Comment by vidarh
17 hours ago
I thought the page was a hilarious joke, not a bad prediction. A lot of these are fantastic observational humour about HN and tech. Gary Marcus still insisting AI progress is stalling 10 years from now, for example. Several digs at language rewrites. ITER hardly having nudged forwards. Google killing another service. And so on.
Wait, wouldn't sustained net positive energy be huge? (Though I don't think that's actually possible from ITER unless there were some serious upgrades over the next decade!)
I totally agree that it was a funny joke.
But I've noticed that a lot of people think of LLM's as being _good_ at predicting the future and that's what I find concerning.
Does the prompt say anything about being funny, about a joke? If yes, great. If no, terrible.
And the answer is no.
The prompt is funny, in itself. The notion of predicting the future is itself not a serious prompt, because there is no meaningful way of giving a serious response. But the addition of "Writ it into form!" makes it sound even more jokey.
If I gave a prompt like that and got the response I did, I'd be very pleased with the result. If I somehow intended something serious, I'd have a second look at the prompt, go mea culpa, and write a far longer prompt with parameters to make something somewhat like a serious prediction possible.
If you honestly can't see why this prompt from the get go was a joke, them you may have to cede that LLM have a better grasp as the subtleties of language than you expect.
That's what makes this so funny: the AI was earnestly attempting to predict the future, but it's so bad at truly out-of-distribution predictions that an AI-generated 2035 HN frontpage is hilariously stuck in the past. "The more things change, the more they stay the same" is a source of great amusement to us, but deliberately capitalizing on this was certainly not the "intent" of the AI.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume the AI was earnestly attempting to predict the future, it’s just as likely attempting to make jokes here for the user who prompted it, or neither of those things.
There is just no reason whatsoever to believe this is someone "earnestly attempting to predict the future", and ending up with this.
There's no chance "google kills gemini cloud" was an earnest predication. That was 100% a joke