Where did "can't you just turn it off?" in the title come from? It doesn't appear anywhere in the actual title or the article, and I don't think it really aligns with its main assertions.
The retitling now by HN appears more accurate
Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI
161–170 of 461 posts
Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI
#162I found this statement particularly relevant:
While it’s possible to demonstrate the safety of an AI for
a specific test suite or a known threat, it’s impossible
for AI creators to definitively say their AI will never act
maliciously or dangerously for any prompt it could be given.
Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Holy survivorship bias, Batman. If you think modern software is unreliable, let me introduce you to our friend, Rational Rose.
You know, I had spent a good amount of years not having even a single thought about rational rose, and now that’s all over.
It could definitely be worse. I have the privilege of using it weekly :(
Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI
#164> AIs will get more reliable over time, like old software is more reliable than new software. :) Was that a humam Freudian slip, or artificial one? Yes, old software is often more reliable than new.
Holy survivorship bias, Batman. If you think modern software is unreliable, let me introduce you to our friend, Rational Rose.
I think old in this sense is "released" rather than "beta" - it takes time to make any software reliable. Many of the examples here further prove that young software is unreliable.
Remember when debuggers were young?
Remember when OSes were young?
Remember when multi-tasking CPUs were young?
Etc...
Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI
#165> Because eventually we’ll iron out all the bugs so the AIs will get more reliable over time Honestly this feels like a true statement to me. It's obviously a new technology, but so much of the "non-deterministic === unusable" HN sentiment seems to ignore the last two years where LLMs have become 10x as reliable as the initial models.
They have certainly gotten better, but it seems to me like the growth will be kind of logarithmic. I'd expect them to keep getting better quickly for a few more years and then kinda slow and eventually flatline as we reach the maximum for this sort of pattern matching kind of ML. And I expect that flat line will be well below the threshold needed for, say, a small software company to not require a programmer.
Ahaha, of course nothing will ever be able to do my job!
Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI
#166For a real world example of the challenges of harnessing LLMs, look at Apple. Over a year ago they had a big product launch focused on "Apple Intelligence" that was supposed to make heavy use of LLMs for agentic workflows. But all we've really gotten since then are a couple of minor tools for making emojis, summarizing notifications, and proof reading. And they even had to roll back the notification summaries for a w…
I'm happy they ate shit here because I like my mac not getting co-pilot bullshit forced into it, but apparently Apple had two separate teams competing against each other on this topic. Supposedly a lot of politics got in the way of delivering on a good product combined with the general difficulty of building LLM products.
Mac LLM vs Lisa LLM?
Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI
#167For a real world example of the challenges of harnessing LLMs, look at Apple. Over a year ago they had a big product launch focused on "Apple Intelligence" that was supposed to make heavy use of LLMs for agentic workflows. But all we've really gotten since then are a couple of minor tools for making emojis, summarizing notifications, and proof reading. And they even had to roll back the notification summaries for a w…
I'm happy they ate shit here because I like my mac not getting co-pilot bullshit forced into it, but apparently Apple had two separate teams competing against each other on this topic. Supposedly a lot of politics got in the way of delivering on a good product combined with the general difficulty of building LLM products.
Apparently? From what? Where did this information come from that they had two competing teams?
Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a sci-fi thing, think of it along the lines of "What do you mean Skynet has gone rogue? Can't you just turn it off?" (I think something along these lines was actually in the Terminator 3 movie, the one where Skynet goes live for the first time). Agreed though, no relation to the actual post.
This sci-fi thing goes as far back as the 1983 movie WarGames, where they wanted to pull the plug on a rogue computer, but there was a reason you couldn’t do that: McKittrick: General, the machine has locked us out. It's sending random numbers to the silos. Pat Healy: Codes. To launch the missiles. General Beringer: Just unplug the goddamn thing! Jesus Christ! McKittrick: That won't work, General. It would interpret…
Further than that, even - this trope appears in Colossus: The Forbin Project, released in 1970, where the rogue computer is buried underground with its own nuclear reactor, so it can't be powered off.
Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI
#169Where did "can't you just turn it off?" in the title come from? It doesn't appear anywhere in the actual title or the article, and I don't think it really aligns with its main assertions.
It shows up at https://boydkane.com under the link "Why your boss isn't worried about advanced AI". Must be some kind of sub-heading, but not part of the actual article / blog post. Presumably it's a phrase you might hear from a boss who sees AI as similar to (and as benign/known/deterministic as) most other software, per TFA
In my experience it’s usually the engineers that aren’t worried about AI, because they see the limitations clearly every time they use it. It’s pretty obvious that whole thing is severely overhyped and unreliable.
Your boss (or more likely, your bosses’ bosses’s boss) is the one deeply worried about it. Though mostly worried about being left behind by their competitors and how their company’s use of AI (or lack thereof) looks to shareholders.
Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI
#170All the same criticisms are true about hiring humans. You don’t really know what they’re thinking, you don’t really know what their values and morals are, you can’t trust that they’ll never make a mistake, etc.
I think you're misreading the article; the point here is not "LLMs are bad and can't replace humans," the point is that many non-technical people have the expectation that LLMs can replace humans _but still behave like regular software_ with regard to reliability and operability.
When a CEO sees their customer chatbot call a customer a slur, they don't see "oh my chatbot runs on a stochastic model of human language and OpenAI can't guarantee that it will behave in an acceptable way 100% of the time", they see "ChatGPT called my customer a slur, why did you program it to do that?"