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>I think the "just tweak the prompts bro" people are missing out on learning. Alternatively they're just learning/building intuition for something else. The le

>I think the "just tweak the prompts bro" people are missing out on learning. Alternatively they're just learning/building intuition for something else. The level of abstraction is moving upwards. I don't know why people don't seem to grok that the level of the current models is the floor, not the ceiling. Despite the naysayers like Gary Marcus, there is in fact no sign of scaling or progress slowing down at all on AI capabilities. So it might be that if there is any value in human labor left in the future it will be in being able to get AI models to do what you want correctly.

Brian_K_White 1y ago
Wishful, self-serving, and beside the point. The primary argument here is not about the capability of the ai. I think the same effect has been around forever in the form of every boss/manager/ceo/rando-divorcee-or-child-with-money using employees to do their thinking as a current information-handling worker or student using an ai to do their thinking.
- vonneumannstan 1y ago
  >Wishful, self-serving, and beside the point. The primary argument here is not about the capability of the ai. "Alternatively they're just learning/building intuition for something else." Reading comprehension is hard.
benterix 1y ago
That would be true if several conditions were fulfilled, starting with LLMs being actually to do their tasks properly, which they still very much struggle with which basically defeats the premise of moving up an abstraction layer if you have to constantly check and correct the lower layer.
- vonneumannstan 1y ago
  [flagged]
pigpag 1y ago
[dead]
fatata123 1y ago
LLMs are plateauing, and you’re in denial.
- vonneumannstan 1y ago
  Show me one metric they are plateauing on.
jimkri 1y ago
I don't think Gary Marcus is necessarily a naysayer; I take it that he is trying to get people to be mindful of the current AI tooling and its capabilities, and that there is more to do before we say it is what it is being marketed as. Like, GPT5 seems to be an additional feature layer of game theory examples. Check LinkedIn for how people think it behaves, and you can see patterns. But they market it as much more.
- vonneumannstan 1y ago
  >I don't think Gary Marcus is necessarily a naysayer Oh come on. He is by far the most well known AI poo-poo'er and it's not even close. He built his entire brand on it once he realized his own research was totally irrelevant.
KoolKat23 1y ago
Agree with this. I mean the guy assembling a thingymajig in the factory, after a few years, can put it together with his hands 10x faster than the actual thingymajig designer. He'll tell you apply some more glue here and less glue there (it's probably slightly better, but immaterial really). However, he probably couldn't tell you what the fault tolerance of the item is, the designer can do that. We still outsource manufacturing to the guy in the factory regardless. We just have to get better at identifying risks with using the LLMs doing the grunt work and get better in mitigating them. As you say, abstracted.
codyb 1y ago
Really? No signs of slowing down? A year or two ago when LLMs popped on the scene my coworkers would say "Look at how great this is, I can generate test cases". Now my coworkers are saying "I can still generate test cases! And if I'm _really pacificcccc_, I can get it to generate small functions too!". It seems to have slowed down considerably, but maybe that's just me.
- lazide 1y ago
  At the beginning, it’s easy to extrapolate ‘magic’ to ‘can do everything’. Eventually, it stops being magic and the thinking changes - and we start to see the pros and cons, and see the gaps. A lot of people are still in the ‘magic’ phase.
- tuesdaynight 1y ago
  Sorry for the bluntness, but you sound like you have a lot of opinions about LLM performance for someone who says that doesn't use them. It's okay if you are against them, but if have used them 3 years ago, you have no idea if there were improvements or not.
  - vonneumannstan 1y ago
    "It can't do 9.9-9.11 or count the number of r's in strawberry!" lol
    - Nevermark 1y ago
      Since models are given tokens, not letters, to process, the famous issues with counting letters is not indicative of incompetence. They are just sub-sensory for the model. None of us can reliably count the e’s as someone talks to us, either.
      - hatefulmoron 1y ago
        It does say something that the models simultaneously: a) "know" that they're not able to do it for the reason you've outlined (as in, you can ask about the limitations of LLMs for counting letters in words) b) still blindly engage with the query and get the wrong answer, with no disclaimer or commentary. If you asked me how many atoms there are in a chair, I wouldn't just give you a large natural number with no commentary.
asveikau 1y ago
This reads to me as extremely defensive.
- vonneumannstan 1y ago
  It's not but ok. Just responding to another version of "This generation is screwed" that has been happening literally since Socrates.
  - jplusequalt 1y ago
    There has been a growing amount of evidence for years that modern technology is not without it's side effects (mental health issues due to social media use, destruction of attention spans among the youth due to cell phone use, erosion of societal discourse and straight up political manipulation, and now we're seeing impacts to cognitive ability from LLMs).
  - thegrim33 1y ago
    So .. people in the past were supposedly wrong about the next generation being "screwed", and therefore we all know that makes it completely impossible for any new generation at any point in history to ever be in any way worse or more screwed than previous generations. Because some people in the past were supposedly incorrect with similar assertions.
lazide 1y ago
I remember this exact discussion (and exact situation) with WYSIWYG UI design tools. They were still useful, and did solve a significant portion of user problems. They also created even more problems, and no one really went out of work long term because of them.

Brian_K_White 1y ago

Wishful, self-serving, and beside the point. The primary argument here is not about the capability of the ai. I think the same effect has been around forever in the form of every boss/manager/ceo/rando-divorcee-or-child-with-money using employees to do their thinking as a current information-handling worker or student using an ai to do their thinking.

vonneumannstan 1y ago
>Wishful, self-serving, and beside the point. The primary argument here is not about the capability of the ai. "Alternatively they're just learning/building intuition for something else." Reading comprehension is hard.

benterix 1y ago

That would be true if several conditions were fulfilled, starting with LLMs being actually to do their tasks properly, which they still very much struggle with which basically defeats the premise of moving up an abstraction layer if you have to constantly check and correct the lower layer.

vonneumannstan 1y ago
[flagged]

pigpag 1y ago

[dead]

fatata123 1y ago

LLMs are plateauing, and you’re in denial.

vonneumannstan 1y ago
Show me one metric they are plateauing on.

jimkri 1y ago

I don't think Gary Marcus is necessarily a naysayer; I take it that he is trying to get people to be mindful of the current AI tooling and its capabilities, and that there is more to do before we say it is what it is being marketed as. Like, GPT5 seems to be an additional feature layer of game theory examples. Check LinkedIn for how people think it behaves, and you can see patterns. But they market it as much more.

vonneumannstan 1y ago
>I don't think Gary Marcus is necessarily a naysayer Oh come on. He is by far the most well known AI poo-poo'er and it's not even close. He built his entire brand on it once he realized his own research was totally irrelevant.

KoolKat23 1y ago

Agree with this. I mean the guy assembling a thingymajig in the factory, after a few years, can put it together with his hands 10x faster than the actual thingymajig designer. He'll tell you apply some more glue here and less glue there (it's probably slightly better, but immaterial really). However, he probably couldn't tell you what the fault tolerance of the item is, the designer can do that. We still outsource manufacturing to the guy in the factory regardless. We just have to get better at identifying risks with using the LLMs doing the grunt work and get better in mitigating them. As you say, abstracted.

codyb 1y ago

Really? No signs of slowing down? A year or two ago when LLMs popped on the scene my coworkers would say "Look at how great this is, I can generate test cases". Now my coworkers are saying "I can still generate test cases! And if I'm _really pacificcccc_, I can get it to generate small functions too!". It seems to have slowed down considerably, but maybe that's just me.

lazide 1y ago
At the beginning, it’s easy to extrapolate ‘magic’ to ‘can do everything’. Eventually, it stops being magic and the thinking changes - and we start to see the pros and cons, and see the gaps. A lot of people are still in the ‘magic’ phase.
tuesdaynight 1y ago
Sorry for the bluntness, but you sound like you have a lot of opinions about LLM performance for someone who says that doesn't use them. It's okay if you are against them, but if have used them 3 years ago, you have no idea if there were improvements or not.
- vonneumannstan 1y ago
  "It can't do 9.9-9.11 or count the number of r's in strawberry!" lol
  - Nevermark 1y ago
    Since models are given tokens, not letters, to process, the famous issues with counting letters is not indicative of incompetence. They are just sub-sensory for the model. None of us can reliably count the e’s as someone talks to us, either.
    - hatefulmoron 1y ago
      It does say something that the models simultaneously: a) "know" that they're not able to do it for the reason you've outlined (as in, you can ask about the limitations of LLMs for counting letters in words) b) still blindly engage with the query and get the wrong answer, with no disclaimer or commentary. If you asked me how many atoms there are in a chair, I wouldn't just give you a large natural number with no commentary.

asveikau 1y ago

This reads to me as extremely defensive.

vonneumannstan 1y ago
It's not but ok. Just responding to another version of "This generation is screwed" that has been happening literally since Socrates.
- jplusequalt 1y ago
  There has been a growing amount of evidence for years that modern technology is not without it's side effects (mental health issues due to social media use, destruction of attention spans among the youth due to cell phone use, erosion of societal discourse and straight up political manipulation, and now we're seeing impacts to cognitive ability from LLMs).
- thegrim33 1y ago
  So .. people in the past were supposedly wrong about the next generation being "screwed", and therefore we all know that makes it completely impossible for any new generation at any point in history to ever be in any way worse or more screwed than previous generations. Because some people in the past were supposedly incorrect with similar assertions.

lazide 1y ago

I remember this exact discussion (and exact situation) with WYSIWYG UI design tools. They were still useful, and did solve a significant portion of user problems. They also created even more problems, and no one really went out of work long term because of them.