Comment by imiric
1 day ago
> LLMs are great, but they're not (yet?) as capable as our best and brightest (and in many ways, lag behind the average human) in most respects, so why would you expect such genius now ?
I'm not expecting novel scientific theories today. What I am expecting are signs and hints of such genius. Something that points in the direction that all tech CEOs are claiming we're headed in. So far I haven't seen any of this yet.
And, I'm sorry, I don't buy the excuse that these tools are not "yet" as capable as the best and brightest humans. They contain the sum of human knowledge, far more than any individual human in history. Are they not intelligent, capable of thinking and reasoning? Are we not at the verge of superintelligence[1]?
> we have recently built systems that are smarter than people in many ways, and are able to significantly amplify the output of people using them.
If all this is true, surely we should be seeing incredible results produced by this technology. If not by itself, then surely by "amplifying" the work of the best and brightest humans.
And yet... All we have to show for it are some very good applications of pattern matching and statistics, a bunch of gamed and misleading benchmarks and leaderboards, a whole lot of tech demos, solutions in search of a problem, and the very real problem of flooding us with even more spam, scams, disinformation, and devaluing human work with low-effort garbage.
>I'm not expecting novel scientific theories today. What I am expecting are signs and hints of such genius.
Like I said, what exactly would you be expecting to see with the capabilities that exist today ? It's not a gotcha, it's a genuine question.
>And, I'm sorry, I don't buy the excuse that these tools are not "yet" as capable as the best and brightest humans.
There's nothing to buy or not buy. They simply aren't. They are unable to do a lot of the things these people do. You can't slot an LLM in place of most knowledge workers and expect everything to be fine and dandy. There's no ambiguity on that.
>They contain the sum of human knowledge, far more than any individual human in history.
It's not really the total sum of human knowledge but let's set that aside. Yeah so ? Einstein, Newton, Von Newman. None of these guys were privy to some super secret knowledge their contemporaries weren't so it's obviously not simply a matter of more knowledge.
>Are they not intelligent, capable of thinking and reasoning?
Yeah they are. And so are humans. So were the peers of all those guys. So why are only a few able to see the next step ? It's not just about knowledge, and intelligence lives in degrees/is a gradient.
>If all this is true, surely we should be seeing incredible results produced by this technology. If not by itself, then surely by "amplifying" the work of the best and brightest humans.
Yeah and that exists. Terence Tao has shared a lot of his (and his peers) experiences on the matter.
https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/115306424727150237
https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/115420236285085121
https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/115416208975810074
>And yet... All we have to show for it are some very good applications of pattern matching and statistics, a bunch of gamed and misleading benchmarks and leaderboards, a whole lot of tech demos, solutions in search of a problem, and the very real problem of flooding us with even more spam, scams, disinformation, and devaluing human work with low-effort garbage.
Well it's a good thing that's not true then
> Like I said, what exactly would you be expecting to see with the capabilities that exist today ?
And like I said, "signs and hints" of superhuman intelligence. I don't know what that looks like since I'm merely human, but I sure know that I haven't seen it yet.
> There's nothing to buy or not buy. They simply aren't. They are unable to do a lot of the things these people do.
This claim is directly opposed to claims by Sam Altman and his cohort, which I'll repeat:
> we have recently built systems that are smarter than people in many ways, and are able to significantly amplify the output of people using them.
So which is it? If they're "smarter than people in many ways", where is the product of that superhuman intelligence? If they're able to "significantly amplify the output of people using them", then all of humanity should be empowered to produce incredible results that were previously only achievable by a limited number of people. In hands of the best and brightest humans, it should empower them to produce results previously unreachable by humanity.
Yet all positive applications of this technology show that it excels at finding and producing data patterns, and nothing more than that. Those experience reports by Terence Tao are prime examples of this. The system was fed a lot of contextual information, and after being coaxed by highly intelligent humans, was able to find and produce patterns that were difficult to see by humans. This is hardly a showcase of intelligence that you and others think it is. Including those highly intelligent humans, some of whom have a lot to gain from pushing this narrative.
We have seen similar reports by programmers as well[1]. Yet I'm continually amazed that these highly intelligent people are surprised that a pattern finding and producing system was able to successfully find and produce useful patterns, and then interpret that as a showcase of intelligence. So much so that I start to feel suspicious about the intentions and biases of those people.
To be clear: I'm not saying that these systems can't be very useful in the right hands, and potentially revolutionize many industries. Ultimately many real-world problems can be modeled as statistical problems where a pattern recognition system can excel. What I am saying is that there's a very large gap from the utility of such tools, and the extraordinary claims that they have intelligence, let alone superhuman and general intelligence. So far I have seen no evidence of the latter, despite of the overwhelming marketing euphoria we're going through.
> Well it's a good thing that's not true then
In the world outside of the "AI" tech bubble, that is very much the reality.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45784179