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Likely due to my nearly 40 years experience in the tech industry, and knowing where we were then compared to where we are now—I am floored by what LLMs are doin

Likely due to my nearly 40 years experience in the tech industry, and knowing where we were then compared to where we are now—I am floored by what LLMs are doing and how much better they are even in the last 2 years I have been tracking on them. That said, I will make no definitive statements like “never” and “can’t” as it relates to AI in the next 5 years because it is already doing things that I would have thought unlikely just 5 years ago…and frankly would have thought functionally impossible back 40 years ago.

timr 1y ago
LLMs are cool and they're amazing for what they are, but the hype is just ridiculous right now, and the extrapolation fallacy is still a fallacy. Without a good structural reason to assume exponential growth (e.g. organism reproduction, which is itself not actually exponential), it's kind of the Godwin's Law of AI debate: the first person to say "if we only project forward X years..." terminates the conversation. I appreciate your unwillingness to say "never" here, but I think the parent comment deserves credit for calling out something important that rarely gets discussed: the importance of emotion for producing great art. This is one of the classic themes of Asimov's entire Robot ouvre, which spends many books digging into the differences between (far more advanced) AI and actual human intelligence. There are fundamental, definable, structural deficiencies that separate LLMs from human thought, it's plainly incorrect to pretend otherwise, and the...extrapolationists...are neglecting that we have no idea how to solve these problems.
- kcplate 1y ago
  > deserves credit for calling out something important that rarely gets discussed: the importance of emotion for producing great art That’s subjective though. An opinion I agree with, but still subjective. I think it’s within the realm of possibility given the advances we have seen so far that a near future AI given enough input describing emotion could simulate it just enough for people to accept that it created a “decent” work. Likely undetectable by most people as AI created vs human created. > we have no idea how to solve these problems. Yet. Obviously time and talent moved us from Eliza to ChatGPT/Gemini. Is it really unlikely that time and talent can’t push us over the artificial emotion precipice as well? I am not betting against it.
  - timr 1y ago
    > Yet. Obviously time and talent moved us from Eliza to ChatGPT/Gemini. Time being the big word there. Eliza came out in the 1960s. >Is it really unlikely that time and talent can’t push us over the artificial emotion precipice as well? I am not betting against it. Nor am I. I'm just not making hyperbolic claims concerning the timeline. For all we know, the next major advance will take another 60 years.
    - kcplate 1y ago
      > the next major advance will take another 60 years It might, or it might be next week.

timr 1y ago

LLMs are cool and they're amazing for what they are, but the hype is just ridiculous right now, and the extrapolation fallacy is still a fallacy. Without a good structural reason to assume exponential growth (e.g. organism reproduction, which is itself not actually exponential), it's kind of the Godwin's Law of AI debate: the first person to say "if we only project forward X years..." terminates the conversation. I appreciate your unwillingness to say "never" here, but I think the parent comment deserves credit for calling out something important that rarely gets discussed: the importance of emotion for producing great art. This is one of the classic themes of Asimov's entire Robot ouvre, which spends many books digging into the differences between (far more advanced) AI and actual human intelligence. There are fundamental, definable, structural deficiencies that separate LLMs from human thought, it's plainly incorrect to pretend otherwise, and the...extrapolationists...are neglecting that we have no idea how to solve these problems.

kcplate 1y ago
> deserves credit for calling out something important that rarely gets discussed: the importance of emotion for producing great art That’s subjective though. An opinion I agree with, but still subjective. I think it’s within the realm of possibility given the advances we have seen so far that a near future AI given enough input describing emotion could simulate it just enough for people to accept that it created a “decent” work. Likely undetectable by most people as AI created vs human created. > we have no idea how to solve these problems. Yet. Obviously time and talent moved us from Eliza to ChatGPT/Gemini. Is it really unlikely that time and talent can’t push us over the artificial emotion precipice as well? I am not betting against it.
- timr 1y ago
  > Yet. Obviously time and talent moved us from Eliza to ChatGPT/Gemini. Time being the big word there. Eliza came out in the 1960s. >Is it really unlikely that time and talent can’t push us over the artificial emotion precipice as well? I am not betting against it. Nor am I. I'm just not making hyperbolic claims concerning the timeline. For all we know, the next major advance will take another 60 years.
  - kcplate 1y ago
    > the next major advance will take another 60 years It might, or it might be next week.