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Why does AI feel so different?
- mm263 1y agoIt feels deeply wrong to put Kahneman in the same list as Socrates, Aristotle, and Bacon.
- actionfromafar 1y agoA category error, even.
- qweiopqweiop 1y agoReplacing our thinking with a few monopolistic tech companies... What could go wrong!
- arielcostas 1y agoNot just our thinking, but our search for truth. The biggest problem I see is that models can hallucinate or be biased (for example, Grok being told explicitly not to mention Trump and Musk when asked about misinformation) for the benefit of their owners or creators. This happens with Chinese models too, of course, because of their laws. The problem is that people just trust what the LLM tells them, not realising they can be misled, or the model tells them "you're right" without any pushback or invitation to think further—just like an echo chamber, the consequences of which we've seen with social media in the last few years
- qweiopqweiop 1y agoExactly what I was getting at. They're probably the most powerful tool in human history if you wanted to influence people. Of course they're exciting from a tech perspective but I can't help but feel people are missing the bigger picture.
- eru 1y agoWhere's the monopoly (or rather oligopoly) you are talking about? There's many models offered by many companies and labs that are close enough to state of the art. Many of them are completely open source or at least have open weights. You might complain about outsourcing your thinking to a machine, sure. But there's no monopoly nor oligopoly.
- qweiopqweiop 1y agoGoogle, currently thought of as the AI leader has shown time and time again they will resort to monopolistic practices. I really hope open source models are the way, but the fact is the vast majority of day to day usage of LLMs is on models owned by multi-bullion dollar companies. And even if they're not monopolies, people being influenced by companies to this extent should worry people.
- eru 1y agoIt's news to me that Google is the AI leader. Where did you get that information / impression? I'd assumed that if anyone is a leader, it's OpenAI, but even their lead seems pretty tenuous at best. And people trying shading things doesn't make a monopoly. Especially if there's plenty of competition.
- SideburnsOfDoom 1y ago> What could go wrong? > "Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them." - F Herbert, 1965 I want to emphasise the "other men with machines" part. Mr Herbert wasn't talking about an AI takeover. He was talking about a techbro takeover. He didn't even believe in the agency of machines, just human potential - an inanimate thing that does not want, will not want to take over. It is a tool for the people who command it and do.
- satisfice 1y agoThis strikes me as babbling. 70 percent fever dream. To take one example, the author speaks of using AI to chat with his favorite thinkers. Well I have favorite thinkers, so why don’t I chat with AI versions of them? Because I know it’s all fake. Whatever substance there is to chatting with a corpse or corpus is unknowable. So it amounts to playing with dolls. I think for a living. I would LIKE AI to help. But it doesn’t. On balance, any benefit is drowned out by the effort it takes me to check its work. I’m left wondering if the only people who value GenAI are those who haven’t experienced the satisfaction of thinking for themselves, or who have crippling impostor syndrome.
- bm3719 1y agoThe thinking-averse outnumber the thinking-inclined. They've tried this thinking thing, and want nothing to do with it. They all went to public school, after all, and the rare times thinking happened it was painful and had to be forced upon them. Their ideal of Being is to react to content, experience positive emotional immediacy, or dull their intellects: all feeling, no thinking. They'll win in the short term, due to the tyranny of convenience. Then, when all economic value has been extracted from them and the possibility of future value made nil, they'll lose. Of course, that doesn't mean you'll win though.
- isoprophlex 1y agoIt's a negative-sum game that breaks the fourth wall; even not playing makes you lose.
- incone123 1y agoThey all went to public school?
- actionfromafar 1y agoYeah, that stuck out to me too.
- satisfice 1y ago
- donperignon 1y agoIt’s the first revolutionary technology that his first goal is to make money for VC investors instead of really change the world, the perceived benefit for society is just a sub-product of the ponzi scheme behind those VC firms.
- JackYoustra 1y agoWhat's your proof?
- __loam 1y agoLiterally every business school and consulting firm wrote articles about how many jobs this stuff was going to displace and how much it would grow the gdp by.
- JackYoustra 1y agoI mean mass displacement is literally world changing
- JohnKemeny 1y agoI recommend this Better Offline episode: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/
- JohnKemeny 1y agoExactly. The tech itself isn't driving the mission --- the funding model is. "AI" right now feels less like the internet in ’95 and more like crypto in 2021: massive hype, vague promises, and any social benefit is incidental to keeping the capital flywheel spinning.
- akoboldfrying 1y agoI simply don't agree. I've personally benefited from asking Gemini questions almost every day; I never benefited from crypto, even though I find the mechanisms intriguing and the design beautiful. It's true that social benefit is incidental to the development of nearly all the big AIs, but that applies to every venture in capitalism.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- JohnKemeny 1y agoThe article keeps referring to "AI" as if it's a coherent, agreed-upon thing. It's not. "AI" is a marketing term that's been applied to whatever happens to look impressive at the moment---right now, that's LLMs. There's no settled definition, no unified discipline, and lumping everything from generative text models to actual robotics under the same label just obscures the discussion. If we're talking about LLMs, let's call them LLMs. And let's be real: we're in a bubble. There's zero evidence that LLMs have produced a measurable productivity boom. If anything, they're net negative in many contexts---encouraging shallow engagement, short-circuiting the learning process, and making knowledge workers more dependent on stochastic parrots that frequently hallucinate. We've replaced "look it up" with "ask the oracle," and the oracle can't reliably tell fact from fiction. The hype cycle will keep burning cash until someone admits the emperor's wardrobe is ... speculative at best.
- edg5000 1y agoI encourage you to try and really lean on LLMs (Claude Code in particular), it's hard to argue that there is no productivity boost. Athropy in "low level" skills is certainly real though. But our ancestors knew how to repair a pair of socks. Due to industrialisation, we just buy new ones and have lost the skills to repair them. Most people may forget how to do many things in programming, but may still intimately understand, at a high level, what each line is doing.
- bamboozled 1y agoThe more you use it and the deeper you go the more you realise its limitations as a useful software engineering tool and more as an autocomplete. Is it useful ? Yes? Am I happy it exists yes ? Is it revolutionary. I doubt it.
- scotty79 1y agoYear ago with enough prompting it could write a function for me that did something conceptually simple but tedious. I tried Windsurf over the last 3 days. It can write complex game mechanics logic in multiple files and refactor code when told to. I can talk to it using language of the domain I just made up and I can talk to it using language that developers use when they talk about the code. It can solve bugs that would take me half an hour to figure out at least. It went from a poor junior to clever junior and half a senior in one year. It's not great at one shot architecting yet, but when told how to architect a thing it can move stuff around to conform with the desired architecture. It creates and modifies SVG's, understands colors and directions. It does all of that blind, without running the code. All it has is compiler (language server really) and linter. You mention it's an autocomplete. I barely used auto-complete at all. I just told it what to do. I touched the code a little bit only because I wanted to, never because I had to. When I wanted a change to the code, 95% of the time I just told it what change I needed and it made it. It basically replaces about 1/3 of software team already enabling (and pushing me towards) a role of (tech lead/architect/qa/product owner) and this fraction is rising. It's not flawless. Sometimes it makes things that don't work on the first try. But you don't always need to revert. It's capable of fixing what it made when told about how the desired behavior differs. And all that without running the program. I anticipate that further development is going to be letting it run and observe what it built so it's gonna move towards QA role. And the other thing might be slowly learning to differentiate between well architected code and badly architected code but that's probably harder as it requires careful preparation (and creation) of training data. While moving towards QA just requires figuring out how to let it run and inspect stuff. Maybe use the debugger.
- isoprophlex 1y ago"Ah cool a list of historic technologies that caused a paradigm shift... I wonder what second-order effects are to be expected from generative AI!" > Customer service automation, Agentic coding, Content creation Fucking hell. Customer service automation. Auto-spaghetti code. Brainrot as a service. Truly what society needs.
- rmnclmnt 1y agoAgreed. Not what society needs, but what giant corporations and govs need for the society to well behave… (Edit: typos)
- eru 1y agoGiant corporations do what their customers, workers and shareholders (and the law) want. If customers want some customer service, but don't want to enough for it to be good; then very basic customer service is what they are getting.
- crystal_revenge 1y agoAI feels different because quietly we are all aware, to differing degrees of comfort, that the world around us is collapsing. We see the escalating effects of climate change impacting day-to-day life in ways we were told would only happen in the far future, witnessing genocide become a normal part of the news critique of which can mean serious personal consequences, we're watching the United States transform into State Capitalism [0] making our country far more like modern day China than many of us would have ever imagined possible. And we deeply need to believe something wonderous, whether delightful or terrifying, is also happening. I honestly think AI is largely mass hallucination which is supported by a system that is able to extract tremendous wealth from this hallucination continuing. We can no longer believe that everything happening is normal, so we need to inject some, slightly less horrific, explanation for what we're experiencing. 0. https://www.wsj.com/economy/the-u-s-marches-toward-state-capitalism-with-american-characteristics-f75cafa8 https://www.wsj.com/economy/the-u-s-marches-toward-state-cap...
- FranzFerdiNaN 1y agoChina manages to have long term planning. The only planning Trump and co do is planning how to line their own pockets.
- eru 1y agoChina is a country. Lots of people live there. Some of them have long term planning for some aspects. Some of them don't.
- uncircle 1y agoA good, albeit controversial, argument in favour of monarchy I’ve heard recently is that a monarch has to plan ahead for decades, if not centuries, to ensure them and their dynasty can keep ruling over a prosperous country. A democratic politician only has to care about the next 4 years, at best; if any issue requires long-term planning, all you can do is hope it fixes itself.
- TrnsltLife 1y agoI agree about China. Probably Russia too and other countries with... longer term leadership. Remind me of some of the things that Biden himself planned during his presidency.
- ec109685 1y agoThese are poor examples: > Why do I need to know what quarks are, or how steam engines work? Why do I need to know anything about anything? I can just look it up with AI Literally all possible with Google and YouTube.
- eru 1y agoAnd a bit earlier with books and libraries. Over time, we reduced friction and cost.
- tannhaeuser 1y agoGo to Google Search and literally ask "How do steam engines work?", and an AI-generated answer is exactly what it will show you, along with a Wikipedia link/excerpt followed by an endless list of links to clickfarms with lede talking about steam engines in general terms to lure you onto their ad-cluttered pages (btw, Duck Duck Go/Bing is just the same). Shouldn't you rather say "go to Wikipedia straight", or push for Wikipedia to improve their search with all their money already? Isn't a choice of using local open-weight LLMs not actually progress over "googling" and Google's rotten algorithms, or even freaking YouTube and their even worse ad feeds? So what's your point (I'm tempted to insert "boomer" here)?
- corentin88 1y agoIt’s one thing to provide hints of a response (10 blue links) and the response (AI).
- tannhaeuser 1y agoExcept it's all a show when those link to generated AI slop next to hundreds or even thousands of trackers and ads anyway, most prominently Google Ads and Google Analytics, which is why they're ranking and displaying at the top in the first place.
- bgwalter 1y agoIf you are using the local LLM as a sort of Encarta (another software that failed) it might work, as long as you are fine with shallow answers. Proper research that compares many different pages still requires the regular Google search. Google LLM summaries are pathetic, Perplexity and Grok have to be nudged to the point that I feel I am training them with links obtained by Google.
- nottorp 1y agoDoes it feel different? Every time i use a LLM it feels like I'm talking to a submediocre marketer or tv script writer ...
- spiderfarmer 1y agoI recently saw a good example of how LLM's can be really useful. A friend of mine, who always found learning difficult, now works as a plumber and installer with his own one-person company. One of his clients is the local community pool. He took over the job from an older man who showed him how everything worked. My friend noticed a lot of inefficient (manual) use of energy and resources, but the previous installer told him it would cost too much to automate, so nothing was done. The other day we talked about AI, and he said he had never tried it. I asked him to think of some questions from his daily work. He came up with questions about the pool system and how to automate it. ChatGPT answered his questions correctly, and after a few follow-ups, it even provided a list of the parts he would need and a plan to make it work. Last weekend he told me that, together with the previous installer, he made improvements that should save the pool thousands of euros over the next few years. Of course, an experienced pool expert might have come up with the same solution, but it is often difficult to convince a committee to hire someone when nothing is broken, the budget is already set, and the inefficiencies are not obvious. My friend now uses ChatGPT several times a day to solve practical problems. It helps him learn new things and explore possibilities he might not have considered otherwise. I do not mind if ChatGPT makes the occasional mistake or gives an answer based on outdated information. As long as it is used as a tool to improve your own abilities, the subscription is worth the cost. When I worked with colleagues, I sometimes relied on advice that turned out to be wrong. Everyone makes mistakes, even when working to the best of their abilities, and I find that my AI 'colleagues' make fewer of them.
- yobbo 1y agoThis is an interesting example but it can't be scaled up to have meaningful impact on the level of the economy or society. The effect right now of LLMs is reducing friction for some people with certain problems, but big important problems are already optimised to much higher levels.
- spiderfarmer 1y agoI disagree completely. You seem to believe the venture capital money machine that tells you technology and innovation must always be a major disruptive force and solve big, important problems. Most problems we encounter in daily life are small. If a technology helps solve them faster, at a lower cost, or in a way that was not possible before, I believe it can scale very well. People just have to get accustomed to it. For example, I fixed my lawnmower recently with the help of ChatGPT. I could have gone to the dealer or asked my brother for help, but instead it was a quick five minute fix that saved me from bothering anyone or spending time searching through manuals and videos for the answer. It literally couldn't have been fixed faster. I prefer that over augmented reality goggles and other "Big Ideas".
- HL33tibCe7 1y ago> What’s going to happen in the next 5 years? Will my skills be relevant? How do I truly add value with AI getting smarter in every way? How does it change life for me and my family? Here is how I approach this - this might be a coping mechanism, but it’s certainly helped me personally. LLMs are hugely impressive, no-one is denying that. But they have already been out for nearly 3 years at this point, and there are still massive gaps in their functionality that mean, in their current state, they are nowhere near being able to take over highly skilled work (e.g. software engineering at senior+ levels) from humans. They can handle grunt work well, but are unable to go beyond that: they operate at the level of a (poor) junior. LLMs remind me to some extent of journalists and the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. When I ask an LLM a question in an area I am not an expert in, I’m impressed. On the other hand, when I ask it something I am an expert in, I am almost always disappointed. I don’t bother using them for complex work any more, because they lie and hallucinate too much. Furthermore, the rate of progress appears to be slowing. All of this gives me some hope that my own life will not be completely ruined as a result of this technology.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- 334f905d22bc19 1y ago>It’s a paradigm shift in accessing knowledge This statement and similar ones along the line have a very bitter taste to me. Someone has to create the knowledge. Someone has to create the actual training data for others to be received in dumbed down and stripped out version through AI. You will always be late to the game when you try to gain knowledge that way. I really really don't understand why people overhype the learning part of AI so much. Yes, it's a neat tool, but in my opinion rather bad for __actual in depth__ learning
- readthenotes1 1y agoMy initial reaction is that it is Kinda sad Kahneman's debunked work was labeled as a pervasive game changer. https://replicationindex.com/2020/12/30/a-meta-scientific-perspective-on-thinking-fast-and-slow/ https://replicationindex.com/2020/12/30/a-meta-scientific-pe...
- sriharis 1y agoAuthor here. Thanks for sharing this, I didn't know about this.
- josefritzishere 1y agoBecause it is the most overhyped service in history. It's an exponential level above normal hype because of the investment cost.
- tim333 1y agoIt's more than another new tech. It's a fundamental change in the nature of complexity on earth. For the last 4bn or so years we've had reproducing DNA which led onto thinking humans but they get born, thinking and then drop dead a 14 millionth of a bn years later. Now we will have AI mind children that live on indefinitely. It's the biggest change since the evolution of life.
- commenter711 1y agowhat