Comment by embedding-shape | Hacker News Reader

Comment by embedding-shape | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

embedding-shape

For all we know, you both could comparing using a Nokia 3310 and a workstation PC based on the hardware, but you both just say "this computer is better than that computer".

There are a ton of models out there, ran in a ton of different ways, that can be used in different ways with different harnesses, and people use different workflows. There is just so many variables involved, that I don't think it's neither fair nor accurate for anyone to claim "This is obviously better" or "This is obviously impossible".

I've been in situations where I hit my head against some hard to find bug for days, then I put "AI" (but what? No one knows) to it and it solves it in 20 minutes. I've also asked "AI" to do trivial work that it still somehow fucked up, even if I could probably have asked a non-programmer friend to do it and they'd be able to.

The variance is great, and the fact that system/developer/user prompts matter a lot for what the responses you get, makes it even harder to fairly compare things like this without having the actual chat logs in front of you.

> The variance is great

this strikes me as a very important thing to reflect on. when the automobile was invented, was the apparent benefit so incredibly variable?

Is this a trick question? Yes it was. A horse could go over any terrain while a car could only really go over very specific terrain designed for it. We had to terraform the world in order to make the automobile so beneficial. And it turned out that this terraforming had many unintended consequences. It's actually a pretty apt comparison to LLMs.

who would I be trying to trick if it was? you didn't answer the question anyways. I'm not wondering whether cars were seen as strictly better than horses in all situations. I'm wondering if people disagreed so vehemently about whether cars were faster road transportation than horses

> was the apparent benefit so incredibly variable?

Yes, lots of people were very vocally against horseless-carriages, as they were called at the time. Safety and public nuisance concerns were widespread, the cars were very noisy, fast, smoky and unreliable. Old newspapers are filled with opinions about this, from people being afraid of horseless-carriages spooking other's horses and so on. The UK restricted the adoption of cars at one point, and some Canton in Switzerland even banned cars for a couple of decades.

Horseless-carriages was commonly ridiculed for being just for "reckless rich hobbyists" and similar.

I think the major difference is that cars produced immediate, visible externalities, so it was easy for opposition to focus on public safety in public spaces. In contrast, AI has less physically visible externalities, although they are as important, or maybe even more important, than the ones cars introduced.

yeah I agree about the negative externalities but I'm curious about the perceived benefits. did anybody argue that cars were actually slower than horse and carriage? (were they at first?)

The cars were obviously faster than the typical horse transportation and I don't think anyone tried to argue against that, but laws typically restricted cars so they couldn't go faster than horses, at least in highly populated areas like cities. As others mentioned too, the benefit of not needing roads to go places were highlighted as a drawback of cars too. People argued that while cars might go faster, the result would be that the world would be worse off in total.

sure but my point is people could agree they were faster at least. that is decidedly not true for LLMs. maybe due to alignable vs non-alignable differences

Reply on news.ycombinator.com