Comment by twochillin
19 hours ago
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.
Sure - and the people responsible for a new freaking era of computing are the ones who asked "given how incredible it is that this works at all at 0.5b params, let's scale it up*.
It's not hyperbole - that it's an accurate description at a small scale was the core insight that enabled the large scale.
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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?