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LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

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Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

#31

Post by bandrami »

lyu07282 wrote: post #23

I think it's interesting how gamers have developed a pretty healthy aversion to generative ai in video games. Steam and Itch both now make it mandatory that games disclose generative ai use and recently even beloved Larian Studios was under fire for using ai for concept art. Gamers hate that shit. I think that's good, but the whole "AI is literally not doing anything", that it's just some mass hallucination has to di…

IDK, I think it's at least reasonable to look at the fact that there isn't a ton of new software available out there and conclude "AI isn't actually making software creation any faster". I understand the counterarguments to that but it's hardly an unreasonable conclusion.

Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

#32

Post by krystofee »

I disagree with the "confidence trick" framing completely. My belief in this tech isn't based on marketing hype or someone telling me it's good – it's based on cold reality of what I'm shipping daily. The productivity gains I'm seeing right now are unprecedented. Even a year ago this wouldn't have been possible, it really feels like an inflection point.

I'm seeing legitimate 10x gains because I'm not writing code anymore – I'm thinking about code and reading code. The AI facilitates both. For context: I'm maintaining a well-structured enterprise codebase (100k+ lines Django). The reality is my input is still critically valuable. My insights guide the LLM, my code review is the guardrail. The AI doesn't replace the engineer, it amplifies the intent.

Using Claude Code Opus 4.5 right now and it's insane. I love it. It's like being a writer after Gutenberg invented the printing press rather than the monk copying books by hand before it.

Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

#33

Post by jaccola »

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #3

I 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…

There are dozens of definitions of "intelligence", we can't even agree what intelligence means in humans, never mind elsewhere. So yes, by some subset of definitions it is intelligent.

But by some subset of definitions my calculator is intelligent. By some subset of definitions a mouse is intelligent. And, more interestingly, by some subset of definitions a mouse is far more intelligent than an LLM.

Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

#34

Post by lyu07282 »

Chance-Device wrote: post #28
lyu07282 wrote: post #23

I think it's interesting how gamers have developed a pretty healthy aversion to generative ai in video games. Steam and Itch both now make it mandatory that games disclose generative ai use and recently even beloved Larian Studios was under fire for using ai for concept art. Gamers hate that shit. I think that's good, but the whole "AI is literally not doing anything", that it's just some mass hallucination has to di…

I think this is probably a trend that will erode with time, even now it’s probably just moved underground. How many human artists are using AI for concepts then laundering the results? Even if it’s just idea generation, that’s a part of the process. If it speeds up throughput, then maybe that’s fewer jobs in the long run. And if AI assisted products are cheaper, and are actually good, then people will have to vote wi…

Because voting with your wallet is nonsense, we can decide what society we want to live in we don't have to accept one in which human artists can't make a living. Capitalism isn't a force of nature we discovered like gravity, it's deliberate choices we made.

Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

#35

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

lyu07282 wrote: post #23

I think it's interesting how gamers have developed a pretty healthy aversion to generative ai in video games. Steam and Itch both now make it mandatory that games disclose generative ai use and recently even beloved Larian Studios was under fire for using ai for concept art. Gamers hate that shit. I think that's good, but the whole "AI is literally not doing anything", that it's just some mass hallucination has to di…

I haven't gamed much in the last few years due to severe lack of time so I'm out of touch, but I used to play a lot of CRPGs and I always dreamed of having NPCs who could talk and react beyond predefined scripted lines. This seems to finally be possible thanks to LLMs and I think it was desired by many (not only me). So why are gamers not excited about generative AI?

Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

#36

Post by [deleted] »

das_keyboard wrote: post #20
ltbarcly3 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are the masses. Are you afraid?

They don't need to instill fear in everyone, but only a critical mass and most importantly _regulators_. So there will be laws because not everyone can be trusted to host and use this "dangerous", new tech. And then you have a few "trusted" big tech firms forming an oligopoly of ai, with all of the drawbacks.

[deleted]

Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

#37

Post by hexbin010 »

dependency_2x wrote: post #6
ltbarcly3 wrote: post #3

I 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.

Got any recent specific examples of it saving you an entire evening?

Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

#38

Post by ACCount37 »

schnitzelstoat wrote: post #11

I agree that all the AI doomerism is silly (by which I mean those that are concerned about some Terminator-style machine uprising, the economic issues are quite real). But it's clear the LLM's have some real value, even if we always need a human-in-the-loop to prevent hallucinations it can still massively reduce the amount of human labour required for many tasks. NFT's felt like a con, and in retrospect were a con. T…

LLMs of today advance in incremental improvements.

There is a finite amount of incremental improvements left between the performance of today's LLMs and the limits of human performance.

This alone should give you second thoughts on "AI doomerism".

Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

#39

Post by BoxOfRain »

latexr wrote: post #26
schnitzelstoat wrote: post #11

I agree that all the AI doomerism is silly (by which I mean those that are concerned about some Terminator-style machine uprising, the economic issues are quite real). But it's clear the LLM's have some real value, even if we always need a human-in-the-loop to prevent hallucinations it can still massively reduce the amount of human labour required for many tasks. NFT's felt like a con, and in retrospect were a con. T…

Those aren’t mutually exclusive; something can be both useful and a con. When a con man sells you a cheap watch for an high price, what you get is still useful—a watch that tells the time—but you were also still conned, because what you paid for is not what was advertised. You overpaid because you were tricked about what you were buying. LLMs are useful for many things, but they’re also not nearly as beneficial and p…

I think the following things can both be true at the same time:

* LLMs are a useful tool in a variety of circumstances.

* Sam Altman is personally incentivised to spout a great deal of hyped-up rubbish about both what LLMs are capable of, and can be capable of.

Re: LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

#40

Post by techpression »

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #3

I 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 did that when I was 14 because I had no other choice, damn you SoundBlaster! I didn't get any menu but I got sound in the end.

I don't think conflating intelligence with "what a computer can do" makes much sense though. I can't calculate the X digit of PI in less than Z, I'm still intelligent (or I pretend to be).

But the question is not about intelligence, it's a red herring, it's just about utility and they (LLM's) are useful.

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