271–280 of 507 posts
Nobody asked for it??? Nobody wants it??? You're not paying attention. I want it. I think it's our only chance at quickly solving huge complex problems like aging, cancer, Alzheimer's.
Not to mention the environmental impact of everlasting humans.
This is insane. We have created the greatest tool in human history and people are complaining. I can use it to help me code, fix modeling issues as I learn CAD, help me troubleshoot the issues in my two-stroke leafblower engine and can consistently walk me through complex leetcode algorithms. It literally knows everything and people still complain.
That's not to say the Internet hasn't caused good things to happen, but to ignore the bad things is counterproductive. Maybe it's ok to slow down and take a step back to make sure we're not doing more bad than good.
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The younger generations do seem to be embracing AI more, but mainly because it can do their homework for them without requiring them to learn anything. For now at least, until curriculums have time to adjust to this new reality.
I don't know if it's "embracing" it, it's just a fact of life. I remember in an interview with Marc Andreessen he spoke about introducing his 8 year old to chat gpt. He described the moment as monumental, likening it to "bringing fire down from the mountains." However, his son was unimpressed by the technology, responding, "It's a computer. Of course you ask it questions and it gives you answers. What else is it for?…
AI in certain hands will be fine. In other hands it will be a disaster for the person that uses it, because they will not perform the reps they need to really be able to think. Believing a computer is a magic box that gives answers is not great, it's adjacent to "believe and do what the computer tells you".
> The best minds of my generation I’m tired of that line. I remember first seeing it on “the best minds of our generation being employed to sell you ads”. Making a computer go brrr doesn’t qualify anyone for a “best mind”. I’d hope a “best mind” would be, above all, empathetic. Concerned about the well being of their fellow humans. Philosophical about the state of the world. Patient. Curious. Wise and not just smart.…
I came here to say exactly this. I can't tell if it's because I'm not a traditional "tech" person, but 90% of the best minds I've seen are nowhere near tech in general. Having a brilliant mind, going to an "elite" school (because someone told you it's elite), joining a FAANG company, building software that you deep down know is killing society, but doing it because the "problems are fun and money is great" is antithe…
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That which is normal is not necessarily also good or not problematic. Racism is normal, but its a problem. War is normal, but its absurdly wasteful and problematic. Cancer is normal etc.
> Racism is normal No, it is not. You ever observe small children in a multicultural group? They’re not racist, because they have no concept of it, nor why you’d want to do that. They see each other as peers. Racism is taught.
Young children's social environment is almost entirely defined by their parents. You'd expect very little aggressive behaviour there.
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It's creating devastating effects in higher education here. I'm a bit older but did a masters after working a few years and I've now decided to quit because most - if not all - students just upload the sheets to an llm and copy the output. Group projects used to be really intense and interesting here - now my partners in the group-projects ask me to explain their code to them. It's not an ivy-league university here b…
> It's 100% transactional - how can I go through this as fast as possible - as a result people fail the exams at unseen rates like 50-80% in classes that can be passed by learning a few days and doing the exercises yourself. This is a funny post because this was my experience 20 years ago in college. Nothing new from LLMs here. My big takeaway from my experience in different universities (I attended several different…
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And it's cheap . Imagine I told you that you could have direct access to every PhD in the world and they would respond to all of your questions instantly... for $20/mo. Mind-blowing stuff and people still complain.
But it's not "direct access to every PhD in the world." You don't really believe that do you?
The funny thing is, it's somewhat less useful for certain business stuff, because so much of that is private within corporations. But the stuff you learn in a PhD program is all published. And it's pretty phenomenal at distilling that information to answer any specific question.
Multiple times a week I run into an obscure term or concept in a paper that isn't defined well or doesn't seem to make sense. I ask AI and it explains it to me in a minute. Yes, it's basically exactly like asking a PhD.
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On that specific quote - I feel like this is offensive on more than one level. The waste of our best minds... sure. Fine. But - "to sell you ads." Marketting has the dubious distinction of being one area of human endeavor where technological advances serve mostly to make your life worse, make your mind less focused, make your wallet more empty. The spherical-cow "ideal" 100% efficient perfect marketing campaign/tacti…
> The spherical-cow "ideal" 100% efficient perfect marketing campaign/tactic literally hypnotizes you into dropping all your money on an arbitrary good or service. It is isomorphic to somebody mugging you. I like the quote and despise advertising of any kind for mostly the same reason, but you could apply this logic to any kind of business and it starts to fall apart. > The spherical-cow "ideal" 100% efficient perfec…
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I'll bite. I received my PhD in Computer Science focused on NLP and creative text generation last year and I think the hype around LLMs is ridiculous (academics are no better than industry on chasing hype). They're trained to predict the next token given a context, and that's exactly what they're good at. How old do you think I am?
I was in my 20s when crypto was "it" and I was definitely on the last group about it, so it's definitely not just about age, even thought there's probably some correlation.
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And it's cheap . Imagine I told you that you could have direct access to every PhD in the world and they would respond to all of your questions instantly... for $20/mo. Mind-blowing stuff and people still complain.
But it's not "direct access to every PhD in the world." You don't really believe that do you?