The amount of grumpiness in this comment thread is amazing.
I know I'm personally just tired of trying to converse with people with heads in the sand. AI saves me shit tons of time daily. If they can't figure it out, so be it. The level of absolute denial in HN AI threads is bizarre. One guess is that hacker nerds have their entire personality tied to being a smart haxor. That is being commoditized and they are getting defensive about it. It's telling that the image/video AI threads are nothing like that because it's not their profession being talked about.
I think current LLM chatbots are too predictable to be conscious. But I still see why some people might think this way. "When a computer can reliably beat humans in chess, we'll know for sure it can think." "Well, this computer can beat humans in chess, and it can't think because it's just a computer." ... "When a computer can create art, then we'll know for sure it can think." "Well, this computer can create art, an…
Just consider the context window Tokens falling off of it will change the way it generates text, potentially changing its “personality”, even forgetting the name it’s been given. People fear losing their own selves in this way, through brain damage. The LLM will go its merry way churning through tokens, it won’t have a feeling of loss.
That's an interesting point, but do you think you're implying that people who are content even if they have alzheimers or a damaged hippocampus aren't technically intelligent?
Seems like people here are pretty negative towards a "conversational" AI chatbot. Chatgpt has a lot of frustrations and ethical concerns, and I hate the sycophancy as much as everyone else, but I don't consider being conversational to be a bad thing. It's just preference I guess. I understand how someone who mostly uses it as a google replacement or programming tool would prefer something terse and efficient. I fall…
> I've dreamed about a computer assistant that can respond to natural language When we dreamed about this as kids, we were dreaming about Data from Star Trek, not some chatbot that's been focus grouped and optimized for engagement within an inch of its life. LLMs are useful for many things and I'm a user myself, even staying within OpenAI's offerings, Codex is excellent, but as things stand anthropomorphizing models…
I just changed my ChatGPT personality setting to “Efficient.” It still starts every response with “Yeah, definitely! Let’s talk about that!” — or something similarly inefficient. So annoying.
A pet peeve of mine is that a noticeable amount of LLM output sounds like I’m getting answers from a millennial reddit user. Which is ironic considering I belong to that demographic. I am not a fan of the snark and “trying to be fun and funny” aspect of social media discourse. Thankfully, I haven’t run into checks notes , “ding ding ding” yet.
> a noticeable amount of LLM output sounds like I’m getting answers from a millennial reddit user
LLM was trained on data from the whole internet (of which reddit is a big part). The result is a composite of all the text on the internet.
OpenAI said that only ~4% of generated tokens are for programming. ChatGPT is overwhelmingly, unambiguously, a "regular people" product.
Yes, just look at the stats on OpenRouter. OpenAI has almost totally lost the programming market.
Well that may also be because ChatGPT is worse than Gemini and Claude for coding. I don't know what the benchmarks say, I am just saying that from my own experience.
I like the term prompt performance ; I am definitely going to use it: > prompt performance (n.) > the behaviour of a language model in which it conspicuously showcases or exaggerates how well it is following a given instruction or persona, drawing attention to its own effort rather than simply producing the requested output. :)
Might be a result of using LLMs to evaluate the output of other LLMs. LLMs probably get higher scores if they explicitly state that they are following instructions...
It's like writing an essay for a standardized test, as opposed to one for a college course or for a general audience. When taking a test, you only care about the evaluation of a single grader hurrying to get through a pile of essays, so you should usually attempt to structure your essay to match the format of the scoring rubric. Doing this on an essay for a general audience would make it boring, and doing it in your college course might annoy your professor. Hopefully instruction-following evaluations don't look too much like test grading, but this kind of behavior would make some sense if they do.
I don’t want more conversational, I want more to the point. Less telling me how great my question is, less about being friendly, instead I want more cold, hard, accurate, direct, and factual results. It’s a machine and a tool, not a person and definitely not my friend.
Agreed. But there is a fairly large and very loud group of people that went insane when 4o was discontinued and demanded to have it back. A group of people seem to have forged weird relationships with AI and that is what they want. It's extremely worrying. Heck, the ex Prime Minister of the UK said he loved ChatGPT recently because it tells him how great he is.
And just like casinos optimizing for gambling addicts and sports optimizing for gambling addicts and mobile games optimizing for addicts, LLMs will be optimized to hook and milk addicts.
They will be made worse for non-addicts to achieve that goal.
That's part of why they are working towards smut too, it's not that there's a trillion dollars of untapped potential, it's that the smut market has much better addict return on investment.