Comment by snickerbockers | Hacker News Reader

Comment by snickerbockers | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

uhhh can it? I've certainly not seen any evidence of an AI generating something not based on its training set. It's certainly smart enough to shuffle code around and make superficial changes, and that's pretty impressive in its own way but not particularly useful unless your only goal is to just launder somebody else's code to get around a licensing problem (and even then it's questionable if that's a derived work or not).

Honest question: if AI is actually capable of exploring new directions why does it have to train on what is effectively the sum total of all human knowledge? Shouldn't it be able to take in some basic concepts (language parsing, logic, etc) and bootstrap its way into new discoveries (not necessarily completely new but independently derived) from there? Nobody learns the way an LLM does.

ChatGPT, to the extent that it is comparable to human cognition, is undoubtedly the most well-read person in all of history. When I want to learn something I look it up online or in the public library but I don't have to read the entire library to understand a concept.

You have to realize AI is trained the same way one would train an auto-completer.

Theres no cognition. It’s not taught language, grammar, etc. none of that!

It’s only seen a huge amount of text that allows it to recognize answers to questions. Unfortunately, it appears to work so people see it as the equivalent to sci-fi movie AI.

It’s really just a search engine.

I agree and that's the case I'm trying to make. The machine-learning community expects us to believe that it is somehow comparable to human cognition, yet the way it learns is inherently inhuman. If an LLM was in any way similar to a human I would expect that, like a human, it might require a little bit of guidance as it learns but ultimately it would be capable of understanding concepts well enough that it doesn't need to have memorized every book in the library just to perform simple tasks.

In fact, I would expect it to be able to reproduce past human discoveries it hasn't even been exposed to, and if the AI is actually capable of this then it should be possible for them to set up a controlled experiment wherein it is given a limited "education" and must discover something already known to the researchers but not the machine. That nobody has done this tells me that either they have low confidence in the AI despite their bravado, or that they already have tried it and the machine failed.

> The machine-learning community

Is it? I only see a few individuals, VCs, and tech giants overblowing LLMs capabilities (and still puzzled as to how the latter dragged themselves into a race to the bottom through it). I don't believe the academic field really is that impressed with LLMs.

There’s a third possible reason which is that they’re taking it as a given that the machine is “intelligent” as a sales tactic, and they’re not academic enough to want to test anything they believe.

no it's not I work on AI and what these things do are much much more then a search engine or an autocomplete. If an autocomplete passed the turing test you'd dismiss it because it's still an autocomplete.

The characterization you are regurgitating here is from laymen who do not understand AI. You are not just mildly wrong but wildly uninformed.

To be fair, it's not clear human intelligence is much more than search or autocomplete. The only thing that's clear here is that LLMs can't reproduce it.

Yes but colloquially this characterization you see used by laymen is deliberately used to deride AI and dismiss it. It is not honest about the on the ground progress AI has made and it’s not intellectual honest about the capabilities and weaknesses of Ai.

I disagree. The actual capabilities of LLMs remain unclear, and there's a great deal of reasons to be suspicious of anyone whose paycheck relies on pimping them.

The capabilities of LLMs are unclear but it is clear that they are not just search engines or autocompletes or stochastic parrots.

You can disagree. But this is not an opinion. You are factually wrong if you disagree. And by that I mean you don’t know what you’re talking about and you are completely misinformed and lack knowledge.

The long term outcome if I’m right is that AI abilities continue to grow and it basically destroys my career and yours completely. I stand not to benefit from this reality and I state it because it is reality. LLMs improve every month. It’s already to the point of where if you’re not vibe coding you’re behind.

> It’s already to the point of where if you’re not vibe coding you’re behind.

I like being productive, not babysitting a semi-literate program incapable of learning

Let me be utterly clear. People with your level of programming skill who incorporate AI into their workflow are in general significantly more productive than you. You are a less productive, less effective programmer if you are not using AI. That is a fundamental fact. And all of this was not true a year ago.

Again if you don’t agree then you are lost and uninformed. There are special cases where there are projects where human coding is faster but that is a minority.

Bruh

Well, I also work on AI, and I completely agree with you. But I've reached the point of thinking it's hopeless to argue with people about this: It seems that as LLMs become ever better people aren't going to change their opinions, as I had expected. If you don't have good awareness of how human cognition actually works, then it's not evidently contradictory to think that even a superintelligent LLM trained on all human knowledge is just pattern matching and that humans are not. Creativity, understanding, originality, intent, etc, can all be placed into a largely self-consistent framework of human specialness.

Isn't that what's going on with synthetic data? The LLM is trained, then is used to generate data that gets put into the training set, and then gets further trained on that generated data?

You didn’t have to read the whole library because your brain has been absorbing knowledge from multiple inputs your entire life. AI systems are trying to temporally compress a lifetime into the time of training. Then, given that these systems have effectively a single input method of streams of bits, they need immense amounts of it to be knowledgeable at all.

>I've certainly not seen any evidence of an AI generating something not based on its training set.

There is plenty of evidence for this. You have to be blind not to realize this. Just ask the AI to generate something not in it's training set.

Like the seahorse emoji?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com