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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

#101

Post by Chance-Device »

lyu07282 wrote: post #34
Chance-Device wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which I assume is why you pay someone to hand-paint scenes from your holidays instead of taking photographs? And why you employ someone to wash your clothes on a scrubbing board instead of using a machine?

Or would you prefer these things be outlawed to increase employment?

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

#102

Post by falloutx »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #84
hexbin010 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

0. Claude, have a look at frontend project A and backend project B. 1. create a skeleton clone of frontend A, named frontend B, which is meant to be the frontend for backend project B, including the oAuth configuration 2. create the kubernetes yaml and deployment.sh, it should be available under b.mydomain.com for frontend B and run it, make sure the deployment worked by checking the page on b.mydomain.com 3. in fron…

Did you need it though? Like most projects I see being done by people with Claude Code are just their personal projects, which they wouldn't have wasted their time on in the past but now they will get pulled into the terminal thinking its only gonna take 20 mins and they end up burning 100s of subscription dollars on it. If there is no other maintainer & the project is all yours, I dont see any harm in doing it.

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

#103

Post by megamix »

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…

Are you also getting dumber? https://tech.co/news/another-study-ai-making-us-dumb

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

#104

Post by obsoleetorr »

qsera wrote: post #100
adrianN wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

> After a while it will start going around in circles.

so like your average human

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

let's try this one on you - say an original joke

oh, right, you dont respond to strangers prompts, thus you have agency, unlike an LLM

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

#105

Post by Meneth »

falcor84 wrote: post #80

> We should be afraid, they say, making very public comments about “P(Doom)” - the chance the technology somehow rises up and destroys us. > This has, of course, not happened. This is so incredibly shallow. I can't think of even a single doomer, who ever claimed that AI will destroy us by now. P(doom) is about the likelihood of it destroying us "eventually". And I haven't seen anything in this post or in any recent d…

> This has, of course, not happened.

And that's the anthropic fallacy. In the worlds where it has happened, the author is dead.

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

#106

Post by latexr »

pousada wrote: post #74
latexr wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that’s the point I’m making. In the scenario you’re describing, that would make Sam Altman a con man. Alternatively, he could simply be delusional and/or stupid. But given his history of deceit with Loopt and Worldcoin, there is precedent for the former.

It would make every marketing department and basically every startup founder conmen too. While I don’t completely disagree with that framing it’s not really helpful.

No, that is not true. Coca-Cola doesn’t advertise itself as a cure for cancer. Dropbox doesn’t advertise itself as a tax-filing application.

Theranos on the other hand… That was a con and the founder was prosecuted.

And again, Sam Altman has a history of deceit.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi...

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...

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

#107

Post by falcor84 »

Meneth wrote: post #105
falcor84 wrote: post #80

> We should be afraid, they say, making very public comments about “P(Doom)” - the chance the technology somehow rises up and destroys us. > This has, of course, not happened. This is so incredibly shallow. I can't think of even a single doomer, who ever claimed that AI will destroy us by now. P(doom) is about the likelihood of it destroying us "eventually". And I haven't seen anything in this post or in any recent d…

> This has, of course, not happened. And that's the anthropic fallacy. In the worlds where it has happened, the author is dead.

A very good point too.

Though I personally hope that we'll have enough of a warning to convince people that there is a problem and give us a fighting chance. I grew up on Terminator and would be really disappointed if the AI kills me in an impersonal way.

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

#108

Post by qsera »

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 is the imitation of intelligence.

It works because people have answered similar questions a million times on the internet and the LLMs are trained on it.

So it will work for a while. When the human generated stuff stops appearing online, then LLMs ll quickly fall in usefulness.

But that is enough time for the people who might think that it going to last for ever to make huge investments into it, and the AI companies to get away with the loot.

Actually it is the best kind of scam...

EDIT: Another thought. Thus it seems that AI companies actually have an incentive to hinder developements, because new things mean that their model is less useful. With the widespread dependence on AI, they might even get away with manipulating the population to stagnate.

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

#109

Post by ACCount37 »

mossTechnician wrote: post #65
ACCount37 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather the "AI safety" of the kind you want didn't exist. The catastrophic AI risk isn't "oh no, people can now generate pictures of women naked".

Why would you rather it not exist? In a vacuum, I agree with you that there's probably no harm in AI-generated nudes of fictional women per se; it's the rampant use to sexually harass real women and children[0], while "causing poor air quality and decreasing life expectancy" in Tennessee[1], that bothers me. [0]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/x-blames-users-f... [1]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/…

Because it's just a vessel for the puritans and the usual "cares more about feeling righteous than about being right" political activists. I have no love for either.

The whole thing with "AI polluting the neighborhoods" falls apart on a closer examination. Because, as it turns out, xAI put its cluster in an industrial area that already has: a defunct coal power plant, an operational steel plant, and an operational 1 GW grid-scale natural gas power plant that powers the steel plant - that one being across the road from xAI's cluster.

It's quite hard for me to imagine a world where it's the AI cluster that moves the needle on local pollution.

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

#110

Post by ACCount37 »

latexr wrote: post #93
ACCount37 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And there could be a teapot in an orbit around the Sun. Do we have any evidence for that being the case though?

So far, there's a distinct lack of "wall" to be seen - and a lot of the proposed "fundamental" limitations of LLMs were discovered to be bogus with interpretability techniques, or surpassed with better scaffolding and better training.

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