8 ms·

It doesn't need to be general intelligence or perfectly map to human intelligence. All it needs to be is useful. Reading constant comments about LLMs can't be

It doesn't need to be general intelligence or perfectly map to human intelligence. All it needs to be is useful. 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). It doesn't need to be general intelligence for the rapid advancement of LLM capabilities to be the most societal shifting development in the past decades.

zebomon 2y ago
I agree. If the LLMs we have today never got any smarter, the world would still be transformed over the next ten years.
AyyEye 2y ago
> 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.)
- IanCal 2y 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.
  - AyyEye 2y ago
    Nobody is disputing the coolness factor, only the intelligence factor.
    - hansonkd 2y 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.
      - Jensson 2y ago
        But if you want to predict the future utility of these models you want to look at their current intelligence, compare that to humans and try to figure out roughly what skills they lack and which of those are likely to get fixed. For example, a team of humans are extremely reliable, much more reliable than one human, but a team of AI's isn't mean reliable than one AI since an AI is already an ensemble model. That means even if an AI could replace a person, it probably can't replace a team for a long time, meaning you still need the other team members there, meaning the AI didn't really replace a human it just became a tool for huamns to use.
        MVissers 2y ago
        I think this is a fair criticism of capability. I personally wouldn't be surprised if we start to see benchmarks around this type of cooperation and ability to orchestrate complex systems in the next few years or so. Most benchmarks really focus on one problem, not on multiple real-time problems while orchestrating 3rd party actors who might or might not be able to succeed at certain tasks. But I don't think anything is prohibiting these models from not being able to do that.
      - 2y ago
handsclean 2y ago
People aren’t responding to their own assumption that AGI is necessary, they’re responding to OpenAI and the chorus constantly and loudly singing hymns to AGI.
surgical_fire 2y ago
> 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 To me it is more like there is someone jumping on a pogo ball while flapping their arms and saying that they are flying whenever they hop off the ground. Skeptics say that they are not really flying, while adherents say that "with current pogo ball advancements, they will be flying any day now"
- intelVISA 2y ago
  Between skeptics and adherents who is more easily able to extract VC money for vaporware? If you limit yourself to 'the facts' you're leaving tons of $$ on the table...
  - surgical_fire 2y ago
    By all means, if this is the goal, AI is a success. I understand that in this forum too many people are invested in putting lipstick on this particular pig.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  An old quote, quite famous: "... is like saying that an ape who climbs to the top of a tree for the first time is one step closer to landing on the moon".
- DonHopkins 2y ago
  Is that what Elon Musk was trying to do on stage?
billyp-rva 2y ago
> It doesn't need to be general intelligence or perfectly map to human intelligence. > All it needs to be is useful. Computers were already useful. The only definition we have for "intelligence" is human (or, generally, animal) intelligence. If LLMs aren't that, let's call it something else.
- throwup238 2y ago
  What exactly is human (or animal) intelligence? How do you define that?
  - billyp-rva 2y ago
    Does it matter? If LLMs aren't that, whatever it is, then we should use a different word. Finders keepers.
    - throwup238 2y ago
      How do you know that LLMs “aren’t that” if you can’t even define what that is? “I’ll know it when I see it” isn’t a compelling argument.
      - grahamj 2y ago
        they can't do what we do therefore they aren't what we are
        layer8 2y ago
        And what is that, in concrete terms? Many humans can’t do what other humans can do. What is the common subset that counts as human intelligence?
        fc417fc802 2y ago
        [dead]
wruza 2y ago
And look at the airplanes, they really can’t just land on a mountain slope or a tree without heavy maintenance afterwards. Those people weren’t all stupid, they questioned the promise of flying servicemen delivering mail or milk to their window and flying on a personal aircar to their workplace. Just like todays promises about whatever the CEOs telltales are. Imagining bullshit isn’t unique to this century. Aerospace is still a highly regulated area that requires training and responsibility. If parallels can be drawn here, they don’t look so cool for a regular guy.
- skydhash 2y ago
  This pretty much. Everyone knows that LLMs are great for text generation and processing. What people has been questioning is the end goals as promised by its builders, i.e. is it useful? And from most of what I saw, it's very much a toy.
  - MVissers 2y ago
    What would you need to see to call it useful? To give you an example– I've used it for legal work such as an EB2-NIW visa application. Saved me countless of hours. My next visa I'll try to do without a lawyer using just LLMs. I would never try this without having LLMs at my disposal. As a hobby– And as someone with a scientific background I've been able to build an artificial ecosystem simulation from scratch without programming experience in Rust: https://www.youtube.com/@GenecraftSimulator https://www.youtube.com/@GenecraftSimulator I recently moved from fish to plants and believe I've developed some new science at the intersection of CS and Evolutionary Biology that I'm looking to publish. This tool is extremely useful. For now– You do require a human in the loop for coordination. My guess is that these will be benchmarks that we see within a few years: How good an AI coordinate multiple other AIs to build, deploy and iterate something that functions in the real world. Basically manager AI. Because they'll literally be able to solve every single one shot problem so we won't be able to create benchmarks anymore. But that's also when these models will be able to build functioning companies in a few hours.
    - skydhash 2y ago
alexalx666 2y ago
If I could put it into Tesla style robot and it could do dishes and help me figure out tech stuff, it would be more than enough.
skywhopper 2y ago
On the contrary, the pushback is critical because many employers are buying the hype from AI companies that AGI is imminent, that LLMs can replace professional humans, and that computers are about to eliminate all work (except VCs and CEOs apparently). Every person that believes that LLMs are near sentient or actually do a good job at reasoning is one more person handing over their responsibilities to a zero-accountability highly flawed robot. We've already seen LLMs generate bad legal documents, bad academic papers, and extremely bad code. Similar technology is making bad decisions about who to arrest, who to give loans to, who to hire, who to bomb, and who to refuse heart surgery for. Overconfident humans employing this tech for these purposes have been bamboozled by the lies from OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, et al. It's crucial to call out overstatement and overhype about this tech wherever it crops up.
- noFaceDiscoG668 2y ago
  I don’t understand how or why someone with your mind would assume that even barely disclosed semi-public releases would resemble the current state of the art. Except if you do it for the conversations sake, which I have never been capable of.
jasondigitized 2y ago
This a thousand times.
colordrops 2y ago
I don't think many informed people doubt the utility of LLMs at this point. The potential of human-like AGI has profound implications far beyond utility models, which is why people are so eager to bring it up. A true human-like AGI basically means that most intellectual/white collar work will not be needed, and probably manual labor before too long as well. Huge huge implications for humanity, e.g. how does an economy and society even work without workers?
- vouaobrasil 2y ago
  > Huge huge implications for humanity, e.g. how does an economy and society even work without workers? I don't think those that create AI care about that. They just to come out on top before someone else does.
  - colordrops 2y ago
    Yes and we should be super worried about that.

zebomon 2y ago

I agree. If the LLMs we have today never got any smarter, the world would still be transformed over the next ten years.

AyyEye 2y ago

> 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.)

IanCal 2y 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.
- AyyEye 2y ago
  Nobody is disputing the coolness factor, only the intelligence factor.
  - hansonkd 2y 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.
    - Jensson 2y ago
      But if you want to predict the future utility of these models you want to look at their current intelligence, compare that to humans and try to figure out roughly what skills they lack and which of those are likely to get fixed. For example, a team of humans are extremely reliable, much more reliable than one human, but a team of AI's isn't mean reliable than one AI since an AI is already an ensemble model. That means even if an AI could replace a person, it probably can't replace a team for a long time, meaning you still need the other team members there, meaning the AI didn't really replace a human it just became a tool for huamns to use.
      - MVissers 2y ago
        I think this is a fair criticism of capability. I personally wouldn't be surprised if we start to see benchmarks around this type of cooperation and ability to orchestrate complex systems in the next few years or so. Most benchmarks really focus on one problem, not on multiple real-time problems while orchestrating 3rd party actors who might or might not be able to succeed at certain tasks. But I don't think anything is prohibiting these models from not being able to do that.
    - 2y ago

handsclean 2y ago

People aren’t responding to their own assumption that AGI is necessary, they’re responding to OpenAI and the chorus constantly and loudly singing hymns to AGI.

surgical_fire 2y ago

> 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 To me it is more like there is someone jumping on a pogo ball while flapping their arms and saying that they are flying whenever they hop off the ground. Skeptics say that they are not really flying, while adherents say that "with current pogo ball advancements, they will be flying any day now"

intelVISA 2y ago
Between skeptics and adherents who is more easily able to extract VC money for vaporware? If you limit yourself to 'the facts' you're leaving tons of $$ on the table...
- surgical_fire 2y ago
  By all means, if this is the goal, AI is a success. I understand that in this forum too many people are invested in putting lipstick on this particular pig.
PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
An old quote, quite famous: "... is like saying that an ape who climbs to the top of a tree for the first time is one step closer to landing on the moon".
DonHopkins 2y ago
Is that what Elon Musk was trying to do on stage?

billyp-rva 2y ago

> It doesn't need to be general intelligence or perfectly map to human intelligence. > All it needs to be is useful. Computers were already useful. The only definition we have for "intelligence" is human (or, generally, animal) intelligence. If LLMs aren't that, let's call it something else.

throwup238 2y ago
What exactly is human (or animal) intelligence? How do you define that?
- billyp-rva 2y ago
  Does it matter? If LLMs aren't that, whatever it is, then we should use a different word. Finders keepers.
  - throwup238 2y ago
    How do you know that LLMs “aren’t that” if you can’t even define what that is? “I’ll know it when I see it” isn’t a compelling argument.
    - grahamj 2y ago
      they can't do what we do therefore they aren't what we are
      - layer8 2y ago
        And what is that, in concrete terms? Many humans can’t do what other humans can do. What is the common subset that counts as human intelligence?
        fc417fc802 2y ago
        [dead]

wruza 2y ago

And look at the airplanes, they really can’t just land on a mountain slope or a tree without heavy maintenance afterwards. Those people weren’t all stupid, they questioned the promise of flying servicemen delivering mail or milk to their window and flying on a personal aircar to their workplace. Just like todays promises about whatever the CEOs telltales are. Imagining bullshit isn’t unique to this century. Aerospace is still a highly regulated area that requires training and responsibility. If parallels can be drawn here, they don’t look so cool for a regular guy.

skydhash 2y ago
This pretty much. Everyone knows that LLMs are great for text generation and processing. What people has been questioning is the end goals as promised by its builders, i.e. is it useful? And from most of what I saw, it's very much a toy.
- MVissers 2y ago
  What would you need to see to call it useful? To give you an example– I've used it for legal work such as an EB2-NIW visa application. Saved me countless of hours. My next visa I'll try to do without a lawyer using just LLMs. I would never try this without having LLMs at my disposal. As a hobby– And as someone with a scientific background I've been able to build an artificial ecosystem simulation from scratch without programming experience in Rust: https://www.youtube.com/@GenecraftSimulator https://www.youtube.com/@GenecraftSimulator I recently moved from fish to plants and believe I've developed some new science at the intersection of CS and Evolutionary Biology that I'm looking to publish. This tool is extremely useful. For now– You do require a human in the loop for coordination. My guess is that these will be benchmarks that we see within a few years: How good an AI coordinate multiple other AIs to build, deploy and iterate something that functions in the real world. Basically manager AI. Because they'll literally be able to solve every single one shot problem so we won't be able to create benchmarks anymore. But that's also when these models will be able to build functioning companies in a few hours.
  - skydhash 2y ago

alexalx666 2y ago

If I could put it into Tesla style robot and it could do dishes and help me figure out tech stuff, it would be more than enough.

skywhopper 2y ago

On the contrary, the pushback is critical because many employers are buying the hype from AI companies that AGI is imminent, that LLMs can replace professional humans, and that computers are about to eliminate all work (except VCs and CEOs apparently). Every person that believes that LLMs are near sentient or actually do a good job at reasoning is one more person handing over their responsibilities to a zero-accountability highly flawed robot. We've already seen LLMs generate bad legal documents, bad academic papers, and extremely bad code. Similar technology is making bad decisions about who to arrest, who to give loans to, who to hire, who to bomb, and who to refuse heart surgery for. Overconfident humans employing this tech for these purposes have been bamboozled by the lies from OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, et al. It's crucial to call out overstatement and overhype about this tech wherever it crops up.

noFaceDiscoG668 2y ago
I don’t understand how or why someone with your mind would assume that even barely disclosed semi-public releases would resemble the current state of the art. Except if you do it for the conversations sake, which I have never been capable of.

jasondigitized 2y ago

This a thousand times.

colordrops 2y ago

I don't think many informed people doubt the utility of LLMs at this point. The potential of human-like AGI has profound implications far beyond utility models, which is why people are so eager to bring it up. A true human-like AGI basically means that most intellectual/white collar work will not be needed, and probably manual labor before too long as well. Huge huge implications for humanity, e.g. how does an economy and society even work without workers?

vouaobrasil 2y ago
> Huge huge implications for humanity, e.g. how does an economy and society even work without workers? I don't think those that create AI care about that. They just to come out on top before someone else does.
- colordrops 2y ago
  Yes and we should be super worried about that.