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LLM Inevitabilism

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Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#981

Post by codebolt »

eschaton wrote: post #979
codebolt wrote: post #943

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The crucial point is that we simply do not know yet if there is an inherent limitation in the reasoning capabilities of LLMs, and if so whether we are currently near to pushing up against them. It seems clear that American firms are still going to increase the amount of compute by a lot more (with projects like the Stargate factory), so time will tell if that is the only bottleneck to further progress. There might al…

What reasoning capabilities?

You are simply deluding yourself if you still refuse to accept that LLMs are capable of some level of reasoning.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#982

Post by ringeryless »

Spot on. i am disgusted how engineers trained to be rigorous will eschew the rigor of precise specification and instead opt for a nondeterministic blackbox magical oracle emitting little pre-packaged turdlets of incomprehension.

Scam Altman is good at sales, and his framing is indeed the key to forcing so many lemmings to submit to 'the inevitable'...

the first step in deprogramming such a brainwashed victim is insisting we refer to LLMs and not using the marketing term AI.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#983

Post by thunspa »

dontlikeyoueith wrote: post #756
magic_hamster wrote: post #754

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are pretty hidden assumption in this comment. First of all, not every business in the AI space is _training_ models, and the difference between training and inference is massive - i.e. most businesses can easily afford inference, perhaps depending on model, but they definitely can. Another several unfounded claims were made here, but I just wanted to say LLMs with MCP are definitely good enough for almost every…

> I just wanted to say LLMs with MCP are definitely good enough for almost every use case you can come up with as long as you can provide them with high quality context. This just shows you lack imagination. I have a lot of use cases that they are not good enough for.

I mean, it all depends on how one defines "high quality context".

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#984

Post by thunspa »

andai wrote: post #551
evantbyrne wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty bearish on the idea that AGI is going to take off anytime soon, but I read a significant amount of theology growing up and I would not describe the popular essays from e.g., LessWrong as religious in nature. I also would not describe them as appearing poorly read. The whole "look they just have a new god!" is a common trope in religious apologetics that is usually just meant to distract from the author's o…

Maybe not a god, but we're intentionally designing artificial minds greater than ours, and we intend to give them control of the entire planet. While also expecting them to somehow remain subservient to us (or is that part just lip service)?

What makes an artificial mind greater than ours?

Do you assume that someone will stumble into creating a person, but with unlimited memory and computational power?

Otherwise, if we are able to create this person using our knowledge, we will most certainly be able to augment humans with those capabilities.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#985

Post by 3abiton »

Animats wrote: post #46

There may be an "LLM Winter" as people discover that LLMs can't be trusted to do anything. Look for frantic efforts by companies to offload responsibility for LLM mistakes onto consumers. We've got to have something that has solid "I don't know" and "I don't know how to do this" outputs. We're starting to see reports of LLM usage having negative value for programmers, even though they think it's helping. Too much eff…

I think this a big side effect of the field moving way too fast for it to be evaluated properly. I don't recall seeing such a big rally in the CS research like this. Nearly every group I know that tackled really totally different topics are converging to LLMs. Talk about eco-diversity in the CS reaearch, all that is reduced now, LLMs are the palm trees of this field now.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#986

Post by tukantje »

layer8 wrote: post #547
Workaccount2 wrote: post #495

People like communicating in natural language. LLMs are the first step in the movement away from the "early days" of computing where you needed to learn the logic based language and interface of computers to interact with them. That is where the inevitabilism comes from. No one* wants to learn how to use a computer, they want it to be another entity that they can just talk to. *I'm rounding off the <5% who deeply lov…

People also like reliable and deterministic behavior, like when they press a specific button it does the same thing 99.9% of the time, and not slightly different things 90% of the time and something rather off the mark 10% of the time (give and take some percentage points). It's not clear that LLMs will get us to the former.

There is a balance to be struck.

If people valued reliability and determinism at its absolute maximum, we would still use formal proof methods as Dijkstra was advocating at the time.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#987

Post by seunosewa »

ojr wrote: post #917
seunosewa wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The true reason was to have a new untainted brand after the election scandal.

After the scandal… Why did he choose the word “Meta” over the million other possibilities? Its because he thought the metaverse had a great future.

A decision can be motivated by multiple reasons.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#989

Post by gond »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #864
kenjackson wrote: post #845

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is both right and wrong. There was a good book that came out probably 15 years ago about how technology never stops in aggregate, but individual technologies tend to grow quickly and then stall. Airplane jets were one example in the book. The reason why I partially note this as wrong is that even in the 70s people recognized that supersonic travel had real concrete issues with no solution in sight. I don…

> even in the 70s people recognized that supersonic travel had real concrete issues with no solution in sight. I don't think LLMs share that characteristic today I think they pretty strongly do The solution seems to be "just lower your standards for acceptable margin of error to whatever the LLM is capable of producing" which should be concerning and absolutely unacceptable to anyone calling themselves an Engineer

“Increasing Success by Lowering Expectations” That is from Despair Inc. This was obviously meant to be funny by them, now it looks like the state of play.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#990

Post by namcheapisdumb »

evantbyrne wrote: post #543
keiferski wrote: post #107

One of the negative consequences of the “modern secular age” is that many very intelligent, thoughtful people feel justified in brushing away millennia of philosophical and religious thought because they deem it outdated or no longer relevant. (The book A Secular Age is a great read on this, btw, I think I’ve recommended it here on HN at least half a dozen times.) And so a result of this is that they fail to notice t…

I'm pretty bearish on the idea that AGI is going to take off anytime soon, but I read a significant amount of theology growing up and I would not describe the popular essays from e.g., LessWrong as religious in nature. I also would not describe them as appearing poorly read. The whole "look they just have a new god!" is a common trope in religious apologetics that is usually just meant to distract from the author's o…

> I also would not describe them as appearing poorly read.

YOU come off as poorly read, so I wouldn't trust your judgement on this one, champ. "common trope" lmfao.

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