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Comment by gloosx | Hacker News Reader

The problem Sabine tries to communicate is that reality is different from what the cash-heads behind main commercial models are trying to portray. They push the narrative that they’ve created something akin to human cognition, when in reality, they’ve just optimised prediction algorithms on an unprecedented scale. They are trying to say that they created Intelligence, which is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills, but we all know the only real Intelligence they are creating is the collection of information of military or political value.

The technology is indeed amazing and very amusing, but like all the good things in the hands of corporate overlords, it will be slowly turning into profit-milking abomination.

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> They push the narrative that they’ve created something akin to human cognition

This is your interpretation of what these companies are saying. I'd love to see if some company specifically anything like that?

Out of the last 100 years how many inventions have been made that could make any human awe like llms do right now? How many things from today when brought back into 2010 would make the person using it make it feel like they're being tricked or pranked? We already take them for granted even thought they've only been around for less than half of a decade.

LLMs aren't a catch all solution to the world's problems; or something that is going to help us in every facet of our lives; or an accelerator for every industry that exists out there. But at no point in history could you talk to your phone about general topics, get information, practice language skills, build an assistant that teaches your kid about the basics of science, use something to accelerate your work in a many different ways etc...

Looking at llms shouldn't be boolean, it shouldn't be between they're the best thing ever invented vs they're useless; but it seems like everyone presents the issue in this manner and Sabine is part of that problem.

No major company directly states "We have created human-like intelligence," they intentionally use suggestive language that leads people to think AI is approaching human cognition. This helps with hype, investment, and PR.

>I'd love to see if some company specifically anything like that?

1. DeepMind researchers: Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4 - https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712

2. "GPT-4 is not AGI, but it does exhibit more general intelligence than previous models." - Sam Altman

3. Musk has claimed that AI is on the path to "understanding the universe." His branding of Tesla's self-driving AI as "Full Self-Driving" (FSD) also misleadingly suggests a level of autonomous reasoning that doesn't exist.

4. Meta's AI chief scientist, Yann LeCun, has repeatedly said they are working on giving AI "common sense" and "world models" similar to how humans think.

>Out of the last 100 years how many inventions have been made that could make any human awe like llms do right now?

ELIZA is an early natural language processing computer program developed from 1964 to 1967

ELIZA's creator, Weizenbaum, intended the program as a method to explore communication between humans and machines. He was surprised and shocked that some people, including Weizenbaum's secretary, attributed human-like feelings to the computer program. 60 years ago.

So as you can see, us humans are not too hard to fool with this.

> they intentionally use suggestive language that leads people to think AI is approaching human cognition. This helps with hype, investment, and PR.

As do all companies in the world. If you want to buy a hammer, the company will sell it as the best hammer in the world. It's the norm.

I don't know exactly what your point is with ELIZA?

> So as you can see, us humans are not too hard to fool with this.

I mean ok? How is that related to having a 30 minute conversation with ChatGPT where it teaches you a language? Or Claude outputting an entire application in a single go? Or having them guide you through fixing your fridge by uploading the instructions? Or using NotebookLM to help you digest a scientific paper?

Im not saying LLMs are not impressive or useful — Im pointing out that corporations behind commercial AI models are capitalising on our emotional response to natural language prediction. This phenomenon isnt new – Weizenbaum observed it 60 years ago, even with the simplest of algorithms like ELIZA.

Your example actually highlights this well. AI excels at language, so it’s naturally strong in teaching (especially for language learning ;)). But coding is different. It’s not just about syntax; it requires problem-solving, debugging, and system design — areas where AI struggles because it lacks true reasoning.

There’s no denying that when AI helps you achieve or learn something new, it’s a fascinating moment — proof that we’re living in 2025, not 1967. But the more commercialised it gets, the more mythical and misleading the narrative becomes

You originally said

> They push the narrative that they’ve created something akin to human cognition

I am saying they're not doing that, they're doing sales and marketing and it's you that interprets this as possible/true. In my analogy if the company said it's a hammer that can do anything, you wouldn't use it to debug elixir. You understand what hammers are for and you realize the scope is different. Same here. It's a tool that has its uses and limits.

> Your example actually highlights this well. AI excels at language, so it’s naturally strong in teaching (especially for language learning ;)). But coding is different. It’s not just about syntax; it requires problem-solving, debugging, and system design — areas where AI struggles because it lacks true reasoning.

I disagree since I use it daily and Claude is really good at coding. It's saving me a lot of time. It's not gonna build a new Waymo but I don't expect it to. But this is besides the point. In the original tweet what Sabine is implying is that it's useless and OpenAI should be worth less than a shoe factory. When in fact this is a very poor approach to look at LLMs and their value and both sides of the spectrum are problematic (those that say it's a catch all AGI and those that say hurr it couldn't solve P versus NP it's trash).

>they're doing sales and marketing and it's you that interprets this as possible/true.

You've moved the goalpost from "they're not saying it" to "they're saying, but you're not supposed to believe it."

The companies are not doing it. This is what I am saying.

You admitted earlier that they are:

Person you replied to: they intentionally use suggestive language that leads people to think AI is approaching human cognition. This helps with hype, investment, and PR.

Your response: As do all companies in the world. If you want to buy a hammer, the company will sell it as the best hammer in the world. It's the norm.

I think one difference between a hammer and an LLM is that hammers have existed since forever, so common sense is assumed to be there as to what their purpose is. For LLMs though, people are still discovering on a daily basis to what extent they can usefully apply them, so it's much easier to take such promises made by companies out of context if you are not knowledgeable/educated on LLMs and their limitations.

As a programmer (and GOFAI buff) for 60 years who was initially highly critical of the notion of LLMs being able to write code because they have no mental states, I have been amazed by the latest incarnations being able to write complex functioning code in many cases. There are, however, specific ways that not being reasoners is evident ... e.g., they tend to overengineer because they fail to understand that many situations aren't possible. I recently had an example where one node in a tree was being merged into another, resulting in the child list of the absorbed node being added to the child list of the kept node. Without explicit guidance, the LLM didn't "understand" (that is, its response did not reflect) that a child node can only have one parent so collisions weren't possible.

> proof that we’re living in 2025, not 1967. But the more commercialised it gets, the more mythical and misleading the narrative becomes

You seem to be living in 2024, or 2023. People generally have far more pragmatic expectations these days, and the companies are doing a lot less overselling ... in part because it's harder to come up with hype that exceeds the actual performance of these systems.

> system design — areas where AI struggles because it lacks true reasoning.

Others addressed code, but with system design specifically - this is more of an engineering field now, in that there's established patterns, a set of components at various levels of abstraction, and a fuck ton of material about how to do it, including but not limited to everything FAANG publishes as preparatory material for their System Design interviews. At this point in time, we have both a good theoretical framework and a large collection of "design patterns" solving common problems. The need for advanced reasoning is limited, and almost no one is facing unique problems here.

I've tested it recently, and suffice it to say, Claude 3.7 Sonnet can design systems just fine - in fact much better than I'd expect a random senior engineer to. Having the breadth of knowledge and being really good at fitting patterns is a big advantage it has over people.

ELIZA was not a natural language processor, and the fact that some people were easily fooled by a program that produced canned responses based on keywords in the text but was presented as a psychotherapist is not relevant to the issue here--it's a fallacy of affirmation of the consequent.

Also,

"4. Meta's AI chief scientist, Yann LeCun, has repeatedly said they are working on giving AI "common sense" and "world models" similar to how humans think."

completely misses the mark. That LLMs don't do this is a criticism from old-school AI researchers like Gary Marcus; LeCun is saying that they are addressing the criticism by developing the sorts of technology that Marcus says are necessary.

How about Sam Altman literally saying on twitter "We know how to build AGI now"? That close enough?

How many examples of CEOs writing shit like that can you name? I can name more than one. Elon's been saying that camera driven level 5 autonomous driving will be ready in 2021. Did you believe him?

Elon? Never did, and for the record, also never really understood his fanboys. I never even bought a Tesla. And no, besides these two guys, I don´t really remember many other CEOs making such revolutionary statements. That is usually the case when people understand their technology and are not ready to bullshit. There is one small differentiation though: At least self-driving cars hype was believable because it seemed almost like a finite-search problem, like along the lines of, how hard could it be to process X input signals from lidars and image frames and marry it to an advanced variation of what is basically a PID controller. And at least there is a defined use-case. With genAI, we have no idea what the problem definition and even problem space is, and the main use-case that the companies seem to be pushing down our throats (aside from code assistants) is "summarising your email" and chatting with your smartphone, for lonely people. Ew, thanks, but no thanks.

I mean you really don't know multiple CEOs in jail that hyped their stock to the moon? Theranos? Nikola?

That's reallyyyy trying hard to minimise the capability of LLMs and their potentials that we're still discovering. But you do you I guess.

No mate, not everyone is trying hard to prove some guy on the Internet wrong. I do remember these two but to be honest, they were not on top of my mind in this context, probably because it's a different example - or what are you trying to say? That the people running AI companies should go to jail for deceiving their investors? This is different to Theranos. Holmes actively marketed and PRESENTED a "device" which did not exist as specified (they relied on 3rd party labs doing their tests in the background). For all that we know, OpenAI and their ilk are not doing that really. So you're on thin ice here. Amazon came close though, with their failed Amazon Go experiment, but they only invested their own money, so no damage was done to anyone. In either case your example is showing what? That lying is normal in the business world and should be done by the CEOs as part of their job description? That they should or should not go to jail for it? I am really missing your point here, no offence.

No offense taken

> In either case your example is showing what? That lying is normal in the business world and should be done by the CEOs as part of their job description? That they should or should not go to jail for it? I am really missing your point here, no offence.

If you run through the message chain you'll see first that the comment OP is claiming companies market llms as AGI, and then the next guy quotes Altmans tweet to support it. I am saying companies don't claim llms are AGI and that CEOs are doing CEO things; my examples are Elon (didn't go to jail btw) and the other two that did.

> For all that we know, OpenAI and their ilk are not doing that really.

I am on the same page here.

I think you completely missed the point. Altman is definitely engaging in 'creative' messaging, so do other GenAI CEOs. But unlike Holmes and others, they are careful to wrap it into conditionals and future tense and this vague corporate speak about how something "feels" like this and that and not that it definitely is this or that. Most of us dislike the fact that they are indeed implying this stuff as being almost AGI, just around the corner, just a few more years, just a few more hundred billion dollars wasted in datacenters. When we can see on a day-to-day basis, that their tools are just advanced text generators. Anyone who finds them 'mindblowing' clearly does not have a complex enough use case.

I think you are missing the point. I never said it's the same nor is that what I am arguing.

> Anyone who finds them 'mindblowing' clearly does not have a complex enough use case.

What is the point of llms? If their only point is complex use cases then they're useless, let's throw them away. If their point/scope/application is wider and they're doing something for a non negligible percentage of people then who are you to gauge whether they deserve to be mindblowing to someone or not regardless of their use case?

What is the point of LLMs? It seems nobody really knows, including the people selling them. They are a solution in search of a problem. But if you figure it out in the meanwhile, make sure to let everyone know. Personally I'd be happy with just having back Google as it was between roughly 2006-2019 (RIP) in the place of the overly verbose statistical parrots.

CEOs represent their companies. "The company didn't say it, the CEO did" is a nonsensical distinction.

You went from "they're not saying it" to "and you believe them when they say it??" Pretty quickly

I said the company is not saying this and not using it for marketing - and this stays true. CEOs hyping their stock is par for the course.

A CEO is the most visible representative of a company.

A statement on their personal Twitter might not be "the company's" statement, but who cares?

Sam Altman's social media IS OpenAI marketing.

If it didn't officially come from the marketing department it's only sparkling overhype right?

“We know how to build something” is pretty different from “our in-market products are something”

> Out of the last 100 years how many inventions have been made that could make any human awe like llms do right now?

Lots e.g. vacuum cleaners.

> But at no point in history could you talk to your phone

You could always "talk" to your phone just like you could "talk" to a parrot or a dog. What does that even mean?

If we're talking about LLMs, I still haven't been able to have a real conversation with 1. There's too much of a lag to feel like a conversation and often doesn't reply with anything related.

Of course they aren't "real" conversations but I can dialog with LLMs as a means of clarifying my prompts. The comment about parrots and dogs is made in bad faith.

> The comment about parrots and dogs is made in bad faith

Not necessarily. (Some aphonic, adactyl downvoters seem to have possibly tried to nudge you into noticing that your idea above is against some entailed spirit the guidelines.)

The poster may have meant that for the use natural to him, he feels in the results the same utility of discussing with a good animal. "Clarifying one's prompts" may be effective in some cases, but it's probably not what others seek. It is possible that many want the good old combination of "informative" and "insightful": in practice there may be issues with both.

> "Clarifying one's prompts" may be effective in some cases but it's probably not what others seek

It's not even that. Can the LLM run away, stop the conversation or even say no? It's as much as your boss "talking" to you about the task and not giving you a chance to respond. Is that a talk? It's 1-way.

E.g. ask the LLM who invented Wikipedia. It will respond with "facts". If I ask a friend, the reply might be "look it up yourself". This a real conversation. Until then.

Even parrots and dogs can respond differently than a forced reply exactly how you need it.

True - but LLMs can do this.

A German Onion-like magazine has a wrapper around ChatGPT that behaves like that called „DeppGPT“ (IdiotGPT), likely implemented with a decent prompt.

If you have something to say, just say it directly and clearly.

And the poster clearly did not mean what you say he "may have meant".

By your own admission, those are not dialogues, but merely query optimisations in an advanced query language. Like how you would tune an SQL query until your get the data you are expecting to see. That's what it is for the LLMs.

Point and context completely missed ... and this is a radical misrepresentation of the process.

> If we're talking about LLMs, I still haven't been able to have a real conversation with 1. There's too much of a lag to feel like a conversation

Imagine the LLM is halfway through its journey to the Moon, and mentally correct for ~1.5 seconds of light lag.

> and often doesn't reply with anything related.

Use better microphone, or stop mumbling.

Right on the money. Plus vacuum cleaners are actually useful and predictable in their inputs and outputs :)

Sure, a vacuum cleaner is the same.

> If we're talking about LLMs, I still haven't been able to have a real conversation with 1. There's too much of a lag to feel like a conversation and often doesn't reply with anything related.

I don't believe this one bit. But keep on trucking.

> Sure, a vacuum cleaner is the same.

> I don't believe this one bit. But keep on trucking.

You sure? Isn't that contradictory? It can't be the same if you don't believe it...

Did you need an /s to understand sarcasm?

> This is your interpretation of what these companies are saying. I'd love to see if some company specifically anything like that?

What is the layman to make of the claim that we now have “reasoning” models? Certainly sounds like a claim of human-like cognition, even though the reality is different.

Studies have shown that corvids are capable of reasoning. Does that sound like a claim of human level cognition?

I think you’re going too far in imagining what one group of people will make of what another group of people is saying, without actually putting yourself in either group.

Much as i agree with the point about overhyping from companies, I'd be more sympathetic to this point of view if she acknowledged the merits of the technology.

Yes, it hallucinates and if you replace your brain with one of these things, you won't last too long. However, it can do things which, in the hands of someone experienced, are very empowering. And it doesn't take an expert to see the potential.

As it stands, it sounds like a case of "it's great in practice but the important question is how good it is in theory."

If it works for you...

I use LLMs. They're somewhat useful if you're on a non niche problem. They're also useful instead of search engines, but that's because search has been entshittified more than because a LLM is better.

However 90% of the marketing material about them is simply disgusting. The bigwigs sound like they're spreading a new religion, and most enthusiasts sound like they're new converts to some sect.

If you're marketing it as a tool, fine. If you're marketing it as the third and fourth coming of $DEITY, get lost.

I completely agree about the marketing material. I'm not sure about 90% but that's not something I have a strong opinion on. The stream from the bigwigs is the same song being played in a different tune and I'm inoculated to it.

I'm not marketing it. I'm not a marketer. I'm a developer trying to create an informed opinion on its utility and the marketing speak you criticize is far away from the truth.

The problem is this notion that it's just completely bullshit. The way it's worded irks me. "I genuinely don't understand...". It's quite easy to see the utility and acknowledging that doesn't, in any way, detract from valid criticisms of the technology and the people who peddle.

Exactly. It’s so strange to read so many comments that boil down to “because some marketing people are over-promising, I will retaliate by choosing to believe false things”

Don't forget that before "AI" there was crypto. Same attitude among their promoters.

So someone who isn't already invested can genuinely draw the conclusion they're similar and not worth the time.

Edit: oh wait

>because some marketing people are over-promising

all "AI" marketing people that I've seen. Ok 98%. And all my LLM info is from what gets posted on HN.

> I will retaliate by choosing to believe false things

"I will retaliate by cataloguing them as pathological liars and not waste my time with them any more".

But it’s not the marketers building the products. This is like saying “because the car salesman lied about this Prius’ gas mileage, I’ll retaliate by refusing to believe hybrids are any better than pure ICE cars and will buy a pickup”.

It hurts nobody but the person choosing ignorance.

No, I'm afraid it's like 90% of the Prius owners who post something about their car post fake gas mileages.

And 100% of the marketers of course.

I disagree, but even conceding the point — why would that make you choose to believe falsehoods just to stick it to the liars?

> I use LLMs. They're somewhat useful if you're on a non niche problem. They're also useful instead of search engines...

The problem for me is that I could use that type of assistance precisely when I hit that "niche problem" zone. Non-niche problems are usually already solved.

Like search. Popular search engines like Google and Bing are mostly garbage because they keep trying to shove gen AI in my face with made up answers. I have no such problems with my SearxNG instance.

> I could use that type of assistance precisely when I hit that "niche problem" zone

Tough luck. On the other hand, we're still justified in asking for money to do the niche problems with our fleshy brains, right? In spite of the likes of Altman saying every week that we'll be obsoleted in 5 years by his products. Like ... cold fusion? Always 5 years away?

[I have more hope for cold fusion than these "AIs" though.]

> Popular search engines like Google and Bing are mostly garbage because they keep trying to shove gen AI in my face with made up answers.

No they became garbage significantly before "AI". Google at least has gradually reduced the number of results returned and expanded the search scope to the point that you want a reminder of the i2c api syntax on a raspberry pi and they return 20 beginner tutorial results that show you how to unpack the damn thing and do the first login instead.

I hate to bring an ad hominem into this, but Sabine is a YouTube influencer now. That's her current career. So I'd assume this Tweet storm is also pushing a narrative on its own, because that's part of doing the work she chose to do to earn a living.

Pinch of salt & all.

What you have done there is to discount statements that may build up a narrative - and still may remain fair... On which basis? Possibly they do not match your own narrative?

While true, I think this is more likely a question of framing or anchoring — I am continuously impressed and surprised by how good AI is, but I recognise all the criticisms she's making here. They're amazing, but at the same time they make very weird mistakes.

They actually remind me of myself, as I experience being a native English speaker now living in Berlin and attempting to use a language I mainly learned as an adult.

I can often appear competent in my use of the language, but then I'll do something stupid like asking someone in the office if we have a "Gabelstapler" I can borrow — Gabelstapler is "forklift truck", I meant to ask for a stapler, which is "Tacker" or "Hefter", and I somehow managed to make this mistake directly after carefully looking up the word. (Even this is a big improvement for me, as I started off like Officer Crabtree from Allo' Allo').

LLMs seem akin to parts of human cognition, maybe the initial fast thinking bit when ideas pop up in a second of two. But any human writing a review with links to sources would look them up and check the are they right ones that match the initial idea. Current LLMs don't seem to do that, at least the ones Sabine complains about.

Akin to human cognition but still a few bricks short of a load, as it were.

You lay the rhetoric on so thick (“cash heads”, “pushing the narrative”, “corporate overlords”, “profit-making abomination”) that it’s hard to understand your actual claim.

Are you trying to say that LLMs are useful now but you think that will stop being the case at some point in the future?

I was trying to say that LLMs will not become more than what they are, especially since they are tools for profit in the modern system. It’s like an iPhone — the latest iPhone 16 Pro is, of course, better than the iPhone 3G, but conceptually, there is nothing new. The same goes for LLMs. In 15 years, we will probably have the same hallucinating LLM, just 10% thinner and 20% faster.

The tech industry, especially big corporations, doesn’t chase innovation; it chases repeatable, predictable profit.

If it's just cash-heads pushing a narrative, where do Bengio and Hinton fit? Stuart Russell? Doug Hofstadter?

I mean fine, argue that they're mistaken to be concerned, if that's your belief. But dismissing it all as obvious shilling is not that argument.

If we're calling out names, what about Roger Penrose, John Searle, Stuart Hameroff, Hubert Dreyfus, Henry Stapp? These are very intelligent people and I suggest to get acquainted with their work. Neural scaling laws are real and no matter if you put into training 10e-8 petaFLOP/days of compute or 200000 petaFLOP/days you will hit irreducible error constant at Efficient Compute Frontier.

I'm not a functionalist and my belief is that AI — especially LLMs — will never achieve real understanding or consciousness, no matter how much we scale them. Language prediction is just a computation, but human thought is more than that.

Calling out names was an argument just for not dismissing AI as a thing "everyone knows" is fake.

Above you wrote "we all know the only real Intelligence ... is" as your support for attributing venial motives to people taking AI progress seriously. OK, now I know your basis for that claim. I've read three of the guys you mention, agree they're intelligent and except for Searle have some good things to say. But it's really unconvincing as support for an AI-is-fake claim, and especially for an everyone-knows claim.

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