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The biggest problem that I have with AI is how people extrapolate out of thin air, going from "LLMs can craft responses that sound exactly like a human" to "LLM

The biggest problem that I have with AI is how people extrapolate out of thin air, going from "LLMs can craft responses that sound exactly like a human" to "LLMs can solve climate change and world hunger". Those are two orthogonal skills and nothing we've seen so far indicates that LLMs would be able to make that jump, any more than I expect someone with a PhD in linguistics to solve problems faced by someone with a PhD in applied physics working on solving nuclear fusion.

mumblemumble 2y ago
Clarke's Third Law is, has always been, and always will be the best explanation for how futurists think about these kinds of things.
kombookcha 2y ago
Yeah, the issue with climate change and world hunger has never been the ability to generate loads and loads of vaguely relevant text in a very short time. It also isn't a problem of being able to recognize patterns in data, as you would with machine learning. They're issues of socially and politically organizing how humans and resources and economies interact, and there is nothing about the current crop of AI that suggests they can help with that in any particular capacity. If anything the genAI hunger for energy and chips is kinda looking like a net negative in terms of the first problem. I don't even really get why the hypemen are pushing these huge global issues as motivators - surely that insane standard of Unrealised Value only highlights how limited the abilities of this technology actually are?
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  > I don't even really get why the hypemen are pushing these huge global issues as motivators - surely that insane standard of Unrealised Value only highlights how limited the abilities of this technology actually are? Sam Altman is either seriously drunk on his own success, or he's a snake-oil salesman: https://ia.samaltman.com/ https://ia.samaltman.com/ (Could be both; they are not mutually exclusive)
_heimdall 2y ago
The expectation for LLMs "solving global warming" is effectively believing that if you could just ask enough people that vaguely know of the research out there to guess how to solve it someone would get the answer right, and they'd get it right better than anyone that has dedicated their life to researching it.

mumblemumble 2y ago

Clarke's Third Law is, has always been, and always will be the best explanation for how futurists think about these kinds of things.

kombookcha 2y ago

Yeah, the issue with climate change and world hunger has never been the ability to generate loads and loads of vaguely relevant text in a very short time. It also isn't a problem of being able to recognize patterns in data, as you would with machine learning. They're issues of socially and politically organizing how humans and resources and economies interact, and there is nothing about the current crop of AI that suggests they can help with that in any particular capacity. If anything the genAI hunger for energy and chips is kinda looking like a net negative in terms of the first problem. I don't even really get why the hypemen are pushing these huge global issues as motivators - surely that insane standard of Unrealised Value only highlights how limited the abilities of this technology actually are?

insane_dreamer 2y ago
> I don't even really get why the hypemen are pushing these huge global issues as motivators - surely that insane standard of Unrealised Value only highlights how limited the abilities of this technology actually are? Sam Altman is either seriously drunk on his own success, or he's a snake-oil salesman: https://ia.samaltman.com/ https://ia.samaltman.com/ (Could be both; they are not mutually exclusive)

_heimdall 2y ago

The expectation for LLMs "solving global warming" is effectively believing that if you could just ask enough people that vaguely know of the research out there to guess how to solve it someone would get the answer right, and they'd get it right better than anyone that has dedicated their life to researching it.