For comparison, here's the frontpage from ten years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2015-12-09
totally forgot about Magic Leap
Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now
251–260 of 1001 posts
Re: Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is so syncophantic, I can't stand LLMs that try to hype you up as if you're some genius, brilliant mind instead of yet another average joe.
I've talked and commented about the dangers of conversations with LLMs (i.e. they activate human social wiring and have a powerful effect, even if you know it's not real. Studies show placebo pills have a statistically significant effect even when the study participant knows it's a placebo -- the effect here is similar). Despite knowing and articulating that, I fell into a rabbit hole with Claude about a month ago wh…
In ChatGPT at least you can choose "Efficient" as the base style/tone and "Straight shooting" for custom instructions. And this seems to eliminate a lot of the fluff. I no longer get those cloyingly sweet outputs that play to my ego in cringey vernacular. Although it still won't go as far as criticizing my thoughts or ideas unless I explicitly ask it to (humans will happily do this without prompting. lol)
Re: Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now
#253IBM acquires OpenAI.
I lol'd
Gemini is predicting the total collapse of OpenAI
Also generates the HackerNews pattern of "lets rewrite X in Rust/Zig"
Re: Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now
#254Why is this a hallucination?
[dead]
Re: Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought the page was a hilarious joke, not a bad prediction. A lot of these are fantastic observational humour about HN and tech. Gary Marcus still insisting AI progress is stalling 10 years from now, for example. Several digs at language rewrites. ITER hardly having nudged forwards. Google killing another service. And so on.
That's what makes this so funny: the AI was earnestly attempting to predict the future, but it's so bad at truly out-of-distribution predictions that an AI-generated 2035 HN frontpage is hilariously stuck in the past. "The more things change, the more they stay the same" is a source of great amusement to us, but deliberately capitalizing on this was certainly not the "intent" of the AI.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume the AI was earnestly attempting to predict the future, it’s just as likely attempting to make jokes here for the user who prompted it, or neither of those things.
Re: Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've talked and commented about the dangers of conversations with LLMs (i.e. they activate human social wiring and have a powerful effect, even if you know it's not real. Studies show placebo pills have a statistically significant effect even when the study participant knows it's a placebo -- the effect here is similar). Despite knowing and articulating that, I fell into a rabbit hole with Claude about a month ago wh…
> But not everyone is fortunate enough to know someone they can reach out to for grounding in reality. this shouldn't stop you at all: write it all up, post on HN and go viral, someone will jump in to correct you and point you at sources while hopefully not calling you, or your mother, too many names. https://xkcd.com/386/
Most stuff posted here are mostly ignored, though. If grounding to reality requires one to become viral first, we are cooked.
Re: Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
my hypothesis is they trained it to snake case for lower case and that obsession carried over from programming to other spheres. It can't bring itself to make a lowercaseunseparatedname
Most LLMs, including Gemini (AFAIK), operate on tokens. lowercaseunseparatedname would be literally impossible for them to generate, unless they went out of their way to enhance the tokenizer. E.g. the LLM would need a special invisible separator token that it could output, and when preprocessing the training data the input would then be tokenized as "lowercase unseparated name" but with those invisible separators. e…
The tokenization can represent uncommon words with multiple tokens. Inputting your example on https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer (GPT-4o) gives me (tokens separated by "|"):
lower|case|un|se|parated|nameRe: Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now
#258Re: Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now
#259HN users: Let's ban AI comments in threads. HN users, later the same day: Let's vote an AI thread to the top.
Because it's hilarious
Re: Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to complain (lightheartedly) about Claude's constant "You're absolutely right!" statements, yet oddly found myself missing them when using Codex. Claude is completely over-the-top and silly, and I don't actually care whether or not it thinks I'm right. Working with Codex feels so dry in comparison. To quote Oliver Babish, "In my entire life, I've never found anything charming." Yet I miss Claude's excessive at…
And that's exactly the point, it increases engagement and stickiness, which they found through testing. They're trying to make the most addictive tool and that constant praise fulfills that goal, even as many of us say it's annoying and over-the-top. My own experience is that it gets too annoying to keep adding "stop the engagement-driving behavior" to the prompt, so it creeps in and I just try to ignore it. But even…
> And that's exactly the point, it increases engagement and stickiness, which they found through testing. They're trying to make the most addictive tool
Is this actually true? Would appreciate further reading on this if you have it.
I think this is an emergent property of the RLHF process, not a social media-style engagement optimization campaign. I don't think there is an incentive for LLM creators to optimize for engagement; there aren't ads (yet), inference is not free, and maximizing time spent querying ChatGPT doesn't really do much for OpenAI's bottom line.