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Comment by mr_toad | Hacker News Reader

Current LLMs are not the end-all of LLMs, and chain of thought frontier models are not the end-all of AI.

I’d be wary of confidently claiming what AI can and can’t do, at the risk of looking foolish in a decade, or a year, or at the pace things are moving, even a month.

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That's entirely true. We've tried hard to stick with general principles that we don't think will readily be overturned. But doubtless we've been too assertive for some people's taste and doubtless we'll be wrong in places. Hence the choice to develop not a static book but rather living document that will evolve with time. The field is developing too fast for anything else.

With respect to what the future brings, we do try to address a bit of that in Lesson 16: https://thebullshitmachines.com/lesson-16-the-first-step-fal...

> we don't think will readily be overturned

I think that’s entirely the problem. You’re making linear predictions of the capabilities of non-linear processes. Eventually the predictions and the reality will diverge.

There's no evidence to support that's the case.

Every time someone claimed “emerging” behavior in LLMs it was exactly that. I can probably count more than 100 of these cases, many unpublished, but surely it is easy to find evidence by now.

Said the turkey to the farmer

I don't think that's how that metaphor works.

Not quite, but it was the closest pithy quote I could think of to convey the point that things can be false for a long time before they are suddenly true without warning.

How about "Yes, they laughed at Galileo, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown?"

We heard alllllll the same hype about how revolutionary the blockchain was going to be and look how that turned out.

It's a virtue to point out the emperor has no clothes. It's not a virtue to insist clothes tech is close to being revolutionary and if you just understand it harder, you'd see the space where the clothes go.

The post seems to be talking about the current capabilities of large language models. We can certainly talk about what they can or cannot do as of today, as that is pretty much evidence based.

They saw you coming in part 16.

That shouldn't give them any more merit that their current iteration deserves.

You could say the same thing about spaceships or self diving cars.

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