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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

#21

Post by leogao »

> The purpose here is not to responsibly warn us of a real threat. If that were the aim there would be a lot more shutting down of data centres and a lot less selling of nuclear-weapon-level-dangerous chatbots.

you're lumping together two very different groups of people and pointing out that their beliefs are incompatible. of course they are! the people who think there is a real threat are generally different people from the ones who want to push AI progress as fast as possible! the people who say both do so generally out of a need to compromise rather than there existing many people who simultaneously hold both views.

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

#22

Post by adrianN »

kusokurae wrote: post #10
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's incredible that on Hacker News we still encounter posts by people who will or cannot differentiate mathematics from magic.

Intelligence is not magic though. The difference between intelligence and mathematics can plausibly be the same kind of difference between chemistry and intelligence.

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

#23

Post by lyu07282 »

I think it's interesting how gamers have developed a pretty healthy aversion to generative ai in video games. Steam and Itch both now make it mandatory that games disclose generative ai use and recently even beloved Larian Studios was under fire for using ai for concept art. Gamers hate that shit.

I think that's good, but the whole "AI is literally not doing anything", that it's just some mass hallucination has to die. Gamers argue it takes jobs from artists away, programmers seem to have to argue it doesn't actually do anything for some reason. Isn't that telling?

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

#24

Post by energy123 »

kusokurae wrote: post #10
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's incredible that on Hacker News we still encounter posts by people who will or cannot differentiate mathematics from magic.

Human intelligence is chemistry and biology, not magic. OK, now what?

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

#25

Post by TeriyakiBomb »

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…

Everything is magic when you don't understand how things work.

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

#26

Post by latexr »

schnitzelstoat wrote: post #11

I agree that all the AI doomerism is silly (by which I mean those that are concerned about some Terminator-style machine uprising, the economic issues are quite real). But it's clear the LLM's have some real value, even if we always need a human-in-the-loop to prevent hallucinations it can still massively reduce the amount of human labour required for many tasks. NFT's felt like a con, and in retrospect were a con. T…

Those aren’t mutually exclusive; something can be both useful and a con.

When a con man sells you a cheap watch for an high price, what you get is still useful—a watch that tells the time—but you were also still conned, because what you paid for is not what was advertised. You overpaid because you were tricked about what you were buying.

LLMs are useful for many things, but they’re also not nearly as beneficial and powerful as they’re being sold as. Sam Altman, while entirely ignoring the societal issues raised by the technology (such as the spread of misinformation and unhealthy dependencies), repeatedly claims it will cure all cancers and other kinds of diseases, eradicate poverty, solve the housing crisis, democracy… Those are bullshit, thus the con description applies.

https://youtu.be/l0K4XPu3Qhg?t=60

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

#27

Post by mossTechnician »

iNic wrote: post #14
mossTechnician wrote: post #2

"AI safety" groups are part of what's described here: you might assume from the general "safety" label that organizations like PauseAI or ControlAI would focus things like data center pollution, the generation of sexual abuse material, causing mental harm, or many other things we can already observe. But they don't. Instead, "AI safety" organizations all appear to exclusively warn of unstoppable, apocalyptic, and unp…

We should do both and it makes sense that different orgs have different focuses. It makes no sense to berate one set of orgs for not working on the exact type of thing that you want. PauseAI and ControlAI have each received less than $1 million in funding. They are both very small organizations as far as these types of advocacy non-profits go.

If it makes sense to handle all of these issues, then couldn't these organizations just acknowledge all of these issues? If reducing harm is the goal, I don't see a reason to totally segregate different issues, especially not by drawing a dividing line between the ones OpenAI already acknowledges and the ones it doesn't. I've never seen any self-described "AI safety" organizations that tackles any of the present-day issues AI companies cause.

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

#28

Post by Chance-Device »

lyu07282 wrote: post #23

I think it's interesting how gamers have developed a pretty healthy aversion to generative ai in video games. Steam and Itch both now make it mandatory that games disclose generative ai use and recently even beloved Larian Studios was under fire for using ai for concept art. Gamers hate that shit. I think that's good, but the whole "AI is literally not doing anything", that it's just some mass hallucination has to di…

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 with their wallets. I think we’ve learned that people aren’t very good at doing that with causes they claim to care about once they have to actually part with their money.

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

#29

Post by timschmidt »

lyu07282 wrote: post #23

I think it's interesting how gamers have developed a pretty healthy aversion to generative ai in video games. Steam and Itch both now make it mandatory that games disclose generative ai use and recently even beloved Larian Studios was under fire for using ai for concept art. Gamers hate that shit. I think that's good, but the whole "AI is literally not doing anything", that it's just some mass hallucination has to di…

> programmers seem to have to argue it doesn't actually do anything for some reason.

It's not really hard to see... spend your whole life defining yourself around what you do that others can't or won't, then an algorithm comes along which can do a lot of the same. Directly threatens the ego, understandings around self-image and self-worth, as well as future financial prospects (perceived). Along with a heavy dose of change scary, change bad.

Personally, I think the solution is to avoid building your self-image around material things, and to welcome and embrace new tools which always bring new opportunities, but I can see why the polar opposite is a natural reaction for many.

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

#30

Post by dgxyz »

schnitzelstoat wrote: post #11

I agree that all the AI doomerism is silly (by which I mean those that are concerned about some Terminator-style machine uprising, the economic issues are quite real). But it's clear the LLM's have some real value, even if we always need a human-in-the-loop to prevent hallucinations it can still massively reduce the amount of human labour required for many tasks. NFT's felt like a con, and in retrospect were a con. T…

I disagree with this perspective. Human labour is mostly inefficiency from habitual repetition from experience. LLMs tend not to improve that. They look like they do but instead train the user into replacing the repetition with machine repetition.

We had an "essential" reporting function in the business which was done in Excel. All SMEs seem to have little pockets of this. Hours were spent automating the task with VBA to no avail. Then LLMs came in after the CTO became obsessed with it and it got hit with that hammer. This is four iterations of the same job: manual, Excel, Excel+VBA, Excel+CoPilot. 15 years this went on.

No one actually bothered to understand the reason the work was being done and the LLM did not have any context. This was being emailed weekly to a distribution list with no subscribers as the last one had left the company 14 years ago. No one knew, cared or even though about it.

And I see the same in all areas LLMs are used. They are merely pasting over incompetence, bad engineering designs, poor abstractions and low knowledge situations. Literally no one cares about this as long as the work gets done and the world keeps spinning. No one really wants to make anything better, just do the bad stuff faster. If that's where something is useful, then we have fucked up.

Another one. I need to make a form to store some stuff in a database so I can do some analytics on it later. The discussion starts with how we can approach it with ReactJS+microservices+kubernetes. That isn't the problem I need solving. People have been completely blinded on what a problem is and how to get rid of it efficiently.

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