5 ms·

What worries me is that _a lot of people seem to see LLMs as smarter than themselves_ and anthropmorphize them into a sort of human-exact intelligence. The wors

• intended 9mo ago
  Reading how AI is being approached in China, the focus is more on achieving day to day utilty, without eviscerating youth employment. In contrast, the SV focus of AI has been about skynet / singularity, with a hype cycle to match. This is supported by the lack of clarity on actual benefits, or clear data on GenAI use. Mostly I see it as great for prototyping - going from 0 to 1, and for use cases where the operator is highly trained and capable of verifying output. Outside of that, you seem to be in the land of voodoo, where you are dealing with something that eerily mimics human speech, but you don't have any reliable way of finding out its just BS-ing you.
  • simonjgreen 9mo ago
    Do you have any links you could share to content you found especially insightful about AI use in China?
    • intended 9mo ago
      I’ve been hunting for a link I found here on HN, which discussed how policy /government elites in China looked at AI. Sadly, the search for that link continues. I did find these from SCMP and Foreign Policy, but there are better articles out there. - https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/11/20/china-ai-race-jobs-youth-unemployment/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/11/20/china-ai-race-jobs-yout... - https://www.scmp.com/specialist-publications/special-reports/topics/wealth-alternative-investments/article/3332729/china-bets-real-world-ai-uses-backed-state-support-and-innovation https://www.scmp.com/specialist-publications/special-reports...
    • logicprog 9mo ago
      I don't know if it supports their particular point, but Machine Decision is Not Final seems like a very cool and interesting look at China's culture around AI: https://www.urbanomic.com/book/machine-decision-is-not-final/ https://www.urbanomic.com/book/machine-decision-is-not-final...
      • andrepd 9mo ago
        In the West we have autonomous systems to commit genocide, detecting and murdering "enemy combatants" at scale, where "enemy combatant" is defined as "male between the ages of 15 and 55". Sometimes I'm not so sure about any so-called moral superiority.
        • jfreds 9mo ago
          Citation? Not saying you’re wrong but my time in defense left me very much with the opposite opinion (radar target acquisitions had to be approved by a human, always)
          • andrepd 9mo ago
            https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/ https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/ There's an overview on Wikipedia too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-assisted_targeting_in_the_Gaza_Strip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-assisted_targeting_in_the_G...
  • latentsea 9mo ago
    Well at least DeepMind is doing nifty things like solving the protein folding problem.
  • mc32 9mo ago
    I’m not seeing the dichotomy as much as you do. Are they not going to build a “skynet” in China? Second, building skynet doesn’t imply eviscerating youth employment. On the other hand, automation of menial tasks does eviscerate all kinds of employment, not only youth emoloyment.
• charcircuit 9mo ago
  AI is smarter than everyone already. Seriously, the breadth of knowledge the AI possesses has no human counterpart.
  • zhoujianfu 9mo ago
    AI has more knowledge than everyone already, I wouldn't say smarter though. It's like wisdom vs intelligence in D+D (and/or life).. wisdom is knowing things, intelligence is how quick you can learn / create new things.
    • consp 9mo ago
      Knowledge is what I see equivalent with a big library. It contains mostly correct information in the context of the book (which might be incorrect in general) and "ai" is very good at taking everything out of context, Smashing a probability distribution over it and picking an answer which humans will accept. E.g. it does not contain knowledge, at best the vague pretense of it.
    • metalman 9mo ago
      AI has zero knowledge, as to know something is to have done it, or seen it first hand. AI has access to a great deal of data, much of it aquired through criminal action, but no way to evaluate that information other than cross checking for citations and similar occurances. Even for a human, infering things is difficult and uncertain, and so we regularly see AI fall of the cliff of cohearant word salading. We are heading strait at an idiocracy writ large that is trying to hide there raciorilgio insanity behind algorythims. Sometimes it's hard to tell, but it seems that a hairdresser has just been put in charge of the US passport office, which is highy sugestive of a new top level program to issue US citizenship on demand, but everbody else will be subject to the "impartiality" of privatly owned and operated AI policing.
  • krainboltgreene 9mo ago
    Man, what are we supposed to do with people who think the above?
• Marha01 9mo ago
  > a lot of people seem to see LLMs as smarter than themselves Well, in many cases they might be right..
  • roenxi 9mo ago
    As far as I can tell from poking people on HN about what "AGI" means, there might be a general belief that the median human is not intelligent. Given that the current batch of models apparently isn't AGI I'm struggling to see a clean test of what AGI might be that a human can pass.
    • verisimi 9mo ago
      > there might be a general belief that the median human is not intelligent This is to deconstruct the question. I don't think it's even wrong - a lot of people are doing things, making decisions, living life perfectly normally, successfully even, without applying intelligence in a personal way. Those with socially accredited 'intelligence' would be the worst offenders imo - they do not apply their intelligence personally but simply massage themselves and others towards consensus. Which is ultimately materially beneficial to them - so why not? For me 'intelligence' would be knowing why you are doing what you are doing without dismissing the question with reference to 'convention', 'consensus', someone/something else. Computers can only do an imitation of this sort of answer. People stand a chance of answering it.
      • Dilettante_ 9mo ago
        >knowing why you are doing what you are doing[...] Computers can only do an imitation of this sort of answer. People stand a chance of answering it. I'm not following. A computer's "why" is a written program, surely that is the most clear expression of its intent you could ask for?
        • verisimi 9mo ago
          A computer doesn't determine the why, it is programmed to do so. It doesn't determine meaning or value from whatever-it-is.
• dataflow 9mo ago
  One problem here is "smarter" is an ambiguous word. I have no problem believing the average LLM has more knowledge than my brain; if that's what "smarter" means, them I'm happy to believe I'm stupid. But I sure doubt an LLM's ability to deduce or infer things, or to understand its own doubts and lack of knowledge or understanding, better than a human like me.
  • Verdex 9mo ago
    Yeah my thought is that you wouldn't trust a brain surgeon who has read every paper on brain surgery ever written but who has never touched a scalpel. Similarly, the claim is that ~90% of communication is nonverbal, so I'm not sure I would trust a negotiator who has seen all of written human communication but never held a conversation.
• KronisLV 9mo ago
  > a lot of people seem to see LLMs as smarter than themselves I think the anthropomorphizing part is what messes with people. Is the autocomplete in my IDE smarter than I am? What about the search box on Google? What about a hammer or a drill? Yet, I will admit that most of the time I hear people complaining about how AI written code is worse than that produced by developers, but it just doesn't match my own experience - it's frankly better (with enough guidance and context, say 95% tokens in and 5% tokens out, across multiple models working on the same project to occasionally validate and improve/fix the output, alongside adequate tooling) than what a lot of the people I know could or frankly do produce in practice. That's a lot of conditions, but I think it's the same with the chat format - people accepting unvalidated drivel as fact, or someone using the web search and parsing documents and bringing up additional information that's found as a consequence of the conversation, bringing in external data and making use of the LLM ability to churn through a lot of it, sometimes better than the human reading comprehension would.
  • saghm 9mo ago
    I think you're spot on here. It's the same idea as scammers and con artists; people can be convinced of things that they might rationally reject if the language is persuasive enough. This isn't some new exploit in human behavior or an epidemic of people who are less intelligent than before; we've just never had to deal with the amount plausible enough sounding coherent human language being almost literally unlimited before. If we're lucky, people will manage to adapt and update their mental models to be less trustworthy of things that they can't verify (like how most of us hopefully don't need to be concerned their older relatives will transfer their bank account contents to benevolent foreign royalties with the expectation of being rewarded handsomely). It's hard to feel especially confident in this though given how much more open-ended the potential deceptions are (without even getting into the question of "intent" from the models or the creators of them).
    • Verdex 9mo ago
      My belief is that the function of a story is to provide social cover for our actions. Other people need to evaluate us (both in the moment and after the dust has settled) and while careful data analysis can do the job, who has time for that crap. As such the story can be completely divorced from reality. The important thing is that the story is a good one. A good story transfers your social cover for yourself to your supervisor. They don't have to understand what you did and explain why it's okay that it failed. They just have to understand the story structure that you gave them. Listen to this great story, it's not my report's fault for this failure, and it's certainly not mine, just bad luck. Additionally, the good (and sufficiently original) story is a gift because your supervisor can reuse it for new scenarios. The good salesman gives you the story you need to excuse the purchase that will enable you to succeed. The bad salesman sells you on a story that you need a frivolous purchase. And this is why job hoping is "bad". Eventually the incompetent employee uses up all of their good stories and management catches onto their act. It's embedded into our language. "Oh we've all heard this story before." The job hopper leaves just as their good stories are exhausted and can start over fresh at the new employer. All of this in response to > If we're lucky, people will manage to adapt and update their mental models to be less trustworthy of things that they can't verify Yes, if we're lucky that is what will happen. But I fear that we're going to have to transition to a very low trust society for that to happen. Reliance on the story is reliant on the trust that someone has done the real work. Distrust of the story implies a wider scale distrust in others and institutions. Maybe we can add a tradition of annotating our stories with arguments and proofs. Although I've spent a two decade career desperately trying to give highly technical people arguments and proofs and I've seen stories completely unmoored from reality win out every time. Optimistically, I'm just really bad at it and it's actually a natural transition. Pessimistically, we're in for a bumpy ride.
• kylecazar 9mo ago
  Maybe it's just my circle, but anecdotally most of the non-CS folks I know have developed a strong anti-AI bias. In a very outspoken way. If anything, I think they'd consider AI's involvement as a strike against the prosecution if they were on a jury.
  • theoreticalmal 9mo ago
    Why do people in your circle not like AI? I have similar a experience about friends and family not liking AI, but usually it’s due to water and energy reasons, not because of an issue with the model reasoning
    • deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
    • saghm 9mo ago
      If your circle has any artists in it, chances are they'll also have a very negative perception, although influenced heavily by the proliferation of AI-generated art. At least personally, I've seen basically three buckets of opinions from non-technical people on AI. There's a decent-sized group of people who loathe anything to do with it due to issues you've mentioned, the art issue I mentioned, or other specific things that overall add up to the point that they think it's a net harm to society, a decent-sized group of people who basically never think about it at all or go out of their way to use anything related to it, and then a small group of people who claim to be fully aware of the limitations and consider themselves quite rational but then will basically ask ChatGPT about literally anything and trust what it says without doing any additional research. It's the last group that I'm personally most concerned about because I've yet to find any effective way of getting them to recognize the cognitive dissonance (although sometimes at least I've been able to make enough of an impression that they stop trying to make ChatGPT a participant in every single conversation I have with them).
      • kylecazar 9mo ago
        Pretty much hit the nail on the head -- while there are some artists, most are from traditional broadly "intellectual" fields. Examples: writers, journalists, academia (liberal arts), publishing industry...
• catlover76 9mo ago
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