Comment by afavour
7 hours ago
I wouldn’t assume that progress is linear. Maybe I’m wrong and it will be! But I’m reminded of early developments with self driving cars, it felt like manual driving would be a thing of the past within a decade. But progress has been much slower than that.
> But I’m reminded of early developments with self driving cars, it felt like manual driving would be a thing of the past within a decade. But progress has been much slower than that.
I think that's exactly the standpoint of Yann LeCun.
[flagged]
No need to be rude! Besides OP just said:
> I’m reminded of
They were drawing a comparison, not saying "x will definitely happen because y"
No need to be such a dick, it reflects poorly on you.
You committed your own fallacy of applying a sloppy heuristic to understanding the person you were responding to without bothering to check if it applies. Spectacular. The comical levels of arrogance that infect over-hyped tech marketing boondoggles (one area among many in which GenAI is clearly similar to self-driving cars) is one of the reasons nobody trusts the hype anymore.
The breathless astroturf articles, the brain-dead talking head conversations, the endless flood of obvious misinformation about industry uptake, the nauseating LinkedIn puff-pieces about PREPARING YOUR ENTERPRISE OR ELSE... it's a hostile information economy at best, and its being driven by the same people who brought you bullshit like self-driving, crypto and the Metaverse... for the exact same reasons (to get rich).
There's no epistemic credibility left in the tech industry in general. Maybe the Dario's or whoevers of the world believed what they were talking about at one point, but I don't believe a single word I read from Anthropic or OpenAI for the same reason I don't believe anything I read from Russian state media. I know it's being produced for reasons that have nothing to do with the truth.
As someone who interacts with the technology on a daily basis at a non-trivial level... I'm not seeing anything that would cure my skepticism about GenAI. The information economy surrounding it is broken. The fundamentals don't line up. The hype about "nearby capabilities" is identical to the hype of generations after generations of hype in the AI space (dating at least back to Turing). It smells like a bad bet.