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Terence Tao on O1

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Re: Terence Tao on O1

#501

Post by codr7 »

threecheese wrote: post #429
codr7 wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're currently in the shiny toy stage, once the flaws are thoroughly explored and accepted by all as fundamental I suspect interest will fade rapidly. There's no substance to be found, no added information; it's just repeating what came before, badly, which is exactly the kind of software that would be better off not written if you ask me. The plan to rebuild society on top of this crap is right up there with basing…

The worry I have is that the net value will become great enough that we’ll simply ignore the flaws, and probabilistic good-enough tools will become the new normal. Consider how many ads the average person wades through to scroll an Insta feed for hours - “we’ve” accepted a degraded experience in order to access some new technology that benefits us in some way. To paraphrase comedian Mark Normand: “Capitalism!”

Scary thought, difficult to unthink.

I'm afraid you might be right.

We've accepted a lot of crap lately just to get what we think we want, convenience is a killer.

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#502

Post by codr7 »

ben_w wrote: post #433
threecheese wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worry I have is that the net value will become great enough that we’ll simply ignore the flaws, and probabilistic good-enough tools will become the new normal. Consider how many ads the average person wades through to scroll an Insta feed for hours - “we’ve” accepted a degraded experience in order to access some new technology that benefits us in some way. To paraphrase comedian Mark Normand: “Capitalism!”

Indeed, even if I were to minimise what LLMs can do, they are still achieving what "targeted advertising" very obviously isn't.

They're both short sighted attempts at extracting profit while ignoring all negative consequences.

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#503

Post by calmworm »

__loam wrote: post #350
atomic128 wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somebody tested people on Hacker News to evaluate programming competency. This was part of a larger evaluation comparing the Hacker News population to people on Reddit programming subreddits. Here is a very heated discussion of the result: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33293522 It appears that Hacker News is perhaps NOT populated by the programming elite. In contrast, there are real wizards on Reddit. Surprisi…

Not surprising given how bad the takes here are and how many of the users here are dumb kids right out of college who are aspiring founders.

Unnecessarily negative. Maybe rethink it.

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#504

Post by j_timberlake »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #149

Rewind your mind to 2019 and imagine reading a post that said “The experience seemed roughly on par with trying to advise a mediocre, but not completely incompetent, graduate student.” With regard to interacting with the equivalent of Alexa. That’s a remarkable difference in 5 years.

Terry is a genius that can get that value out of an LLM.

Average Joe can't do anything like that yet, both because he won't be as good at prompting the model, and because his problems in life aren't text-based anyway.

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#505

Post by j_timberlake »

ocular-rockular wrote: post #476

I don't understand why this is news? This could have been said by any one particular contributor from HackerNews but just because it's from Terence Tao it hits the front page? I understand that the guy is a great mathematician, but why is his input on this any more valuable than the myriad of discussions about o1 from other professionals on here?

[flagged]

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#506

Post by ken47 »

charlieyu1 wrote: post #333
ken47 wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The conflict of interest might have something to do with the fact that OpenAI's CEO/founder was once a major figure in Y Combinator. But I think you wanted to insinuate that the conflict of interest ran in the other direction. Once ChatGPT can even come close to replacing a junior engineer, you can retry your claim. The progression of the tech underlying ChatGPT will be sub-linear.

The current driving force of AI is the desire to cut costs. Jobs will be cut even if ChatGPT is nowhere near a junior engineer and that's the problem.

Care to elaborate on the second sentence with any proof?

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#507

Post by SmartHypercube »

Nadya wrote: post #83
skydhash wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Much Much more productive world by just knuckling down and learning how to do the work. The fact everyone that say they've become more productive with LLMs won't say how exactly. I can talk about how VIM have make it more enjoyable to edit code (keybinding and motions), how Emacs is a good environment around text tooling (lisp machine), how I use technical books to further my learning (so many great books out here)…

Ever seen someone try and search something on Google and they are just AWFUL at it? They can never find what they're looking for and then you try and can pull it up in a single search? That's what it is like watching some people try to use LLM's. Learning how to prompt an LLM is as much a learned skill as much as learning how to phrase internet searches is a learned skill. And as much as people decried that "searchin…

> That's what it is like watching some people try to use LLM's.

Exactly. I made a game testing prompting skills a few days earlier, to share with some close friends, and it was your comment that inspired me to translate the game into English and submitted to HN. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41545541 )

I am really curious about how other people write prompts, so while my submission only got 7 points, I'm happy that I can see hundreds of people's own ways to write prompts thanks to HN.

However, after reading most prompts (I may missed some), I found exactly 0 prompts containing any kind of common prompting techniques, such as "think step by step", explaining specific steps to solve the problem instead of only asking for final results, few-shots (showing example inputs and outputs). Half of the prompts are simply asking AI to do the thing (at least asking correctly). The other half do not make sense, even if we show the prompt to a real human, they won't know what to reply with.

Well... I expected that SOME complaints about AI online are from people not familiar with prompting / not good at prompting. But now I realized there are a lot more people than I thought not knowing some basic prompting techniques.

Anyway, a fun experience for me! Since it was your comment made me want to do this, I just want to share it with you.

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#508

Post by drzzhan »

bbor wrote: post #477
drzzhan wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting. I am young so I don't know what actually is creativity. Could you explain that part for me?

You’re asking the right questions, IMO! Chomsky has spent his life trying to answer this question in different forms, and has ultimately arrived to the conclusion that we live in a “Pre-Gallilean” era of cognitive science, where the only answers available to us are developed through the use of intuitive interpretation (like they used to do with ‘the heavens’/space) instead of empirical contradiction (aka science). He…

Wow. Thank you for your thoughtful answer! > “human creativity is the ability to create an infinite range of outputs from a finite range of inputs that nonetheless pertain to our motivations/context in some useful way” Do you think this can be used as a metric? Like the more useful answer we can come up with, the more "creative" we are. The constraint of outputs and "some useful way" is such a good insight.

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#509

Post by drzzhan »

vlovich123 wrote: post #469
drzzhan wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting. I am young so I don't know what actually is creativity. Could you explain that part for me?

> Creativity is defined as the tendency to generate or recognize ideas, alternatives, or possibilities that may be useful in solving problems, communicating with others, and entertaining ourselves and others Basically can you provide a new perspective on solving a problem that hasn't been considered or a new way of looking at an existing idea in a new way to unlock a path.

That is such a good quote to remember. Thanks for your answer! It actually opened my understanding a lot. I searched your quote and found some other good ones.

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#510

Post by drzzhan »

perching_aix wrote: post #459
drzzhan wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting. I am young so I don't know what actually is creativity. Could you explain that part for me?

A couple days ago I saw a tweet that described how to remove an element from an array in O(1) time instead of O(n). The key to it was identifying that for the purpose the given array was being used for, it could be unordered / not fully ordered, and it would not be an issue. This way, it was possible to simply replace the element with the last array element, then decrease the size of the array by one. I'd say that's…

Thank you for your answer! TIL a new word: qualia I like your two examples. They have different perspectives. Though I must say the "qualia to manifestation" is still a bit abstract for me now. I'll keep them in mind.
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