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We've all heard the phrase "the sum of all human knowledge". I've been feeling more and more that generative AI represents the average of all human knowledge.
by caditinpiscinam 7mo ago
We've all heard the phrase "the sum of all human knowledge".
I've been feeling more and more that generative AI represents the average of all human knowledge. Which has its place. But a future in which all thought and creativity is averaged away is a bleak one. It's the heat death of thought.
- ModernMech 7mo agoThe soft gaussian blur of all human knowledge.
- oblio 7mo ago> I've been feeling more and more that generative AI represents the average of all human knowledge. It's literally what it is. Fairly sure that mathematically it's a fancier regression/prediction so it's a form of average.
- ninjagoo 7mo ago> I've been feeling more and more that generative AI represents the average of all human knowledge. Have you tried the paid versions of frontier models? They certainly do not feel like they spew the average of all human knowledge. It's not uncommon for them to find and interpret the cutting edge of papers in any of the domains that I've asked them questions about.
- fuzzer371 7mo agoYup. And they all sound like slop. Read the papers, comprehend the papers, don't make someone else's computer do it for you.
- codemog 7mo agoAnti-tech contrarian sentiment happens with every new technology. Someone older than you probably said the same thing about the internet.
- selcuka 7mo agoTrue, and they were right about it when they said that. They wouldn't be right anymore, because the Internet has evolved. The same might happen to LLMs, but currently one would be right to call LLM output "slop".
- darkwater 7mo agoDepending on the criticism at the time, they were probably wrong at the time and are correct now. There were always trolls and bad people but at least there were no mega-corp playing with people's minds.
- BuddyPickett 7mo agoYep. Even windows, the most widely used OS on the planet has a fringe group of contrarians still today. Amazing.
- Xfx7028 7mo agoI grew up using windows and was a fan of it, but now I am a contrarian because of how shitty it has become. The fact that it is widely used is not an argument that it is good. It is widely used because of existing market share and reluctance of change by people.
- xigoi 7mo agoEven tobacco, the second most widely used drug, has a group of contrarians still today. Amazing.
- dang 7mo agoThought and creativity won't be averaged away because human beings have a drive for these things. This just raises the bar for it. And why not? We get complacent when not pushed. Dostoevsky said that if all human knowledge could ever be reduced to 2 + 2 = 4, man would stick out his tongue and insist that 2 + 2 = 5. That was a 19th century formulation—he was a contemporary of Boole. I wonder what the equivalent would be for the LLM era.
- frm88 7mo agoThought and creativity won't be averaged away because human beings have a drive for these things. That may or may not be true, but the expression of thought and creativity matters to transfer meaning. If you average that out, it loses momentum. Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47346935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47346935. Compare the posters first and second, LLM assisted, paragraph. The second one is just bleak. If I had to read several pages like that, my eyes would glaze over. It cannot hold attention.
- palmotea 7mo ago> Thought and creativity won't be averaged away because human beings have a drive for these things. This just raises the bar for it. And why not? We get complacent when not pushed. The why not is: human beings are valuable in and of themselves, not just because of what they can do. If you raise the bar too high, you kick people out. And our society just isn't setup for that, and is unlikely to ever be in our lifetimes. And I'm talking about a radical shift in the concept of ownership, where shareholding is radically democratized. Basically every random Joe needs the option to live comfortably on passive income generated by things he owns.
- altairprime 7mo agoPerhaps closer to “the mean vector point such that all outbound vectors to different training tests are in sum the smallest”? I assume that’s a property of neural networks anyways, though I’m out of date on current math for them.
- permo-w 7mo agoYou're falsely conflating knowledge with intelligence
- kruffalon 7mo agoBut it's a weird kind of average... Not the 3 from 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5 but rather like the bland tv-dinner which tastes non-upsetting for most people.
- EarlKing 7mo agoAn intellectual Mode rather than a Mean or a Median?
- kruffalon 7mo agoI don't understand what you mean by "intellectual mode". I mean that it's a kind of lowest common denominator average where it's more important to seem reasonable and to not upset anyone rather than be really good in some ways and bad in others.
- jibal 7mo agohttps://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/200282/explaining-mean-median-mode-in-laymans-terms https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/200282/explaining-...
- kruffalon 7mo agoWhat a great resource, thank you <3 The comment by Joseph Greenpie[0] is just marvellous, what a gem! ----- [0] https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/204558 https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/204558
- red_hare 7mo agoI feel the same about Claude Code. It's a fast but average developer at just about everything and there are some things that average developers are just consistently bad at and therefore Claude is consistently bad at.
- Cthulhu_ 7mo agoI'm not sure, I think you overestimate the average developer. But then, the average code doesn't end up in public repositories, it spends decades in enterprise codebases rotting. At this point I'd rather review LLM generated code than a poor developer's.
- baxtr 7mo agoYes, it’s the "sum" of which you extract an average.
- ludicrousdispla 7mo agoIf you want a more accurate measure then you should subtract "the sum of all human ignorance" before taking the average.
- larodi 7mo agopooling as it is called, is, well the same as averaging. has nothing to do with swimming really. it happens all the time in latent space. it is a tool, not a side effect.
- pessimizer 7mo ago> I've been feeling more and more that generative AI represents the average of all human knowledge. No, it's far worse. It's the mode of all human knowledge. The amount of effort you have to put into an LLM to get it to choose an option that isn't the most salient example of anything that could fit as a response is monumental. They skip exact matches for most common matches; it's basically a continuity from when search engines stopped listening to your queries and just decided what query they wanted to respond to - and it suddenly became nearly impossible to search for people who had the same first name as anyone who was famous or in the news. I've tried a dozen times to get LLMs to find authors for me, or papers, where I describe what I remember about them fairly exactly. They deliver me a bunch of bestsellers and popular things, over and over again, who don't even match at all large numbers of the criteria I've laid out. It's why they're dumb and can't accomplish anything original. It's structural. They're inherently biased to deliver lowest common denominator work. If you're trying to deliver something original or unusual, what bubbles up is samplings of the slop that surrounds us every day. They're fed everything, meaning everything in proportion to its presence in the world. The vast majority of things are shit, or better said, repetitions of the same shit that isn't productive. The things that are most readily available are already tapped out. The things that are productive are obscure. You can't even get LLMs to say some words by asking them to "say word X." They just will always find a word that will fill that slot "better." As I said, this is just google saying "did you mean Y?" But it's not asking anymore, it's telling. edit: It's also why asking it to solve obscure math problems is a dumb test. If the math problem is obscure enough, and there's only one way to possibly solve it, and somebody did it once, somewhere, or referred to the possibility of solving it that way, once, somewhere, you're going to have a single salient example. It's not a greenfield, it's not a white sheet of paper: it's a green field with one yellow flower on it, or a piece of white paper with one black sentence on it, and you're asking it to find the flower or explain the sentence. edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47346901 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47346901 - I'm late and long-winded.