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LLMs are making me lose my savviness

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Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness

#51

Post by Ekaros »

newsomix9xl wrote: post #2

Using AI can open up topics you couldn't work on before. I think you're blaming tools for what are other problems. No carpenter ever said "I used to plane wood by hand and carve magnificent pieces, now that I have an orbital sander and power tools, the love just isn't there". I don't buy this argument at all.

I think more apt analogy is that now I get random parts from Ikea and screw them together to something that resembles furniture. Just need to get enough parts and eventually they mostly fit. Customers really don't notice any difference.

Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness

#52

Post by system2 »

geophph wrote: post #44
system2 wrote: post #21

This article tells me the author is not that creative. With LLMs, the number of projects I create increases by 1000%.

Being creative and creating things are not the same?

Isn't being creative a requirement to create things? The author complains that he can't do the basic things that LLMs now take care of. And I am saying that if you really have a creative mind, you can come up with 1000s of projects every day and enjoy bringing them to life very fast.

For example, I wanted to build my own note-taking app for a long time because I got sick of Obsidian. Now I built my own, and it is magnitudes better than Obsidian, at least to me and for my use. I built smart home systems with Claude because, without an LLM, it would be too time-consuming to troubleshoot APIs and read all the api documentation. I wanted to test a TTS model, and it took me 10 minutes waiting to test it without reading the documentation. I use it for everyday random creations all day long.

Instead of one tiny project consuming all my week, I can now work on all of them in hours. My /srv folder has over 100 projects of my own, and some of them are parent folders to smaller dependency projects.

Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness

#53

Post by dvt »

luke5441 wrote: post #46
dvt wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how much frontier math you follow, but probabilistic arguments are extremely popular (particularly in, weirdly enough, number theory), especially for fiddling with the bounds on things, or getting closer to full coverage of various theorems. So this idea that doing math is some kind of fully deterministic & mechanistic process is a bit misleading.

Is that kind of argument something like where you count the number of cranks claiming P=NP and the number of cranks claiming P!=NP and then if you get 95% papers claiming P!=NP that one wins?

What? Not at all. I'm referring to things like discussing distributions of certain things or probabilities of things as we go towards infinity, etc. These are proper papers, not surveys.

Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness

#54

Post by _the_inflator »

dvt wrote: post #28

Have mathematicians become "less savvy" since the invention of the abacus or calculator? The invention of logarithms or analysis? In some ways, the answer is trivially positive. In fact, number crunching was, for most of human history, a key element of being a maths researcher. However, when we look at the claim with a more critical eye, it becomes obvious that this view is myopic. In fact, current progress is in fac…

Did you study math? I did and I cannot relate to your comparison.

Mathematics isn’t about calculating numbers but formulas and proves.

I have to put it politely: until the advent of AI no machine ever “calculated” a formula for me, because I didn’t have to calculate anything.

It is like driving a Tesla and laughing about the manufacturer when he mentions how hard it is to get the product right, because you have an easy ride.

I can relate to the article’s AI depression sometimes.

Whatever comes to your mind, AI makes it happen in a couple of minutes in most cases no matter what you imagined.

You invest days and the AI just build it is a couple of minutes way better than you and your 10 teams together did before.

So much hard work and sacrifice - and now? Poof - there it is.

It is nice but also depressing. And not being challenged is the actual problem.

Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness

#55

Post by _the_inflator »

Scubabear68 wrote: post #12

It is opposite for me than what the author describes. With AI I can explore new areas far more effectively. For example, I have never been great with front end web stuff, but asking LLMs to generate something and then looking at the code they built is pretty cool. Of course there are errors and gaffes and weird bits all over, but that helps keep me in the loop and understanding it better. I can now (more) boldly go w…

How large are your projects? What kind of?

Just curious. No right or wrong answer possible.

Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness

#56

Post by zerof1l »

Prior to AI, I’d spend hours debugging and figuring how to make something work. It felt exciting in the end; the journey not so much. It was frustrating sometimes, and the overall output was not great. Sometimes I couldn’t try out all of my ideas simply because I had no capacity to do it. Anything requiring multiple months of work, I’d get burned out and never finish anything.

Now I delegate all the grinding to AI. I still feel accomplishment when I get the final result. But more importantly, I can now build something in couple of weeks that would otherwise take me half a year. I can focus now less on the for-loop vs while-loop and more on the big picture, like keeping things tidy and separation of concerns. The front-end and how end-users will interact with what I build is now more important to me, as well as the design. Previously, I had brain capacity only for writing my clever backend algorithm. Now I can make an equally clever front-end for it.

Maybe we never enjoyed the grind? We just came to accept it and convinced ourselves to enjoy it, because there was no other way. If you wanted something cool, it meant you had to put in hours. Now you just need to word it correctly and get the prerequisites.

Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness

#57

Post by luke5441 »

dvt wrote: post #53
luke5441 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that kind of argument something like where you count the number of cranks claiming P=NP and the number of cranks claiming P!=NP and then if you get 95% papers claiming P!=NP that one wins?

What? Not at all. I'm referring to things like discussing distributions of certain things or probabilities of things as we go towards infinity, etc. These are proper papers, not surveys.

But if a LLM writes such a paper, how do you know there aren't any issues in it that cause wrong probabilities/distributions?

Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness

#58

Post by dvt »

luke5441 wrote: post #57
dvt wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Not at all. I'm referring to things like discussing distributions of certain things or probabilities of things as we go towards infinity, etc. These are proper papers, not surveys.

But if a LLM writes such a paper, how do you know there aren't any issues in it that cause wrong probabilities/distributions?

You don't, that's why you review it (just how you would handle a real human submitting a paper). The main issue with LLM papers is that they tend to be very dense/circuitous or—because LLMs don't truly understand what they're doing—have the wrong focus. An LLM might spend pages on a trivial result, but quickly gloss over a truly remarkable finding.

Terry Tao talks about this challenge in some of his blog posts and interviews, it's pretty interesting.

Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness

#59

Post by coldtea »

dvt wrote: post #28

Have mathematicians become "less savvy" since the invention of the abacus or calculator? The invention of logarithms or analysis? In some ways, the answer is trivially positive. In fact, number crunching was, for most of human history, a key element of being a maths researcher. However, when we look at the claim with a more critical eye, it becomes obvious that this view is myopic. In fact, current progress is in fac…

>Have mathematicians become "less savvy" since the invention of the abacus or calculator?

The abacus and calculator doesn't do high order thinking or prove theorems for you. Math as a field aren't about manually adding numbers together or doing simple algebra formulas, and wheren't that even 2000 years ago.

Those calculators are to math what something like an IDE or a helper library is to programming.

The analogy would be with theorem provers, and even better, with the exact same tool as in the programming case: LLM doing the proofs.

If mathematicians had LLMs and theorem provers do their job, they'd certainly have gotten "less savvy". And if they let them write their coursework, starting from university, they'd might never even become savvy enough in the first place.

Re: LLMs are making me lose my savviness

#60

Post by coldtea »

dvt wrote: post #58
luke5441 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if a LLM writes such a paper, how do you know there aren't any issues in it that cause wrong probabilities/distributions?

You don't, that's why you review it (just how you would handle a real human submitting a paper). The main issue with LLM papers is that they tend to be very dense/circuitous or—because LLMs don't truly understand what they're doing—have the wrong focus. An LLM might spend pages on a trivial result, but quickly gloss over a truly remarkable finding. Terry Tao talks about this challenge in some of his blog posts and in…

>You don't, that's why you review it

Review enough of those without doing the proving yourself, and you'll soon lose the ability to review. And have LLMs do the course work for you at math school, and you might never acquire such ability to begin with anyway.

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