Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick

tomrenner.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 202 posts

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

#91

Post by ozim »

satisfice wrote: post #60
ManuelKiessling wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I call "AGI" or "100x miracle" a bullshit but still existing stuff definitely is "10x miracle".

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

#92

Post by trimethylpurine »

carpo wrote: post #68
vanderZwan wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But saying it's a confidence trick is saying it's a con. That they're trying to sell someone something that doesn't work. Th op is saying it makes then 10x more productive, so how is that a con?

The marketing says it does more than that. This isn't just a problem unique to LLMs either. We have laws about false advertising for a reason. It's going on all the time. In this case the tech is new so the lines are blurry. But to the technically inclined, it's very obvious where they are. LLMs are artificial, but they are not literally intelligent. Calling them "AI" is a scam. I hope that it's only a matter of time until that definition is clarified and we can stop the bullshit. The longer it goes, the worse it will be when the bubble bursts. Not to be overly dramatic, but economic downturns have real physical consequences. People somewhere will literally starve to death. That number of deaths depends on how well the marketers lied. Better lies lead to bigger bubbles, which when burst lead to more deaths. These are facts. (Just ask ChatGPT, it will surely agree with me, if it's intelligent. ;p)

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

#93

Post by latexr »

ACCount37 wrote: post #75
latexr wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If that's the case, then, what's the wall? The "walls" that stopped AI decades ago stand no more. NLP and CSR were thought to be the "final bosses" of AI by many - until they fell to LLMs. There's no replacement. The closest thing to a "hard wall" LLMs have is probably online learning? And even that isn't really a hard wall. Because LLMs are good at in-context learning, which does many of the same things, and can do…

> If that's the case, then, what's the wall?

I didn’t say that is the case, I said it could be. Do you understand the difference?

And if it is the case, it doesn’t immediately follow that we would know right now what exactly the wall would be. Often you have to hit it first. There are quite a few possible candidates.

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

#94

Post by iNic »

mossTechnician wrote: post #27
iNic wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should do both and it makes sense that different orgs have different focuses. It makes no sense to berate one set of orgs for not working on the exact type of thing that you want. PauseAI and ControlAI have each received less than $1 million in funding. They are both very small organizations as far as these types of advocacy non-profits go.

If it makes sense to handle all of these issues, then couldn't these organizations just acknowledge all of these issues? If reducing harm is the goal, I don't see a reason to totally segregate different issues, especially not by drawing a dividing line between the ones OpenAI already acknowledges and the ones it doesn't. I've never seen any self-described "AI safety" organizations that tackles any of the present-day…

If you've never seen it then you haven't been paying attention. For example Anthropic (the biggest AI org which is "safety" aligned) released a big report last year on metal well being [1]. Also here is their page on societal impacts [2]. Here is PauseAI's list of risks [3], it has deepfakes as its second issue!

The problem is not that no one is trying to solve the issues that you mentioned, but that it is really hard to solve them. You will probably have to bring large class action law suits, which is expensive and risky (if it fails it will be harder to sue again). Anthropic can make their own models safe, and PauseAI can organize some protests, but neither can easily stop grok from producing endless CSAM.

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/news/protecting-well-being-of-user...

[2] https://www.anthropic.com/research/team/societal-impacts

[3] https://pauseai.info/risks

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

#95

Post by falloutx »

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…

That is consumer choice, a consumer has rights to know whether something is made by using a tech which could make them unemployed or not. I wouldnt pay $70 or $10 on a game that I know someone didnt put effort into.

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

#96

Post by demorro »

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.

It's like arguing that the piano goes out of tune randomly and that even if you get through 1, 2, or even 10 songs without that happening, I'm not interested in playing that piano on stage.

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

#97

Post by myrmidon »

ACCount37 wrote: post #75
latexr wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If that's the case, then, what's the wall? The "walls" that stopped AI decades ago stand no more. NLP and CSR were thought to be the "final bosses" of AI by many - until they fell to LLMs. There's no replacement. The closest thing to a "hard wall" LLMs have is probably online learning? And even that isn't really a hard wall. Because LLMs are good at in-context learning, which does many of the same things, and can do…

Agree completely with your position.

I do think though that lack of online learning is a bigger drawback than a lot of people believe, because it can often be hidden/obfuscated by training for the benchmarks, basically.

This becomes very visible when you compare performance on more specialized tasks that LLMs were not trained for specifically, e.g. playing games like Pokemon or Factorio: General purpose LLMs are lagging behind a lot in those compared to humans.

But it's only a matter of time until we solve this IMO.

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

#98

Post by latexr »

JacoboJacobi wrote: post #86
latexr wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. It’s like if someone claimed to be selling magical fruit that cures cancer, and they’re just regular apples. Then people like your parent commenter say “that’s not a con, I eat apples and they’re both healthy and tasty”. Yes, apples do have great things about them, but not the exaggerations they were being sold as. Being conned doesn’t mean you get nothing, it means you don’t get what was advertised.

The claims being made that are cited are not really in that camp though.. It may be extremely dangerous to release. True. Even search engines had the potential to be deemed too dangerous in the nuclear pandoras box arguments of modern times. Then there are high-speed phishing opportunities, etc. It may be an essential failure to miss the boat. True. If calculators were upgraded/produced and disseminated at modern Int…

> The claims being made that are cited are not really in that camp though..

They literally are. Sam Altman has literally said multiple times this tech will cure cancer.

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

#99

Post by ACCount37 »

falloutx wrote: post #77
bodge5000 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The LLM's are clearly useful for many things I don't think that's of any doubt. Even beyond programming, imo especially beyond programming, there are a great many things they're useful for. The question is; is that worth the enormous cost of running them? NFT's were cheap enough to produce and that didn't really scale depending on the "quality" of the NFT. With an LLM, if you want to produce something at the same s…

All of the professions its trying to replace are very much bottom end of the tree, like programmers, designers, artists, support, lawyers etc. While you can easily already replace management and execs with it already and save 50% of the costs, but no one is talking about that. At this point the "trick" is to scare white collar knowledge workers into submission with low pay and high workload with the assumption that A…

"Just replace management and execs with AI" is an elaborate wagie cope. "Management and execs" are quite resistant to today's AI automation - and mostly for technical reasons.

The main reason being: even SOTA AIs of today are subhuman at highly agentic tasks and long-horizon tasks - which are exactly the kind of tasks the management has to handle. See: "AI plays Pokemon", AccountingBench, Vending-Bench and its "real life" test runs, etc.

The performance at long-horizon tasks keeps going up, mind - "you're just training them wrong" is in full force. But that doesn't change that the systems available today aren't there yet. They don't have the executive function to be execs.

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

#100

Post by qsera »

adrianN wrote: post #22
kusokurae wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Intelligence is not magic though. The difference between intelligence and mathematics can plausibly be the same kind of difference between chemistry and intelligence.

There is Intelligence and there is Imitation of Intelligence. LLMs do the latter.

Talk to any model about deep subjects. You ll understand what I am saying. After a while it will start going around in circles.

FFS ask it to make an original joke, and be amused..

Post reply on HN