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I'm becoming AI-blind

cymerys.com

281–290 of 533 posts

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... including the "novel" math solutions, all of which appear to just be "a composition of solutions humans have developed and documented elsewhere" upon deeper inspection. But that is precisely what human mathematicians do, prove new theorems by combining ones proven earlier. I don't see any fundamental difference in functionality between human intellectual contributions vs performant ML ones (LLM or otherwise). W…

New and interesting mathematics is done by inventing new definitions and fields, not just combining old theorems to prove new ones.

It's not that different, when a human proposes a better definition vis-a-vis a competing one for example, they would defend this by certain desiderata.

Often a mathematician or physicist will use their intuition to speed up the naive brute force of candidate well formed formula variations so that the desired properties emerge, postulating the existence of an intersection on multiple desiderata can in itself be viewed as a novel conjecture, to be proven or disproved.

A very basic (unimpressive) example for an example desideratum is regularity or compactness. the tau=2 * pi substitution does make a whole bunch of expressions more slightly more regular and compact. That is something objective and measurable on a system of theorems.

There is no mathematician's moat vis-a-vis machine learning at a fundamental level. There can be artificially sustained moat, if AI powers limit the distribution of say cryptographic advance capable models, in jurisdictions outside such AI powers, but even that would be expected to be fleeting and temporary...

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#282
post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I take issue with your "correct" answer. Q: Why do cows produce milk? A: Because calves (baby cows) drink it.

May I suggest the one common in my childhood playgrounds as an alternative? How do you escape from a perfectly sealed room with a table in it? You run around the table until your legs are sore, use the saw to cut the table into two, two halves make a whole, you escape through the hole.

For people wondering, in some locations, sore and saw are homophones.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "something deeply wrong" part about AI, that even most technology enthusiasts evidently do not seem to grasp, is that it is still fundamentally a statistical model — an algorithmic construct — and does not possess any real intelligence or critical thought whatsoever. No matter how much investors and tech companies want you to believe that they are on the verge of super intelligence, nothing I've seen to date can…

Most of these arguments are over some metaphysical definition of the word “intelligence”. As per later era Wittgenstein, I prefer to ignore these engagements and focus more on the meaning-as-use approach. What is the use of intelligence? What are the concrete outcomes of intelligence?

This seems like a complete waste of time given the more practical and more urgent need to clarify to everyone involved that current LLMs are not actually intelligent.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Happily, I don't need to define "intelligence" here, because it's squarely in "I know it when I see it" territory. It's notoriously hard to define. I also don't ascribe intelligence to a pocket calculator.

Do you ascribe intelligence to a gorilla? How about a goldfish?

Would you ask either of them to review a PR? Or a calculator to eat a banana? Or an LLM to calculate prime factors?

These aren't interesting questions. As much as any definition is in use here, we're not going to get much value talking about "intelligence" this way.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Happily, I don't need to define "intelligence" here, because it's squarely in "I know it when I see it" territory. It's notoriously hard to define. I also don't ascribe intelligence to a pocket calculator.

I don't find it's particularly hard to define loosely, but then I don't think of it as a special property of humans other than it tends to be quite high in them. But we are obviously talking about different things and if you're not going to provide a definition then it's not really the basis for a productive conversation.

To address this similarly to my sibling reply, I don't have a definition of intelligence that provides value here.

And your loose definition isn't doing a lot of help either, beyond perhaps noting: that Google search bar _is_ similarly "intelligent" to an LLM? Which says what, a lot about search? A lot about modern LLMs?

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#286
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

watch this and see if you think it has intelligence by the end https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYUicaho5k8

I wonder if you went back before we had any idea how the brain worked and talked to the smartest people about how neurons work (without giving away that it's a human brain) then asked them all "would such a system be intelligent?" how many would say yes. The main problem I have with people stating it's not intelligent or conscious is I don't think we even have a good definition of either word that satisfies everyone.…

The definition issue cuts both ways. It is just as much an issue for those insisting that LLMs are intelligent/conscious in some way.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"nd then it gets taken out of the conversation so that it doesn't get sent to the agent the next turn (no context bloat). " Uh - dude - this means you're paying 10x in token costs because there's no caching. If you 're-write token history' then you can't cache tokens. It means for any reasonably long conversation, the llm has to reprocess the entire history as preflow on every prompt. Are you sure you're really doing…

Nope, you gotta understand. This is the move. It is appended at the end of every single message. It is never saved in the conversation that get sent back for inference. So you send it. But when you go back for inference, it’s at the top of the stack so all of the cashing works you’re not pre-filling every time or anything like that. It burns plus N tokens, where N is my prompt stack. It is not really that expensive.…

Yes - with arbitrary prefix caching that might work. That's tricky though, not everyone is going to provide that.

Did you have to build your own harness for this? Or hack Claude Code or something?

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#288
post #30

There's some psychological mechanism by which my brain immediately recognizes AI generated text and just short-circuits to "there is no information here". And when I force myself to read AI-generated text I realize I'm making my brain do creative work to impart meaning to the words. It is exhausting because my brain is literally trying to do a just-in-time rewrite of the text into something valuable. Something is dee…

The "something deeply wrong" part about AI, that even most technology enthusiasts evidently do not seem to grasp, is that it is still fundamentally a statistical model — an algorithmic construct — and does not possess any real intelligence or critical thought whatsoever. No matter how much investors and tech companies want you to believe that they are on the verge of super intelligence, nothing I've seen to date can…

"and does not possess any real intelligence or critical thought whatsoever."

unfortunately in most companies this is literally wrongthink and will get you shut down as being a scared luddite.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, you gotta understand. This is the move. It is appended at the end of every single message. It is never saved in the conversation that get sent back for inference. So you send it. But when you go back for inference, it’s at the top of the stack so all of the cashing works you’re not pre-filling every time or anything like that. It burns plus N tokens, where N is my prompt stack. It is not really that expensive.…

Yes - with arbitrary prefix caching that might work. That's tricky though, not everyone is going to provide that. Did you have to build your own harness for this? Or hack Claude Code or something?

I don’t use their CLIs. OMP/OpenCode. If you are stuck on them, you can do it in a proxy layer.

Re: I'm becoming AI-blind

#290

I've been stuck in loop all week where a coworker asked me to review some methodology documents that are clearly generated by Claude (which is fine in this case) but every time I sit down my brain can't get through 2 sentences without feeling like I'm reading nothing. It actually feels like the content, which isn't empty, has no meaning. So I go on to another assignment and come back later and the same thing happens.…

Yeah I think a bad prompt can create an output which is meaningless. I had such experience reviewing a software architecture diagram generated by Claude. Worse, I noticed that people in an office environment themselves have adopted a more speculative, communication style. In the past, people remembered what was said and would draw attention to discrepancies. I could trust what people said. Nowadays it's like; someone…

I've noticed this too. Because people are generating work so quickly , and maybe not understanding it entirely, then they hit a bug, pivot, and pretend it was the plan the whole time. Or drop something they were very excited about 3 days ago and never speak of it again.
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