Comment by rpastuszak
15 hours ago
> It’s not always consistent, but humans have a higher capability of self-awareness. It’s kind of telling that these Claudes don’t seem to consider this pretty obvious failure mode.
We need better words to describe this than "self-awareness" or "consider". These words mean fundamentally different things when speaking about humans or clankers.
This response is so tiring.
It is tiring to write it as well! But, people make real decisions based on unrealistic expectations that LLMs would act like humans.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Why? Unjustified linguistic analogy is a huge part of AI companies success. If we want to actually understand how LLMs work and differ in their operation from humans we need to develop appropriate language, not latch onto some totally unproven equivalence that makes Dario's eyes water with all the free boosting we are doing for him.
Lay people might talk about traditional computers "thinking" but there's a reason actual computer scientists developed precise language around what they were actually doing instead.
We should be critical and use language appropriately and try to describe things correctly. LLMs do not have plastic brain like humans do, which already fundamentally changes what "self awareness" can means for them. There's also the small problem of LLMs not really having an identity beyond the stateless computation that is a chat session which is just some computer code executed on a server. lol
> Lay people might talk about traditional computers "thinking" but there's a reason actual computer scientists developed precise language around what they were actually doing instead. > not latch onto some totally unproven equivalence
Precisely. This is akin to my dad, back in 1995, telling me to stop moving the mouse cursor in MS Paint because the computer was "thinking" (he heard the HDD buzzing). That I can understand.
But surely we can expect more from people here than from a carpenter in a tiny mountain village who bought his son a computer in the 90s. (The second one in town!)