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Comment by tymscar | Hacker News Reader

You are clearly not a dimwit, and you don’t only have way more experience than most people here, you also have some amazing projects under your belt.

However I can’t help but notice that the vast majority of blogposts, talks, tweets, and basically everything else you do now is around LLMs. Do you not think that’s indicative of this being “hyped” and “shiny tools”?

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If hype just means people are excited about it and talking about it, it should be a positive signal about the merit of the thing. I think people get the wrong idea by measuring P(X is good | people are excited about X) and finding it to be low. But P(X is good | people are not excited about X) is vastly lower, and 'hype' as here used is not really discrediting.

> I think people get the wrong idea by measuring P(X is good | people are excited about X) and finding it to be low. But P(X is good | people are not excited about X) is vastly lower

Only if you're including things that don't exist. If you restrict yourself to things that people might conceivably talk about, that probability is actually very high, for the simple reason that bad things are exciting specifically because they are bad.

Here are some boring things:

- bread

- sunlight

- air

- water

- parents

Note that starvation, darkness, suffocation, dehydration, and being orphaned are all much more exciting than their opposites.

Poor phrasing on my part; 'good' should have been 'worth talking about'.

I'm writing a lot about LLMs at the moment because they're the focus of much of my work.

I don't see that as a hype thing - in the past I've had other topics I've focused on, not because of hype but because those were the topics I was spending the most time with.

Deep learning is the most important thing to happen to philosophy since Socrates / Wittgenstein.

I would be very interested in you providing an example of Deep Learning offering more cultural or historical impact than Socrates / Wittgenstein.

I mean, already ChatGPT alone has made more cultural and historical impact per capita than the aforementioned gentlemen, simply because nobody cares about philosophy. But that was never my point. My point is: you can think of uncle Witt kind of like "postmodern" twist on Socrates, i.e. they're both effectively talking about the same thing: determining optimal form for computing language. Wittgenstein had made considerable progress here, i.e. language games, and now we finally get means to literally compute these. To me it's absolutely clear; this is the most important thing to happen in philosophy.

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