501–510 of 527 posts
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Something curious that I've noticed is that the people who I see that are MOST excited are in tech. When I show ChatGPT to a lay person they don't really care. When I show it to a professional copywriter they say that if they submitted this content to a client they would lose the client. I'm reminded of when my son was learning to talk and everything he said seemed brilliant and coherent to me. To any stranger it sou…
Perhaps those in tech can simply see further out. It reminds me of the advent of the internet, the lay person also didn't care, until websites and web apps were made that catered to their needs. But the people who made those sites and apps were precisely the tech people who could see beyond the lay person's idea of what the internet was. So too with AI.
But go back on HN a decade and be really honest.
Are we any better than average at forecasting?
I'm starting to think that being on the bleeding edge and seeing so many possible alternate futures actually makes us worse
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Perhaps those in tech can simply see further out. It reminds me of the advent of the internet, the lay person also didn't care, until websites and web apps were made that catered to their needs. But the people who made those sites and apps were precisely the tech people who could see beyond the lay person's idea of what the internet was. So too with AI.
This is the sort of stock line, and we're inclined to believe it because we're all in tech. But go back on HN a decade and be really honest. Are we any better than average at forecasting? I'm starting to think that being on the bleeding edge and seeing so many possible alternate futures actually makes us worse
Everyone is terrible at that.
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> Non-productive work is not destructive work -- again, Keynes ditches. Sorry, but breaking a window and then fixing it is non-productive. > Your country, the USA, is very close to system collapse because of its inequal distribution of fruits. Hardly. If the US will collapse, it's because of the current leftist swing of the government engaging in ever-increasing wealth redistribution. > I daresay it makes good popcor…
You could literally be hit by an asteroid and you'd find a way to blame "leftists." Good night and good luck
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In theory it's great, in practice... who knows. The cynic in me would expect it to go worse than anyone could ever imagine. If everything is automated, why do you still need humans?
We have more technology and more stuff than ever, yet it seems we've accomplished about zero in solving the human problems of greed and narcissism. Ted Faro is alive today. We just aren't sure which of the FRANK'S he's at.
Ted Faro was a horrible human being blinded by delusions of grandeur, but he wasn’t “evil” - he was even convinced he was saving humanity by ending the threat of both war and climate change.
I don’t see GPT itself as representing a new Faro Plague, but I do see a lot of wannabe Ted Faros making the decisions at the top.
If LLMs come even close to achieving their short-term potential, we’re unleashing a bigger destabilizing force on the world than the smartphone/social media combo - and the world of 202x seems blatantly incapable of absorbing that level of disruption.
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Interesting to have this contrast in perspectives. For me, the language generated by ChatGPT is flat and boring. No spark of human creativity or originality or flair. And this cheap trick of getting it to write in rhyme or 'in the style of' such and such I find awfully tacky. I'm not saying AlphaZero was creative either. But because it was operating inside a system that was already beautiful and which had such a vast…
The breakthrough of ChatGPT is not a brilliant literary work per se. It's how it interprets what people write and provides coherent answers. This was not possible previously. AlphaZero, chess algos do not have to break this barrier, they work form a very clear and well-defined input. It was clear that a mixture of machine brute force and smart thinking would eventually beat us at these games. No magic here. Alpha fam…
But it remains a tool and a derivative one. You will see people in these recent HN threads making grandiose claims about LLMs 'reasoning' and 'innovating' and 'trying new things' (I replied negatively under a comment just like this in this thread). LLMs can't and will never be able to do these things because, as I've already said, they are completely derivative. They may, by collating information and presenting it to the user, provoke new insights in the human user's mind. But they won't be forming any new insights themselves, because they are machines and machines are not alive, they are not intelligent, and they cannot think or reason (even if a machine model can 'learn').
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The breakthrough of ChatGPT is not a brilliant literary work per se. It's how it interprets what people write and provides coherent answers. This was not possible previously. AlphaZero, chess algos do not have to break this barrier, they work form a very clear and well-defined input. It was clear that a mixture of machine brute force and smart thinking would eventually beat us at these games. No magic here. Alpha fam…
Your third paragraph describes language pretty well (although I'd quibble with formal grammars only being 'vague' in their coverage - I think they do a pretty good job although I agree they can never be perfect). And I appreciate the achievement of LLMs in being able to take in language prompts and return useful responses. So it's an achievement that is useful certainly in providing a 'natural language' querying and…
I totally see your point about inherent "derivativeness" of LLMs. This is true.
But note how "being alive" or "being intelligent" or "be able to think" are hard to define. I'd work for the "duck test" approach: if it is not possible to distinguish a simulation from the original then it doesn't make sense to draw a line.
Anyways, yes, LLMs are boring. I am just not sure we people are not boring as well.
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> once it's roughly on par with us it'll be just as capable of innovating and trying new things This is complete nonsense. An LLM has no ability to innovate or 'try new things'.
I keep seeing people post a line like this and it makes about zero sense to me... Just what the shit do you think Google/Microsoft/Amazon are pouring billions of dollars into machine learning/AI for? The first one that creates a self improving-self learning machine wins the game (or destroys the earth with a paperclip maximizer). You and your human intelligence are not magic. You're biological hardware and software t…
This is (materialistic) nihilism. Materialism is a philosophy and not a new one, but an exceedingly sterile one, in my view. If you want to take that philosophical position you can, but others are free to reject it (and most people do) because it is only a philosophical position, not a proved description of reality (how can it be?).
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> It's really striking though that a person graduating high school in say, 1970, could easily pick from a number of career choices even without doing college or even learning an in-demand trade, like plumbing, welding, etc. [...] Those are the days that are super gone Isn't this rather a strong argument for the claim that what high school as of today teaches is a strong mismatch with what the labour market demands? I…
This is true, but I dont think high school was ever intended to be preparing kids for the labor market; I thought it was to teach a basic education for understanding the world.
But high school and college both got dumbed down, and now an education at a state university is comparable to high school in the first half of the twentieth century.
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Look .. I am one of the working class here. But I gotta point out. Our standard of living is far superior to someone living in 1970 when it comes to stuff/technology. The stuff is cheaper because of China/globalization. The tech is there because we outsourced production and kept specializing the work force. I don't think UBI is the solution. Nor is squeezing people more than they are being squeezed. Efficiency and pr…
It's not about our "standard of living", it's more about class mobilization. If you were born poor, you could still get a job at McDonalds, go to college on those wages, and buy a home/start a family and live middle class easily, if not upper-middle class if you chose a high-earnings potential career. Today, that's close to impossible unless you take student loans, go through the gauntlet of getting a higher paying j…
[0] https://www.thebalancemoney.com/u-s-federal-budget-breakdown...