My guess is Google knows it is (way) behind the and needs to keep drumming up interest. Although at some point it becomes counterproductive (raising "yet another not available model; is it vaporware" vibes).
6,890 karma · joined July 29, 2016
That was a big self-own from a group that thought they have a carte blanche and can just ignore those pesky normies instead of explaining why the changes are good for them, too. And being smarter in picking battles. And minimizing inconveniences from unavoidable sharp edges.
Yes. But my point is that we have a major crisis (and a part of the population thinking that the current way of life is over forever), every few generations. With your analogy, the dinosaurs had "the end is nigh" and "this time is different" doomerist beliefs a million times before finally being right.
Agree fully that it is good to strive for the improvement. But there are so many different views of what the improvement would look like, so we have good folks who, when spun up by their respective leaders, focus on their differences and start fighting. Which, IMO, is almost, almost, almost always a bad way to build something better. My 2c.
Of course. And I am not claiming that my view is the view or even a particularly good view. It is just my personal worldview. But I think that with ups and downs, over generations and centuries, the world is on an uptrend. My parents were being driven, with their families, from their homes as kids; one of them lost an eye (as a kid) from a war; both lived through years of hunger. My grandparents saw real crap, two lived through a famine and saw many die from hunger.
But they all lived through those disruptions, worked and tried to build something better (I had to probe that information out of them; they did not even mention those things to us). I think the AI disruptions will not be nearly as painful and we will live through them just fine. Again, just a personal perspective.
> I see machines which, in a matter of three years, went from being able to do basic proofs, to math Olympiad problems, to century-old Millennium problems. I see no reason why progress will slow down.
I think what we see is LLMs picking the low hanging fruit. There is a lot of it, but I do not think we can extrapolate it. Some things will be particularly easy for LLMs to exceed humans on (like a steam engine being better in driving heavy machinery), some possible, many very hard. And humans will find new things to explore and build. We will see in 25 years (I am old and might not be alive then, but maybe I will see enough in 15).
As a side note: I do not know why you are being downvoted. I do not agree with your view, but I think it is intelligent and well written. I hope folks stop downvoting anything they disagree with and go back to downvoting on tone, not alignment.
Humans have a bad track record predicting where a technology is going.
I do not know where AI heads in the next 5-25 years (I have my hypotheses, but they are likely off, too), but I see a useful tool that allows many people to experiment with and try things that they could not before and I do not see why should I subscribe to the doomer view.
As far as the moral character of the leaders: that's common, too. Many luminaries were, based on recollections, seen as pretty bad human beings and that didn't run off on their inventions. My 2c.
I suspect this is because the responsibility is not nearly settled. If I am wrong, would love to get a rebuttal, ideally with references.
For example, I found that two of my favorite software products were built by a single person (I assumed medium-sized team for each). That, if anything, made me appreciate them more. My 2c.
I know there is a strong desire to stick it to <pick an evil AI overlord>, but for the law to be useful (and, ideally, at least somewhat fair) we need a good legal framework. Which we do not have right now; otherwise people and NGOs would be shaking that tree already even if the government is not doing that.
For everything else the general mode is "can we make it work well enough". And when it breaks, well, we will curse and pry it open and either fix or rebuild it. There are many stories of a particular thing that was built long time ago by folks who are long gone and no one knows how it works or even where it physically is.
And it works fine; usually better than ensuring complete reliability from the get-go, when it is not clear if it is a long-term core feature or a kludge that will be obsolete soon. My 2c.
Just a personal view, but I feel great when I get that result. I had an effing problem that was a pain but is now fixed after a short conversation. I get to check and confirm that results are good for me. And it gets done without spending hours with random tech support ("did you try reinstalling your OS"?). My 2c.
For some you may be even able to leverage your software skills.
Yes, US will print money to inflate debt until it can no longer do so. Yes, the realignment after it cannot get treasuries sold externalkyexternally, will be painful. But this has happened before (in the world) and will happen again. The country doesn't have to fail in the way of the USSR.
And once the dust settles the long term state will probably be better for many countries, US included. My 2c.
They said a few years ago that Trump and Biden have a chance only if they run against each other.
So it is more nuanced. We will see what the candidates in 2 years look like.
Liability and safety requirements, when needed, should be placed on final product manufacturers, not the tools they use to build things, whether pencils or LLMs. My 2c.
Why? I, as the poster you replied to, do not see it this way at all. Any society, modern or not, can adapt to slow changes. And rapid changes would be at least as damaging several centuries ago, when for example 2-3 consecutive years of bad harvests meant a major upheaval.
Things can look a lot smoother after a few centuries. My 2c.
That's, uhm, normal and why groups form by interests, from cooking to hiking to reading to hackerspaces to rocketry. I see it as neither bad nor sad. My 2c.
"User asks for the wrong thing, LLMs corrupts production data" -- fair, do not do this, ME, SE or anyone else.
But I am not talking about safety or enterprise critical systems. In those systems a random SE also does not have the skills to comply with implied guardrails and should not have the authority to do damage. Those systems have explicit, enforced guardrails that apply to every request.
I am talking about prototyping and personal projects. We let softwies use a kitchen knife to cut beans and bread without a licensed ME supervision despite the fact that knives can (and do) cause a lot of damage. In the same vein we should let everyone use LLMs as just another tool and set their own safety vs functionality constraints.
If people feel that LLMs are so dangerous that they require specific licensing like firearms, explosives, etc. they should advocate for such licensing. But it will be a hard sell. My 2c.
I do not agree to that. Being able to make computers do your bidding is a very powerful skill, but is not universal. Software is a small part of the real world. If LLMs help non-software types tinker and try their own ideas more effectively, vive les LLM! If some folks who write CRUD apps or ad distribution algorithms feel threatened by LLMs, ... well, that is a trade worth taking. My 2c.
This! Groups with strong software skills (like HN) miss how LLMs unblock people who previously were unable to build what they wanted because they lacked the software skills.
I know an ME at work who have begged software folks for a year to build specific software he wants and was getting a mix of "we are too busy", "it does not work this way" and quick prototypes that were not quite what he wanted. Then he spent his free cycles with Claude building what he wanted. It took some time and some iterations and it may be ugly under the hood, but he wowed many folks with different types of demos of our system. The view he presented resonated with many users. And he feels empowered how that he can build tools he wants to try himself and do some projects that before he had to beg for, himself.
The software is being disrupted and disruptions are painful. But maintaining the status quo of several big tech names controlling everything we do on most electronic devices and optimizing for the doomscrolling time is not a worthy goal either. My 2c.
In many countries, both democratic and not, police can lie (e.g. to try to get a suspect make a mistake and expose some information).
Going to court is the standard, and usually the only, path for resolving disagreements that parties cannot easily resolve between themselves. Retaliating by putting the passenger on a no fly list deserves public shaming and pushback.
For example, a major grocery store can put people on a "do not come here again" list. But this is an easy way for a big business to hurt a person and should not be used for minor issues. I might see this "the business bans whoever it wants for any reason" as a legitimate defense, but not in a regulated business with high barrier to entry.
Everything else IMO is just fine. The airline landed the plane safely, made some promises (including a single room), could not keep all of those promises, the passenger pushed for more compensation than what airline offered, etc. That happens thousands of times every day all over the world. But this does not remove the big black mark of exploring putting a passenger on a no-fly list. My 2c.
Because kids, because pornography, because terrorism, whatever. This is too powerful an option for control freaks to resist.