect it's going to eventually lead to a 2x or 3x time productivity increase for software engineering generally (if not more). Will that result in less demand for software engineers? I doubt it. I think it will lead to companies and organizations doing way more software engineering. I was going to use the old "ATMs resulted in more jobs for ba…
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Same here. I don't think it's surprising, but depending on where you say it, you'll find people insisting that this can't be possible. I think a lot of our widely held cultural beliefs on this front have been informed by academic philosophy from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. In particular, I would go do far as to say that Hubert Dreyfus, author of the book "What computers can't do" and frequent friendly adversary of Daniel…
One thing that LLMs have made me realize is just how ungrounded a lot of mainstream academic philosophy was in the 70s and 80s. For example, so much of Derrida's work centered around the impossibility of truly communicating shared meaning between individuals through language. The fact that we can now communicate so effectively (with remarkably few contextual errors and razor-sharp conveyance of intent) with an entity…
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Has Chomsky been right about anything?
My first introduction to him was when one uncontacted tribe or anothers' language refuted something he thought was fundamental to humans. In the decade(s) since I kinda think "Chomsky was wrong" is pretty much the only reason people bring him up.
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Doing a table lookup for common cases and computing for the less common ones is perfectly valid!
Not 100% sure but I believe this is how we landed the lunar module on the moon the first time...tan/arctan/both were too hard to compute on the processors of those days so they discretized into half angles & stored the tangents in a lookup table.
There is a startling acceleration of innovation in the field that GPT-4 illustrates. According to NVidia, LLM sizes have been increasing 10X per year for the last few years. This tech is going to hit every aspect of society like a sledgehammer over the next 48 months.
I guess you perception of society is severely limited if you think a fancy autocomplete is capable of changing every aspect of it.
What happens when AI models ingest the AI-generated content that will soon flood the web?
But if they creating BS, then we’ll need much better tools for validating truth.
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> Emotionally and psychologically I think that some tech and other highly paid knowledge workers just can't accept the sea-change that we are living through. This is a good way to frame it. As a mid-career person, I’m trying to figure out how to respond to these developments in my own career. I think there’s a good chance that software development as a career looks very different in 10 years in terms of the day to da…
I've been calling the mockery and dismissiveness, "nervous laughter". I think we have a sharp crowd here but they either lack imagination or are in denial.
Every innovation can be used both for good and for evil, and it often has unintended side-effects. Just ask Thomas Midgley Jr., who played a major role in both leaded gasoline and CFCs. Or Alfred Nobel, who tried to make mining safer, only to be appalled at an erroneous obituary to describe him as the "merchant of death" due to its military use.
Over the last two decades we've seen tech giants go from a bunch of nerds in garages to parasites invading our personal lives and consuming every bit of data about us they can get their hands on - and social media went from a cute gimmick to a society-destroying tool powering genocides.
AI is undeniably extremely promising, and it is not hard to see that it has the potential to change the world forever. However, we are inherently unable to understand how it works, or to alter it in a meaningful way. It's a Pandora's Black Box: will it give us a better and easier life, or will it destroy us? Nobody knows, least of all the people who are opening it!
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I see a lot of irony in this. When Chomsky proposed generative grammars, his theory of universal language acquisition, and so on, they were radical ideas that upturned the central cannon of linguistics. Time has been on his side - entire schools and subfields of linguistics went extinct as more evidence emerged that Chomsky was fundamentally right. Basically every computer language and data format in existence is par…
What's even more bizarre is the ChatGPT is proving him right , that a neural net can build logical grammar, and he is denying it!
“ Their deepest flaw is the absence of the most critical capacity of any intelligence: to say not only what is the case, what was the case and what will be the case — that’s description and prediction — but also what is not the case and what could and could not be the case. Those are the ingredients of explanation, the mark of true intelligence.”
Isn’t that just plainly true of LLMs? Sure they can produce text that looks like an explanation, and sure putting in a header telling it to spell out its reasoning will get it to output text that looks like reasoning, but I feel the nature of its hallucinations make it clear that it’s not actually performing those steps anywhere in the net.
But maybe I’m just a Luddite? These technologies are amazing and transformative, I’m just shocked to see hate on HN of CHOMSKY of all people, the father of modern linguistics and cognitive science…