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Comment by Mordisquitos | Hacker News Reader

Verging off-topic, but is there a specific reason that so many of the replies to the tweet are applying the argument analogously to index-fund investing?

I'm not even sure whether the spirit of those replies is mostly to criticise the argument by showing it is absurd (on the premise that index investing is a known good choice), or whether they aim to criticise index investing itself (on the premise that the argument is good).

Maybe I am missing some context. Has Paul Graham strongly supported index funds, and so are these replies some kind of "gotcha"? Or is there some general disdain for index funds in some circles, and so are they just taking the opportunity to disparage the value of index funds by using this argument?

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I am both an index investor and an AI enthusiast, and I think it’s an excellent analogy.

If you are an investor who does not have interest in maximizing your returns and you just want a place to park your savings, an index fund is great, and will return the market average return.

Similarly, if there is a skill that you need that is not your “special” skill, it makes sense to subscribe to the “market average” of that skill, as implemented by a statistical language model, which is in a sense “averaging” over the collective language skill of the entire internet.

In both cases, the ingredients of the “average” are formed by the people who try to do better. Active investors, including hedge funds and short sellers, think they can do better, and they provide signal that in turn feeds back into the index.

Similarly, anybody who thinks they are better at writing than the language model is free to try to outperform it, and eventually will feed back into the training data.

I think criticizing the argument. It's so common for a non-positive logical conclusion to be sort of a half hearted reductio ad absurdum (disproving by showing the consequence is absurd) that many people mistake this for happening when it's not. So, they argue against the sub-text that may or may not actually be there.

Or, maybe they're just copying the joke. (The joke aspect being that even when saying how AI won't dominate everything, he's referring to human works as "training data", so it's at least dominating the framing.)

I said that there https://twitter.com/arjie/status/1635693927071387648?s=20 some hour and a half after his post which is about when I saw it.

I didn't realize others also did. They felt isomorphic to me. If the AI generated content is regurgitation of previous content, novel human-generated content will stand out and human-generated content will become valuable. i.e. the balancing mechanism is that novelty will beat dumb replication in the same way that an active manager who has true alpha can beat a passive fund.

Now, personally, I think that multimodal LLM-groups plus feedback plus many more sensors is not far from where we are, so I mentioned that if AIs do become creative it's not a problem - they will be us or better! I, personally, believe that's where we'll go.

Anyway, I'm not too inclined to discuss in this forum (though we can chat if you're in SF) since it's easy to misunderstand and jump into argument spirals, but I just wanted to make it clear that it's not a "gotcha" or a dunk or anything like that. Nothing is being disparaged.

It's just a conversation like a normal conversation where you bring up what you think and mention ideas you have that others might find interesting. If many others have brought it up, about the best I can say is that in this respect it appears I am not particularly inventive - perhaps the best evidence that LLMs are already human-like ;)

I personally found the index fund comparison quite thought-provoking. Not necessarily supportive or countering the original point, but interesting.

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