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Why the Hacker News community is still running "AI is the second coming of Jesus", "AI is and will always be a mere party trick" (and company) threads is beyond
by vacuity 2y ago
Why the Hacker News community is still running "AI is the second coming of Jesus", "AI is and will always be a mere party trick" (and company) threads is beyond me. LLMs are, at some level, conceptually simple: they take training data that is sorta like a language and become an oracle for it. Everyone keeps saying the Statue of Liberty is copper-green, so it answers similarly when asked as much. Maybe it gets a question about the Statue of Liberty's original color, putting a bit more pressure on it to get the right data now that there is modality, but still really easy in practice. It imitates intelligence based on its training data. This is not a moral evaluation but purely factual. If you believe creativity can come from unoriginal ideas meshed or stretched originally, as it seems humans generally do, then the LLM is creative too. If humans have some external spark, perhaps LLMs don't. But that's all speculation and opinion. Since humans have produced all the training data, an LLM is basically a superhuman that really likes following directions. An LLM, as is anything we create, a glorified mirror for ourselves. It's easy to have an emotionally charged, normative, one-dimensional take on the LLM landscape, certainly when that's what everyone else is doing too. Hype in any direction is a distraction; look for the unadulterated truth, account for probabilistic change, and decide which path to take. Try to understand varied perspectives without being hasty. Be gracious. I know that YC is a place for VC money, and also that people are weird about stuff they either created or didn't create.
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
- Max Planck (commonly told as "science advances one funeral at a time")
We should collectively try to not force the last resort to accept change and instead go along with the flow. If you ever think your view is on top of things, there's a good chance you're still missing a lot. So don't grandstand or moralize (certainly, I would never! ha ha...). Be respectful of others' time, experiences, and intelligence.
- betimsl 2y agoI never knew that Planck was such a pessimist. I wonder why? I mean the guy knew.
- moffkalast 2y agoThat's not really a pessimistic statement imo, it's just an obvious observation.
- stavros 2y agoIt is not a hopeful thought, the thought that human beings are so bad at reasoning that they consider as true only the facts that they grew up with, and if you want to change a society's opinion, you must change the entire population of that society.
- cluckindan 2y agoNot only that: human learning tends to ignore narrative and nuance, only picking up on subject-object-representations and their associations while reinterpreting them as causalities. By default, we learn everything according to our norms, seeing the norm-defensive representation as a protagonist hero saviour, and the norm-offensive as an antagonist enemy. It takes a lot of concentration and patience to override these default modes.
- ysofunny 2y agothe population of a society will change itself completey but it does take a lifetime to happen. it takes a huge amount of pretense to want to control the opinion of a whole society; we are free and some of are willing to make the point that we are free by arbitrarily refusing to accepting the 'normal' opinion, i.e. some will reject any opinion that someone attempts to impose merely because of the impositional aspect
- svachalek 2y agoSo true though. Look at how much resistance there is to ideas like "Pluto is not a planet", no matter that pretty much no one has anything to gain or lose by it either way other than a sense of being "right". Now add in actual incentives and the problem becomes incredibly hard.
- rqlakhy 2y agoWe had that before. It's called a search engine and delivers better and more balanced results. On any political topic you can educate yourself faster by using Google and Wikipedia rather than read a stilted and wrong response from an LLM. If you are willing to steal code, plunder GitHub directly and strip the license rather than have an LLM launder it for you. So many "new" technologies just enable losers who rely on them for their income. "Social coding" websites enable bureaucrats to infiltrate projects, do almost nothing but still get the required amounts of green squares in order to appear productive. LLMs enable idiots to sound somewhat profound, hence the popularity and the evangelism. I'm not even sure if Planck would have liked LLMs or recognized them as important.
- vacuity 2y agoPersonally I have my own set of beliefs on the use of LLMs, but I think you're even more cynical than me. In any case, Planck's sentiment cuts both ways. It is not necessarily the case that some change necessitates progress, but of course we tend to point out progress over things that are neutral or regress, so that is a bias or fallacy in how we normally perceive progress. If tomorrow it was conclusively shown that LLMs have some meaningful upper bound, it would behoove LLM adorers to similarly be accepting of that disappointing news. It's fine and expected for people to display a variety of opinions on a topic. I just ask that we all strive to understand each other and promote collective progress, whether that means adopting or rejecting something.