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But AI is still a stochastic parrot with no actual intellectual capability... who actually believes otherwise? I figured most people had played with local model

by mjr00 10mo ago

But AI is still a stochastic parrot with no actual intellectual capability... who actually believes otherwise? I figured most people had played with local models enough by now to understand that it's just math underneath. It's extremely useful, but laughably far from intelligence, as anyone who has attempted to use Claude et al for anything nontrivial knows.

pegasus 10mo ago
Are you serious? Sam Altman and a legion of Silicon Valley movers and shakers believe otherwise. How do you think they gather the billions to build those data centers. Are they right? Are you right? We don't really know, do we...
- xgulfie 10mo ago
  "They convinced the investors so they must be right"
- mjr00 10mo ago
  > Are you serious? Sam Altman and a legion of Silicon Valley movers and shakers believe otherwise. How do you think they gather the billions to build those data centers. Are they right? Are you right? We don't really know, do we... The money is never wrong! That's why the $100 billion invested in blockchain companies from 2020 to 2023 worked out so well. Or why Mark Zuckerberg's $50 billion investment in the Metaverse resulted in a world-changing paradigm shift.
  - bena 10mo ago
    It's not that the money can predict what is correct, it's that it can tell us where people's values lie. Those people who invested cash in blockchain believed that they could develop something worthwhile on the blockchain. Zuckerberg believed the Metaverse could change things. It's why he hired all of those people to work on it. However, what you have here are people claiming LLMs are going to be writing 90% of code in the next 18 months, then turning around and hiring a bunch of people to write code. There's another article posted here, "Believe the Checkbook" or something like that. And they point out that Anthropic had no reason to purchase Bun except to get the people working on it. And if you believe we're about to turn a corner on vibe coding, you don't do that.
    - threethirtytwo 10mo ago
      Someone also believed the internet would take over the world. They were right. So we could be right or we could be wrong. What we do know is that from 2 years ago a lot of what people were saying or “believed” about LLMs are now categorically wrong.
      - bena 10mo ago
        Someone also believed the moon was made of green cheese. They were wrong. And some of those beliefs they were wrong about is about when and how it will change things. And my post is not about who is correct. It's about discerning what people truly believe despite what they might tell you up front. People invested money into the internet. They hired people to develop it. That told you they believed it was useful to them.
    - threethirtytwo 10mo ago
      > However, what you have here are people claiming LLMs are going to be writing 90% of code in the next 18 months, then turning around and hiring a bunch of people to write code. Very few people say this. But it’s realistically to say at the least in the next decade our jobs are going out the window.
      - bena 10mo ago
        The CEO of Nvidia is saying this. So yeah, he's just "one guy", but in terms of "one guys", he's a notable one.
- bigstrat2003 10mo ago
  Sam Altman is the modern day PT Barnum. He doesn't believe a damn thing except "make more money for Sam Altman", and he's real good at convincing people to go along with his schemes. His actions have zero evidential value for whether or not AI is intelligent, or even whether it's useful.
  - pegasus 10mo ago
    Maybe not, but I was answering to "nobody believes", not to whether AI is intelligent or not (which might just be semantics anyway). Plenty believe, especially the insiders working on the tech, who know it much better than us. Take Ilya Sutskever, of "do you feel the AGI" fame. Labelling them all as cynical manipulators is delusional. Now, they might be delusional as well, at least to some degree - my bet is on the latter - but there are plenty of true believers out there and here on HN. I've debated them in the past. There are cogent arguments on either side.
rybosworld 10mo ago
Why does it even matter if it is a stochastic parrot? And whose to say that humans aren't also? Imagine the empire state building was just completed, and you had a man yelling at the construction workers: "PFFT that's just a bunch of steel and bricks"
threethirtytwo 10mo ago
“It’s just math underneath” This quote is so telling. I’m going to be straight with you and this is my opinion so you’re free to disagree. From my POV you are out of touch with the ground truth reality of AI and that’s ok because it has all changed so fast. Everything in the universe is math based and in theory even your brain can be fully modelled by mathematics… it’s a pointless quote. The ground truth reality is that nobody and I mean nobody understands how LLMs work. This isn’t me making shit up, if you know transformers, if you know the industry and if you even listened to the people behind the technology who make these things… they all say we don’t know how AI works. But we do know some things. We know it’s not a stochastic parrot because in addition to the failures we’ve seen plenty of successes to extremely complicated problems that are too non trivial for anything other than an actual intelligence to solve. In the coming years reality will change so much that your opinion will flip. You might be so stubborn as to continue calling it a stochastic parrot but by then it will just be lip service. Your current reaction is normal given the paradigm shift happened so fast and so recently.
- mjr00 10mo ago
  > The ground truth reality is that nobody and I mean nobody understands how LLMs work. This is a really insane and untrue quote. I would, ironically, ask an LLM to explain how LLMs work. It's really not as complicated as it seems.
  - rybosworld 10mo ago
    It's not an insane thing to say. You can boil LLM's down to "next token predictor". But that's like boiling down the human brain to "synapses firing". The point that OP is making I think, is that we don't understand how "next token prediction" leads to more emergent complexity.
    - mjr00 10mo ago
      The only thing we don't fully understand is how the ELIZA effect[0] has been known for 60 years yet people keep falling for it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect

by mjr00 10mo ago

pegasus 10mo ago

Are you serious? Sam Altman and a legion of Silicon Valley movers and shakers believe otherwise. How do you think they gather the billions to build those data centers. Are they right? Are you right? We don't really know, do we...

xgulfie 10mo ago
"They convinced the investors so they must be right"
mjr00 10mo ago
> Are you serious? Sam Altman and a legion of Silicon Valley movers and shakers believe otherwise. How do you think they gather the billions to build those data centers. Are they right? Are you right? We don't really know, do we... The money is never wrong! That's why the $100 billion invested in blockchain companies from 2020 to 2023 worked out so well. Or why Mark Zuckerberg's $50 billion investment in the Metaverse resulted in a world-changing paradigm shift.
- bena 10mo ago
  It's not that the money can predict what is correct, it's that it can tell us where people's values lie. Those people who invested cash in blockchain believed that they could develop something worthwhile on the blockchain. Zuckerberg believed the Metaverse could change things. It's why he hired all of those people to work on it. However, what you have here are people claiming LLMs are going to be writing 90% of code in the next 18 months, then turning around and hiring a bunch of people to write code. There's another article posted here, "Believe the Checkbook" or something like that. And they point out that Anthropic had no reason to purchase Bun except to get the people working on it. And if you believe we're about to turn a corner on vibe coding, you don't do that.
  - threethirtytwo 10mo ago
    Someone also believed the internet would take over the world. They were right. So we could be right or we could be wrong. What we do know is that from 2 years ago a lot of what people were saying or “believed” about LLMs are now categorically wrong.
    - bena 10mo ago
      Someone also believed the moon was made of green cheese. They were wrong. And some of those beliefs they were wrong about is about when and how it will change things. And my post is not about who is correct. It's about discerning what people truly believe despite what they might tell you up front. People invested money into the internet. They hired people to develop it. That told you they believed it was useful to them.
  - threethirtytwo 10mo ago
    > However, what you have here are people claiming LLMs are going to be writing 90% of code in the next 18 months, then turning around and hiring a bunch of people to write code. Very few people say this. But it’s realistically to say at the least in the next decade our jobs are going out the window.
    - bena 10mo ago
      The CEO of Nvidia is saying this. So yeah, he's just "one guy", but in terms of "one guys", he's a notable one.
bigstrat2003 10mo ago
Sam Altman is the modern day PT Barnum. He doesn't believe a damn thing except "make more money for Sam Altman", and he's real good at convincing people to go along with his schemes. His actions have zero evidential value for whether or not AI is intelligent, or even whether it's useful.
- pegasus 10mo ago
  Maybe not, but I was answering to "nobody believes", not to whether AI is intelligent or not (which might just be semantics anyway). Plenty believe, especially the insiders working on the tech, who know it much better than us. Take Ilya Sutskever, of "do you feel the AGI" fame. Labelling them all as cynical manipulators is delusional. Now, they might be delusional as well, at least to some degree - my bet is on the latter - but there are plenty of true believers out there and here on HN. I've debated them in the past. There are cogent arguments on either side.

rybosworld 10mo ago

Why does it even matter if it is a stochastic parrot? And whose to say that humans aren't also? Imagine the empire state building was just completed, and you had a man yelling at the construction workers: "PFFT that's just a bunch of steel and bricks"

threethirtytwo 10mo ago

“It’s just math underneath” This quote is so telling. I’m going to be straight with you and this is my opinion so you’re free to disagree. From my POV you are out of touch with the ground truth reality of AI and that’s ok because it has all changed so fast. Everything in the universe is math based and in theory even your brain can be fully modelled by mathematics… it’s a pointless quote. The ground truth reality is that nobody and I mean nobody understands how LLMs work. This isn’t me making shit up, if you know transformers, if you know the industry and if you even listened to the people behind the technology who make these things… they all say we don’t know how AI works. But we do know some things. We know it’s not a stochastic parrot because in addition to the failures we’ve seen plenty of successes to extremely complicated problems that are too non trivial for anything other than an actual intelligence to solve. In the coming years reality will change so much that your opinion will flip. You might be so stubborn as to continue calling it a stochastic parrot but by then it will just be lip service. Your current reaction is normal given the paradigm shift happened so fast and so recently.

mjr00 10mo ago
> The ground truth reality is that nobody and I mean nobody understands how LLMs work. This is a really insane and untrue quote. I would, ironically, ask an LLM to explain how LLMs work. It's really not as complicated as it seems.
- rybosworld 10mo ago
  It's not an insane thing to say. You can boil LLM's down to "next token predictor". But that's like boiling down the human brain to "synapses firing". The point that OP is making I think, is that we don't understand how "next token prediction" leads to more emergent complexity.
  - mjr00 10mo ago
    The only thing we don't fully understand is how the ELIZA effect[0] has been known for 60 years yet people keep falling for it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect