6 ms·

A bit of a "dog bites man" story to note that a CEO of a hot company is hyping the future beyond reason. The real story of LLMs is revealed when you posit a mag

• vbezhenar 2y ago
  There are plenty of plastic parts in cars and you can print them with 3D printer. I don't think that anything really changed because of that.
  • edgyquant 2y ago
    Because those are irrelevant to the point being made in the GP
    • paulyy_y 2y ago
      GP? What happened to the good old "OP"?
      • rendall 2y ago
        OP is original poster (or post), to which we are not referring.
      • taiduoxiaoqi 2y ago
        GP != OP; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8363646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8363646
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
  • rendall 2y ago
    I think that is GP's point.
• olliem36 2y ago
  Great analogy! I'll borrow this when explaining my thoughts on how LLMs pose to replace software engineers.
  • rapind 2y ago
    I tried replacing myself (coding hat) and it was pretty underwhelming. Some day maybe.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• barrell 2y ago
  I would say LLMs are much less “produce a perfect part from nothing” and more “cut down a tree and get a the part you ask for, for a random model of car”
  • bee_rider 2y ago
    Car analogies are a little fraught because, I mean, in some cases you can even die if you put just the wrong parts in your car, and they are pretty complex mechanically. If you had a printer that could print semi-random mechanical parts, using it to make a car would be obviously dumb, right? Maybe you would use it to make, like, a roller blade wheel, or some other simple component that can be easily checked.
• ryandrake 2y ago
  > How would the car industry change if someone made a 3D printer that could make any part, including custom parts, with just electricity and air? The invention would never see the light of day. If someone were to invent Star Trek replicators, they'd be buried along with their invention. Best Case it would be quickly captured by the ownership class and only be allowed to be used by officially blessed manufacturing companies, and not any individuals. They will have learned their lesson from AI and what it does to scarcity. Western [correction: all of] society is hopelessly locked into and dependent on manufacturing scarcity, and the idea that people have to pay for things. The wealthy and powerful will never allow free abundance of physical goods in the hands of the little people.
  • CoastalCoder 2y ago
    I'm curious if this is true. Are there specific historical examples of this that come to mind?
    • rsynnott 2y ago
      The closest real-life thing (and probably what a lot of believers in this particular conspiracy theory are drawing on directly) is probably the Phoebus lightbulb cartel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel It’s rather hard to imagine even something like that (and it’s pretty limited in scope compared to the grand conspiracy above) working today, though; the EC would definitely stomp on it, and even the sleepy FTC would probably bestir itself for something so blatant.
      • marcosdumay 2y ago
        It only worked at the time because it benefited the public at large.
      • dgoodell 2y ago
        And that’s not really the same thing. Did someone invent the LED bulb in 1920 and that cartel crushed it? Not really. In reality, the biggest problem was they had no incentive to invest in new lighting technology research, although they had the money to do so. It takes a lot of effort to develop a new technology, and significantly more to make it practical and affordable. I think the story of the development of the blue LED which led to modern LED lighting is more illustrative of the real obstacles of technological development. Companies/managers don't want to invest in R&D bc it’s too uncertain and they typically are more interested in the short term. And it’s hard for someone without deep technical knowledge to identify a realistic worthwhile technical idea from a bad one. So they focus on what they can understand and what they can quantify (). And even technical people can fail to properly evaluate ideas that are even slightly outside their area of expertise (or even sometimes the ones that are within it )
• __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  I dunno, magically fabricating a part is fundamentally different than magically deciding where and when to do so. AI can magically decide where to put small pieces of code. Its not a leap to imagine that it will later be good at knowing where to put large pieces of code. I don't think it'll get there any time soon, but the boundary is less crisp than your metaphor makes it.
  • refulgentis 2y ago
    > I dunno, magically fabricating a part is fundamentally different than magically deciding where and when to do so. Right. It sounds to me like you agree and are repeating the comment but are framing as disagreeable. I'm sure I'm missing something.
    • NitpickLawyer 2y ago
      The person you replied to suggests that the analogy of a 3d printer building a part does not hold, as LLM-based coding systems are able to both "print" some code, and decide where and when to do so. I tend to agree with them. What people seem to miss about LLM coding systems, IMO: a) deciding on the capabilities of an LLM to code after a brief browser session with 4o/claude is comparable to waking up a coder in the middle of the night, and having them recite the perfect code right then and there. So a lot of people interact with it that way, decide it's meh, and write it off. b) most people haven't tinkered with with systems that incorporate more of the tools human developers use day to day. They'd be surprised of what even small, local models can do. c) LLMs seem perfectly capable to always add another layer of abstraction on top of whatever "thing" they get good at. Good at summaries? Cool, now abstract that for memory. Good at q/a? Cool, now abstract that over document parsing for search. Good at coding? Cool, now abstract that over software architecture. d) Most people haven't seen any RL-based coding systems yet. That's fun. ---- Now, of course the article is perfectly reasonable, and we shouldn't take what any CEO says at face value. But I think the pessimism, especially in coding, is also misplaced, and will ultimately be proven wrong.
      • Filligree 2y ago
• bboygravity 2y ago
  That comparison would make sense if the company was open source, non-profit, promised to make all designs available for free, took Elon Musk's money and then broke all promises includidng the one in its name and started competing with Musk.
• djjfksbxn 2y ago
  > A bit of a "dog bites man" story to note that a CEO of a hot company is hyping the future beyond reason. Why is it in your worldview a CEO “has to lie”? Are you incapable of imagining one where a CEO is honest? > The real story of LLMs is revealed when you posit a magical technology that can print any car part for free. I’ll allow it if you stipulate that randomly and without reason when I ask for an alternator it prints me toy dinosaur. > It is easy to imagine that the inventor of such a technology As if the unethical sociopath TFA is about is any kind of, let alone the, inventor of genai. > Being able to generate code/text/images is of no use to someone who doesn't know what to do with it. Again, conveniently omitting the technology’s ever present failure modes.
  • Null-Set 2y ago
    A CEO has a fiduciary duty to lie.
    • Capricorn2481 2y ago
      A CEO that is the CEO of a publicly traded company who has over-leveraged their position and is now locked into chasing growth even if the company they're running suffers has a fiduciary duty to lie. There are plenty of CEOs not in this position. I'm not talking about Altman in particular, I'm just annoyed with this constant spam on HN about how we all need to turn a blind eye to snake oil salesman because "that's just how it's supposed to be for a startup." For a forum that complains about how money ruins everything, from the Unity scandal to OSS projects being sponsored and "tainted" by "evil companies," it's shocking to see how often golden boy executives are excused. I wish people had this energy for the much smaller companies trying to be profitable by raising subscriptions once in the 20 years they've been running, but instead they are treated like they burned a church. It truly is an elitist system.
• btown 2y ago
  > specify the correct parts, in the correct order, and use the parts to good purpose While the attention-based mechanisms of the current generation of LLMs still have a long way to go (and may not be the correct architecture) to achieve requisite levels of spatial reasoning (and of "practical" experience with how different shapes are used in reality) to actually, say, design a motor vehicle from first principles... that future is far more tangible than ever, with more access to synthetic data and optimized compute than ever before. What's unclear is whether OpenAI will be able to recruit and retain the talent necessary to be the ones to get there; even if it is able to raise an order of magnitude more than competitors, that's no guarantee of success. My guess would be that some of the decisions that have led to the loss of much senior talent will slow their progress in the long run. Time will tell!
• kylecazar 2y ago
  Your post is a good summarization of what I believe as well. But what's interesting when I speak to laymen is that the hype in the general public seems specifically centered on the composite solution that is ChatGPT. That's what they consider 'AI'. That specific conversational format in a web browser, as a complete product. That is the manifestation of AI they believe everyone thinks could become dangerous. They don't consider the LLM API's as components of a series of new products, because they don't understand the architecture and business models of these things. They just think of ChatGPT and UI prompts (or it's competitor's versions of the same).
  • bee_rider 2y ago
    I think people think* of ChatGPT not as the web UI, but as some mysterious, possibly thinking, machine which sits behind the web UI. That is, it is clear that there’s “something” behind the curtain, and there’s some concern maybe that it could get out, but there isn’t really clarity on where the thing stops and the curtain begins, or anything like that. This is more magical, but probably less wrong, than just thinking of it as the prompt UI. *(which is always a risky way of looking at it, because who the hell am I? Neither somebody in the AI field, nor completely naive toward programming, so I might be in some weird knows-enough-to-be-dangerous-not-enough-to-be-useful valley of misunderstanding. I think this describes a lot of us here, fwiw)
    • wkat4242 2y ago
      An LLM is not going to go skynet. It's not smart enough and can't take initiative. An AGI however could. Once it reaches IQs of more than say 500 it would become very hard to control it.
      • lotsoweiners 2y ago
        Power cord?
        • ctoth 2y ago
          Here are two explanations of why cutting the power won't help you once you reach that state. In short, you have already lost. [0]: No Physical Substrate, No Problem https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/07/no-physical-substrate-no-problem/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/07/no-physical-substrate-... [1]: It Looks Like You’re Trying To Take Over The World https://gwern.net/fiction/clippy https://gwern.net/fiction/clippy
• addcn 2y ago
  Printed this out and pasted it into my journal. Going to come back to it in a few years. This touches on something important I can’t quite put into words yet. Some fundamental piece of consciousness that is hard to replicate - desire maybe
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • plaidfuji 2y ago
    Desire is a big part of it! Right now LLMs just respond. What if you prompted an LLM, “your goal is to gain access to this person’s bank account. Here is their phone number. Message with them until you can confirm successful access.” Learning how to get what you want is a fundamental skill you start learning from infancy.
• surfingdino 2y ago
  Not enough plastics, glass, or metal in the air to make it happen. You need a scrapyard. Actually, that's how the LLMs treat knowledge. They run around like Wall-E grabbing bits at random and assembling them in a haphazard way to quickly give you something that looks like the thing you asked for.
• throwaway5752 2y ago
  That's a really good comment and insight, but understandably I think it is aimed at this forum and a technical audience. It landed well for me in terms of the near team impact of LLMs and other models. But outside this forum, I think our field is in a crisis from being very substantially oversold and undersold at the same time. We have a very limited ability to define human intelligence, so it is almost impossible to know how near or far we are from simulating it. Everyone here knows how much a challenge it is to match average human cognitive abilities in some areas, and human brains run at 20 watts. There are people in power that may take technologists and technology executives at their word and move very large amounts of capital on promises that cannot be fulfilled. There was already an AI Winter 50 years ago, and there are extremely unethical figures in technology right now who can ruin the reputation of our field for a generation. On the other hand, we have very large numbers of people around the world on the wrong end of a large and increasing wealth gap. Many of those people are just hanging on doing jobs that are actually threatened by AI. They know this, they fear this, and of course they will fight for their and their families lifestyles. This is a setup for large scale violence and instability. If there isn't a policy plan right now, AI will be suffering populist blowback. Aside from those things, it looks like Sam has lost it. The recent stories about the TSMC meeting, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41668824 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41668824, was a huge problem. Asking for $7T shows a staggering lack of grounding in reality and how people, businesses, and supply chains work. I wasn't in the room and I don't know if he really sounded like a "podcasting bro", but to make an ask of companies like that with their own capital is insulting to them. There are potential dangers of applying this technology; there are dangers of overpromising the benefits; and neither of them are well served when relatively important people in related industries thing there is a credibility problem in AI.
  • cheschire 2y ago
    LLMs aren't really simulating intelligence so much as echoing intelligence. The problem is when the hype machine causes the echoes to replace the original intelligence that spawned the echoes, and eventually those echoes fade into background noise and we have to rebuild the original human intelligence again.
• theptip 2y ago
  This argument simply asserts that the LLMs (or their successor systems including scaffolding) will asymptote somewhere below human capabilities. It’s possible that this could happen but you need to propose a mechanism and metric for this argument to be taken seriously (and to avoid fooling yourself with moving goalposts). Under what grounds do you assert that the trend line will stop where you claim it will stop? Yes, if super-human AGI simply never happens then the alignment problem is mostly solved. Seems like wishful thinking to me.
  • throwaway984393 2y ago
    [dead]
  • richardw 2y ago
    This. It’s far harder to think of reasons that limits will endure, in a world where innovation by inches has always produced improvements. Everyone brings out the current state and technology. Those are transient.
    • semi-extrinsic 2y ago
      WTF? Look at a word processor today, and then one from 1999, and tell me again how technology always keeps improving dramatically. The standard electrical wall sockets that you use have not really changed since WW2. For load bearing elements in buildings, we don't have anything substantially better today than 100 years ago. There is a huge list of technological items where we've polished out almost every last wrinkle and a 1% gain once a decade is hailed as miraculous.
      • richardw 2y ago
        So what? Many animals haven’t changed much for millions of years, and that was irrelevant to our emergence. Not everything has to change in equal measure. There are many reasons for all those things not to change. Limits abound. We discovered that getting taller or faster isn’t “better”, all we needed is smarter. Intelligence is different. It applies to everything else. You can lose a limb or eyesight and still be incredibly capable. The intelligence is what makes us able to handle all the other limits and change the world even though MS Word hasn’t changed much. We are now applying a lot of our intelligence to inventing another one. The architecture won’t stay the same, the limits won’t endure. People keep trying and it’s infinitely harder to imagine reasons why progress will stop. Just choose any limit and defend it.
• lawn 2y ago
  > The real story of LLMs is revealed when you posit a magical technology that can print any car part for free. I think the insight is that some people truly believe that LLMs would be exactly as groundbreaking as a magical 3D printer that prints out any part for free. And they're pumping AI madly because of this belief.
• slashdave 2y ago
  Perhaps someone should have considered what problem they are trying to solve before spending vast resources on the "solution"?