183 karma · joined June 21, 2019
It's a bit weird to be against the use of the phrase "artificial intelligence" and not "machine learning". Is it possible to learn without intelligence? Methinks the author is a bit triggered by the term "intelligence" at a base primal level ("machines can't think!").
> “Generative AI” is just a very good Markov chain that people expect far too much from.
The author of this post doesn't know the basics of how LLMs work. The whole reason LLMs work so well is that they are extremely stateful and not memoryless, the key property of Markov processes.
There's the graphic: "Top 1% cognition aged 12 and top 5% salary mid-30s" which is supposed to be the most dramatic one. So apparently we suddenly just take at face value the criticism "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich"?
Also, I find this view very selfish. Yes, let's gatekeep a ground-breaking technology because it will hurt my specific profession. That's literally what technological progress is- it always (at least temporarily) disadvantages a particular sector of workers that specialized in that skill for the benefit of society. It's just funny because usually it's the blue collar workers who have to worry about this and the white collar workers who sanctimoniously tell them to suck it up or learn to code.
Also, I can't help but chuckle slightly at the irony here. The entire purpose of software engineering and computers is automation, and the lost jobs in other sectors due to SWEs is massive. To spend one's entire life in pursuit of this and be morally opposed to the "ultimate" automation (automating this process of automation itself) is a bit rich.
But there is a spectrum here. AI is a cruder, less fine-grained method of producing output. But it is a very powerful tool. Instead of "chiseling" the code line by line, it transforms relatively short prompts along with "context" into an imperfect, but much larger/fully formed product. The more you ask it to do in one go, usually the more imperfect it is. But the more precise your prompts, and the "better" your context, the more you can ask it to do while still hanging on to its "form" (always battling against the entropy of AI slop).
Incidentally, those "prompts" are the thinking. The point is to operate at the edge of LLM/machine competence. And as the LLMs become more capable, your vision can grow bigger.
From the article I read:
"A twelve-day-old infant cannot crawl. It cannot grab, and it cannot put something into its own mouth. “It also cannot swallow a Tylenol-3 pill,” Juurlink told me. “I don’t know what happened in that house, on that night, but I do know that someone gave this baby crushed Tylenol-3,” likely mixed in breast milk or formula. “That’s the only way these numbers make sense.”"
It's probably true that without a chance of conviction, standard protocol dictates that public resources should not be expended on reopening the investigation. But I was also heavily distracted while reading the article, scanning optimistically for the happy (under the circumstances) ending where justice is served. I certainly don't think there is "no benefit to anybody".
I suspect (for no concrete reason in particular besides a feeling) that the readership of HN is fairly similar to California in political demographics. Active commentators are considerably more left-wing due to selection effects.
Psy-ops, astroturfing, now LLM slop.
Being against this is essentially to be in favor of a form of discrimination by proxy- if you can't typeset, then likely you can't do research either. And wouldn't it be really annoying if those people who can't research could magically typeset. It's a fundamentally undemocratic impulse: Since those who cannot typeset well are unlikely to produce quality mathematics, we can (and should) use this as an effective barrier to entry. If you replace ability to typeset with a number of other traits, they would be rather controversial positions.
To me, this is directly relevant to the issue of democratization of science. There seems to be a tool that is inconveniently resulting in the "wrong" people accelerating their output. That is essentially the complaint here rather than any criticism inherent to LLMs (e.g. water/resource usage, environmental impact, psychological/societal harm, etc.). The post I'm responding to could have been written if LLMs were replaced by any technology that resulted in less experienced or capable researchers disproportionately being able to submit to journals.
To be concrete, let's just take one of prism's capabilities- the ability to "turn whiteboard equations or diagrams directly into LaTeX". What a monstrous thing to give to the masses! Before, those uneducated cranks would send word docs to journals with poorly typeset equations, making it a trivial matter to filter them into the trash bin. Now, they can polish everything up and pass off their chicken scratch as respectable work. Ideally, we'd put up enough obstacles so that only those who should publish will publish.
"which is really not the point of these journals at all"- it seems that it very much is one of the main points? Why do you think people publish in journals instead of just putting their work on the arxiv? Do you think postdocs and APs are suffering through depression and stressing out about their publications because they're agonizing over whether their research has genuinely contributed substantively to the academic literature? Are academic employers poring over the publishing record of their researchers and obsessing over how well they publish in top journals in an altruistic effort to ensure that the research of their employees has made the world a better place?
I don't think that one's personal moral compass and one's profession have much correlation at all. Otherwise, moral philosophy professors would be near saints. Moreover the moral philosophers at Harvard would be more ethical than those at Ohio State.
As much as you may detest all the other great powers jostling for position with seemingly cursory attention paid to moral considerations, making your core identity the cultured "nice guy" is likely a trap. I'd love to see the resurgence of a strong Europe. I think this will require some introspection and more action than simply boycotting Google and Amazon.