My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

Disclaimer: I'm not praising piracy but outside of US borders is a free for all.

The criticisms I hear are almost always gotchas, and when confronted with the benchmarks they either don’t actually know how they are built or don’t want to contribute to them. They just want to complain or seem like a contrarian from what I can tell.

Are LLMs perfect? Absolutely not. Do we have metrics to tell us how good they are? Yes

I’ve found very few critics that actually understand ML on a deep level. For instance Gary Marcus didn’t know what a test train split was. Unfortunately, rage bait like this makes money

You've already lost me, because I view programming as an art form. I would no more use AI to generate code than I would use it to paint my canvas.

I think the rest of the article is informative. It made me want to try some things. But it's written from the perspective of a CEO thinking all his developers are just salt miners; miners go into the cave and code comes out.

I think that's actually what my hangup is. It's the old adage of programmers simply "copying and pasting from stack overflow" but taken to the extreme. It's the reduction of my art into mindless labor.

As somebody who comes from a politically left family, and was also around in the early days of the Web, let me tentatively note that this issue has a particular political slant, too. The left has strong roots in being able to effectively critique new developments, economic and social, that don't come from its own engines of innovation which have revolved around those critiques, plus solidarity, organization, and sociopolitical action.

The movement's theorists work far more slowly on how to integrate the effect of those changes into its vision. That means when something like this comes along, the left's cultural norms err on the side of critique. Which is fine, but it makes any other expression both hard to convey, and instantly suspect in those communities. I saw this in the early Web, where from a small group of early adopters of all political slants, it was the independents, heterodox leftists, and the right, -- and most vocally, the libertarians -- who were able to most quickly adapt to and adopt the new technology. Academic leftists, and those who were inspired by them took a lot longer to accomodate the Net into their theses (beyond disregarding or rejecting it) and even longer to devise practical uses for it.

It wasn't that long, I should say -- a matter of months or years, and any latent objections were quickly swamped by younger voices who were familiar with the power of the Net; but from my point of view it seriously set back that movement in practicality and popularity during the 80s and 90s.

I see the same with AI: the left has attracted a large generational of support across the world from providing an emotionally resonant and practical alternative to the status quo many people face. But you quickly lose the mandate of heaven if you fail to do more than just simplistically critique or reject a thing that the average person in the world feels they know better, or feels differently toward, than you do. This is something to consider, even if you still strongly believe yourselves to be correct in the critiques.

We're in the middle of a major shift - there will benefits to those that adapt first. People outside the field have no idea what's coming, even those of us in the field are underestimating the shift.

There were a few outliers in the 60s who understood what the computing revolution meant and would mean, but most did not. This is likely an even bigger change than that.