I see millions of kids cheating on their schoolwork, many adults substituting reading and thinking to GPUs. There's like 0.001% of people that use them to learn responsibly. You are genuinely a fool.
I'm glad I was able to inspire a new username for you. But aren't you concerned that if you let other people influence you like that, you're frying your brain? Shouldn't everything originate in your own mind?
> They don't provide any value except to a very small percentage of the population who safely use them to learn
There are many things that only a small percentage of the population benefit from or care about. What do you want to do about that? Ban those things? Post exclamation-filled comments exhorting people not to use them? This comes back to what I said at the end of my previous comment:
You might want to make sure you understand what you’re trying to achieve.
Do you know the answer to that?
> A language model is not the same as a convolution neural network finding anomalies on medical imagining.
Why not? Aren't radiologists "frying their brains" by using these instead of examining the images themselves?
The last paragraph of your other comment was literally the Luddite argument. (Sorry I can't quote it now.) Do you know how to weave cloth? No? Your brain is fried!
The world changes, and I find it more interesting and challenging to change with it, than to fight to maintain some arbitrary status quo. To quote Ghost in the Shell:
All things change in a dynamic environment. Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you.
For me, it's not about "getting ahead" as you put it. It's about enjoying my work, learning new things. I work in software development because I enjoy it. LLMs have opened up new possibilities for me. In that 5 year future you mentioned, I'm going to have learned a lot of things that someone not using LLMs will not have.
As for being dependent on Altman et al., you can easily go out and buy a machine that will allow you to run decent models yourself. A Mac, a Framework desktop, any number of mini PCs with some kind of unified memory. The real dependence is on the training of the models, not running them. And if that becomes less accessible, and new open weight models stop being released, the open weight models we have now won't disappear, and aren't going to get any worse for things like coding or searching the web.
> Keep falling for lesswrong bs.
Good grief. Lesswrong is one of the most misleadingly named groups around, and their abuse of the word "rational" would be hilarious if it weren't sad. In any case, Yudkowsky advocated being ready to nuke data centers, in a national publication. I'm not particular aware of their position on the utility of AI, because I don't follow any of that.
What I'm describing to you is based on my own experience, from the enrichment I've experienced from having used LLMs for the past couple of years. Over time, I suspect that kind of constructive and productive usage will spread to more people.
> There are many things that only a small percentage of the population benefit from or care about. What do you want to do about that?
---There are many things from our society that I would like to ban that are useful to a small percentage of the population, or at least should be heavily regulated. Guns for example. A more extreme example would be cars. Many people drive 5 blocks when they could walk to their (and everyone else's) detriment. Forget the climate, it impacts everyone ( break dust, fumes, pedestrian deaths). Some cities create very expensive tolls / parking fees to prevent this, this angers most people and is seen as irrational by the masses but is necessary and not done enough. Open Free societies are a scam told to us by capitalist that want to exploit without any consequences.
--- I want to air-gap all computers in classrooms. I want students to be expelled for using LLMs to do assignments, as they would have been previously for plagiarism (that's all an llm is, a plagiarism laundering machine).
---During COVID there was a phenomenon where some children did not learn to speak until they were 4-5 years old, and some of those children were even diagnosed with autism. In reality, we didn't understand fully how children learned to speak, and didn't understand the importance of the young brain's need to subconsciously process people's facial expressions. It was Masks!!! (I am not making a statement on masks fyi) We are already observing unpredictable effects that LLMs have on the brain and I believe we will see similar negative consequences on the young mind if we take away the struggle to read, think and process information. Hell I already see the effects on myself, and I'm middle aged!
> Why not? Aren't radiologists "frying their brains" by using these instead of examining the images themselves?
--- I'm okay with technology replacing a radiologist!!! Just like I'm okay with a worker being replaced in an unsafe textile factory! The stakes are higher in both of these cases, and obviously in the best interest of society as a whole. The same cannot be said for a machine that helps some people learn while making the rest dependent on it. Its the opposite of a great equalizer, it will lead to a huge gap in inequality for many different reasons.
We can all say we think this will be better for learning, that remains to be seen. I don't really want to run a worldwide experiment on a generation of children so tech companies can make a trillion dollars, but here we are. Didn't we learn our lesson with social media/porn?
If Uber's were subsidized and cost only $20.00 a month for unlimited rides, could people be trusted to only use it when it was reasonable or would they be taking Uber's to go 5 blocks, increasing the risk for pedestrians and deteriorating their own health. They would use them in an irresponsible way.
If there was an unlimited pizza machine that cost $20.00 a month to create unlimited food, people would see that as a miracle! It would greatly benefit the percentage of the population that is food insecure, but could they be trusted to not eat themselves into obesity after getting their fill? I don't think so. The affordability of food, and the access to it has a direct correlation to obesity.
Both of these scenarios look great on the surface but are terrible for society in the long run.
I could go on and on about the moral hazards of LLMs, there are many more outside of just the dangers of learning and labor. We are being told they are game changing by the people who profit off them..
In the past, empires bet their entire kingdom's on the words of astronomers and magicians who said they could predict the future. I really don't see how the people running AI companies are any different than those astronomers (they even say they can predict the future LOL!)
They are Dunning Kruger plagiarism laundering machines as I see it. Text extruding machines that are controlled by a cabal of tech billionaires who have proven time and time again they do not have societies best interest at heart.
I really hope this message is allowed to send!
The problem with such approaches is that it involves some people imposing their opinions on others, “for their own good”. That kind of thing often doesn’t turn out well. The Amish address that by letting their children leave to experience the outside world, so that their return is (arguably) voluntary - they have an opportunity to consent to the Amish social contract.
But what you seem to be doing is making a determination of what’s good for society as a whole, and then because you have no way to effect that, you argue against the tools that we might abuse rather than the tendencies people have to abuse them. It seems misplaced to me. I’m not saying there are no societal dangers from LLMs, or problems with the technocrats and capitalists running it all, but we’re not going to successfully address those issues by attacking the tools, or people who are using them effectively.
> In the past, empires bet their entire kingdom's on the words of astronomers and magicians who said they could predict the future.
You’re trying to predict the future as well, quite pessimistically at that.
I don’t pretend to be able to predict the future, but I do have a certain amount of trust in the ability of people to adapt to change.
> that's all an llm is, a plagiarism laundering machine
That’s a possible application, but it’s certainly not all they are. If you genuinely believe that’s all they are, then I don’t think you have a good understanding of them, and it could explain some of our difference in perspective.
One of the important features of LLMs is transfer learning: their ability to apply their training to problems that were not directly in their training set. Writing code is a good example of this: you can use LLMs to successfully write novel programs. There’s no plagiarism involved.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/r...
However, I don't agree that AI is a risk to the extreme levels you seem to think it is. The truth is that humans have advanced by use of technology since the first tool and we are horrible predictors at what the use case of these technologies will bring.
So far they have been mostly positive, I don't see a long term difference here.
They have, believe it or not, very little power to stop kids from choosing to use cheating engines on their personal laptops. Universities are not Enterprise.