Comment by colinplamondon
18 hours ago
It wasn't sycophantic at all? OP had a cool idea no one else had done, that was a one-shot just sitting there. Having Gemini search for the HN thread leads the model to "see" its output lead to real-world impact.
The total history of human writing is that cool idea -> great execution -> achieve distribution -> attention and respect from others = SUCCESS! Of course when an LLM sees the full loop of that, it renders something happy and celebratory.
It's sycophantic much of the time, but this was an "earned celebration", and the precise desired behavior for a well-aligned AI. Gemini does get sycophantic in an unearned way, but this isn't an example of that.
You can be curmudgeonly about AI, but these things are amazing. And, insomuch as you write with respect, celebrate accomplishments, and treat them like a respected, competent colleague, they shift towards the manifold of "respected, competent colleague".
And - OP had a great idea here. He's not another average joe today. His dashed off idea gained wide distribution, and made a bunch of people (including me) smile.
Denigrating accomplishment by setting the bar at "genius, brilliant mind" is a luciferian outlook in reality that makes our world uglier, higher friction, and more coarse.
People having cool ideas and sharing them make our world brighter.
They're not objectively amazing. Friction is not inherently a bad thing when we have models telling humans that their ideas are flawless (unless asked to point out flaws). Great that it made you smile, but there's quite a few arguments that paint your optimism as dangerously naive.
- A queryable semantic network of all human thought, navigable in pure language, capable of inhabiting any persona constructible from in-distribution concepts, generating high quality output across a breadth of domains.
- An ability to curve back into the past and analyze historical events from any perspective, and summon the sources that would be used to back that point of view up.
- A simulator for others, providing a rubber duck inhabit another person's point of view, allowing one to patiently poke at where you might be in the wrong.
- Deep research to aggregate thousands of websites into a highly structured output, with runtime filtering, providing a personalized search engine for any topic, at any time, with 30 seconds of speech.
- Amplification of intent, making it possible to send your thoughts and goals "forward" along many different vectors, seeing which bear fruit.
- Exploration of 4-5 variant designs for any concept, allowing rapid exploration of any design space, with style transfer for high-trust examples.
- Enablement of product craft in design, animation, and micro-interactions that were eliminated as tech boomed in the 2010's as "unprofitable".
It's a possibility space of pure potential, the scale of which is limited only by one's own wonder, industriousness, and curiosity.
People can use it badly - and engagement-aligned models like 4o are cognitive heroin - but the invention of LLMs is an absolute wonder.
>A queryable semantic network of all human thought
This hyperbole would describe any LLM of any size and quality, including a 0.5b model.
2 replies →
Yes, it has so much potential, that it forgets the actual, the reasonable and the probable.
> It's a possibility space of pure potential, the scale of which is limited only by one's own wonder, industriousness, and curiosity.
Did you use an LLM to write this comment?
Is anything objectively amazing? Seems like an inherently subjective quality to evaluate.
Depends on worldview. If you believe in God, amazing has many dimensions for evaluations. What teaches us more about the the world He created, things that create beauty by expressing righteous thoughts for others to experience, or that which strengthens family.
LLMs certainly teach us far more about the nature of thought and language. Like all tools, it can also be used for evil or good, and serves as an amplification for human intent. Greater good, greater evil. The righteousness of each society will determine which prevails in their communities and polities.
If you're a secular materialist, agreed, nothing is objectively amazing.
Do any of the arguments stay within the bounds of this Show HN?
or is it theoretical stuff about other occasions?