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The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

aphyr.com

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Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

#31

Post by apsurd »

kevg123 wrote: post #22

I sent the entire series by Aphyr [1] to some friends. Two of them, independently, responded with a variant of, "TLDR, can you give a summary?" I chat with these friends a lot but I rarely send articles that I suggest they read and that I think are profound, so I expected them to read it. These are smart people that have a history of reading lots of books. They are both huge AI proponents now and use AI for nearly ev…

maybe it means they were never really as smart as you thought?

Not meant to be snarky. It's been two decades now since my first wide-eyed entry into the workforce, moving for new opportunities, meeting new people. it's been great. There's a lot of smart people out there. I also realize that many people I seen as smart had more access to more content then i did. i still appreciated their sharing , it was enlightening to me. But after 20 years, I think back and it's literally quoting things from smart youtube videos. and regurgitating the latest thought leaders.

We all do this, but like you, what's meaningful to me is the chewing, the dissection and synthesis. coming together to share different perspectives and so on. i've had those friends too! it's just not 1:1

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

#32

Post by Scholmo »

kevg123 wrote: post #22

I sent the entire series by Aphyr [1] to some friends. Two of them, independently, responded with a variant of, "TLDR, can you give a summary?" I chat with these friends a lot but I rarely send articles that I suggest they read and that I think are profound, so I expected them to read it. These are smart people that have a history of reading lots of books. They are both huge AI proponents now and use AI for nearly ev…

You might just overhype this blog.

I read one of his last week? and didn't like it that much. I read this one despite it because its quite high on hn for whatever reason.

I don't think everything is lies and i don't like how he thinks a LLM is just some bullshit machine.

Its also waaaay to early to even understand were this is going. We as humans have never had that much compute and used it this particular way. It could literlay be the road to a utopia or dystopia. But its very crazy to experience it.

His article series feels so negative and dismissive, that i'm not taking anything from it.

There is so much more research, money and compute behind this AI topic right now, every week or two weeks something relevant better/new comes out of this. From 2d, 3d models, new LLM versions, smaller LLms, faster inferencing (Nvidias Nemotron), we don't know how this will continue.

And the weird thing is that he clearly knows plenty about LLMs but it feels so negative dismissive, hard to put a finger to it.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

#33

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

davidclark wrote: post #29
Scholmo wrote: post #25

Don't agree with this. LLM when it came out, was perfect as an interface between a system and a normal human. So many people call customer support for issues they could in theory fix themselves. If that LLM system can understand me well enough, its an okay interface. In worst case you have to escalate anyway. My mum actually told me that she talked to some AI. And yes normal systems are also not correct often enough.…

>LLM when it came out, was perfect as an interface between a system and a normal human. Statements like this make me feel like I live in a different universe with a different implementation of LLMs than other internet commenters.

You're on a forum with a disproportionate number of people who are trying to profit from AI and have an interest in promoting that it's a worthwhile time and resource investment. It is a different universe than other places outside this bubble.

And it's a one day old account.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

#34

Post by Lerc »

A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE

THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION

—IBM internal training, 1979

It took me a while to realise that the premise is saying the same thing as the reason why we have so many "Computer says no" experiences today.

The conclusion only follows if you want someone to be accountable.

If you want to avoid being accountable, computers should make all management decisions. This has nothing to do with AI other than it provides another mechanism to do that.

People saying "I'd love to help you but the computer won't let me do that" has been happening for years now.

Websites develop abusive patterns because A/B testing lets a process decide based on the goal you want, It doesn't measure the repercussions so you have made no decision to allow them.

Management read it as

A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE

THEREFORE THERE CAN BE NO LIABILITY IF COMPUTERS MAKE ALL MANAGEMENT DECISIONS

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

#35

Post by Scholmo »

duskdozer wrote: post #15
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #6

This is doomerism. Yes, everything will get worse. But everything will also get better. Such is progress. (for every one of these examples of annoyances, I can think of two ways to use AI to get around the annoyance. not clever programmer things, but things an average person who learns to use Codex or Claude Desktop to operate their desktop will know) Most of these annoyances are also things that existed before AI, a…

>(for every one of these examples of annoyances, I can think of two ways to use AI to get around the annoyance. not clever programmer things, but things an average person who learns to use Codex or Claude Desktop to operate their desktop will know) As the author said: >I suspect that like the job market, everyone will wind up paying massive “AI” companies to manage the drudgery they created.

It could also lead to a massive crash of capitalism and reevaluation of how our society functions.

It could lead to significant progress in every single research area.

I'm at least very impressed about the amount of open models and that it doesn't hold up that the gap between public and private diverges massivly. Public is probably one year behind.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

#36

Post by xp84 »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #16

Regarding companies trying to block any contact with customer service and adding endless AI hurdles: In some countries, having a reachable means of contact is legally required. Is there a NOYB-style organization that specializes in enforcing this right (suing companies on behalf of consumers)? For the "bureaucracy has royally fucked up and doesn't want to fix it", if it is something that can be fixed with money and i…

> In countries that have effective small claims courts, these can be a surprisingly convenient (less hassle than the "talk to the bot" wall of the company!) to resolve this kind of issue. Idk where we fall on the scale of “effectiveness” vs our peers, but I do read more people’s stories of Small Claims that are positive than negative. But I’ve never used this. I suspect it would be difficult to press a claim against a random large “company” just based on how slippery their identities even are. “Oh, Apple Inc. isn’t responsible for that, it’s a different subsidiary based in Ireland for tax reasons. Go serve them.” I think most people would have to be out more money (maybe more than the S.C. limit?) before being motivated to engage with the chronically overextended legal system, sadly.

Also, if the effective tools do exist, count on American companies using the American bribery-based political system to change the laws to dull those tools or to eliminate them.

Again, if you live in some consumer-friendly country good for you, I’m just saying how it plays out in this one society. I’ll stipulate that it’s all our fault blah blah blah.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

#37

Post by GavinAnderegg »

steveklabnik wrote: post #26
GavinAnderegg wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this something you're seeing personally? If so, how do you know it's because of the Online Safety Act? This is a personal blog and it doesn't seem to have any adult content that I can find. The homepage of the site isn't blocked when I check it here: https://www.blocked.org.uk/check

https://aphyr.com/posts/395-geoblocking-multiple-localities-...

Thanks for this! Seems like a bold stance… but the Online Safety Act also seems like a poor piece of legislation.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

#38

Post by agentultra »

To lie requires recognition of the truth and an intention to deceive. LLM’s don’t have such abilities. They are systems that generate plausible sequences of symbols based on training inputs, alignments, reinforcement, and inference. These systems don’t know or care what truth is and therefore cannot lie.

It’s already bad. I’m not looking forward to the future. These systems are terrible. It’s a future without people that they want for some reason. I’d rather deal with people incompetent, tired, annoyed people than an LLM.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

#39

Post by Myrmornis »

I read the first couple of posts in the series. The essay is full of criticism of LLMs, and in a couple of places the author distances himself, as if he himself isn't using them ("some people I respect tell me that...").

It's certainly worth discussing the fact that the entire industry is starting to outsource large amounts of our thinking and writing work to non-sentient statistical algorithms, but this discussion needs to honestly confront the extent to which they are successfully completing useful tasks today.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances

#40

Post by Scholmo »

davidclark wrote: post #29
Scholmo wrote: post #25

Don't agree with this. LLM when it came out, was perfect as an interface between a system and a normal human. So many people call customer support for issues they could in theory fix themselves. If that LLM system can understand me well enough, its an okay interface. In worst case you have to escalate anyway. My mum actually told me that she talked to some AI. And yes normal systems are also not correct often enough.…

>LLM when it came out, was perfect as an interface between a system and a normal human. Statements like this make me feel like I live in a different universe with a different implementation of LLMs than other internet commenters.

Do you want to add any argument so we can discuss this?

I mean, did you not write with ChatGPT and were surprised how well it response?

I'm schocked how well i can talk to an AI through some app like Gemini or ChatGTP. A few years ago i couldn't imagine building such a generic system which such high quality of understanding.

I was playing around with dragon naturally speaking and similiar dictation tools 10 years ago and it was horrible. And that software is expensive.

If you look how normal people use a computer, they are slow just because they don't understand basic drag and drop. Or they are unable to just create some java or php script to convert some data or clean up some data. I would just write a php script reading some csv file and converting stuff around and was faster than everyone around me.

Tool calling is bonkers.

And i tried to break GPT-3, i can literaly write an english sentence and just dropin german words, it was already that good.

Its often enough shitty in doing exactly what i want, but the quality is massive to everything we had before. Massive.

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