Probably no, because according to quantum mechanics, photons are indistinguishable in a way that affects experiments.

Sounds wonderful. I remove my shoes in the office as well, since not doing so has led to health issues in the past, but it’s not so hygienic when everyone from colleagues to cleaning staff visit your office with their shoes on.

(Where I live, this is the norm at home, but not at office or public places.)

I also don’t commit files by accident. Just don’t `git add *` as some people do, and check `git status` before committing, and then you’re good.

In the political sense, «Western Europe» is typically taken to be «NATO Europe», and «Eastern Europe» is «Warsaw Pact Europe». Which is different from a strict geographic definition.

You’d have to say which NATO. Czechia is in NATO and was in Warsaw pact.

If you said: Americans usually incorrectly think of Western Europe as those countries not partially or fully under control of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, then I’d agree with you.

That is also not correct anymore as Northern countries were reallocated to include the Baltics in UN as an example.

That sounds somewhat applicable to many tools. Like Vim/Emacs, for example. Or computers and smart phones in general.

Computers - mostly no.

Smartphones - mostly yes.

Smartphones are fully portable which makes them always available and super addictive.

Computers have 10% of that addictive power.

Yeah, like caffeine is to meth

Thank you for this, the hand waving comparisons of AI and anything else is getting out of hand on HN. Your ”like caffeine is to meth” is one of the more succinct and describing sentences I’ve seen describe the difference.

Seems legitimate to me. Did you find any technical error?

Perhaps the conclusions simply weren't mooving.

In case you missed the intentional misspelling, rather than are just going along with the joke: the word used was 'udder' (a cow's teats) rather than 'utter'.

Ah yes, indeed, the well-known point-cow approximation!

The point-cow is simply the zero-dimensional generalization of the spherical cow.

In some countries it is, to some extent. In Norway for example, it is illegal to broadcast ads for political parties, alcohol, tobacco, plus basically any ads specifically targeting children (though the last one is often violated).

I disagree with this take. While LLMs themselves are currently unreliable, the work done in the math community on hooking up creative LLMs to reliable verifiers like Lean show that it’s possible to construct systems where the unreliability is suppressed. For now, that still requires experts to set up and monitor, but I do believe that in a couple of decades we’ll make progress on how to do more mundane tasks in a reliable way without expert supervision, where an LLM still sits as the translation layer between humans and machines. And that universal human-to-machine translator, I would certainly consider a foundational technology.

EDIT: If you asked people on the street in 1990, they’d probably not consider the Internet to be in the same category as the Steam engine either. I mean, you already had phone and fax, so it wasn’t that ground breaking. And I’ve even read articles from the mid-90s declaring the Internet a temporary fad.

> I disagree with this take. While LLMs themselves are currently unreliable, the work done in the math community on hooking up creative LLMs to reliable verifiers like Lean show that it’s possible to construct systems where the unreliability is suppressed. For now, that still requires experts to set up and monitor, but I do believe that in a couple of decades we’ll make progress on how to do more mundane tasks in a reliable way without expert supervision, where an LLM still sits as the translation layer between humans and machines. And that universal human-to-machine translator, I would certainly consider a foundational technology.

Yes, for a verifiable domains you can set up a harness and brute-force a search space if you have enough money for compute. Why do you think they keep coming up with those examples of impressive achievements like solving math puzzles? Why not focus on something with economic value to it? My answer is they can't, those are hard problems, those require building an actual product, those require reliability.

> EDIT: If you asked people on the street in 1990, they’d probably not consider the Internet to be in the same category as the Steam engine either. I mean, you already had phone and fax, so it wasn’t that ground breaking. And I’ve even read articles from the mid-90s declaring the Internet a temporary fad.

We are not people people on the street we are people who are directly involved in application of the technology, we posses a higher level of insight.

I generally side with your skepticism, but there are verifiable domains with economic value such as drug discovery.

Are LLMs doing drug discovery? To my knowledge, that’s all classic “machine learning”

Not yet, as far as I know, but perhaps someone will find a way to do that in the future. We're talking about the next two decades here, a lot can happen in that time.

DNA itself can be thought of as a language which describes proteins, and I personally don't know enough about the limits of LLMs as a technology to claim that it can never be adapted to, say, do reverse translation from desired protein shapes into DNA sequences.

This is why it's better to call the underlying technology transformers rather than 'language model'. It can make a model from anything you can digitize and is informational (random noise would not be informational for example). It's the relations between the bits of data that matters.

I share this sentiment, while deploring the current AI board room sentiment. I know some people that design (safe) buildings. They use software all the time for their load-bearing work (lol). Think about the creativity that could be unleashed if that (like LEAN for math) becomes a commodity.

The same thing for my job: creating insurance premiums is somewhat hard but not stellar. A combination of skills, data, tools and people. I can imagine a future where you can post a 'have good weather on holiday or money back' bond on a platform. (I can think of more serious applications...) The sheer diversity and amount of liquidity AI's can create is enormous. (Switching to a very general outlook here.) And with liquidity hopefully comes more specificity in the ROI on saving our planet. (Or the disproving of the necessity thereof, if that is your outlook.)

Construction isn't using LLMs any time soon like that. We don't even send our files in structured data because everyone's playing nose goes for liability and sending pdfs

I know! And financials and actuaries aren't either. Excel, Python, R and don't know what we can use ducktape and spit for to keep together. But as the LEAN-example quite nicely shows: with the right scaffolding I am convinced the GPU World /could/ look rosy.

An economic problem would be - how could the builder of a scaffold capture _some_ value without right away be copied. The fact that LLMs threw away every protection of intellectual property at their inception makes it a lot harder to invest in (with the goal of capturing some) value. I am at least /somewhat/ influenced by RMS on the 'seductive mirage' of IP but I have my doubts on how copyleft could bring more than breadcrumbs to those who build scaffolds.

The LEAN example is the ideal case. It's like a baby POC to me.

I can only assume the only realistic way to get all the federated data will be a ton of massivr vertical consolidation of industry by hubris laden tech execs crossing industry domains.

In spirit of this conversation - Terence Tao is awesome right? He was already one of the best mathematicians on the planet when he happened to start dabbling in computer assisted proofs (obviously as a giant standing on the shoulders of giants) at exactly the right time for the computer revolution to find a perfect use case (as you point out).

Most notably Paul Krugman Nobel winning economist in 98: "By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s."

Predicting the future is hard.

Hadn't seen this quote before, amazing.

Also goes to show how hard it is to predict anything that is a massive change - these levels of changes are so infrequent that we can't rely on priors to predict the future.

pretty sure Krugman himself said his prediction was intentionally pessimistic to counter the hyper-optimism of his peers. and in fairness, he wrote that at the height of the dot-com bubble.

actually, thinking about it more, I wonder if we'll see something similar with LLMs where, the bubble will eventually pop, but the technology won't disappear, and we'll see it quietly improve and integrate further into our lives over time. probably not that wild of a prediction to make, but I do wonder still

What will be LLMs' social media?

More or less the same as social media but for agents, perhaps?

When I want to book an airline ticket in the future, I expect my LLM agent to contact the airline LLM agent, and the two to discuss options and negotiate a deal on my behalf.

Negotiate? For an airline ticket? When's the last time a human did that and why would an agent? There's a price, and if you don't like it you go to a competitor you don't call customer service and negotiate? Who in their right mind would let an LLM set prices?

> hooking up creative LLMs to reliable verifiers like Lean show that it’s possible to construct systems where the unreliability is suppressed.

You can also have LLMs create these things called "programs" that are written in "code" that result in deterministic outputs when given inputs.

I say this with a bit of snark to highlight the point that both humans and LLMs can write code that is cheaper to run and easy to verify. I'm not saying Lean being used like this is a bad idea, just that it's just one end of the spectrum.

I don't think you've said anything different than the person you're responding to. The difference primarily seems to be whether you think AI is transformative vs simply being another tool (which is really just a matter of perspective).

If you're not an expert software engineer, it's transformative. If you are, it's just another tool.

I’m an expert software engineer. I would categorize something that multiplies my productivity by > 2x is transformative. AI has certainly done that and more for me

> Like I will get to an ATM and think "wait - what is my PIN?".

Apple also has this stupid thing where you sometimes have to type your iPhone pin on your Mac to verify your identity. I’m unable to recall it on a keyboard instead of a keypad.