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Comment by emp17344 | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think I’ve ever seen this guy say anything negative about an AI product, which makes me skeptical of his insights here.

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He's a proponent, but that doesn't mean his analysis isn't useful. It's clear and mostly accurate and when he gets something wrong he makes it right. Does he do all that with rose tinted glasses, probably, but my experience reading him is that he's sharp, thoughtful, and entirely reasonable.

Dismissing the opportunity to learn because the person offering you knowledge is enthusiastic about his area of expertise is probably shortsighted.

I don't think they were being dismissive. They just said they were skeptical, which is generally a good thing. It's certainly better than the goofy hero worship I constantly see on HN.

How is this Simon’s area of expertise? I know he’s a programming legend, but I’ve never heard anything to indicate he’s a machine learning expert.

I’m not intending to be dismissive, just noticing a pattern and advocating a bit of skepticism.

This is more akin to a race car driver give a review of, for example, a new type of electric car. It doesn’t matter that the driver is not a domain expert in electric motors and regenerative braking; what matters is he knows how to operate these machines in their use case at the limits.

Hearing a programming legend weigh in on the latest programming tool seems entirely completely reasonable.

Being an expert in machine learning turns out to not be particularly relevant to being an expert in the applications of LLMs to real-world problems. I'm certainly not an expert in the former but I do think I have credibility in the latter.

Have you seen my writing on prompt injection (a term that I coined)?

That's pretty negative! https://simonwillison.net/series/prompt-injection/

There's a whole section in the linked piece about how Cowork doesn't do enough here, including:

> I do not think it is fair to tell regular non-programmer users to watch out for “suspicious actions that may indicate prompt injection”

I don’t think you coined “prompt injection”…

https://simonwillison.net/2022/Sep/12/prompt-injection/

> This isn’t just an interesting academic trick: it’s a form of security exploit. I propose that the obvious name for this should be prompt injection.

I've written about it 142 times since then: https://simonwillison.net/tags/prompt-injection/

I'm credited for coining the term on Wikipedia and in several academic papers.

I don't claim to have discovered the vulnerability - I credited that to Riley Goodside, but we later learned it was independently discovered and first reported to OpenAI by Jonathan Cefalu of Preamble, see https://www.preamble.com/prompt-injection-a-critical-vulnera...

I would argue the EXACT opposite. His analysis is very constructive.

The people you should be skeptical of are the random Xitter handles who post about a robotic phlebotomists and say "THE FUTUE IS ALREADY HERE".

No. It’s also good to be skeptical of people that seem like they are operating in good faith.

Example: The decade+ of people worshipping at Musk’s feet only for him to reveal himself as a malignant narcissist.

The deciding factor on whether to believe someone should not be whether they believe themselves, but whether they are worth believing. A murderer who acts in good faith is still a murderer.

id imagine someone like Simon to pick his AI products carefully enough that he doesn't waste his time on duds.

He literally brings up a concern he calls the "lethal trifecta" when it's even remotely relevant.

You're right to be skeptical. He makes a living as a hype merchant.

It's a pretty terrible way to make a living, to be honest. If I was in this for the money I'd trade my reputation as an independent voice for a six figure salary at an AI company.

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