Whenever I hear the AI hype cycle, I'm always reminded of expert systems and how they were going to revolutionize the world.
The problem with expert systems is that even if the tooling was perfect the people using them needed a rather nuanced and sophisticated understanding of ontologies. That just wasn’t going to happen. There is not enough of that kind of expertise to go around. Efforts to train people largely failed. I think the intentional undermining of developer salaries pushed a lot of smart people out of the software industry making the problem even worse.
That’s what makes AI special, the ability to deliver value even when used by unsophisticated operators. Many workflows can largely stay the same and AI can be sprinkled in where it makes the most sense. I use it for documentation writing and UI asset production and it’s better in that role than the people I used to pay.
Sometimes the future just gets here before we're ready for it.
Generative models are already changing how people live and work. Ignore the grifters, and ignore the entrepreneurs. Look at civilians, regular folks, and watch how it impacts them.
It doesn't have anything to do with the libertarian vision of BTC but it's the same technical concept.
It's like hiring someone to go to the gym for you, as far as I can see.
They are more intelligent than the average person I deal with on a daily basis.
The one thing us meat bags have going for us is that we have bodies and can do things.
No they aren't. They are differently intelligent. Which includes being more "intelligent" in some ways, and vastly less in others.
It is an all too common mistake to infer an LLM's capability based on what it would mean if a human could produce the same output. But it's not the same thing at all. A human that could produce the quality of many LLM outputs I've seen would be a person with superintelligence (and supercreativity, for that matter). But a human who is constrained to only the output that an LLM is capable of would be an untrustworthy idiot.
What's interesting to me is looking at the human+LLM combos that have recently entered the world. (As in, everyone who is regularly using good quality LLMs.) What are they capable of? Hopefully they'll be at least as intelligent as a regular human, though some of the articles on people blindly accepting LLM hallucinations do make me wonder.
Good luck with that genie
eBay, Amazon, Google, Yahoo etc were all around at the time and making serious money.
Not sure who those people were but it was very obvious to most that the internet was here to stay.
I think doubt is OK, at least it is before any particular technology or product has actually proven itself.