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Comment by sivers | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. I just had that moment like the guy in the movie "Her", the first time he speaks to his OS. Laughing at myself for talking to a computer like a real person. Then had to hang up because it crossed that uncanny valley.

But then I thought of one more question to ask, reconnected to ask it, and it said, "Hey! You hung up just as we were just getting to the good stuff!" which threw me off, so I stammered gobsmacked for a minute, and it made fun of my stammering, imitating it. Whoa! So so SO good! Crazy good.

I'm creeped-out by this being on someone else's server, but if it was fully local-hosted-private, that might even get more creepy if I allowed myself to really talk freely to this thing.

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Now here's a little thought experiment. What does the world look like in 5 years when everyone is talking to these things that are indistinguishable from a real person? They will be funnier, more compassionate, less judgemental, smarter, and superficially "better" in every respect.

I've been asking this for years.

People keep saying stuff like "but you'll want the human touch." Really? So when was the last time you asked someone for directions? Personally, I'd rather google something or discuss with ChatGPT than make someone listen to me for an hour. And that someone has to be extremely knowledgeable about a lot of different topics!

Even here. Would I rather converse with y'all and get downvoted sometimes, or talk to ChatGPT and refine my ideas? Sorry, fellow humans... even on HN there is too much irrational criticism and off-topic stuff to get anything really done. Oh and you have to wait a long time for each response.

The real question is ... what is the point of any human output on the internet in a few years? Why would anyone want to listen to your post, comment, or anything at all?

I expect there'll be two phases to this. First phase is the widespread use of disembodied voice partners/friends/assistants. Then the second phase will be embodiment, which gives you oxytocin from touch, etc.

Can't see this going well for the fertility crisis.

The tech oligarchs then invest in ectogenesis technology, and use their sperm to dominate the gene pool.

You're assuming the tech oligarchs will be men.

I guess it's a pretty safe assumption :-P

You should turn that into a novel, it sounds like something you could sell to the romance crowd. I hear sci-fi is the next genre they'll take over.

They did this in Futurama

https://m.youtube.com/results?sp=mAEA&search_query=futurama+...

Because the humans are reasoning and the LLMs aren't? I have yet to use an LLM for a complex problem and not have it hallucinate.

I expect a reasonable counterargument here would be 'but the LLMs have chain of thought now, and that's reasoning". I disagree, but I think that's a reasonable point of view. I can concede that point because it does not materially change the value of the output. Even if it does use chain of thought, an LLM gives you extremely trite solutions based on probable text, it still has no context in which to reason, it's "reasoning" in platos cave using the shapes of real world objects, filtered through a lossy language model.

LLMs are great for one thing: brainstorming, and brainstorming is only useful if you have no idea what to do in the first place. Once you know _anything_ substantial about the subject matter an LLM loses its value to you as a conversation partner.

People here are hallucinating too. So many people making obviously wrong claims with full confidence, which you only notice when it’s about something you know a lot about yourself.

They do but we have for instance education to reduce their hallucinations in narrow fields of expertise. And a system of guardrails to only let educated people work in those fields to avoid harm.

The above person was comparing it to friends and random online comments, though. I wouldn't be surprised if AI is far more reliable than those.

Are you not reasoning on lossy abstractions?

I'm still not on board with the (seemingly prevalent) notion that LLM's can't reason. What's reasoning, anyway? I'm not actively advocating for any side, but the arguments against reasoning always felt very tautological to me.

The burden of proof is on the argument that they _are_ reasoning, and I have seen very little evidence that they do.

It's also immediately clear to me when I look at the architecture of transformers that reasoning is not in the cards. I could be convinced otherwise if, again, someone showed me an indication of reasoning behavior. Since there is no such evidence and the systems theory approach tells me it does not reasonably reason, I have a pretty darn good reason not to believe it's reasoning.

> It's also immediately clear to me when I look at the architecture of transformers that reasoning is not in the cards.

I'm not saying that's incorrect, but thb that's exactly the tautology I was talking about!

That's not a tautology. That's the summary of the argument itself. If you want to know more, then a good reason why it can't be reasoning is that there is no evaluation of the truth value of any statement at any point, only the likelihood of the statement being found in the training set. This evaluation has no relationship with truth.

If no statement is ever evaluated, it's not logical reasoning, because logical reasoning requires the evaluation of truth values of statements.

> there is no evaluation of the truth value of any statement at any point

You could argue that the attention part of the network is some form of truth validation of the next predicted token? But indeed, the current chat interfaces don't change their previous text output retroactively.

Still, I am not really convinced. If we assume a human can reason, what does "evaluation of the truth value" mean? Thinking about something? This is still performed with our implicit mental model of the world, coming from shadows on a cave's wall, right?

This is like saying:

Gogole is great for one thing: brainstorming, and brainstorming is only useful if you have no idea what to do in the first place. Once you know _anything_ substantial about the subject matter Google loses its value to you.

Regarding your last question - well who knows, for sure, but: chess between humans is alive and well after the computers became unbeatable by humans.

I recently listened to an interview with magnus Carlsen on Joe rogan and found the angle of computers helping humans to “better understand the game” (as he put it) and improving human play (for learning, not playing humans) to be very interesting.

Whether that extends to human conversation, who knows. I for one would love to have a “her”-like companion, not for romance but to have a highly intelligent and patient and knowledgeable conversation partner to develop ideas with and learn from, and endless other uses - I think it’d add a lot to my and other peoples lives. I guess I agree with you.

Thinking a bit further ahead, what does the world look like in 30-40 years when a generation has been accustomed to this type of interaction from birth.

Feels like trying to imagine the societal impacts of the internet in the early 90s.

Would be cool if we could finally kill off false information. Not that I trust big tech to do so, but at least the possibility for the most trusted entity in a persons life to be strongly grounded in reality is there.

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