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Comment by xilinx_guy | Hacker News Reader

It's totally hilarious, how organizations are training large language models and calling them "intelligent". These overgrown & overstuffed stochastic parrots are just toys to amuse and shock the ignorant. Once the novelty wears off, and everyone understands the serious limitations of these models, it will be back to business as usual. "That's not really AI" will return as a catchphrase.

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They can do things we consider indicative of intelligence. To consistently deny the novel usefulness of large language models requires constraining intelligence to a smaller and more exclusionary definition until, I'm sure in the weeks before AGI hits, everyone bearish on AI will agree that the one true definition of intelligence is the ability to independently train and deploy an intelligence smarter than yourself.

>to consistently deny the novel usefulness of large language models requires constraining intelligence to a smaller and more exclusionary definition

I'm not quite sure what you're talking about or if you even have a real definition of intelligence. These newer AI systems don't even fit the most basic definition of intelligence, let alone possessing such broad qualities of intelligence that we have to narrow its definition to keep ourselves exceptional. GPT literally isn't capable of self-directed action, learning and thinking. Instead, We factually know that GPT is essentially as the comment you reply to describes and simply applies probability analysis algorithms to enormous data sets, just to then fail at even basic reasoning tasks outside of the information compressed parroting it is algorithmically good at.

The amount of AI woo on this site is astonishing sometimes at this point.

My wife’s a journalist and she already uses ChatGPT for a good deal of gruntwork.

Requires a lot of human oversight but is quite helpful.

It's important to not only look at what the technology can currently do, but also at the future technological trajectory of the technology.

Based off of past data points it is realistic to logically project that the human oversight will be needed less and less as the technology improves.

They're very helpful for a lot of things, but it's at most a revolution on the scale of the smartphone, not the singularity. It may define the next fifteen years of tech (I'm withholding judgement), but it's not the end of the world as we know it.

Isn’t that conflating the present with the future? That they are very helpful is to say nothing about what they will be able to do.

It’s like predicting that a motorcar will never outrun a horse because current motorcars can only run at 5mph.

Transformers were introduced a mere six years ago.

The safe bet with any technology is that it will be capable of at least an order of magnitude more performance than whatever biology has been able to come up with.

Horses vs cars. Birds vs aircraft. Carlsen vs Stockfish. Betting on biology is a very unsafe position to take.

I agree. We merely have new chisels with which to sculpt.

Meanwhile, the layperson buys the hype and insists that the tools can work themselves. Maybe it's due to fear and insecurity.

It's a tool that will allow 1 man to do the work of 10, 50 or 100. People with capital/money do not need to fear it as it will allow them to get work multiple times their investment than previously but people that do the work should worry as the value/money for the work they do collectively will decrease so the salaries they get individually will also decrease.

When you take into account each year the cost of electricity because of solar as well as the price of chips coming down. The cost of running a LLM in 10 years will be 1-2% of what it is today.

Nothing brings progress as fast as war/competition with the billions being spent by the largest companies openly and by countries behind closed doors on this tech to think this is what will be is a very myopic view.

I think that while this is true, it does not matter at all. As a labourer, what you are getting paid for is not 'to understand' stuff, but actually 'to do' stuff. If an overgrown language model can 'do stuff'; I don't think it matters, at all, whether it understands anything or not. From the perspective of the company/user, it is intelligent.

This is all oversold hype meant to distract you from the real problems. As you say, once the novelty wears off we will return to our cubicles (if lucky) none the wiser.

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