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Comment by mistrial9 | Hacker News Reader

splendid sales headline - however, human communication is varied and multi-layered. Since there are too many angles to summarize -- suffice it to say that IMHO a healthy skepticism is warranted, along with evidence and test results.

link to cited repo: https://github.com/brendenlake/MLC/tree/v1.0.0

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I will take this article with a bag of salt but I think we are very close to solving the human communication problem. Not because the machines are perfect but because the human, our benchmarks, are prone to mistakes and so a "close enough" machine would pass as a human just fine.

There is inherently no solution to the human communication problem. The mistake has always been in thinking technology would unite us and improve communication when clearly it's doing the opposite.

I agree. But "Nature" is quite a name.

And desperate to retain their relevance in the face of the onslaught of advancements that open access papers has unleashed.

So to retain their relevance you claim they abandon academic standards and sensationalize an openly accessible study that anyone can read and thus dispute the article. Okay.

Anyone can read but most press will read and believe the abstract, and write breathless articles on it.

It isn't exactly unheard of for them to do that. They'll just wipe their hands of it afterwards if it turns out to be bad science by saying that their goal isn't to publish research that's guaranteed correct.

I don't think it is quite that intentional, but just as human economic systems regularly create bubbles there are blind spots in the academic science collective. People desperately want to get in on LLMs right now.

That's a category error. You don't submit your manuscript to a prestige journal in order to publish it but to take advantage of their PR machinery. The services Nature provides are very good and cost-effective, but you have to meet their standards.

As research papers, the papers published in Nature/Science/etc. are rarely that useful. Because the journals target the general scientifically literate audience, the interesting details are usually hidden in supplementary material. And the supplements are often little more than giant info dumps that nobody has paid sufficient attention to.

It would be nice to live in a world where such PR services are unnecessary, but that's not the world we are living in. The academia is very competitive, and there is never enough funding and never enough good jobs.

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