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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

#51

Post by latexr »

ACCount37 wrote: post #38
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".

That is not necessarily true. That would be like arguing there is a finite number of improvements between the rockets of today and Star Trek ships. To get warp technology you can’t simply improve combustion engines, eventually you need to switch to something else.

That could also apply to LLMs, that there would be a hard wall that the current approach can’t breach.

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

#52

Post by ACCount37 »

kusokurae wrote: post #10
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…

It's incredible that on Hacker News we still encounter posts by people who will or cannot differentiate mathematics from magic.

Your brain is just math implemented in wet meat.

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

#53

Post by amelius »

vanderZwan wrote: post #50
krystofee wrote: post #32

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 any…

Even assuming all of what you said is true, none of it disproves the arguments in the article. You're talking about the technology, the article is about the marketing of the technology. The LLM marketing exploits fear and sympathy. It pressures people into urgency. Those things can be shown and have been shown. Whether or not the actual LLM based tools genuinely help you has nothing to do with that.

Yeah, but it should have been in the title otherwise it uses in itself a centuries old trick.

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

#54

Post by HWR_14 »

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…

A huge issue with voting with your wallet is fraud. It's easy to lie about having no AI in your process. Especially if the final product is laundered by a real artist.

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

#55

Post by remus »

vanderZwan wrote: post #50
krystofee wrote: post #32

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 any…

Even assuming all of what you said is true, none of it disproves the arguments in the article. You're talking about the technology, the article is about the marketing of the technology. The LLM marketing exploits fear and sympathy. It pressures people into urgency. Those things can be shown and have been shown. Whether or not the actual LLM based tools genuinely help you has nothing to do with that.

The point of the article is to paint LLMs as a confidence trick, the keyword being trick. If LLMs do actually deliver very real, tangible benefits then can you say there is really a trick? If a street performer was doing the cup and ball scam, but I actually won and left with more money than I started with then I'd say that's a pretty bad trick!

Of course it is a little more nuanced than this and I would agree that some of the marketing hype around AI is overblown, but I think it is inarguable that AI can provide concrete benefits for many people.

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

#56

Post by runarberg »

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…

> it can still massively reduce the amount of human labour required for many tasks.

I want to see some numbers before I believe this. So far my feelings is that the best case scenario is that it reduces the time it needs to do bureaucratic tasks, tasks that were not needed anyway and could have just been removed for an even grater boost in productivity. Maybe, it seems to be automating tasks from junior engineer, tasks which they need to perform in order to gain experience and develop their expertise. Although I need to see the numbers before I believe even that.

I have a suspicion that AI is not increasing productivity by any meaningful metric which couldn’t be increased by much much much cheaper and easier means.

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

#57

Post by satisfice »

krystofee wrote: post #32

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 any…

You are speculating. You don’t know. You are not testing this technology— you are trusting it.

How do I know? Because I am testing it, and I see a lot of problems that you are not mentioning.

I don’t know if you’ve been conned or you are doing the conning. It’s at least one of those.

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

#58

Post by HWR_14 »

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.

Bad example. IKEA assembles better with a manual screwdriver.

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

#59

Post by consp »

krystofee wrote: post #32

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 any…

> It's like being a writer after Gutenberg invented the printing press rather than the monk copying books by hand before it.

That's not how book printing works and I'd argue the monk can far more easy create new text and devise new interpretations. And they did in the sidelines of books. It takes a long time to prepare one print but nearly just as long as to print 100 which is where the good of the printing press comes from. It's not the ease of changing or making large sums of text, it's the ease of reproducing and since copy/paste exist it is a very poor analogue in my opinion.

I'd also argue the 10x is subject/observer bias since they are the same person. My experience at this point is that boilerplate is fine with LLMs, and if that's only what you do good for you, otherwise it will hardly speed up anything as the code is the easy part.

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

#60

Post by satisfice »

ManuelKiessling wrote: post #49
krystofee wrote: post #32

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 any…

This. By now I don’t understand how anyone can still argue in the abstract while it’s trivial to simply give it a try and collect cold, hard facts. It’s like arguing that the piano in the room is out of tune and not bothering to walk over to the piano and hit its keys.

I am hitting the keys, and I call bullshit.

Yes, the technology is interesting and useful. No, it is not a “10x” miracle.

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