LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick
tomrenner.com
LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick
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Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick
#2"AI safety" groups are part of what's described here: you might assume from the general "safety" label that organizations like PauseAI or ControlAI would focus things like data center pollution, the generation of sexual abuse material, causing mental harm, or many other things we can already observe.
But they don't. Instead, "AI safety" organizations all appear to exclusively warn of unstoppable, apocalyptic, and unprovable harms that seem tuned exclusively to instill fear.
Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick
#3I think anyone who thinks that LLMs are not intelligent in any sense is simply living in denial. They might not be intelligent in the same way a human is intelligent, they might make mistakes a person wouldn't make, but that's not the question.
Any standard of intelligence devised before LLMs is passed by LLMs relatively easily. They do things that 10 years ago people would have said are impossible for a computer to do.
I can run claude code on my laptop with an instruction like "fix the sound card on this laptop" and it will analyze what my current settings are, determine what might be wrong, devise tests to have me gather information it can't gather itself, run commands to probe hardware for it's capabilities, and finally offer a menu of solutions, give the commands to implement the solution, and finally test that the solution works perfectly. Can you do that?
Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick
#4"AI safety" groups are part of what's described here: you might assume from the general "safety" label that organizations like PauseAI or ControlAI would focus things like data center pollution, the generation of sexual abuse material, causing mental harm, or many other things we can already observe. But they don't. Instead, "AI safety" organizations all appear to exclusively warn of unstoppable, apocalyptic, and unp…
You are the masses. Are you afraid?
Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick
#5I think anyone who thinks that LLMs are not intelligent in any sense is simply living in denial. They might not be intelligent in the same way a human is intelligent, they might make mistakes a person wouldn't make, but that's not the question. Any standard of intelligence devised before LLMs is passed by LLMs relatively easily. They do things that 10 years ago people would have said are impossible for a computer to…
In a way LLMs are intelligence tests indeed.
Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick
#6I think anyone who thinks that LLMs are not intelligent in any sense is simply living in denial. They might not be intelligent in the same way a human is intelligent, they might make mistakes a person wouldn't make, but that's not the question. Any standard of intelligence devised before LLMs is passed by LLMs relatively easily. They do things that 10 years ago people would have said are impossible for a computer to…
I'm vibe coding now, after work. I am able to much more quickly explore the landscape of a problem, get into and out of dead ends in minutes instead of wasting an evening. At some point I need to go in and fix, but the benefit of the tool is there. It is like a electric screwdriver vs. normal one. Sometimes the normal one can do things the electric can't, but hell if you get an IKEA deliver you want the electric one.
Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick
#7I think anyone who thinks that LLMs are not intelligent in any sense is simply living in denial. They might not be intelligent in the same way a human is intelligent, they might make mistakes a person wouldn't make, but that's not the question. Any standard of intelligence devised before LLMs is passed by LLMs relatively easily. They do things that 10 years ago people would have said are impossible for a computer to…
I also cannot calculate the square root of 472629462.
My pocket calculator is not intelligent. Nor are LLMs.
Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick
#8I think anyone who thinks that LLMs are not intelligent in any sense is simply living in denial. They might not be intelligent in the same way a human is intelligent, they might make mistakes a person wouldn't make, but that's not the question. Any standard of intelligence devised before LLMs is passed by LLMs relatively easily. They do things that 10 years ago people would have said are impossible for a computer to…
I'm vibe coding now, after work. I am able to much more quickly explore the landscape of a problem, get into and out of dead ends in minutes instead of wasting an evening. At some point I need to go in and fix, but the benefit of the tool is there. It is like a electric screwdriver vs. normal one. Sometimes the normal one can do things the electric can't, but hell if you get an IKEA deliver you want the electric one.
And is the electric one intelligent? :p
Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm vibe coding now, after work. I am able to much more quickly explore the landscape of a problem, get into and out of dead ends in minutes instead of wasting an evening. At some point I need to go in and fix, but the benefit of the tool is there. It is like a electric screwdriver vs. normal one. Sometimes the normal one can do things the electric can't, but hell if you get an IKEA deliver you want the electric one.
And is the electric one intelligent? :p
Who cares!
Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick
#10I think anyone who thinks that LLMs are not intelligent in any sense is simply living in denial. They might not be intelligent in the same way a human is intelligent, they might make mistakes a person wouldn't make, but that's not the question. Any standard of intelligence devised before LLMs is passed by LLMs relatively easily. They do things that 10 years ago people would have said are impossible for a computer to…
It's incredible that on Hacker News we still encounter posts by people who will or cannot differentiate mathematics from magic.