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I Am Tired of AI

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Re: I Am Tired of AI

#851

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But superhuman AI seems now only few years away Seems unreasonable. You are afraid because marketing gurus like Altman made you believe that a frog that can make bigger leap than before will be able to fly.

That argument holds no water because the grifters aren't the source of this idea. I literally don't believe Altman at all; his public words don't inspire me to agree or disagree with them - just ignore them. But I also hold the view that transformative AI could be very close. Because that's what many AI experts are also talking about from a variety of angles. Additionally, when you're talking with certainty about whe…

> Because that's what many AI experts are also talking about from a variety of angles.

Wow, in that case I'm convinced. Such an unbiased group with nothing at all to gain from massive AI hype.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#852
post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The evidence I've been seeing is that progress with LLMs have already slowed down and that they're nowhere near good enough to replace programmers. They can be useful tools ro be sure, but it seems more and more clear that they will not reach AGI.

They are already above average human level on many tasks, like math benchmarks.

So are calculators …

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#853

I'm tired of LLMs. Enough billions of dollars have been spent on LLMs that a reasonably good picture of what they can and can't do has emerged. They're really good at some things, terrible at others, and prone to doing something totally wrong some fraction of the time. That last limits their usefulness. They can't safely be in charge of anything important. If someone doesn't soon figure out how to get a confidence me…

Totally agree on the confidence metric. The way chatbots spew complete falsities in such a confident tone is really disheartening. I want to use AI more but I don't feel I can trust it at all. If I can't trust it and have to search for other resources to verify it's claims, the value is really diminished.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#854
post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What fascinates me about your comment is that you are expressing that you trusted what you read before. For me, LLMs don't change anything. I already questioned the information before and continue to do so. Why do you think that you could trust what you read before? Is it now harder for you to distinguish false information, and if so, why?

There were news reports that Russia spent less than a million dollars on a massive propaganda campaign targeting U.S elections and the American population in general. Do you think it would be possible before internet, before AI? Bad actors, poorly written/sourced information, sensationalism etc have always existed. It is nothing new. What is new is the scale, speed and cost of making and spreading poor quality stuff…

How can I wreck havoc with a few hours, a laptop, and an internet connection?

It takes a bit more than that.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#855
post #846

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The utility of LLMs clearly exists (I'm building a product on this premise, so I'm not uninterested!) But hype also exists. How closely they are matched is not yet clear. But your comment seems to indicate that the "pro-tech" position is automatically the best. This is _not_ true, as cryptocurrency has already demonstrated.

Funny thing is you are actually the pro [corporate] tech one, not on the side of freedom. Furthermore nobody said anything about crypto - you are seriously grasping at straws. You have said nothing about the products on shelves (billions of dollars in the industry already) argument, only presented crypto as an argument which has nothing to do with the conversation.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#856
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trust as no bearing on what they said. Reading was a form of connecting with someone. Their opinions are bound to be flawed, everyone's are - but they're still the thoughts and words of a person. This is no longer the case. Thus, the human factor is gone and this reduces the experience to some of us, me included.

I think the key thing here is equating trust and truth. I trust my dog, a lot, more than most humans frankly. She has some of my highest levels of trust attainable, yet I don’t exactly equate her actions with truth. She often barks when there’s no one at the door or at false threats she doesn’t know aren’t real threats and so on. But I trust she believes it 100% and thinks she’s helping me 100%. What I think OP was s…

> She has some of my highest levels of trust attainable

I like to think of these ambiguities of "trust" as something like:

1. Trusting their identity

2. Trusting their intentions

3. Trusting their judgement about what to do

4. Trusting their competence to execute the task

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#857
post #742

My last job made me shill for AI stuff because GPUs have a lot of income potential. One of my next ones is going to make me shill for AI stuff because it makes people deal with terrifying amounts of data. I understand why this is the case, but it's still kinda disappointing. I'm hoping for an AI winter so that I can talk about normal uses of computers again.

reviving an old throwaway:

the last two years have been incredibly depressing in the space of dedicated hardware for doing high performance computing tasks.

all the air has been sucked out of the room because the world can’t get enough of generating more text that no one has any meaningful use for besides hyping up their product whose primary focus is how it “leverages AI”.

and in the midst of all of this, I’m seeing these same technologies dramatically accelerate problems in short fiction, science fiction and fantasy, and education.

it will be absurdly bleak if the grotesque reality we’re creating destroys the things that made go into science & engineering in the first place…

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#858

I'm tired of LLMs. Enough billions of dollars have been spent on LLMs that a reasonably good picture of what they can and can't do has emerged. They're really good at some things, terrible at others, and prone to doing something totally wrong some fraction of the time. That last limits their usefulness. They can't safely be in charge of anything important. If someone doesn't soon figure out how to get a confidence me…

Is it even possible in principle for an LLM to produce a confidence interval given that in a lot of cases the input is essentially untrusted?

What comes to mind is - I consider myself an intelligent being capable of recognising my limits - but if you put my brain in a vat and taught me a new field of science, I could quite easily make claims about it that were completely incorrect if your teaching was incorrect because I have no actual real world experience to match it up to.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#859

I'm tired of LLMs. Enough billions of dollars have been spent on LLMs that a reasonably good picture of what they can and can't do has emerged. They're really good at some things, terrible at others, and prone to doing something totally wrong some fraction of the time. That last limits their usefulness. They can't safely be in charge of anything important. If someone doesn't soon figure out how to get a confidence me…

Is it even possible in principle for an LLM to produce a confidence interval given that in a lot of cases the input is essentially untrusted? What comes to mind is - I consider myself an intelligent being capable of recognising my limits - but if you put my brain in a vat and taught me a new field of science, I could quite easily make claims about it that were completely incorrect if your teaching was incorrect becau…

Right, and that's why "years of experience" matters in humans. You will be giving incorrect answers, but as long as you get feedback, you will improve, or at least calibrate your confidence meter.

This is not the case with current model - they are forever stuck at junior level, and they won't improve no matter how much you correct them.

I know humans like that too. I don't ask them questions that I need good answers too.

Re: I Am Tired of AI

#860

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"They're really good at some things, terrible at others, and prone to doing something totally wrong some fraction of the time." I agree 100% with this sentiment, but, it also is a decent description of individual humans. This is what processes and control systems/controls are for. These are evolving at a slower pace than the LLMs themselves at the moment so we're looking to the LLM to be its own control. I don't thin…

>also is a decent description of individual humans A friend of mine was moving from software development into managing devs. He told me: "They often don't do things the way or to the quality I'd like, but 10 of them just get so much more done than I could on my own." This was him coming to terms with letting go of some control, and switching to "guiding the results" rather than direct control. The LLMs are a lot like…

Your friend got lucky, I've seen (and worked with) people with negative productivity - they make the effort and sometimes they commit code, but it inevitably ends up being broken, and I realize that it would take less of my time for me to write the code myself, rather than spend all the time explaining and then fixing bugs.

The LLMS are a lot like this.

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