Comment by Bridged7756
2 days ago
You're relying on the public's sentiment as a metric. The public's sentiment is, more than often, skewed, influenced by marketing, or flat out wrong. That is not a good metric to rely on.
Did it ever occur to you that the ever changing goalposts might have more to do with the expensive marketing campaigns of the big LLM providers?
We could talk about what's a measurable metric and what's not. Certainly, we have not much more other than "benchmarks" of which, honestly, I don't know the veracity of, or if big LLM cheats somehow, or if the performance is even stable. The core idea is that LLMs remain able to do exactly what they were able to do back at release; text prediction. They got better in some regards, sure.
Your example is worrisome to me. It should be to you too. You didn't write a literature review, you generated a scaffold of a literature review, with the same vices of LLM-based-writing as anything it does and still needing review and revising. I would hope rewriting to avoid your work be associated with LLM-generation. For better or worse, you still need to, normally, revise your work. For, once again, because this point seems to be difficult to grasp, a text predictor is not a reliable source of information. We make tradeoffs, sacrificing reliability for ease of use, but any real work needs human reviewing: which goes back to my first point. In this example it's doing nothing other than it being a fancy search and scaffolding tool.
The ball is likely to be in the same place because, once again, they're text predictors. Not sentient beings, or intelligent. Still generating text, still hallucinating, probably even more so thanks to the ever increasing amount of LLM-written content on the internet and initiatives like poison fountain doing a number on the generated content.
It's wild to me to make such claims about the rate of change of those tools. You're claiming we'll see exponential gains for those tools, I take, while completely ignoring the base set of constraints those models will, never, be able to get rid of. They only know how to produce text. They don't know, and will never really, know if it's right.
Hi. I read your message, and I considered it. I've also read some of your previous HN comments. Briefly, I'll just say I've argued at length against many of the claims you make (you certainly aren't alone in making them). I don't feel it would be useful to repeat these again here, but I'll reference a few, below, just to show that I do care about the subject matter and am happy to dig deeper ...
... but only with certain conversational norms. I say this because I predict we aren't (yet) matched up in a way such that we would have a conversation useful to us. The main reason (I guess) isn't about our particular viewpoints nor about i.e. "if we're both critical thinkers". We're both demonstrating that frame, at least in our language. Instead, I think it is about the way we engage and what we want to get out of a conversation. Just to pick one particular guide star, I strive to follow Rapoport's Rules [1]. FWIW, HN Guidelines are not all that different, so simply by commenting here, one is explicitly joining a sort of social contract that point in their direction already.
Anatol Rapoport or Daniel Dennett were not only brilliant in their areas of specialty but also in teaching us how to criticize constructively in general. I offer the link at [1] just in case you want to read them and give them a try, here. We can start the conversation over (if you want).
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In response to your comments about consciousness, intelligence, etc, here are some examples of what I mean by intelligence and why:
- intelligence: https://assets.edge.bigthink.com/uploads/attachment/file/151...