4 ms·

I have fun on these HN chats responding to comments like yours . It’s just fancy auto complete to you? You honestly can’t see the capability it has and extend

I have fun on these HN chats responding to comments like yours . It’s just fancy auto complete to you? You honestly can’t see the capability it has and extend it the future? What’s that saying about “it’s hard to get someone to understand something when their salary depends on their not understanding it”.

HervalFreire 4y ago
[flagged]
- _dain_ 4y ago
  > When these LLMs get normalized probably 5 years from now I'm going go back to these old threads and contact these people who are in self denial and throw it in their face. I'll just link this comment and be like I TOLD YOU, I TOLD YOU, YOU WERE WRONG. this isn't a kind thing to do.
  - HervalFreire 4y ago
    [flagged]
  - Jeff_Brown 4y ago
    Nor rational. What a strange impulse.
    - HervalFreire 4y ago
      [flagged]
blurbleblurble 4y ago
I feel very frustrated with these takes because instead of grappling with what we're going to do about it (like having a conversation) it's a flat, dismissive denial, and it isn't even grounded in the science, which says that "memory augmented large language models are computationally universal". So at the very least we're dealing with algorithms that can do anything a hand written program can do, except that they've been trained to do it using natural language in extremely flexible ways. I'm having a hard time seeing how "fancy autocomplete" is the right description for this.
- maxdoop 4y ago
  I agree 100%. I don't understand why we can't look at the potential, or even current, capabilities of these LLMs and have a real conversation about how it might impact things. Yet so many folks here just confidently dismiss it. "It doesn't even think!" -- OK, define thinking? "It doesn't create novel ideas!" OK -- what do most devs do every day? "It is wrong sometimes!" OK -- is it wrong more or less often than an average dev?
  - spacemadness 4y ago
    In case we forget the amazing predictive capabilities of HN there’s always https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
- enord 4y ago
  «Computationally universal»? Are you quite sure? Hoo boy pass the nitroglycerin hooooo aaah ohh after 80 years Turing was proven right after all ghasp
  - tel 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_approximation_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_approximation_theore...
  - blurbleblurble 4y ago
    Well I don't understand the nitroglycerin reference and of course "computationally universal" doesn't mean "sentient" but the point is when you add the external memory they (Flan-U-PaLM 540B to be specific) have been demonstrated to be capable of simulating a specific, well defined Turing machine without special training. There are some other papers out there arguing this from a theoretical angle too, but this is the one whose title I quoted: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.04589 https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.04589
    - enord 4y ago
      5 thermostats in the right comfiguration can be a universal computer. Approximation, in the computational sense, is relative to some well defined function, which gives the approximation an ontology. The feasability of approximation is not disputed, but the content and nature of the ontology is a battlefield of motivated rhetoric. Yes, this is arguing semantics but in this particular case, semantics is the whole point.

HervalFreire 4y ago

[flagged]

_dain_ 4y ago
> When these LLMs get normalized probably 5 years from now I'm going go back to these old threads and contact these people who are in self denial and throw it in their face. I'll just link this comment and be like I TOLD YOU, I TOLD YOU, YOU WERE WRONG. this isn't a kind thing to do.
- HervalFreire 4y ago
  [flagged]
- Jeff_Brown 4y ago
  Nor rational. What a strange impulse.
  - HervalFreire 4y ago
    [flagged]

blurbleblurble 4y ago

I feel very frustrated with these takes because instead of grappling with what we're going to do about it (like having a conversation) it's a flat, dismissive denial, and it isn't even grounded in the science, which says that "memory augmented large language models are computationally universal". So at the very least we're dealing with algorithms that can do anything a hand written program can do, except that they've been trained to do it using natural language in extremely flexible ways. I'm having a hard time seeing how "fancy autocomplete" is the right description for this.

maxdoop 4y ago
I agree 100%. I don't understand why we can't look at the potential, or even current, capabilities of these LLMs and have a real conversation about how it might impact things. Yet so many folks here just confidently dismiss it. "It doesn't even think!" -- OK, define thinking? "It doesn't create novel ideas!" OK -- what do most devs do every day? "It is wrong sometimes!" OK -- is it wrong more or less often than an average dev?
- spacemadness 4y ago
  In case we forget the amazing predictive capabilities of HN there’s always https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
enord 4y ago
«Computationally universal»? Are you quite sure? Hoo boy pass the nitroglycerin hooooo aaah ohh after 80 years Turing was proven right after all ghasp
- tel 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_approximation_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_approximation_theore...
- blurbleblurble 4y ago
  Well I don't understand the nitroglycerin reference and of course "computationally universal" doesn't mean "sentient" but the point is when you add the external memory they (Flan-U-PaLM 540B to be specific) have been demonstrated to be capable of simulating a specific, well defined Turing machine without special training. There are some other papers out there arguing this from a theoretical angle too, but this is the one whose title I quoted: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.04589 https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.04589
  - enord 4y ago
    5 thermostats in the right comfiguration can be a universal computer. Approximation, in the computational sense, is relative to some well defined function, which gives the approximation an ontology. The feasability of approximation is not disputed, but the content and nature of the ontology is a battlefield of motivated rhetoric. Yes, this is arguing semantics but in this particular case, semantics is the whole point.