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0 pointsAyyEye1y ago0 comments

> Reading constant comments about LLMs can't be general intelligence or lack reasoning etc, to me seems like people witnessing the airplane and complaining that it isn't "real flying" because it isn't a bird flapping its wings (a large portion of the population held that point of view back then).

That is a natural reaction to the incessant techbro, AIbro, marketing, and corporate lies that "AI" (or worse AGI) is a real thing, and can be directly compared to real humans.

There are people on this very thread saying it's better at reasoning than real humans (LOL) because it scored higher on some benchmark than humans... Yet this technology still can't reliably determine what number is circled, if two lines intersect, or count the letters in a word. (That said behaviour may have been somewhat finetuned out of newer models only reinforces the fact that the technology inherently not capable of understanding anything.)

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IanCal1y ago

I encounter "spicy auto complete" style comments far more often than techbro AI-everything comments and its frankly getting boring.

I've been doing AI things for about 20+ years and llms are wild. We've gone from specialized things being pretty bad as those jobs to general purpose things better at that and everything else. The idea you could make and API call with "is this sarcasm?" and get a better than chance guess is incredible.

surgical_fire1y ago

Eh, I see far more "AI is the second coming of Jesus" type of comments than healthy skepticism. A lot of anxiety from people afraid that their source of income will dry and a lot of excitement of people with an axe to grind that "those entitled expensive peasants will get what they deserve".

I think I count myself among the skeptics nowadays for that reason. And I say this as someone that thinks LLM is an interesting piece of technology, but with somewhat limited use and unclear economics.

If the hype was about "look at this thing that can parse natural language surprisingly well and generate coherent responses", I would be excited too. As someone that had to do natural language processing in the past, that is a damn hard task to solve, and LLMs excel at it.

But that is not the hype is it? We have people beating the drums of how this is just shy of taking the world by storm, and AGI is just around the corner, and it will revolutionize all economy and society and nothing will ever be the same.

So, yeah, it gets tiresome. I wish the hype would die down a little so this could be appreciated for what it is.

williamcotton1y ago

We have people beating the drums of how this is just shy of taking the world by storm, and AGI is just around the corner, and it will revolutionize all economy and society and nothing will ever be the same.

Where are you seeing this? I pretty much only read HN and football blogs so maybe I’m out of the loop.

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AyyEyeOP1y ago

Nobody is disputing the coolness factor, only the intelligence factor.

hansonkd1y ago

I'm saying the intelligence factor doesn't matter. Only the utility factor. Today LLMs are incredibly useful and every few months there appears to be bigger and bigger leaps.

Analyzing whether or not LLMs have intelligence is missing the forest from the trees. This technology is emerging in a capitalist society that is hyper optimized to adopt useful things at the expense of almost everything else. If the utility/price point gets hit for a problem, it will replace it regardless of if it is intelligent or not.

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