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Anyone who claims that a poorly definined concept, AGI, is right around the corner is most likely: - trying to sell something - high on their own stories - h

Anyone who claims that a poorly definined concept, AGI, is right around the corner is most likely: - trying to sell something - high on their own stories - high on exogenous compounds - all of the above LLMs are good at language. They are OK summarizers of text by design but not good at logic. Very poor at spatial reasoning and as a result poor at connecting concepts together. Just ask any of the crown jewel LLM models "What's the biggest unsolved problem in the [insert any] field". The usual result is a pop-science-level article but with ton of subtle yet critical mistakes! Even worse, the answer sounds profound on the surface. In reality, it's just crap.

timmg 1y ago
Interesting. I think the key to what you wrote is "poorly definined". I find LLMs to be generally intelligent. So I feel like "we are already there" -- by some definition of AGI. At least how I think of it. Maybe a lot of people think of AGI as "superhuman". And by that definition, we are not there -- and may not get there. But, for me, we are already at the era of AGI.
- Incipient 1y ago
  I would call them "generally applicable". "intelligence" definitely implies leaning - and I'm not sure RAG, fine-tuning, or 6monthly updates counts - to split hairs. Where I will say we have a massive gap, which makes the average person not consider it AGI, is in context. I can give a person my very modest codebase, and ask for a change, and they'll deliver - mostly coherently - to that style, files in the right place etc. Still to today with AI, I get inconsistent design, files in random spots, etc.
- apsurd 1y ago
  that's the thing about language. we all kinda gotta agree on the meanings
- weatherlite 1y ago
  > I find LLMs to be generally intelligent. So I feel like "we are already there" -- by some definition of AGI. At least how I think of it. I don't disagree - they are useful in many cases and exhibit human like (or better) performance in many tasks. However they cannot simply be a "drop in white collar worker" yet, they are too jagged and unreliable, don't have a real memory etc. Their economic impact is still very much limited. I think this is what many people mean when they say AGI - something with a cognitive performance so good it equals or beats humans in the real world, at their jobs - not at some benchmark. One could ask - does it matter ? Why can't we say the current tools are great task solvers and call it AGI even if they are bad agents? It's a lengthy discussion to have but I think that ultimately yes, agentic reliability really matters.
richardw 1y ago
They’re great at working with the lens on our reality that is our text output. They are not truth seekers, which is necessarily fundamental to every life form from worms to whales. If we get things wrong, we die. If they get them wrong, they earn 1000 generated tokens.
- jhanschoo 1y ago
  Why do you say that LLMs are not truth seekers? If I express an informational query not very well, the LLM will infer what I mean by it and address the possible well-posed information queries that I may have intended that I did not express well. Can that not be considered truth-seeking, with the agent-environment boundary being the prompt box?
  - chychiu 1y ago
    They are not intrinsically truth seekers, and any truth seeking behaviour is mostly tuned during the training process. Unfortunately it also means it can be easily undone. E.g. just look at Grok in its current lobotomized version
    - jhanschoo 1y ago
      > They are not intrinsically truth seekers Is the average person a truth seeker in this sense that performs truth-seeking behavior? In my experience we prioritize sharing the same perspectives and getting along well with others a lot more than a critical examination of the world. In the sense that I just expressed, of figuring out the intention of a user's information query, that really isn't a tuned thing, it's inherent in generative models from possessing a lossy, compressed representation of training data, and it is also truth-seeking practiced by people that want to communicate.
      - imbnwa 1y ago
        >Is the average person a truth seeker in this sense that performs truth-seeking behavior? Absolutely
JKCalhoun 1y ago
Where does Eric Schmidt fit? Selling something?
- raspasov 1y ago
  I think he's generally optimistic which is a net positive.
  - paulryanrogers 1y ago
    Why is that a net positive?
- rvz 1y ago
  Already invested in the AI companies selling you something.
Buttons840 1y ago
I'll offer a definition of AGI: An AI (a computer program) that is better at [almost] any task than 5% of the human specialists in that field has achieved AGI. Or, stated another way, if 5% of humans are incapable of performing any intellectual job better than an AI can, then that AI has achieved AGI. Note, I am not saying that an AI that is better than humans at one particular thing has achieved AGI, because it is not "general". I'm saying that if a single AI is better at all intellectual tasks than some humans, the AI has achieved AGI. The 5th percentile of humans deserves the label of "intelligent", even if they are not the most intelligent, (I'd say all humans deserve the label "intelligent") and if an AI is able to perform all intellectual tasks better than such a person, the AI has achieved AGI.
- djoldman 1y ago
  I like where this is going. However, it's not sufficient. The actual tasks have to be written down, tests constructed, and the specialists tested. A subset of this has been done with some rigor and AI/computers have surpassed this threshold for some tests. Some have then responded by saying that it isn't AGI, and that the tasks aren't sufficiently measuring of "intelligence" or some other word, and that more tests are warranted.
  - Buttons840 1y ago
    You're saying we need to write down all intellectual tasks? How would that help? If an AI is better at some tasks (that happen to be written down), it doesn't mean it is better at all tasks. Actually, I'd lower my threshold even further--I originally said 50%, then 20%, then 5%--but now I'll say if an AI is better than 0.1% of people at all intellectual tasks, then it is AGI, because it is "general" (being able to do all intellectual tasks), and it is "intelligent" (a label we ascribe to all humans). But the AGI has to be better at all (not just some) intellectual tasks.
    - djoldman 1y ago
      > An AI (a computer program) that is better at [almost] any task than 5% of the human specialists in that field has achieved AGI. Let's say you have a candidate AI and assert that it indeed has passed the above benchmark. How do you prove that? Don't you have to say which tasks?
ninetyninenine 1y ago
Alright, let’s get this straight. You’ve got people foaming at the mouth anytime someone mentions AGI, like it’s some kind of cult prophecy. “Oh it’s poorly defined, it’s not around the corner, everyone talking about it is selling snake oil.” Give me a break. You don’t need a perfect definition to recognize that something big is happening. You just need eyes, ears, and a functioning brain stem. Who cares if AGI isn’t five minutes away. That’s not the point. The point is we’ve built the closest thing to a machine that actually gets what we’re saying. That alone is insane. You type in a paragraph about your childhood trauma and it gives you back something more coherent than your therapist. You ask it to summarize a court ruling and it doesn’t need to check Wikipedia first. It remembers context. It adjusts to tone. It knows when you’re being sarcastic. You think that’s just “autocomplete”? That’s not autocomplete, that’s comprehension. And the logic complaints, yeah, it screws up sometimes. So do you. So does your GPS, your doctor, your brain when you’re tired. You want flawless logic? Go build a calculator and stay out of adult conversations. This thing is learning from trillions of words and still does better than half the blowhards on HN. It doesn’t need to be perfect. It needs to be useful, and it already is. And don’t give me that “it sounds profound but it’s really just crap” line. That’s 90 percent of academia. That’s every selfhelp book, every political speech, every guy with a podcast and a ring light. If sounding smarter than you while being wrong disqualifies a thing, then we better shut down half the planet. Look, you’re not mad because it’s dumb. You’re mad because it’s not that dumb. It’s close. Close enough to feel threatening. Close enough to replace people who’ve been coasting on sounding smart instead of actually being smart. That’s what this is really about. Ego. Fear. Control. So yeah, maybe it’s not AGI yet. But it’s smarter than the guy next to you at work. And he’s got a pension.
- sponnath 1y ago
  Something big is definitely happening but it's not the intelligence explosion utopia that the AI companies are promising. > Who cares if AGI isn’t five minutes away. That’s not the point. The point is we’ve built the closest thing to a machine that actually gets what we’re saying. That alone is insane. You type in a paragraph about your childhood trauma and it gives you back something more coherent than your therapist. You ask it to summarize a court ruling and it doesn’t need to check Wikipedia first. It remembers context. It adjusts to tone. It knows when you’re being sarcastic. You think that’s just “autocomplete”? That’s not autocomplete, that’s comprehension My experience with LLMs have been all over the place. They're insanely good at comprehending language. As a side effect, they're also decent at comprehending complicated concepts like math or programming since most of human knowledge is embedded in language. This does not mean they have a thorough understanding of those concepts. It is very easy to trip them up. They also fail in ways that are not obvious to people who aren't experts on whatever is the subject of its output. > And the logic complaints, yeah, it screws up sometimes. So do you. So does your GPS, your doctor, your brain when you’re tired. You want flawless logic? Go build a calculator and stay out of adult conversations. This thing is learning from trillions of words and still does better than half the blowhards on HN. It doesn’t need to be perfect. It needs to be useful, and it already is. I feel like this is handwaving away the shortcomings a bit too much. It does not screw up in the same way humans do. Not even close. Besides, I think computers should rightfully be held up to a higher standard. We already have programs that can automate tasks that human brains would find challenging and tedious to do. Surely the next frontier is something with the speed and accuracy of a computer while also having the adaptability of human reasoning. I don't feel threatened by LLMs. I definitely feel threatened by some of the absurd amount of money being put into them though. I think most of us here will be feeling some pain if a correction happens.
giancarlostoro 1y ago
Its right around the corner when you prove it as fact. Otherwise as suggested it is just hype to sell us on your LLM flavor.
refurb 1y ago
This is a good summary of what LLM offer today. My company is desperately trying to incorporate AI (to tell investors they are). The fact that LLM gets thing wrong is a huge problem since most work can’t be wrong and if if a human needs to carefully go through output to check it, it’s often just as much work as having that same human just create the output themselves. But languages is one place LLMs shine. We often need to translate technical docs to layman language and LLMs work great. It quickly find words and phrases to describe complex topics. Then a human can do a final round of revisions. But anything de novo? Or requiring logic? It works about as well as a high school student with no background knowledge.
- smhinsey 1y ago
  Fundamentally, they are really powerful text transformers with some additional capability. The further away from that sweet spot and the closer to anthropomorphization the more unreliable the output
rf15 1y ago
There's definitely also people in the futurism and/or doom and gloom camps with absolutely no skin in the game that can't resist this topic.
Davidzheng 1y ago
I agree with the last part but I think that criticism applies to many humans too so I don't find it compelling at all. I also think by original definition (better than median human at almost all task) it's close and I think in the next 5 years it will be competitive with professionals at all tasks which are nonphysical (physical could be 5-10 years idk). I could be high on my own stories but not the rest. LLMs are good at language yes but I think to be good at language requires some level of intelligence. I find this notion that they are bad at spatial reasoning extremely flawed. They are much better than all previous models, some of which are designed for spatial reasoning. Are they worse than humans? Yes but just the fact that you can put newer models on robots and they just work means that they are quite good by AI standards and rapidly improving.
andyfilms1 1y ago
Thousands are being laid off, supposedly because they're "being replaced with AI," implying the AI is as good or better as humans at these jobs. Managers and execs are workers, too--so if the AI really is so good, surely they should recuse themselves and go live a peaceful life with the wealth they've accrued. I don't know about you, but I can't imagine that ever happening. To me, that alone is a tip off that this tech, while amazing, can't live up to the hype in the long term.
- sleepybrett 1y ago
  Every few weeks I give LLMs a chance to code something for me. Friday I laid out a problem very cleanly. Take this datastructure and tranform it into this other datastructure in terraform. With examples of the data in both formats. After the seventh round of back and forth where it would give me code that would not compile or code that gave me a totally different datastructure, giving it more examples and clarifications all the while I gave up. I gave the problem to a junior and they came back with the answer in about an hour. Next time an AI bro tells you that AI can 'replace your juniors' tell him to go to hell.
- theossuary 1y ago
  I don't think anyone is being laid off because of AI. People are being laid off because the market is bad for a myriad of reasons, and companies are blaming AI because it helps them deflect worry that might lower their stock price. Companies say "we've laid people off because we're using AI,x but they mean "we had to lay people off, were hoping we can make up for them with AI."
  - hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
    > I don't think anyone is being laid off because of AI. I think that's demonstratively false. While many business leaders may be overstating it, there are some pretty clear cut cases of people losing their jobs to AI. Here are 2 articles from the Washington Post from 2 years ago: https://archive.vn/C5syl https://archive.vn/C5syl "ChatGPT took their jobs. Now they walk dogs and fix air conditioners." https://archive.vn/cFWmX https://archive.vn/cFWmX "ChatGPT provided better customer service than his staff. He fired them."
0x20cowboy 1y ago
LLM are a compressed version of their training dataset with a text based interactive search function.
- Salgat 1y ago
  LLMs require the sum total of human knowledge to ape what you can find on google, meanwhile Ramanujan achieved brilliant discoveries in mathematics using nothing but a grade school education and a few math books.
  - rowanG077 1y ago
    You phrase it as a diss but "Yeah LLM suck, they aren't even as smart as Ramanujan" sounds like a high praise to me.
    - Salgat 1y ago
      Unfortunately LLMs fail even basic logic tests given to children so definitely not high praise. I'm just highlighting the absurd amount of data they need versus humans to highlight that they're just spitting out regressions on the training data. We're talking data that would take a human countless thousands of lifetimes to ingest. Yet a human can accomplish infinitely more with a basic grade school education.
      - jbstack 1y ago
        Humans can achieve more within one (or two, or a few) narrowly scoped field(s), after a lot of hard work and effort. LLMs can display a basic level of competency (with some mistakes) in almost any topic known to mankind. No one reasonably expects a LLM to be able to do the former, and humans certainly cannot do the latter. You're comparing apples and oranges. Also, your comparison is unfair. You've chosen an exceptional high achiever as your example of a human to compare against LLMs. If you instead compare the average human, LLMs don't look so bad even when the human has the advantage of specialisation (e.g. medical diagnostics). A LLM can do reasonably well against an average (not exceptional) person with just a basic grade school education if asked to produce an essay on some topic.
QuantumGood 1y ago
Definitions around AI have been changing since the beginning, making it always farther in the future. In this system it can always be "right around the corner" but never arrive.

timmg 1y ago

Interesting. I think the key to what you wrote is "poorly definined". I find LLMs to be generally intelligent. So I feel like "we are already there" -- by some definition of AGI. At least how I think of it. Maybe a lot of people think of AGI as "superhuman". And by that definition, we are not there -- and may not get there. But, for me, we are already at the era of AGI.

Incipient 1y ago
I would call them "generally applicable". "intelligence" definitely implies leaning - and I'm not sure RAG, fine-tuning, or 6monthly updates counts - to split hairs. Where I will say we have a massive gap, which makes the average person not consider it AGI, is in context. I can give a person my very modest codebase, and ask for a change, and they'll deliver - mostly coherently - to that style, files in the right place etc. Still to today with AI, I get inconsistent design, files in random spots, etc.
apsurd 1y ago
that's the thing about language. we all kinda gotta agree on the meanings
weatherlite 1y ago
> I find LLMs to be generally intelligent. So I feel like "we are already there" -- by some definition of AGI. At least how I think of it. I don't disagree - they are useful in many cases and exhibit human like (or better) performance in many tasks. However they cannot simply be a "drop in white collar worker" yet, they are too jagged and unreliable, don't have a real memory etc. Their economic impact is still very much limited. I think this is what many people mean when they say AGI - something with a cognitive performance so good it equals or beats humans in the real world, at their jobs - not at some benchmark. One could ask - does it matter ? Why can't we say the current tools are great task solvers and call it AGI even if they are bad agents? It's a lengthy discussion to have but I think that ultimately yes, agentic reliability really matters.

richardw 1y ago

They’re great at working with the lens on our reality that is our text output. They are not truth seekers, which is necessarily fundamental to every life form from worms to whales. If we get things wrong, we die. If they get them wrong, they earn 1000 generated tokens.

jhanschoo 1y ago
Why do you say that LLMs are not truth seekers? If I express an informational query not very well, the LLM will infer what I mean by it and address the possible well-posed information queries that I may have intended that I did not express well. Can that not be considered truth-seeking, with the agent-environment boundary being the prompt box?
- chychiu 1y ago
  They are not intrinsically truth seekers, and any truth seeking behaviour is mostly tuned during the training process. Unfortunately it also means it can be easily undone. E.g. just look at Grok in its current lobotomized version
  - jhanschoo 1y ago
    > They are not intrinsically truth seekers Is the average person a truth seeker in this sense that performs truth-seeking behavior? In my experience we prioritize sharing the same perspectives and getting along well with others a lot more than a critical examination of the world. In the sense that I just expressed, of figuring out the intention of a user's information query, that really isn't a tuned thing, it's inherent in generative models from possessing a lossy, compressed representation of training data, and it is also truth-seeking practiced by people that want to communicate.
    - imbnwa 1y ago
      >Is the average person a truth seeker in this sense that performs truth-seeking behavior? Absolutely

JKCalhoun 1y ago

Where does Eric Schmidt fit? Selling something?

raspasov 1y ago
I think he's generally optimistic which is a net positive.
- paulryanrogers 1y ago
  Why is that a net positive?
rvz 1y ago
Already invested in the AI companies selling you something.

Buttons840 1y ago

I'll offer a definition of AGI: An AI (a computer program) that is better at [almost] any task than 5% of the human specialists in that field has achieved AGI. Or, stated another way, if 5% of humans are incapable of performing any intellectual job better than an AI can, then that AI has achieved AGI. Note, I am not saying that an AI that is better than humans at one particular thing has achieved AGI, because it is not "general". I'm saying that if a single AI is better at all intellectual tasks than some humans, the AI has achieved AGI. The 5th percentile of humans deserves the label of "intelligent", even if they are not the most intelligent, (I'd say all humans deserve the label "intelligent") and if an AI is able to perform all intellectual tasks better than such a person, the AI has achieved AGI.

djoldman 1y ago
I like where this is going. However, it's not sufficient. The actual tasks have to be written down, tests constructed, and the specialists tested. A subset of this has been done with some rigor and AI/computers have surpassed this threshold for some tests. Some have then responded by saying that it isn't AGI, and that the tasks aren't sufficiently measuring of "intelligence" or some other word, and that more tests are warranted.
- Buttons840 1y ago
  You're saying we need to write down all intellectual tasks? How would that help? If an AI is better at some tasks (that happen to be written down), it doesn't mean it is better at all tasks. Actually, I'd lower my threshold even further--I originally said 50%, then 20%, then 5%--but now I'll say if an AI is better than 0.1% of people at all intellectual tasks, then it is AGI, because it is "general" (being able to do all intellectual tasks), and it is "intelligent" (a label we ascribe to all humans). But the AGI has to be better at all (not just some) intellectual tasks.
  - djoldman 1y ago
    > An AI (a computer program) that is better at [almost] any task than 5% of the human specialists in that field has achieved AGI. Let's say you have a candidate AI and assert that it indeed has passed the above benchmark. How do you prove that? Don't you have to say which tasks?

ninetyninenine 1y ago

Alright, let’s get this straight. You’ve got people foaming at the mouth anytime someone mentions AGI, like it’s some kind of cult prophecy. “Oh it’s poorly defined, it’s not around the corner, everyone talking about it is selling snake oil.” Give me a break. You don’t need a perfect definition to recognize that something big is happening. You just need eyes, ears, and a functioning brain stem. Who cares if AGI isn’t five minutes away. That’s not the point. The point is we’ve built the closest thing to a machine that actually gets what we’re saying. That alone is insane. You type in a paragraph about your childhood trauma and it gives you back something more coherent than your therapist. You ask it to summarize a court ruling and it doesn’t need to check Wikipedia first. It remembers context. It adjusts to tone. It knows when you’re being sarcastic. You think that’s just “autocomplete”? That’s not autocomplete, that’s comprehension. And the logic complaints, yeah, it screws up sometimes. So do you. So does your GPS, your doctor, your brain when you’re tired. You want flawless logic? Go build a calculator and stay out of adult conversations. This thing is learning from trillions of words and still does better than half the blowhards on HN. It doesn’t need to be perfect. It needs to be useful, and it already is. And don’t give me that “it sounds profound but it’s really just crap” line. That’s 90 percent of academia. That’s every selfhelp book, every political speech, every guy with a podcast and a ring light. If sounding smarter than you while being wrong disqualifies a thing, then we better shut down half the planet. Look, you’re not mad because it’s dumb. You’re mad because it’s not that dumb. It’s close. Close enough to feel threatening. Close enough to replace people who’ve been coasting on sounding smart instead of actually being smart. That’s what this is really about. Ego. Fear. Control. So yeah, maybe it’s not AGI yet. But it’s smarter than the guy next to you at work. And he’s got a pension.

sponnath 1y ago
Something big is definitely happening but it's not the intelligence explosion utopia that the AI companies are promising. > Who cares if AGI isn’t five minutes away. That’s not the point. The point is we’ve built the closest thing to a machine that actually gets what we’re saying. That alone is insane. You type in a paragraph about your childhood trauma and it gives you back something more coherent than your therapist. You ask it to summarize a court ruling and it doesn’t need to check Wikipedia first. It remembers context. It adjusts to tone. It knows when you’re being sarcastic. You think that’s just “autocomplete”? That’s not autocomplete, that’s comprehension My experience with LLMs have been all over the place. They're insanely good at comprehending language. As a side effect, they're also decent at comprehending complicated concepts like math or programming since most of human knowledge is embedded in language. This does not mean they have a thorough understanding of those concepts. It is very easy to trip them up. They also fail in ways that are not obvious to people who aren't experts on whatever is the subject of its output. > And the logic complaints, yeah, it screws up sometimes. So do you. So does your GPS, your doctor, your brain when you’re tired. You want flawless logic? Go build a calculator and stay out of adult conversations. This thing is learning from trillions of words and still does better than half the blowhards on HN. It doesn’t need to be perfect. It needs to be useful, and it already is. I feel like this is handwaving away the shortcomings a bit too much. It does not screw up in the same way humans do. Not even close. Besides, I think computers should rightfully be held up to a higher standard. We already have programs that can automate tasks that human brains would find challenging and tedious to do. Surely the next frontier is something with the speed and accuracy of a computer while also having the adaptability of human reasoning. I don't feel threatened by LLMs. I definitely feel threatened by some of the absurd amount of money being put into them though. I think most of us here will be feeling some pain if a correction happens.

giancarlostoro 1y ago

Its right around the corner when you prove it as fact. Otherwise as suggested it is just hype to sell us on your LLM flavor.

refurb 1y ago

This is a good summary of what LLM offer today. My company is desperately trying to incorporate AI (to tell investors they are). The fact that LLM gets thing wrong is a huge problem since most work can’t be wrong and if if a human needs to carefully go through output to check it, it’s often just as much work as having that same human just create the output themselves. But languages is one place LLMs shine. We often need to translate technical docs to layman language and LLMs work great. It quickly find words and phrases to describe complex topics. Then a human can do a final round of revisions. But anything de novo? Or requiring logic? It works about as well as a high school student with no background knowledge.

smhinsey 1y ago
Fundamentally, they are really powerful text transformers with some additional capability. The further away from that sweet spot and the closer to anthropomorphization the more unreliable the output

rf15 1y ago

There's definitely also people in the futurism and/or doom and gloom camps with absolutely no skin in the game that can't resist this topic.

Davidzheng 1y ago

I agree with the last part but I think that criticism applies to many humans too so I don't find it compelling at all. I also think by original definition (better than median human at almost all task) it's close and I think in the next 5 years it will be competitive with professionals at all tasks which are nonphysical (physical could be 5-10 years idk). I could be high on my own stories but not the rest. LLMs are good at language yes but I think to be good at language requires some level of intelligence. I find this notion that they are bad at spatial reasoning extremely flawed. They are much better than all previous models, some of which are designed for spatial reasoning. Are they worse than humans? Yes but just the fact that you can put newer models on robots and they just work means that they are quite good by AI standards and rapidly improving.

andyfilms1 1y ago

Thousands are being laid off, supposedly because they're "being replaced with AI," implying the AI is as good or better as humans at these jobs. Managers and execs are workers, too--so if the AI really is so good, surely they should recuse themselves and go live a peaceful life with the wealth they've accrued. I don't know about you, but I can't imagine that ever happening. To me, that alone is a tip off that this tech, while amazing, can't live up to the hype in the long term.

sleepybrett 1y ago
Every few weeks I give LLMs a chance to code something for me. Friday I laid out a problem very cleanly. Take this datastructure and tranform it into this other datastructure in terraform. With examples of the data in both formats. After the seventh round of back and forth where it would give me code that would not compile or code that gave me a totally different datastructure, giving it more examples and clarifications all the while I gave up. I gave the problem to a junior and they came back with the answer in about an hour. Next time an AI bro tells you that AI can 'replace your juniors' tell him to go to hell.
theossuary 1y ago
I don't think anyone is being laid off because of AI. People are being laid off because the market is bad for a myriad of reasons, and companies are blaming AI because it helps them deflect worry that might lower their stock price. Companies say "we've laid people off because we're using AI,x but they mean "we had to lay people off, were hoping we can make up for them with AI."
- hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
  > I don't think anyone is being laid off because of AI. I think that's demonstratively false. While many business leaders may be overstating it, there are some pretty clear cut cases of people losing their jobs to AI. Here are 2 articles from the Washington Post from 2 years ago: https://archive.vn/C5syl https://archive.vn/C5syl "ChatGPT took their jobs. Now they walk dogs and fix air conditioners." https://archive.vn/cFWmX https://archive.vn/cFWmX "ChatGPT provided better customer service than his staff. He fired them."

0x20cowboy 1y ago

LLM are a compressed version of their training dataset with a text based interactive search function.

Salgat 1y ago
LLMs require the sum total of human knowledge to ape what you can find on google, meanwhile Ramanujan achieved brilliant discoveries in mathematics using nothing but a grade school education and a few math books.
- rowanG077 1y ago
  You phrase it as a diss but "Yeah LLM suck, they aren't even as smart as Ramanujan" sounds like a high praise to me.
  - Salgat 1y ago
    Unfortunately LLMs fail even basic logic tests given to children so definitely not high praise. I'm just highlighting the absurd amount of data they need versus humans to highlight that they're just spitting out regressions on the training data. We're talking data that would take a human countless thousands of lifetimes to ingest. Yet a human can accomplish infinitely more with a basic grade school education.
    - jbstack 1y ago
      Humans can achieve more within one (or two, or a few) narrowly scoped field(s), after a lot of hard work and effort. LLMs can display a basic level of competency (with some mistakes) in almost any topic known to mankind. No one reasonably expects a LLM to be able to do the former, and humans certainly cannot do the latter. You're comparing apples and oranges. Also, your comparison is unfair. You've chosen an exceptional high achiever as your example of a human to compare against LLMs. If you instead compare the average human, LLMs don't look so bad even when the human has the advantage of specialisation (e.g. medical diagnostics). A LLM can do reasonably well against an average (not exceptional) person with just a basic grade school education if asked to produce an essay on some topic.

QuantumGood 1y ago

Definitions around AI have been changing since the beginning, making it always farther in the future. In this system it can always be "right around the corner" but never arrive.