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 worst-case scenario of Utah's law is that when the disclaimer is added that the report is generated by AI, enough jurists begin to associate that with "likely more correct than not".
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.
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:
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
LLMs may appear to do well on certain programming tasks on which they are trained intensively, but they are incredibly weak. If you try to use an LLM to generate, for example, a story, you will find that it will make unimaginable mistakes. If you ask an LLM to analyze a conversation from the internet it will misrepresent the positions of the participants, often restating things so that they mean something different or making mistakes about who said what in a way that humans never do. The longer the exchange the more these problems are exacerbated.
We do have AI systems that write stories [0]. They work. The quality might not be spectacular but if you've ever gone out and spent time reading fanfiction you'd have to agree there are a lot of rather terrible human writers too (bless them). It still hits this issue that if we want LLMs to compete with the best of humanity then they aren't there yet, but that means defining human intelligence as something that most people don't have access to.
> If you ask an LLM to analyze a conversation from the internet it will misrepresent the positions of the participants, often restating things so that they mean something different or making mistakes about who said what in a way that humans never do.
AI transcription & summary seems to be a strong point of the models so I don't know what exactly you're trying to get to with this one. If you have evidence for that I'd actually be quite interested because humans are so bad at representing what other people said on the internet it seems like it should be an easy win for an AI. Humans typically have some wild interpretations of what other people write that cannot be supported from what was written.
I haven't tried Dramatron, but my experience is that it isn't possible to do sensibly. With regard to the second part
>AI transcription & summary seems to be a strong point of the models so I don't know what exactly you're trying to get to with this one. If you have evidence for that I'd actually be quite interested because humans are so bad at representing what other people said on the internet it seems like it should be an easy win for an AI. Humans typically have some wild interpretations of what other people write that cannot be supported from what was written.
Transcription and summarization is indeed fine, but try posting a longer reddit or HN discussion you've been part of into any model of your choice and ask it to analyze it, and you will see severe errors very soon. It will consistently misrepresent the views expressed and it doesn't really matter what model you go for. They can't do it.
I can see why they'd struggle, I'm not sure what you're trying to ask the model to do. What type of analysis are you expecting? If the model is supposed to represent the views expressed that would be a summary. If you aren't asking it for a summary what do you want it to do? Do you literally mean you want the model to perform conversational analysis (ie, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversation_analysis#Method)?
Usually I use the format "Analyze the following ...".
For simple discussions this is fine. For complex discussions, especially when people get into conflict-- whether that conflict is really complex or not, problems usually result. The big problems are that the model will misquote or misrepresent views-- attempted paraphrases that actually change the meaning, the ordinary hallucinations etc.
For stories the confusion is much greater. Much of it is due to the basic way LLMs work: stories have dialogue, so if the premise contains people not being able to speak each other's language problems come very soon. I remember asking some recent Microsoft Copilot variant to write some portal scenario-- some guys on vacation to Teneriffe rent a catamaran and end up falling through a hole in the world of ASoIAF and into the seas off Essos, where they obviously have a terrible time, and it kept forgetting that they don't know English.
This is of course not obviously relevant for what Copilot is intended for, but I feel that if you actually try this you will understand how far we are from something like AGI, because if things like OpenAIs or whoever's systems were in fact close, this would be close too. If we were close we'd probably see silly errors too, but it'd be different kinds of errors, things like not telling you the story you want, not ignoring core instructions or failing to understand conversations.
Your points about misquotes and language troubles are very valid and interesting. But a word of caution on your prompt: you’re asking a lot of the word “analyze” here; if the LLM responded that the thread had 15 comments by 10 unique authors, and a total of 2000 characters, I would classify that as a completely satisfactory answer (assuming the figures were correct) based on the query
> Usually I use the format "Analyze the following ...".
It doesn't surprise me that you're getting nonsense, that is an ill-formed request. The AI can't fulfil it because it isn't asking it to do anything. I'm in the same boat as an AI would be, I can't tell what outcome you want. I'd probably interpret it as "summarise this conversation" if someone asked that of me, but you seem to agree that AI are good at summery tasks so that doesn't seem like it would be what you want. If I had my troll hat on I'd give you a frequency analysis of the letters and call it a day which is more passive-aggressive than I'd expect of the AI, they tend to just blather when they get a vague setup. They aren't psychic, it is necessary to give them instructions to carry out.
> 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.
Did you mean it doesn't set its own goals? Or what did you mean by "determine the why" if not a stack trace of its motivations(which is to say, its programming)? Could you give an example of determinimg meaning or value?
Yes, set its own goals. Here's an example - say you wanted to track your spending, you might create a spreadsheet to do so. The spreadsheet won't write itself. If you want, you could perhaps task an ai to monitor and track spending - but it doesn't care. It is the human that cares/feels/values whatever-it-is. Computers are not that type.
Is your position that humans are pretty mechanistic, and simply playing out their programming, like computers? And that they can provide a stacktrace for what they do?
If so, this is what I was getting at with my initial comment. Most people do not apply their intelligence personally - they are simply playing out the goals that we inserted into them (by parents, society). There are alternative possibilities, but it seems that most people's operational procedures and actions are not something they have considered or actively sought.
>Is your position that humans are [...] simply playing out their programming?
Yes, at least it's what I wanted to drill further into.
Boiled down, I'm interested in hearing where "intelligent" people derive their motivations(I'm in agreement that most people are on ["non-intelligent" if you will] auto-pilot most of the time) if not from outside themselves, in your framework.
When does a goal start being my intelligent own goal? Any impetus for something can be traced back to not-yourself: I might decide to start tracking my spending, but that decision doesn't form out of the void. Maybe I value frugality, but I did not create that value in myself. It was instilled in me by experience, or my peers, etc. I see no way for one to "spontaneously" form a motivation, or if I wanted to take it one step further(into the Buddha's territory), I would have to question who, and where, and what this "self" even is.
Here's a question for you. Imagine a child who was well looked after (fed and loved) but didn't go to school for 12+ years. Now imagine the same person who from the age of 5-6 followed the usual path of 12+ years of schooling. Which person do you imagine would be more fully themselves, the more complete expression of whatever was already inside? If the schooled person did a PhD too (so another 6 years) would that help or hinder them from becoming themselves?
To me, the answer is obvious. Inserting thousands of ideas and patterns of thoughts into a person will be unlikely to help them become a true expression of their nature. If you know gardening, the schooled person is more like a trained tree - grown in a way that suits the farmer - the more tied back the tree is, the less free it is.
As I see it, each individual is unique, with a soul. Each is capable of reaching a full expression of itself, by itself. What I also see is that there are many systems that are intentional manipulations, put in place in order to farm individuals at the individual's expense. The more education one receives, the more amenable one is to being 'farmed' according to the terms that were inserted. To me, this is the installation of an unnatural and servile mentality, which once adopted makes the person easy to harness - the person will even think being harnessed and 'in service' is right and good.
The problem is that these principles were not their own. These are like religious beliefs, and unlike principles founded according to personal experience. Received principles will always be unnatural. Acting according to them, is to act in an inauthentic way. However, there is no material reason to address the inauthenticity, as when one looks around, everyone else is doing the same. This results in a self-supporting, collective delusion.
In my view there are answers to what the self is - but 'society' cannot teach you them - it can only fill you with delusions. Imo, you would be on a better footing to forget everything you think you know (this costs you nothing) and do something like apply the scientific method personally - let your personal experiences guide you. Know the difference between 'knowing' because of experience and 'belief' because you were taught it. Even more simply, know thyself.
My position is that we are nothing but our circumstances(I'm assuming that we're in agreement that genetics, pre-birth nutrition etc, are part of these circumstances and not of the 'soul' you're after?), or to put it more directly: We are our circumstances. Our Soul Is That. There is nothing that is "already inside".
The tree does not exist in isolation, separate from the patterns of rain and sunshine that shape its growth. "The separation is an illusion".
I have indeed been on the same path as you of trying to shed delusions and applying the scientific method, and have up to this point found no indication of any "causeless cause" to steer me besides the fundamental is-ness of the universe.
Put bluntly, I believe that if you hadn't started with the assumption of a soul, you would be entirely unable to arrive at the conclusion of a soul by rational methods. And starting by assuming the unproven instead of emptyness is epistemological cheating.
Have you seen babies, or puppies? You would easily be able to confirm for yourself that creatures are born with distinct personalities. Its not just chemistry or nurture.
> "The separation is an illusion"
But you don't really think this. You don't really think you are a tree. You do think you are distinct.
>You would easily be able to confirm for yourself that creatures are born with distinct personalities
Refer to my previous post: "I'm assuming that we're in agreement that genetics, pre-birth nutrition etc, are part of these circumstances and not of the 'soul' you're after?"
That's not some mysterious transcendant soul, that's genetics. Literally the exact same thing as a computer program. Dog breeds are specifically bred(programmed) to exhibit certain character traits, for example.
>You don't really think you are a tree. You do think you are distinct.
You missed the point of the argument. Just as the tree is not separate from its circumstances, neither am I.
You brought up "know thyself" so I assumed we were pulling from a similar corpus and brought up "the illusion of separation" as a mutually familiar point that didn't need much elaboration, sorry about that.
Also, it's not so much that I "think" I am distinct, more that I "believe" it, to put it in the terms you used earlier. I am conditioned to consider certain things "me" and others not.
Really I am no more distinct from the tree than, say, my fingernail is distinct from my nosebone. They belong to the same Individual.
> Dog breeds are specifically bred(programmed) to exhibit certain character traits, for example.
And yet all dogs have their own unique characters, no? They are not the same individual, right?
> You brought up "know thyself" so I assumed we were pulling from a similar corpus and brought up "the illusion of separation" as a mutually familiar point that didn't need much elaboration, sorry about that.
I don't know what corpus you refer to. Please explain if you like. I'm not basing what I'm saying on a corpus - of course I've read books, but I am giving you my personal view on things.
> Also, it's not so much that I "think" I am distinct, more that I "believe" it, to put it in the terms you used earlier. I am conditioned to consider certain things "me" and others not.
I have heard this sort of (nondual) thinking before and completely dispute it. I personally cannot access anyone else's mind or body, I haven't no idea what you are thinking. I can only pretend to be doing this. There is a self, we live it continuously. There are times when we are fully present, where we are so in the immediate experience, that we can move out of linguistic/common concepts perhaps, but this is still within oneself.
For me, it is more that each person is a world in their own right, rather than "us" all being in the same universe. We simply do not have the level of interconnectivity you believe is there, when you say you are the tree or me. Furthermore, it really is very hard to see the point you are making when we have a disagreement - plainly there is a distinction.
You're either outright refusing or unable to see the point I've been making about the breeds: The traits are physically programmed in, whether individual or familial, not "already inside" the individual's soul. You aren't tracking that part of our conversation properly.
On the "corpus" point: It's not about not "giving my personal view", it's about drawing from a shared lexicon, of terminology, of lenses through which to view and analyze That Which We Are Talking About. My "home" in this respect is mostly in Hindu Yoga, (Zen) Buddhism and Daoism. You will find in those corpus-es(corpi?) essentially the exact conversation we're having right now, and find addressed the questions you have, in a wonderful plethora of different ways. Any other religion's mystic branch, or western occultism or alchemy similarly. If you want a specific recommendation for an entry-point, I could recommend giving the Bhagavad Gita a shot and seeing if you "vibe" with the way it explains things. If you skip the (usually) included commentary and only read the core translation, it ought to be a fairly quick read.
The nonduality point: Your body cannot access others' experience any more than my fingernail can access that of my nosebone, sure. But again, that does not mean they aren't part of the same organism. The fingernail and the nosebone do not make independent choices, the choice is made for them by the meta-organism(my body). Similarly, the argumentation might go, the tree and I do not make independent choices, but are governed by the same meta-organism(Nature, if you will, or perhaps "The Universe", but I suspect that term will turn you off since it might evoke the image of new-age-hippy woowoo).
I'm saying that if you insist that the body/mind/whatever you currently refer to as "you" is your "Self", you are taking "the fingernail" to be your Self instead of "the whole person". "Plainly there is a distinction", yes. But at the same time, there is also an underlying interconnectivity.
>Furthermore, it really is very hard to see the point you are making when we have a disagreement
That is perhaps the wisest thing either of us is going to say in this conversation. This format does not serve high-effort posting very well, I know I'm not doing the best I could be.
Perhaps we'd shelve this discussion for now? If you care to continue more deeply, you could shoot me an email at any point in the future(see my profile), and I again heartily recommend the Bhagavad Gita. Or perhaps, if you're more rational-thinking oriented, you might enjoy(the even shorter) Yogasutras of Patanjali. Or have you checked out Yudkowski's "Sequences"[1]? That one's completely down-to-eath, no spiritual terminology or metaphors (or non-dualism I'm pretty sure!), and covers a lot of the same ground my eastern background does.
> You're either outright refusing or unable to see the point I've been making about the breeds: The traits are physically programmed in, whether individual or familial, not "already inside" the individual's soul. You aren't tracking that part of our conversation properly.
I don't dispute traits. But the traits idea fails to address the unique characteristics of each dog.
It seems I'm not tracking the things you want me to track, terminology, science, traits. But then, as I said in the first place:
> 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.
I can tell you are sincere with your investigations, but I can't help wondering whether direct observations of reality, the development of a personal outlook on reality, use personal experience as primary source, is ultimately more valuable than familiarity with a corpus. But then I would say that. And you would disagree.
Again, you are not getting what I was saying about the corpus. I am pulling from a vocabulary to express my personal outlook from personal experience, from direct observation.
It's not either/or. You are the one completely rejecting half of all power-of-truth-finding available to you, and calling it intelligent?
I'm explaining mathematics to you and you're complaining that I'm leaning on centuries of established proofs instead of, what, inventing a new lexicon just for talking to you?
I am giving up. You are engaging with the points in your head instead of those on the page.
Being an intelligent being is not the same as being considered intelligent relative to the rest of your species. I think we’re just looking to create an intelligence, meaning, having the attributes that make a being intelligent, which mostly are the ability to reason and learn. I think the being might take over from there no?
With humans, the speed and ease with which we learn and reason is capped. I think a very dumb intelligence with stay dumb for not very long because every resource will be spent in making it smarter.
Does an LLM scoring well on the Mensa test translate to it doing excellent and factual police reporting? It is probably not true of humans doing well on the Mensa, why would it be true of an LLM?
We should probably rigorously verify that, for a role that itself is about rigorous verification without reasonable doubt.
I can immediately, and reasonably, doubt the output of an LLM, pending verification.
A core problem with humans, or perhaps it's not even a problem, just something that takes a long time to recognize, is that they complain and hate on something that they continue to spend money on.
Not like food or clothing, but stuff like DLC content, streaming services, and LLMs.
At least in my case, I suspect they also don't keep up with the progress. They did experiments in 2023/24, were thoroughly put off, have not fired it up since. So the impression they have is frozen in time, a time when it was indeed much less impressive.
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
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).
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...
That's a good point; "art" might be a bit too narrow to accurately describe the type of field where people have fairly concrete concerns about how AI relates to what they produce. I'd be tempted to use the label "creative work", but even that doesn't quite feel like it's something that everyone would understand to include stuff like written journalism, which I think is likely to have pretty similar concerns.
> 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.
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).
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.
I'm not sure I'm quite as pessimistic as you, just because I tend to treat most predictions of how society will adapt to things as a whole as fairly low confidence, but I certainly don't disagree that it at least seems hard to imagine people getting past all this quickly.
The idea of story being how people justify making their decisions is interesting. I'm reminded of a couple of anecdotes my father has repeated a few times over the years about two distinct medical circumstances he's had. When he was first diagnosed with sleep apnea, he apparently was very skeptical that he had any reason to do anything because the sleep doctor told him things like "this will help you be less sleepy during the day" and "you won't start nodding off as you drive" when he didn't feel like either of those experiences happened to him. Eventually a different sleep doctor did convince him it was worthwhile to treat, and he's used a CPAP since then, he still seems not to feel like it would have made sense for him to start when he first got the diagnosis. Through the lens you've given, the original doctor didn't give him a compelling enough story to justify the effort on his part. On the other hand, the first time he talked to a nutritionist about changing his diet, he apparently mentioned something about how he wanted to at least be able to eat ice cream occasionally, even if it was less often, rather than not ever be able to eat it again, and the nutritionist replied "Of course! that would make life not worth living". He ended up being much more open to listening to the advice of the nutritionist than I would have expected, and I think it would be reasonable to argue that was because the nutritionist was able to give him a story that seemed compelling about what his life would be like with the suggested changes.
Just this weekend it (Gemini) has produced two detailed sets of instructions on how to connect different devices over bluetooth, including a video (that I didn’t watch), while the devices did not support doing the connections in that direction. No reasonable human reading the involved manuals would think those solutions feasible. Not impressed, again.
It's pretty similar to looking something up with a search engine, mashing together some top results + hallucinating a bit, isn't it? The psychological effects of the chat-like interface + the lower friction of posting in said chat again vs reading 6 tabs and redoing your search, seems to be the big killer feature. The main "new" info is often incorrect info.
If you could get the full page text of every url on the first page of ddg results and dump it into vim/emacs where you can move/search around quickly, that would probably be similarly as good, and without the hallucinations. (I'm guessing someone is gonna compare this to the old Dropbox post, but whatever.)
It has no human counterpart in the same sense that humans still go to the library (or a search engine) when they don't know something, and we don't have the contents of all the books (or articles/websites) stored in our head.
Dan makes a case for being charitable to the commenter and how lame it is to neener-neener into the past, not that it has some opposite meaning everyone is missing out on.
Dan clearly references how people misunderstand not only the comment (“he didn't mean the software. He meant their YC application”) but also the whole interaction (“He wasn't being a petty nitpicker—he was earnestly trying to help, and you can see in how sweetly he replied to Drew there that he genuinely wanted them to succeed”).
So yes, it is the opposite of why people link to it (which is a judgement I’m making, I’m not arguing Dan has that exact sentiment), which is to mock an attitude (which wasn’t there) of hubris and lack of understanding of what makes a good product.
The comment isn't infamous because it was petty or nitpicking. It's because the comment was so poorly communicated and because the author was so profoundly out-of-touch with the average person that they had lost all perspective.
It's why it caught the zeitgeist at the time and why it's still apropos in this conversation now.
> It's because the comment was so poorly communicated and because the author was so profoundly out-of-touch with the average person that they had lost all perspective.
None of those things are true. Which is the point I’m making. Go read the original conversation. All of it.
It is absurd to claim that someone who quickly understood the explanation, learned from it, conceded where they were wrong, is somehow “profoundly out-of-touch” and “lost all perspective”. It’s the exact opposite.
I agree with Dan that we’d be lucky if all conversations were like that.
> If you could get the full page text of every url on the first page of ddg results and dump it into vim/emacs where you can move/search around quickly, that would probably be similarly as good, and without the hallucinations.
Curiously, literally nobody on earth uses this workflow.
People must be in complete denial to pretend that LLM (re)search engines can’t be used to trivially save hours or days of work. The accuracy isn’t perfect, but entirely sufficient for very many use cases, and will arguably continue to improve in the near future.
The reason why people don't use LLMs to "trivially save hours or days of work" is because LLMs don't do that. People would use a tool that works. This should be evidence that the tools provide no exceptional benefit, why do you think that is not true?
The only way LLM search engines save time is if you take what it says at face value as truth. Otherwise you still have to fact check whatever it spews out which is the actual time consuming part of doing proper research.
Frankly I've seen enough dangerous hallucinations from LLM search engines to immediately discard anything it says.
How is verification faster and easier? Normally you would check an article's citations to verify its claims, which still takes a lot of work, but an LLM can't cite its sources (it can fabricate a plausible list of fake citations, but this is not the same thing), so verification would have to involve searching from scratch anyway.
As I said, how are you going to check the source when LLMs can't provide sources? The models, as far as I know, don't store links to sources along with each piece of knowledge. At best they can plagiarize a list of references from the same sources as the rest of the text, which will by coincidence be somewhat accurate.
When talking about LLMs as search engine replacements, I think the stark difference in utility people see stems from the usecase. Are you perhaps talking about using it for more "deep research"?
Because when I ask chatgpt/perplexity things like "can I microwave a whole chicken" or "is Australia bigger than the moon" it will happily google for the answers and give me links to the sites it pulled from for me to verify for myself.
On the other hand, if you ask it to summarize the state-of-the art in quantum computing or something, it's much more likely to speak "off the top of its head", and even when it pulls in knowledge from web searches it'll rely much more on it's own "internal corpus" to put together an answer, which is definitely likely to contain hallucinations and obviously has no "source" aside from "it just knowing"(which it's discouraged from saying so it makes up sources if you ask for them).
I haven't had a source invented in quite some time now.
If anything, I have the opposite problem. The sources are the best part. I have such a mountain of papers to read from my LLM deep searches that the challenge is in figuring out how to get through and organize all the information.
For most things, no it isn’t. The reason it can work well at all for software is that it’s often (though not always) easy to validate the results. But for giving you a summary of some topic, no, it’s actually very hard to verify the results without doing all the work over again.
Even if we were going to accept the premise that total knowledge is equivalent to intelligence (which is silly, as sibling comments have pointed out), shouldn't accuracy also come into play? AI also says a lot more obviously wrong things than the average person, so how do you weight that against the purported knowledge? You could answer yes or no randomly to any arbitrary question about whether something is true and approximate a 50% accuracy rate with an evenly distributed pool of questions, but that's obviously not proof that you know everything. I don't think the choice of where to draw the line on "how often can you be wrong and have it still matter" is as easy as you're implying, or that everyone will necessarily agree on where it lies (even if we all agree that 50% correctness is obviously way too low).
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.
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.
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.
I'd do the same thing I'd do with anyone that has a different opinion than me: try my best to have an honest and open discussion with them to understand their point of view and get to the heart of why they believe said thing, without forcefully tearing apart their beliefs. A core part of that process is avoiding saying anything that could cause them to feel shame for believing something that I don't, even if I truly believe they are wrong, and just doing what I can to earnestly hear them out. The optional thing afterwards, if they seem open to it, is express my own beliefs in a way that's palatable and easily understood. Basically explain it in a language they understand, and in a way that we can think about and understand and discuss together, not taking offense to any attempts at questioning or poking holes in my beliefs because that is the discovery process imo for trying something new.
Online is a little trickier because you don't know if they're a dog. Well, now a days it's even harder, because they could also not have a fully developed frontal lobe, or worse, they could be a bot, troll, or both.
I don't know, it's kinda terrifying how this line of thinking is spreading even on HN. AI as we have it now is just a turbocharged autocomplete, with a really good information access. It's not smart, or dumb, or anything "human" .
I hate these kinds of questions where you try to imply it's actually the same thing as what our brains are doing. Stop it. I think it would be an affront to your own intelligence to entertain this as a serious question, so I will not.
My thoughts on this are as serious as it gets - AI in it's current state is no more than clever statistics. I will not be comparing how my own brain functions to what is effectively a linear algebra machine, as it's insulting to the intelligence of everyone here - what kind of serious thought would you like to have here, exactly?
I don't disagree but what we really should have dropped "AI" a long time ago for "statistical machine intelligence". Machine learning then is just what statistical machine intelligence does.
We could have then just swapped "AI" for "SMI" and avoided all this confusion.
It also would avoid pointless statements like "It is JUST statistical machine intelligence". As if statistical machine intelligence is not extraordinarily powerful.
The real difference though is not in "intelligence", is it in "being". It is not as much an insult to our intelligence as it is an insult to our "being" when people pretend that LLMs have some kind of "being".
The strange thing to me is Gemini just tells me these things so I don't know how people get confused:
"A rock exists. A calculator exists. Neither of them has "being."
I am closer to a calculator than a human.
A calculator doesn't "know" math; it executes logic gates to produce a result.
I am a hyper-complex calculator for language. I calculate the probability of the next word rather than the sum of numbers."
You’re very adamant about not doing an obvious comparison. You want to stop thinking at that point. It’s an emotional reaction, not an intellectual one. Quite an interesting one as well, that possibly suggests a threat response.
The assumption you seem to keep making is that things like “clever statistics” and “linear algebra” simply have no bearing on human intelligence. Why do you think that? Is it a religious view, that e.g. you believe humans have a soul that somehow connects to our intelligence, making it forever out of reach of machine emulation?
Because unless that’s your position, then the question of how human intelligence differs from current machine intelligence, the question that you simply refuse to contemplate, is one of the more important questions in this space.
The insult I see to intelligence here is the total lack of intellectual curiosity that wants to shoot down an entire line of thinking for reasons that apparently can’t be articulated.
>>here is the total lack of intellectual curiosity that wants to shoot down an entire line of thinking for reasons that apparently can’t be articulated.
It's the same energy as watching a Joe Rogan podcast where yet another guest goes "well they say there's global warming yet I was cold yesterday, I'm not saying it's fake but really we should think about that". These questions about AI and our brains aren't meant to stimulate intellectual curiosity and provoke deep interesting discussions - they are almost always asked just to pretend the AI is something that it's not - a human like intelligence where since our brains also work "kinda like that" it means it must be the same - and the nearest equivalence is how my iron heats water so in essence it's the same as my stomach since it can also do this.
>>the question that you simply refuse to contemplate
I don't refuse to contemplate it, I just think the answer is so painfully obvious the question is either naive or uninformed or antagonistic in nature - there is no "machine intelligence" - it's not a religious conviction, because I don't think you need one to realise that a calculator isn't smart for adding together numbers larger than I could do in my own head.
>ChatGPT (o3): Scored 136 on the Mensa Norway IQ test in April 2025
If you don't want to believe it, you need to change the goal posts; Create a test for intelligence that we can pass better than AI.. since AI is also better at creating test than us maybe we could ask AI to do it, hang on..
>Is there a test that in some way measures intelligence, but that humans generally test better than AI?
Answer:Thinking, Something went wrong and an AI response wasn't generated.
Edit, i managed to get one to answer me; the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus for Artificial General Intelligence (ARC-AGI). Created by AI researcher François Chollet, this test consists of visual puzzles that require inferring a rule from a few examples and applying it to a new situation.
So we do have A test which is specifically designed for us to pass and AI to fail, where we can currently pass better than AI... hurrah we're smarter!
The validity of IQ tests as a measure of broad intelligence has been in question for far longer than LLMs have existed. And if it’s not a proper test for humans, it’s not a proper test to compare humans to anything else, be it LLMs or chimps.
To be intelligent is to realise that any test for intelligence is at best a proxy for some parts of it. There's no objective way to measure intelligence as a whole, we can't even objectively define intelligence.
I believe intelligence is difficult to pin down in words but easy to spot intuitively - and so are deltas in intelligence.
E.g watch a Steve jobs interview and a Sam Altman one (at the same age). The difference in the mode of articulation, simplicity in communication, obsession over details etc are huge. This is what superior intelligence to me looks like - you know it when you see it.
>Create a test for intelligence that we can pass better than AI
Easy? The best LLMs score 40% on Butter-Bench [1],
while the mean human score is 95%. LLMs struggled the most with multi-step
spatial planning and social understanding.
That is really interesting; Though i suspect its just a effect of differing training data, humans are to a larger degree trained on spacial data, while LLMs are trained to a larger degree on raw information and text.
Still it may be lasting limitation if robotics don't catch up to AI anytime soon.
Don't know what to make of the Safety Risks test, threatening to power down AI in order to manipulate it, and most act like we would and comply. fascinating.
>humans are to a larger degree trained on spacial data
you must be completely LLMheaded to say something like that, lol
humans are not trained on spacial data, they are living in the world. humans are very much diffent from silicone chips, and human learning is on another magnitude of complexity compared to a large language model training
There's a lot of things going on in the western world, both financial and social in nature. It's not good in the sense of being pleasant/contributing to growth and betterment, but it's a correction nonetheless.
That's my take on it anyway. Hedge bets. Dive under the wave. Survive the next few years.
> The new head of Facebook AI is 28 years old? That's not OK, that's too young. Too inexperienced and not worldwise enough by a long shot.
This is ageist in the way I don't usually expect from the Valley. Plenty of entrepreneurs have built successful or innovative concepts in their 20s. It is OK to state that Wang is incompetent, but that has little to do with his age and more to do with his capability.
> you're going to see people figure out how to be the digital Amish and run what they need locally and live without the benefits of the rest.
I've been a large proponent of what LLMs and the transformative nature of them, but for a lot of people running these companies, it's clear that it isn't about the technology and instead about control. I've even lost some trust in my Apple products throughout this as it feels more like a matter of time that they bend to this more than they have, especially with the shakeup.
I think it's OK if people want to use these systems - but if they don't, we'll let the market speak for itself. For now, I'm out.
These things don't really supply "jobs" in any sort of way that is noticeable to the surrounding community. A couple hundred people. The idea that DCs produce jobs is basically a false hope given these communities.
Well, at least a DC fills vacant lots that might otherwise attract crime.
I don't know what realistic alternative the residents have in mind, but I'd say even a few jobs is better than the urban decay that's been destroying Michigan.
> DC fills vacant lots that might otherwise attract crime.
Can we prove that the location of this DC is attracting crime? It's not a vacant lot. This protest is because DTE is expected to raise electric rates for the state's residents, so you're costing the local economy in aggregate more than the jobs that the DC is even providing. It's not guaranteed, if almost likely not, to be a net positive on the whole versus the zero-case of a "vacant lot".
> the urban decay that's been destroying Michigan.
I'm asking this genuinely: have you been to Michigan? The entire state is certainly not some sort of industrial wasteland and a lot of people equate the state to the Urbex porn of the shell of Detroit. This is planned in the state capital's entertainment district, not some semi-abandoned factory area.
Most of the state I've seen has been mostly nature, some sand dunes, and woods.
The parts where traffic generates money for the kind of people who would think putting an advertisement on a screen on someone's home refrigerator is an acceptable thing to do (morally, not legally or whatever).
I'm thinking the same thing. AFAICT this is still going to increase M0 and long-term inflation risk. I don't see how this rate cut is likely to change and/or stimulate the economy with the conditions we have today, just to add to the risk of stagflation.
> It's like somebody set out to do what the 90s Geocities couldn't, using modern tech.
This style is basically a sort of nostalgiacore and that's exactly what it's trying to do. It's heavily influenced by Web 1.0 and the time-smear of 1990s-2000s early Web culture.
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