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Comment by more_corn | Hacker News Reader

My bet is on unverified AI going the way of the dodo. I’m sorta sick of hallucinated nonsense. I also don’t see a business use case for a lot of “cool” ai products.

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I don't know if you're familiar with how LLMs work, but after diving a bit into that space, I'm a "realistic enthusiast" after a lifetime as a deep skeptic. For me it's like the beginning of the internet (yes...old). It's clear there's something profoundly different and potentially enormously useful going on. Exactly how it will end up being used and who will make money from it is unclear. We know from experience that those questions ended up having answers different than we anticipated with the internet and I'd expect the same to happen with AI.

The parent post is very orthogonal to yours. That isn't saying that LLMs won't be useful -- it's saying that unverified LLMs are of limited value.

This rings true. There's a low economic value for performing activities when it doesn't matter if the output is true or accurate.

Unverified LLMs can generated unlimited output that cannot be trusted; this is output that can approximate truth at times.

I suppose the long term question is whether the approximation is sufficient for value-generating purposes. It clearly is sufficient in cases where it outperforms the status quo (example: summarizing customer feedback).

This is also the case for unverified and verified humans, and one thing I can say with absolute confidence is that the majority of internet content has always, and will always be unverified opinion and ideology. As is the majority of human minds. The most valuable thing to come out of AI is the forced introspection about ourselves. It's "us" times N. For better or worse.

I don't know, remember the controversy over the wildly inaccurate historical AI images? That could serve some satirical products.

Weren't the majority of those induced by manipulated politics rather than it being a base characteristic of the technology?

In my optimistic moments, I think that.

In my realistic moments I think that we will rewrite medical law, banking law, and privacy law and so on to accomodate the shitty AI children of billionaires. Misdiagnosed by "AI"? Too bad. Lose a job because of AI? Too bad. Sentenced to death by an AI-powered criminal investigation? Too bad.

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