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AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

kasava.dev

301–310 of 608 posts

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're describing is not finding flaws in code. It's summarizing, which current models are known to be relatively good at. It is true that models can happen to produce a sound reasoning process. This is probabilistic however (moreso than humans, anyway). There is no known sampling method that can guarantee a deterministic result without significantly quashing the output space (excluding most correct solutions).…

> moreso than humans Citation needed.

Much of the space of artificial intelligence is based on a goal of a general reasoning machine comparable to the reasoning of a human. There are many subfields that are less concerned with this, but in practice, artificial intelligence is perceived to have that goal.

I am sure the output of current frontier models is convincing enough to outperform the appearance of humans to some. There is still an ongoing outcry from when GPT-4o was discontinued from users who had built a romantic relationship with their access to it. However I am not convinced that language models have actually reached the reliability of human reasoning.

Even a dumb person can be consistent in their beliefs, and apply them consistently. Language models strictly cannot. You can prompt them to maintain consistency according to some instructions, but you never quite have any guarantee. You have far less of a guarantee than you could have instead with a human with those beliefs, or even a human with those instructions.

I don't have citations for the objective reliability of human reasoning. There are statistics about unreliability of human reasoning, and also statistics about unreliability of language models that far exceed them. But those are both subjective in many cases, and success or failure rates are actually no indication of reliability whatsoever anyway.

On top of that, every human is different, so it's difficult to make general statements. I only know from my work circles and friend circles that most of the people I keep around outperform language models in consistency and reliability. Of course that doesn't mean every human or even most humans meet that bar, but it does mean human-level reasoning includes them, which raises the bar that models would have to meet. (I can't quantify this, though.)

There is a saying about fully autonomous self driving vehicles that goes a little something like: they don't just have to outperform the worst drivers; they have to outperform the best drivers, for it to be worth it. Many fully autonomous crashes are because the autonomous system screwed up in a way that a human would not. An autonomous system typically lacks the creativity and ingenuity of a human driver.

Though they can already be more reliable in some situations, we're still far from a world where autonomous driving can take liability for collisions, and that's because they're not nearly as reliable or intelligent enough to entirely displace the need for human attention and intervention. I believe Waymo is the closest we've gotten and even they have remote safety operators.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#302
post #32

> We're thinking about AI wrong. And this write up is not an exception. Why even bother thinking about AI, when Anthropic and OpenAI CEOs openly tell us what they want (quote from recent Dwarkesh interview) - "Then further down the spectrum, there’s 90% less demand for SWEs, which I think will happen but this is a spectrum." So save thinking and listen to intent - replace 90% of SWEs in near future (6-12 months accor…

Where is this "90% less demand for SWEs" going to come from? Are we going to run out software to write?

Historically when SWEs became more efficient then we just started making more complicated software (and SWE demand actually increased).

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it can't find actual flaws in your code I can tell from this statement that you don't have experience with claude-code. It might just be a "text predictor" but in the real world it can take a messy log file, and from that navigate and fix issues in source. It can appear to reason about root causes and issues with sequencing and logic. That might not be what is actually happening at a technical level, but it is indi…

What you're describing is not finding flaws in code. It's summarizing, which current models are known to be relatively good at. It is true that models can happen to produce a sound reasoning process. This is probabilistic however (moreso than humans, anyway). There is no known sampling method that can guarantee a deterministic result without significantly quashing the output space (excluding most correct solutions).…

Nothing you've said about reasoning here is exclusive to LLMs. Human reasoning is also never guaranteed to be deterministic, excluding most correct solutions. As OP says, they may not be reasoning under the hood but if the effect is the same as a tool, does it matter?

I'm not sure if I'm up to date on the latest diffusion work, but I'm genuinely curious how you see them potentially making LLMs more deterministic? These models usually work by sampling too, and it seems like the transformer architecture is better suited to longer context problems than diffusion

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#304
post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you purposely write this to sound like an LLM?

It's just good writing structure. I get the feeling many people hadn't been exposed to good structure before LLMs. LLMs can definitely have a tone, but it is pretty annoying that every time someone cares to write well, they are getting accused of sounding like an LLM instead of the other way around. LLMs were trained to write well, on human writing, it's not surprising there is crossover.

It's really not "good" for many people. It's the sort of high-persuasion marketing speak that used to be limited to the blogs of glossy but shallow startups. Now it's been sucked up by LLMs and it's everywhere.

If you want good writing, go and read a New Yorker.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#305
post #131

The amount of "It's not X it's Y" type commentary suggests to me that A) nobody knows and B) there is solid chance this ends up being either all true or all false Or put differently we've managed to hype this to the moon but somehow complete failure (see studies about zero impact on productivity) seem plausible. And similarly kills all jobs seems plausible. That's an insane amount of conflicting opinions being help i…

You appear to have said a lot. Without saying anything.

You appear to have written a lot. Without understanding anything.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it can't find actual flaws in your code I can tell from this statement that you don't have experience with claude-code. It might just be a "text predictor" but in the real world it can take a messy log file, and from that navigate and fix issues in source. It can appear to reason about root causes and issues with sequencing and logic. That might not be what is actually happening at a technical level, but it is indi…

What you're describing is not finding flaws in code. It's summarizing, which current models are known to be relatively good at. It is true that models can happen to produce a sound reasoning process. This is probabilistic however (moreso than humans, anyway). There is no known sampling method that can guarantee a deterministic result without significantly quashing the output space (excluding most correct solutions).…

This all sounds like the stochastic parrot fallacy. Total determinism is not the goal, and it not a prerequisite for general intelligence. As you allude to above, humans are also not fully deterministic. I don't see what hard theoretical barriers you've presented toward AGI or future ASI.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#307
post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like a real employee!

And just like a real employee, this makes it work worse. (Old study, I wonder if it holds up on newer models? https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.14531 )

Interesting, I've actually found swearing at the dumbass bots to give better results, might just be the catharsis of telling it it's a dumbass though.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#309
post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The benefits we get from checking in with other humans, like error correction, and delegation can all be done better by AI. Not this generation of AI though. It's a text predictor, not a logic engine - it can't find actual flaws in your code, it's just really good at saying things which sound plausible.

> it can't find actual flaws in your code I can tell from this statement that you don't have experience with claude-code. It might just be a "text predictor" but in the real world it can take a messy log file, and from that navigate and fix issues in source. It can appear to reason about root causes and issues with sequencing and logic. That might not be what is actually happening at a technical level, but it is indi…

> I can tell from this statement that you don't have experience with claude-code.

I happen to use it on a daily basis. 4.6-opus-high to be specific.

The other day it surmised from (I assume) the contents of my clipboard that I want to do A, while I really wanted to B, it's just that A was a more typical use case. Or actually: hardly anyone ever does B, as it's a weird thing to do, but I needed to do it anyway.

> but it is indistinguishable from actual reasoning

I can distinguish it pretty well when it makes mistakes someone who actually read the code and understood it wouldn't make.

Mind you: it's great at presenting someone else's knowledge and it was trained on a vast library of it, but it clearly doesn't think itself.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#310
post #273
post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The benefits we get from checking in with other humans, like error correction, and delegation can all be done better by AI. Not this generation of AI though. It's a text predictor, not a logic engine - it can't find actual flaws in your code, it's just really good at saying things which sound plausible.

[flagged]

I use these tools and that's my experience.
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