The LLM marketing exploits fear and sympathy. It pressures people into urgency. Those things can be shown and have been shown. Whether or not the actual LLM based tools genuinely help you has nothing to do with that.
Of course it is a little more nuanced than this and I would agree that some of the marketing hype around AI is overblown, but I think it is inarguable that AI can provide concrete benefits for many people.
Yes, yes you can. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this thread:
> When a con man sells you a cheap watch for an high price, what you get is still useful—a watch that tells the time—but you were also still conned, because what you paid for is not what was advertised. You overpaid because you were tricked about what you were buying.
LLMs are being sold as miracle technology that does way more than it actually can.
Simplifying the hype into 2 threads, the first is that AI is an existential risk and the second is the promise of “reliable intelligence”.
The second is the bugbear, and the analogy I use is factories and assembly lines vs power tools.
LLMs are power tools. They are being hyped as factories of thoughts.
String the right tool calls, agents, and code together and you have an assembly line that manufactures research reports, gives advice, or whatever white collar work you need. No Holidays, HR, work hours, overhead etc.
I personally want everyone who can see why this second analogy does not work, to do their part in disabusing people of this notion.
LLMs are power tools, and impressive ones at that. In the right hands, they can do much. Power tools are wildly useful. But Power tools do not make automatically make someone a carpenter. They don’t ensure you’ve built a house to spec. Nor is a planar saw going to evolve into a robot.
The hype needs to be taken to task, preferably clinically, so that we know what we are working with, and can use them effectively.
It's not LLMs they care about, it's datacenter ownership. US political norms empower owners. If you think of a DC as a mega church and remote users the disciple, it makes the desired network effect obvious. That is leveraged to sway Congress and states.
These tech projects are not intended for users. They're designed to gain confidence of politicians, preferential political support.
Gen pop is not the market. DC is.
Most peoples individual data crunching problems can be resolved with a TI graphing calculator.
Big Tech convinced Congress that culture of helpless consumers of their data center outputs is simpler and will lead humanity to a forever growth future!... nevermind they will all be dead, unable to verify.
A con trick that worked great on older, more religious leaning Americans. One that's not working so well on the younger generation who know how these systems work.
Exactly, and that's the whole point. If you lack genuine mathematical reasoning skill, a calculator won't help you at the IMO. You might as well bring a house plant or a teddy bear.
But if you bring a GPT5-class LLM, you can walk away with a gold medal without having any idea what you're doing.
Consequently, analogies involving calculators are not valid. The burden of proof rests firmly on the shoulders of those who claim that an LLM couldn't invent new mathematical techniques in response to a problem that requires it.
In fact, that appears to have just happened (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46664631), where an out-of-distribution proof for an older problem was found. (Meta: also note the vehement arguments in that thread regarding whether or not someone is using an LLM to post comments. That doesn't happen without intelligence, either.)
I would guess it's only a matter of days before that proof, or one very similar, is found in the training data, if that hasn't happened already, just as has been the case every time.
No fundamental change in how the LLM functions has been made that would lead us to expect otherwise.
Similar "discoveries" occurred all the time with the dawn of the internet connecting the dots on a lot of existing knowledge. Many people found that someone had already solved many problems they were working on. We used to be able to search the web, if you can believe that.
The LLMs are bringing that back in a different way. It's functional internet search with an uncanny language model, that sadly obfuscates the underlying data while making guesswork to summarize it (which makes it harder to tell which of its findings are valuable, and which are not).
It's useful for some things, but that's not remotely what intelligence is. It doesn't literally understand.
>* if you bring a GPT5-class LLM, you can walk away with a gold medal without having any idea what you're doing.*
My money won't be betting on your GPT5-class business advice unless you have a really good idea what you're doing.
It requires some (a lot of) intelligence and experience to usefully operate an LLM in virtually every real world scenario. Think about what that implies. (It implies that it's not by itself intelligent.)
You cannot bluff, trick, or "market" your way through a test like that.
If scoring highly on an exam implies intelligence then certainly I'm not intelligent and the Super Nintendo from the 90s is more sentient than myself, given I'm terrible at chess.
I personally don't agree with that definition, nor does any dictionary I'm familiar with, nor do any software engineers with whom I'm familiar, nor any LLM specialists, including the forefront developers at OpenAI, xAI, Google, etc. as far as I'm aware.
But for some reason (it's a very obvious reason $$$), marketers, against the engineers' protest, appear to be claiming otherwise.
This is what you're up against and what you'll find the courts, and lawyers, will go by when this comparison comes to a head.
In my opinion, I can't wait for this to happen.
Thrilled to know if I shouldn't wait for that. If you're directly involved with some credible research to the contrary, I would love to hear more.
But IMO, in this case at least, has nothing to do with intelligence. It's performing a search against its own training data, and piecing together a response in line with that data, while including the context of the search term (aka the question). This is run through a series of linear regressions, and a response is produced. There is nothing really groundbreaking here, as best I can tell.
It is unsupportable to claim that ML researchers at leading labs share your opinion. Since roughly 2022, they understand that they are working with systems capable of reasoning: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.11916
The article you linked discussed reasoning. That's really cool. But, consider that we can say that a chess game computer opponent is reasoning. It's using a preprogrammed set of instructions to predict out to some number of possible moves ahead, and choosing the most reasonable. A calculator, essentially, it is in fact reasoning. But that doesn't have much to do with intelligence. As we read in the dictionary, intelligence implies understanding, and we certainly can't say that the Chess Masters opponent from the Super Nintendo literally understands me, right?
More to the point, I don't see that any LLM has thus far exhibited remotely any inkling of understanding, nor can it. It's a linear regression calculator. Much like a lot of TI84 graphing calculators running linear algebraic functions on a grand scale. It's impressive that basic math can achieve results across word archives that sound like a person, but it's still not understanding what it outputs, and really, not what it inputs beyond graphing it algebraically either.
It doesn't literally understand. So, it is not literally intelligent, and it will require some huge breakthroughs to change that. I very much doubt that such a discovery will happen in our lifetime.
It might be more likely that the marketers will succeed in revising the dictionary. We've seen often times that if you use words wrong enough, it becomes right. But so far at least, that hasn't happened with this word.
Let's say a kid who's not unusually gifted/talented at math somehow ends up at the International Math Olympiad. Smart-enough kid, regularly gets 4.0+ grades in normal high school classes, but today Timmy got on the wrong bus. He does have a great calculator in his backpack -- heck, we'll give him a laptop with Mathematica installed -- so he figures, why not, I'll take the test and see how it goes. Spoiler: he doesn't do so well. He has the tools, but he lacks understanding of how and when to apply them.
At the same time, the kid at the next desk also doesn't understand what's going on. She's a bright kid from a talented family -- in fact Alice's old man works for OpenAI -- but she's a bit absent-minded. Alice not only took the wrong bus this morning, but she grabbed the wrong laptop on the way out the door. She shrugs, types in the problems, and copies down what she sees on the screen. She finishes up, turns in the paper, and they give her a gold medal.
My point: any definition of "understanding" you can provide is worthless unless it can somehow account for the two kids' different experiences. One of them has a calculator that does math, the other has a calculator that understands math.
I very much doubt that such a discovery will happen in our lifetime.
So did I, and then AlphaGo happened, and IMO a few years later. At that point I realized I wasn't very good at predicting what was and was not going to be possible, so I stopped trying.
Don't stop trying. Predictability is an indicator of how well a theory describes the universe. That's what science is.
The engineers have long predicted this stuff. LLM tech isn't really new. The size and speed of the machines is new. The more you understand about a topic, the better your predictions.
Indeed.
I feel that my expectations surrounding "AI" are much more realistic than they were before building the tools.
If you haven't already, it's very much worth giving them a run through.
It may be extremely dangerous to release. True. Even search engines had the potential to be deemed too dangerous in the nuclear pandoras box arguments of modern times. Then there are high-speed phishing opportunities, etc.
It may be an essential failure to miss the boat. True. If calculators were upgraded/produced and disseminated at modern Internet speeds someone who did accounting by hand would have been fired if they refused to learn for a few years.
Its communication builds an unhealthy relationship that is parasitic. True. But the Internet and the way content is critiqued is a source of this even if it is not intentionally added.
I don't like many people involved and I don't think they will be financially successful on merit alone given that anyone can create a LLM. But LLM technology is being sold by organic "con" that is how all technology such as calculators end up spreading for individuals to evaluate and adopt. A technology everyone is primarily brutally honest about is a technology that has died because no one bothers to check if the brutal honesty has anything to do with their own possible uses.
They literally are. Sam Altman has literally said multiple times this tech will cure cancer.