Comment by dyauspitr
8 hours ago
Probably a lot. I’ve never learned about so many disparate subjects as I have over the last two years with LLMs.
Why is it always these supremely weak arguments and rationalizations against LLMs that come from people that have been intelligent, at least based on their comment histories, for so many years. It’s radicalizing me. I want a data center everywhere and I want tokens to be so cheap they’re like electricity or water.
You mean you think you've learned about them. Passive consumption doesn't lead to learning.
> Why is it always these supremely weak arguments and rationalizations against LLMs that come from people that have been intelligent, at least based on their comment histories, for so many years. It’s radicalizing me. I want a data center everywhere and I want tokens to be so cheap they’re like electricity or water.
What do you think the impact of "tokens to be so cheap they’re like electricity or water" will be? I think people who are intelligent and don't have their heads stuck in the sand see the implications of that. Why should people with money pay people to for intelligence, when they can buy machine intelligence very cheaply?
I guess it will free up smart people to finally take jobs that don't use their intelligence, or sit around scraping by on minimum-wage-like UBI (if we're so lucky).
> sit around scraping by on minimum-wage-like UBI (if we're so lucky).
If every cognitive task currently done by humans could be done for ~free, our global material abundance would be truly unprecedented, nigh unlimited.
I have many worries about a world where people aren't needed, but "scraping by" does not describe that world in any sense.
> our global material abundance would be truly unprecedented, nigh unlimited.
Serious question, how? Don't the people who own the models and the companies who want to want to use the models to do all the cognitive tasks want to make money? Are they going to give their products and services away for free? There always seems to be this kind of Underpants Gnomes logic about this where 1. We can do things cheaply 2. ??? 3. Material abundance! where step 2 is actually "very rich people give things away for free!". Which requires people like Altman/Thiel/Zuck whoever to have care for other humans and empathy and actual feelings other than a blind Will to Power. If all the cognitive tasks currently done by humans are ~free it seems like the far, far, far, far more likely outcome given who is actually creating and benefiting this nightmare is that all of us do tasks that don't require cognitive ability and subsist on whatever scraps we're given.
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The big problem with this argument is that the current owners of frontier models are actively working against these ideals.
Many people, including myself, would feel very differently if models were open(and not just open weights), compute/resources were cheap enough to enable local access and ownership.
Unfortunately, despite what they may say in press releases, a lot of people in the space are banking on holding a stranglehold over the market and building a regulatory and resource moat to protect their investment.
Of course there is the argument that they deserve some return on the investment in training but lets not forget that it is our work, the work of the commons, that enabled it in the first place. People are frustrated that a small group of people endeavour to control the use of a tool that was created using the work, thoughts and content of us all, often using questionably legal means.
Soon they might be as cheap as electricity, even if token price doesn't change
Ah, the ol’ switcheroo!
Learning "about" a subject and actually learning a subject are totally different things.
It’s just a matter of what you focus on don’t kid yourself. These things are reading more papers than you can ever read compiling them and then giving you that information along with sources. It makes learning everything better.
At school i was made to read all of shakespeare. It wasnt about passing tests. Any LLM can read shakespeare and pass a test. I was made to read shakespeare so that i would appreciate language in the hope that i would strive to improve my own. That still counts.
I am a soldier and language is vital in every day of my job. Tone, word choice, cadence ... all of it conveys meaning in a way that an LLM simply cannot. Soldiers will not follow an AI up a hill, nor will they follow those they know use AI to pretend they understand a subject.
Want to sound smart? Watch blackadder. Want to win no-win aguements through wit? Watch Archer. Want to inspire your troops to do somthing unpleasant? read and watch shakespeare. An LLM can teach you nothing that really counts.
None of this is relevant to the argument above. There is no reason to believe these archives are equivalent to Shakespeare even if one were to agree with you that Shakespeare is that important to read.
> An LLM can teach you nothing that really counts.
Nothing you wrote supports that argument.
None of us can read everything. None of us can even read every novel published in a single month. So we filter. One way an LLM can teach you is as an excellent way of filtering information and give you a chance to read what really counts.
Ya. Try reading a few hundred pages of historical documents. Expertise does not come from the facts that an LLM can so easily integrate. It comes from understanding the mindset of the people who wrote those pages. Do it properly and you should start to speak and write like those people. The path to becoming an expert on the East India cannot be shortcuted via an LLM.
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