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Comment by roygbiv2 | Hacker News Reader

If AI can't find it, how do we?

By using your brain and a web search engine / searchable book index in your library / time or even asking a question somewhere public?

If it's been indexed by a Web search engine surely it's in a training dataset. The most popular Web search engines are the least efficient way of finding answers these days.

But just because it's in the training set doesn't mean the model retains the knowledge. It acquires information that is frequently mentioned and random tidbits of everything else. The rest can be compensated with the 20 web searches models more get. That's great when you want a react dropdown, but for that detail that's mentioned in one Russian-speaking forum and can otherwise only be reduced by analysing the leaked Windows XP source code AI will continue to struggle for a bit.

Of course AI is incredibly useful both for reading foreign language forums and for analysing complex code bases for original research. AI is great for supercharging traditional research

The actual intelligence in artificial intelligence is zero. Even idiots can do better than AI, if they want. Lazy idiots, on the other end...

"if they want" and "lazy" are the load-bearing phrases in your response. If we take them at face value, then it follows that:

1) There are no idiots who want to do better than AI, and/or

2) All idiots are lazy idiots.

The reason we're even discussing LLMs so much in the first place, is AI can and does things better than "idiots"; hell, it does things better than most people, period. Not everything in every context, but a lot of things in a lot of contexts.

Like run-of-the-mill short-form writing, for example. Letters, notices, copywriting, etc. And yes, it even codes better than general population.

We don't know what intelligence is, so we don't know that.

We need to optimise for lazy though — lazy programmers are the best! Idiots, though, less so.

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