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AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

kasava.dev

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

#581

Post by wamiks »

jychang wrote: post #557
dns_snek wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> do you know what "Mechanistic Interpretability Researcher" means? Because that would be a fairly bold statement if you were aware of that. The mere existence of a research field is not proof of anything except "some people are interested in this". Its certainly doesn't imply that anyone truly understands how LLMs process information, "think", or "reason". As with all research, people have questions, ideas, theories…

That's a lame typical anti-intellectual argument. You might as well as say all of physics is worthless because nobody truly understands gravity. Notice I didn't use vague terms like "think" or "reason" and instead used specific terms like "feature/circuit internal representation". You're trying to make a false equivalence of "the hard problem of gravity/reasoning/etc is not solved ... so therefore nobody understands…

Dude, seriously, the parent is typical of a mature phd student and up. It's spot on. Enthusiasm is great, but not without humility.

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

#583

Post by windexh8er »

pousada wrote: post #418
windexh8er wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Current LLMs do not think. Just because all models anthropomorphize the repetitive actions a model is looping through does not mean they are truly thinking or reasoning. On the flip side the idea of this being true has been a very successful indirect marketing campaign.

What does “truly thinking or reasoning” even mean for you? I don’t think we even have a coherent definition of human intelligence, let alone of non-human ones.

Oh, yes. The trope of "but what does it even mean to think".

If you can't speak, can you think? Yes. Large Language model. Thinking is not predicated on language.

A few good starts for you. Please refute all of these arguments in your spare time to convince me otherwise:

* https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-think... * https://archive.is/FM4y8 * https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/secondary-school-maths-show...

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

#584

Post by runarberg »

dwohnitmok wrote: post #569
runarberg wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replying in a split thread to clearly separate where I was wrong. If Gemini is so good at chess because of a non-LLM feature of the model, then it is kind of disingenuous to rate it as an LLM and claim that LLMs are approaching 2000 ELO. But the fact it still plays illegal moves sometimes, is biased towards popular moves, etc. makes me think that chess is still handled by an LLM, and makes me suspect benchmaxxing. Bu…

Gemini is an LLM. It playing chess is not relying on a non-LLM module of some sort. I'm just saying that as an LLM, Gemini has a peculiar profile compared to other LLMs (likely an artifact of its post-training process). In particular Gemini is very capable, but also quite misaligned (it will more often actively sabotage users). > then all we can conclude is that Gemini can play chess well, and we cannot generalize to…

The problem with benchmaxxing is that lies about the capabilities of the technology. IF all we wanted was a machine that plays chess, we would just use a chess engine, which we have known how to make for decades. If Google wanted Gemini to be able to play chess, it would be much easier (and better; and hellavulat cheaper) to stick a traditional chess engine into their product and defer all chess to that engine.

The claim here (way up thread) was: “we have the technology to train models to do anything that you can do on a computer, only thing that's missing is the data”, and the implication is that logic and reasoning is an emerging properties of these models if given enough data and enough parameters. However the evidence seems to suggest otherwise. Logic and reasoning have to be specifically programmed into these models, and even with dataset as vast as online chess games (just lichess has 7.1 billion games), if that claim above were true, chess should be easy for LLMs, but it obviously isn’t. And that tells us something about the limitations of the technology.

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

#585

Post by runarberg »

cesarvarela wrote: post #198
dwohnitmok wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1800 FIDE players do make illegal moves. I believe they make about one to two orders of magnitude less illegal moves than Gemini 3 does here. IIRC the usual statistic for expert chess play is about 0.02% of expert chess games have an illegal move (I can look that up later if there's interest to be sure), but that is only the ones that made it into the final game notation (and weren't e.g. corrected at the board by an…

A player at that level making an illegal move is either tired, distracted, drunk, etc. An LLM makes it because it does not really "understand" the rules of chess.

I suspect the majority of these illegal moves are in blitz or bullet tournaments in game 12 of the third day, and the player touches one peace but moves another, or hits the clock with the hand that didn’t make the move, or hits the clock without making a move. I don‘t think any expert level chess player grabs a captured rook and places it on the board, or moves a light squared bishop to a dark square, unless they are hustling at the park, in which case (it can be argued) moves like this with a slight of hand is part of the game.

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

#586

Post by quietbritishjim »

jsumrall wrote: post #329
quietbritishjim wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of the mythical man month is not that more people are necessarily worse for a project, it's just that adding them at the last minute doesn't work, because they take a while to get up to speed and existing project members are distracted while trying to help them. It's true that a larger team, formed well in advance, is also less efficient per person, but they still can achieve more overall than small teams (…

Interesting point. And from the agents point of view, it’s always joining at the last minute, and doesn’t stick around longer than its context window. There’s a lesson in there maybe…

A small difference is that AGENTS.md gets added every time, so the evolution of that is essentially your agent's equivalent of team experience.

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

#587

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

wcfrobert wrote: post #464

Ultimately, AI is meant to replace you, not empower you. 1 - This exoskeleton analogy might hold true for a couple more years at most. While it is comforting to suggest that AI empowers workers to be more productive, like chess, AI will soon plan better, execute better, and have better taste. Human-in-the-loop will just be far worse than letting AI do everything. 2 - Dario and Dwarkesh were openly chatting about how…

If someone’s only value add was “I codez real gud” you have been a replaceable commodity for over a decade if you were a standard enterprise dev (no offense to enterprise devs - that’s what I was for 25 years until 2020 with various levels of responsibility and for all intents and purposes still am just with a fancier title and the ability to talk to people). It’s finally caught up to BigTech.

Thr value I brought to companies has never been I can write for loops. It’s always been I can use my decade+ of experience with computers to either make the company more money or save the company more money than they are paying me.

Before anyone replies I didn’t have a decade of experience starting out, actually I did. I was hobbyist assembly language then C developer for a decade before graduating from college in 1996.

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

#588

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

Kon5ole wrote: post #527
kfichter wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who needs the money when you have an autonomous system to produce all the energy and resources you need? These systems simply do not need the construct of money as we know it at a certain point.

The star trek society is is a remote possibility here. One can hope.

The Star Trek society was a myth - even on Star Trek. This was called out by Quark on DS9. There was very much the idea of “credits” and rationing based on limited resources.

During the original Star Trek show, you never really saw what life was like for everyone who was not aboard the flagship starship. They started exposing more of the universe in subsequent decades

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

#589

Post by recursive »

esafak wrote: post #568
recursive wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If an employee repeatedly makes factually incorrect statements, we will (or could) hold them accountable. That seems to be one difference.

You can cancel your AI subscription too.

Then you lose all your employees. And all the new candidates are just the old one in new costumes.

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

#590

Post by krapp »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #588
Kon5ole wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The star trek society is is a remote possibility here. One can hope.

The Star Trek society was a myth - even on Star Trek. This was called out by Quark on DS9. There was very much the idea of “credits” and rationing based on limited resources. During the original Star Trek show, you never really saw what life was like for everyone who was not aboard the flagship starship. They started exposing more of the universe in subsequent decades

Gene Roddenberry imagined a society in which humans evolved beyond their base desires and where petty disagreements and conflict didn't exist - but that made for lousy drama so the writers ignored it.

But you don't even need to go that far. A Star Trek style 'post-scarcity' society is impossible because it depends on infinite free energy, FTL and perfect matter replication, none of which are allowed by modern physics. In the real world you can't just outwit the second law of thermodynamics. No matter what form AGI takes - if it ever exists at all - it won't be magical. There will always be scarcity, and where scarcity exists there will always be hierarchies of power and control because human nature doesn't change.

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