Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI Built a Nuke and Still Lost

lwilko.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 103 posts

Re: AI Built a Nuke and Still Lost

#81

Post by piazz »

fyredge wrote: post #11

There is something to be said about the qualia of LLM generated passages. Each individual sentence reads as a statement and every next statement a continuation of the previous one. This happened, then this happened... Ad infinitum. Before today, I could not explain to you why AI articles were so obvious to me, but I think I do now. There is no insight to be gleamed. Pre-LLM, authors generally had intention behind the…

The term that I saw once, and now constantly land back on, is “meaning shaped”

At a quick glance, it looks like a thing that should contain meaning and substance. At any closer inspection, it falls apart completely.

Re: AI Built a Nuke and Still Lost

#82

Post by tgv »

> CivBench is one small attempt to measure it, nowhere near the whole answer, but I'd rather measure the right thing badly than the wrong thing perfectly.

Yet the benchmark is Civilization VI, which consists of extremely coarse, human written rules with the explicit goal of keeping players busy. Basically, a waste of time, money, water, and CO2.

Re: AI Built a Nuke and Still Lost

#83

Post by davedx »

The way it failed to maintain its strategy, or even its build plans, makes me wonder if this is something that could be solved via the attention mechanism itself?

Instead of only using attention to focus on the previous token position, could it also do some kind of higher order "temporal attention" planning where it weighs each previous log (game state + intent) checkpoint when generating outputs?

Re: AI Built a Nuke and Still Lost

#84

Post by dingaling »

dinfinity wrote: post #63
fyredge wrote: post #11

There is something to be said about the qualia of LLM generated passages. Each individual sentence reads as a statement and every next statement a continuation of the previous one. This happened, then this happened... Ad infinitum. Before today, I could not explain to you why AI articles were so obvious to me, but I think I do now. There is no insight to be gleamed. Pre-LLM, authors generally had intention behind the…

> Pre-LLM, authors generally had intention behind their words. I think this is at least in part a combination of rosy retrospection and attentional bias: A lot of human writing was always trash. Absolute dogshit with regard to the quality of writing, but there was no "AI slop" label to attach to it. How would you, pre-LLMs, have placed a comment on the writing style if a post was badly written? From what I've seen it…

> A lot of human writing was always trash.

Yes, several history authors come to mind who over several decades never broke out of the style of "this happened, then they moved to here, then this happened.". Their entire book could just be summarised in a table instead of prose.

LLMs seem to be stuck at the same stage, telling us 'what' but not 'why' and 'so what.'

Re: AI Built a Nuke and Still Lost

#85

Post by seba_dos1 »

sph wrote: post #80
goatherders wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer is in your question. "Empty calories" is a multi trillion dollar business in the food world. It will be the same in the digital world.

McDonalds serves a need: human tend to get hungry. What need does filling the Internet with AI-generated slop serve? No one is ever going to read those. As I've shown, sometimes they're not even selling anything. The multi-trillion dollar business is for hyperscalers, but I don't get what slop creators get out of this. What are they spending money for?

> What are they spending money for?

To prepare for the future use of these resources.

Re: AI Built a Nuke and Still Lost

#86

Post by geon »

teekert wrote: post #19
fyredge wrote: post #11

There is something to be said about the qualia of LLM generated passages. Each individual sentence reads as a statement and every next statement a continuation of the previous one. This happened, then this happened... Ad infinitum. Before today, I could not explain to you why AI articles were so obvious to me, but I think I do now. There is no insight to be gleamed. Pre-LLM, authors generally had intention behind the…

It's not this, it's that. And then what happened? This. I did that... This happened. It's a thing I don't know why But it's a thing To be honest, it's not a thing. Let that sink in. Maybe we find most meaning in the least average language constructs.

Like a horoscope.

I suppose we humans are so good at reading between the lines, that we will see meaning where there is none.

Re: AI Built a Nuke and Still Lost

#87

Post by inglor_cz »

sph wrote: post #80
goatherders wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer is in your question. "Empty calories" is a multi trillion dollar business in the food world. It will be the same in the digital world.

McDonalds serves a need: human tend to get hungry. What need does filling the Internet with AI-generated slop serve? No one is ever going to read those. As I've shown, sometimes they're not even selling anything. The multi-trillion dollar business is for hyperscalers, but I don't get what slop creators get out of this. What are they spending money for?

I wouldn't underestimate the market for AI videos. From funny to hyperpolitical/propagandist.

One of the most globally recognized attribute of the recent US-Iranian war was the Lego cartoons. This sort of content will be soon churned out by everyone.

Re: AI Built a Nuke and Still Lost

#88

Post by majorbugger »

fragmede wrote: post #38
majorbugger wrote: post #7

> Somewhere in the first game, between a bug fix and a strategy note, I asked the agent what this was actually like for it Yeah because LLM "experiences" the game

What word would you use instead?

Nothing, because the question makes no sense.

Re: AI Built a Nuke and Still Lost

#89

Post by raincole »

artpar wrote: post #75
pjio wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a limited amount of time I appreciated the level of detail in the article, hoping it would give me more insight, until it exhausted me. I think those two ideas are real takeaways: "Knowing is not doing" and "What can we trust AI to do?". Still, could have been said with a more concise text and maybe a follow up about the details.

The key takeaway pretty much applies to the authoring of the article itself. The LLM knew what all happened but couldn't put it into a readable article.

Your comment has more insight than this whole article (which is, well, not a very high bar).

Re: AI Built a Nuke and Still Lost

#90

Post by watwut »

dspillett wrote: post #68
wmwragg wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This and the fact that you often read a sentence, paragraph or the whole article, and think this said absolutely nothing in lots of words.

That is also true of a lot of pre-2023, so most likely human penned, writing. LLMs seem to emulate bad (or even "meh") writing well but, without a human editor making significant tweaks, have yet to excel at good writing. I've been incorrectly identified as an LLM before now because my writing is sometimes bad and falls into the tropes now associated with generative AI (“not this, but that”, being overly wordy, appea…

> That is also true of a lot of pre-2023, so most likely human penned, writing.

Frankly, much less so. People were more likely to just write nothing at all. The "things are drowning in slop" complaint is about very real change.

Post reply on HN