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Comment by petesergeant | Hacker News Reader

> is framing LLM's as quasi-gods, which they absolutely are not

Always such certainty in these dismissals. And whenever you dig in, it always seems to be "well my super-human coding assistant made this dumb mistake!", along with a heavy dose of https://mastodon.social/@falseknees/116477394235883790

I don't think anyone who has spent any time around me would describe me as having anything but a pretty clear-eyed view of the current abilities of LLMs, I don't think anyone would seriously consider me to be in a period of mania or psychosis, and it also seems almost inevitable to me that we are a year or two away from LLM-cognition being substantially more competent in almost every regard from human cognition, and therefore in the foothills of the singularity.

The extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary proof is that this will somehow all blow over, not that we're heading towards a singularity here.

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Honest question: What _would_ convince you that we are not heading towards a singularity? Like, is this belief falsifiable?

(Secondary question: what do you mean with singularity?)

As an offering of me engaging in good faith, a controversial opinion of mine: I legit think arpanet going online and starting the networking all of humanity into a massive coupled complex system fits the definition of singularity of "the moment after which predicting what will happen becomes hard to impossible", although that of course heavily depends on your definitions of prediction and hard/impossible.

For falsification, I would take a year in which we don’t see an absolute sea change in capability. The last twelve months were not that, in my opinion, nor were the twelve before it. Hell, I’d even throw in “a year in which capabilities obviously improve but at a cost consumers can’t afford”.

“What LLMs can’t do, only humans can” feels like a God of the Gaps situation: people have to keep moving the goal posts because the more recent models keep unlocking more territory that was previously a “well they’ll never be able to do this!” holdout

That's the best answer I've seen to that question so far, my honest respect. I am much more skeptical than you, for me I have seen a sea change in _tool capabilities_ (mainly pre opus 4.5 to post 4.5) and harness engineering but no strong change in the type of errors made and the pattern of harness engineering (the pattern of "set things up for the LLM to see when it fucks up and let it flail till the verifier tells it to stop").

I would actually expect the sea changes as you describe it in your first criteria to continue with 1) vision, audio and video natively integrated 2) continued scaling of e2e rlvf for workflows with large scale labeling efforts 3) ASICs and widescale deployment of diffusion models leading to speed ups

But as of right now, I still expect these models to need humans to prune the output to the gold and set up the harness right for both the novel bits, and for the boilerplate to be cohesive with the global intent.

Which is of course an amazing potential boost in productivity, but still a sigmoid flattening.

As for your second criteria that includes cost, I think we might every well see this coming soon, but it's difficult to estimate with the efficiency gains still possible.

Thanks for engaging:-)

> I don't think anyone who has spent any time around me would describe me as having anything but a pretty clear-eyed view of the current abilities of LLMs

You are literally arguing that LLMs are quasi-gods in the same comment you claim a 'clear-eyed view' of current LLMs.

That is a statement of faith.

Every bubble has its believers; that's why we have bubbles. There have been so many times somebody very smart has thought we were on the verge of the rapture, the coming utopia, the workers' paradise, power too cheap to meter, flying cars, settling the moon.

Could this bubble finally be the one? Sure. You could finally be the guy who is vindicated. And tomorrow the people I grew up around could be vindicated by Jesus's return to earth.

I can't prove either of you wrong, because you're not making rational arguments. You've had powerful experiences that have convinced you of something. There is no point in trying to discuss it rationally. The only thing people without faith can tell the faithful is what I said 30 years ago when I got out: I guess we'll see.

But my prediction is that we'll see an AI version of the Great Disappointment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Disappointment

Many will stay faithful. The date of the singularity will keep getting pushed back. There will be another AI winter, but some will always see summer as just around the corner.

I guess we'll see.

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