ITT: angry people saying fellow brilliant hackers jart and ggerganov are actually not that smart. I'm surprised jart even keeps posting here when we're so hostile and toxic.
Problems that attract smart people
61–70 of 106 posts
Re: Problems that attract smart people
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Moreover it's worrisome that someone who knows Witten and Tao personally doesn't have even grade-school media literacy.
Maybe I don’t have the required level of literacy but I understand « The smartest people I know personally and that I'm aware of generally » as the union of the « know personally » and « aware of generally » sets.
Thanks! This is the sense in which I had intended the sentence. I wish that I knew Terrence Tao and Ed Witten! The smart people I know personally I wanted to keep anonymous....
Re: Problems that attract smart people
#63The premise of this is ridiculous. The smartest people I know personally and that I'm aware of generally are not attracted by AI. Person 1 was interested in fundamental physics (dark matter) but had to leave physics due to lack of job opportunities. Person 2 is Terrence Tao. Person 3 is Ed Witten, etc etc. This reflects the hubris of the tech world that overestimates its own intelligence....
I think by "smartest people" the article is referring to the top 1-3 percent smartest people, not the actual 1-3 smartest people in the world...
It still doesn't occur to me that the 1-3% smartest people in the world would be attracted to LLM/AI just because they're intelligent. The most intelligent people I know are variously uninterested in AI because AI threatens many of their beloved interests in which the confluence of their intelligence can be expressed, i.e creative activities like music, composition, visual art, interactive works like games, and writing.
Re: Problems that attract smart people
#64The premise of this is ridiculous. The smartest people I know personally and that I'm aware of generally are not attracted by AI. Person 1 was interested in fundamental physics (dark matter) but had to leave physics due to lack of job opportunities. Person 2 is Terrence Tao. Person 3 is Ed Witten, etc etc. This reflects the hubris of the tech world that overestimates its own intelligence....
I don't know how many of the tech world now the math/phys world. We had a core set of classes in college around that, but I couldn't compare with computing at the time. After years in juggling with semi-advanced CS/FP ideas, whenever I get into "old" science, it get sobering fast.
Re: Problems that attract smart people
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
The very premise that 'smartness' is easily quantifiable is also flawed. Attempting to rank all human minds on some hierarchical scale is going to run into the same problems as with human bodies. Is it better to be able to run the fastest, or to lift the heaviest weights, or to have the best hand-eye coordination when it comes to throwing and catching objects? Will specialization in one area of mental skill inevitabl…
Exactly, 'smartness' is meaningless. You can accomplish x task with y practice, applies to any task.
Except that smart people need less y to learn almost any x, which is part of what it means to be smart.
Re: Problems that attract smart people
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're just extending the lines in a way you like to imagine. Kinda like wishing for flying cars when we can't even make them navigate 2D city streets autonomously.
I don't have to imagine anything since I'm already delegating part of the job I used to send to my own secretary to AI, such as: - reading boring documents and giving me the gist of it - classifying my emails - checking for typos and problems in my writing - writing the boiler plate of documents - translating doc - doing basic search on a topic, such as legal obligations that haven't change in the last 2 years It's c…
So you're comfortable giving a black box secretary powers, including accessing and using remote APIs on your behalf, while you have zero insight or control over its decisions? Or will you be second guessing it every step of the way rendering it little more then a fancy autocomplete?
I don't think you realize the amount of risk involved in giving these opaque probabilistic systems control over data and compute. They are not people replacements and assuming so and acting on it will create more problems than it solves... Because extending thee lines to wrap around your needs is wishful thinking and there is a lot more complexity and hidden unintended consequences than assumed when saying chatbots capable of using APIs will be dependable personal assistants, which is the point I'm trying to make.
Re: Problems that attract smart people
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly, 'smartness' is meaningless. You can accomplish x task with y practice, applies to any task.
Except that smart people need less y to learn almost any x, which is part of what it means to be smart.
I would add that some of the stupidest things I've seen people do were actually done by people who were, by any objective measure, extremely smart - either from hubris or general otherworldliness....
Re: Problems that attract smart people
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think by "smartest people" the article is referring to the top 1-3 percent smartest people, not the actual 1-3 smartest people in the world...
It still doesn't occur to me that the 1-3% smartest people in the world would be attracted to LLM/AI just because they're intelligent. The most intelligent people I know are variously uninterested in AI because AI threatens many of their beloved interests in which the confluence of their intelligence can be expressed, i.e creative activities like music, composition, visual art, interactive works like games, and writi…
Perhaps I'm outing myself as a so-called unintelligent person here, but I don't see how AI is a threat to creative hobbies of mine like music and writing. AI isn't going to stop me from sitting down at the piano or writing a short story. There will always be people in the world better at those things than me, so what difference does it make if an AI may or may not be better at them too?
And if I can't tell the difference between a human generated piece of art and an AI generated one, then I find that fascinating, not threatening. It says a lot about 1) your own tastes and perceptions, 2) the meaning of art in general, and 3) what exactly it means when activities previously considered solely human are mastered by programs, such as what happened in the past with chess engines, etc.
I think these are all exciting developments, and I look forward to seeing how art will evolve in the way the emergence of chess engines changed strategy for humans moving forward.
Re: Problems that attract smart people
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except that smart people need less y to learn almost any x, which is part of what it means to be smart.
I would add that some of the stupidest things I've seen people do were actually done by people who were, by any objective measure, extremely smart - either from hubris or general otherworldliness....
Your anecdote doesn't really prove anything. "Intelligent" doesn't mean "free of character flaws" or "happy" or "wealthy".
Meanwhile, intelligence research continues to be one of the more fruitful (and reliable) fields of the social sciences
Re: Problems that attract smart people
#70Like Paul Graham, I'm in my 50s. Unlike Paul Graham, I've never been confident that I can identify what a 'smart' person is. The only thing I know for sure is that it rarely has anything to do with what people like to call 'intelligence'.