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AI is a horse (2024)

kconner.com

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Re: AI is a horse (2024)

#51

Post by einpoklum »

amelius wrote: post #35

A horse that can do your homework.

Yeah, well... not really.

I used to tell my Into-to-Programming-in-C course students, 20 years ago, that they could in principle skip one or two of the homework assignments; and that some students even manage to outsmart us and submit copied work as homework, but - they would just not become able to program if they don't do their homework themselves. "If you want to be able to write software code you have to exercise writing code. It's just that simple and there's no getting around it."

Of course not every discipline is the same. But I can also tell you that if you want to know, say, history - you have to memorize accounts and aspects and highlights of historical periods and processes, and recount them yourself, and check that you got things right. If "the AI" does this for you, then maybe it knows history but you don't.

And that is the point of homework (if it's voluntary of course).

Re: AI is a horse (2024)

#53

Post by zorked »

oliwary wrote: post #41
BoredomIsFun wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> excellent show "halt and catch fire". I found it very caricature, too saturated with romance - which is untypical for tech environment, much like "big bang theory".

IMO it really came into its own after the first season. S1 felt like mad men but with computers, whereas in the latter seasons it focused more on the characters - quite beautiful and sad at times.

I vaguely remember that they tried to reboot it several times. So the same crew invented personal computers, BBSes and the Internet (or something like that), but every time they started from being underfunded unknowns. They really tried to make the series work.

Re: AI is a horse (2024)

#54

Post by Almondsetat »

direwolf20 wrote: post #14
krige wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh horses fart a lot too.

Horses poop a lot. A lot.

More than pooping a lot, they literally cannot hold it. Humans don't poop that much, but imagine if everyone just did it on the floor at a moment's notice regardless of where they are

Re: AI is a horse (2024)

#56

Post by throw310822 »

Famously Steve Jobs said that the (personal) computer is "like a bicycle for the mind". It's a great metaphor because- besides the idea of lightness and freedom it communicates- it also described the computer as multiplier of the human strength- the bicycle allows one to travel faster and with much less effort, it's true, but ultimately the source of its power is still entirely in the muscles of the cyclist- you don't get out of it anything that you didn't put yourself.

Bu the feeling I'm having with LLMs is that we've entered the age of fossil-fuel engines: something that moves on its own power and produces somewhat more than the user needs to put into it. Ok, in the current version it might not go very far and needs to be pushed now and then, but the total energy output is greater than what users need to put in. We could call it a horse, except that this is artificial: it's a tractor. And in the last months I've been feeling like someone who spent years pushing a plough in the fields, and has suddenly received a tractor. A primitive model, still imperfect, but already working.

Re: AI is a horse (2024)

#58

Post by Symmetry »

baxtr wrote: post #31
georgestrakhov wrote: post #25

AI is not a horse (2023) https://essays.georgestrakhov.com/ai-is-not-a-horse/

Maybe AI is a centaur??

After Deep Blue Garry Kapsparav proposed "Centaur Chess"[1] where teams of humans and computers would complete with each other. For about a decade a team like that was superior to either an unaided computer or an unaided AI. These days pure AI teams tend to be much stronger.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_chess

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